Hacker News Reader

Comment by blahyawnblah | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I'm not sure why they haven't been able to sort out their infrastructure issues. Nothing they do is rocket science. Especially these days.

Probably concentrating on IPO and trying to keep the balance sheet tight.

View on HN

Eh, at their scale(one of the most visited websites across the world) everything is complex. It doesn't excuse their continuous failures in some aspects (e.g. video player still sucks, years later), but in general reliability is decent. Their engineering blog was quite enlightening, but I don't think they've posted in a while.

the new layout is still pretty garbage compared to the old one and because of this, reddit has to maintain four different web front ends: new desktop, new mobile, old desktop (old.reddit.com), and old mobile (i.reddit.com). hosting their own image/videos so that 80% of the content isn’t dependent on third parties like imgur is probably a good change, but there’s no way it didn’t massively increase the complexity of maintaining the website too.

The old frontends aren't maintained, so their existence has a negligible impact. Hosting images/videos is indeed a non-trivial matter at their scale, but if memory serves me right they're just using Cloudfront, so it's pretty straightforward.

old.reddit not being maintained is a bonus imo - you don't see a lot of the gamification features they keep introducing. everytime i accidentally visit new reddit i think "wow i would not be using this site if i had to wade through this visual overload"

Why would they IPO? They're owned by Advance Publications, which is owned by the Newhouse family. They're not an independent company and haven't been since 2011.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com