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Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

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Re: Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

#11

Cool. Maybe these guys should get in touch with the redesign guys and get them fired. Also fire any executive that thought it was a good idea. Because all the hard work to serve ads more efficiently goes to waste when the site is a mess and unusable.

I remember when Digg was bigger than Reddit and then after a certain Digg site redesign they lost a significant number of their users to Reddit and never really recovered.

Re: Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

#13
As the founder of a SAAS ad serving company, I can say that as slick as (I think) my platform is, it's not a problem I would want to tackle again. There will be a large volume of technical challenges and required features to support.

It'd be like writing Apache or Nginx from scratch. It seems simple on the surface and then you wake up to all kinds of inconvenient and unexpected technical challenges.

I'm not sure Reddit's engineering resources are best allocated to building ad serving infrastructure and software. It was going to be an ongoing headache from the start, and worse, it sounds like it was build with a language and stack that was fairly new to the team.

My prediction is that it will become a high cost and difficult to maintain project that will also prove difficult to hire for when this engineering team gets tired of working on the (currently new and fun, soon to be old and scary) adserver and moves on to other jobs.

My point being that some challenges are best left to third parties who make solving some problem its full time job. I truly do not say that out of bias, just experience building and managing such a complex system.

Re: Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

#14
post #11

Cool. Maybe these guys should get in touch with the redesign guys and get them fired. Also fire any executive that thought it was a good idea. Because all the hard work to serve ads more efficiently goes to waste when the site is a mess and unusable.

I remember when Digg was bigger than Reddit and then after a certain Digg site redesign they lost a significant number of their users to Reddit and never really recovered.

I feel like that would have happened this time if there were a viable alternative. I know if they kill the ability to opt out of the new redesign I will be looking a lot harder for one.

Re: Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

#15

As the founder of a SAAS ad serving company, I can say that as slick as (I think) my platform is, it's not a problem I would want to tackle again. There will be a large volume of technical challenges and required features to support. It'd be like writing Apache or Nginx from scratch. It seems simple on the surface and then you wake up to all kinds of inconvenient and unexpected technical challenges. I'm not sure Redd…

Honestly I think you make a good point and implicitly they could have used those resources instead to improve the user experience (for example, improve the sites efficiency and load times)

Re: Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

#16

Cool. Maybe these guys should get in touch with the redesign guys and get them fired. Also fire any executive that thought it was a good idea. Because all the hard work to serve ads more efficiently goes to waste when the site is a mess and unusable.

For me the bigger irony is all that work to serve adds and the adds are all for clickbait websites and/or scams.

Re: Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

#17
post #9

A means for rapidly selecting and loading an advert which will then be blocked by the users' browser. (Although even without adblock, are there actually all that many overt ads on Reddit, other than the sidebar ad which nearly always is an ad for a different subreddit?)

There are also promoted posts intermingled with user generated content. They are specially visible in the mobile app

Re: Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

#18
post #14
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when Digg was bigger than Reddit and then after a certain Digg site redesign they lost a significant number of their users to Reddit and never really recovered.

I feel like that would have happened this time if there were a viable alternative. I know if they kill the ability to opt out of the new redesign I will be looking a lot harder for one.

old.reddit.com or i.reddit.com on mobile.

Re: Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

#19

As the founder of a SAAS ad serving company, I can say that as slick as (I think) my platform is, it's not a problem I would want to tackle again. There will be a large volume of technical challenges and required features to support. It'd be like writing Apache or Nginx from scratch. It seems simple on the surface and then you wake up to all kinds of inconvenient and unexpected technical challenges. I'm not sure Redd…

They could have gone with Iponweb[1] or something like that but at Reddit's scale it might actually (for a change) make sense to roll their own.

They're one of the largest websites in the world now, so what holds for 'ordinary' websites and their best practices may simply no longer apply to Reddit.

The whole Reddit saga for the last few years is quite the story of turnaround management done well.

[1] https://www.iponweb.com/

Re: Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

#20

Cool. Maybe these guys should get in touch with the redesign guys and get them fired. Also fire any executive that thought it was a good idea. Because all the hard work to serve ads more efficiently goes to waste when the site is a mess and unusable.

This was my opinion until I spent a week using it. Now I don't even notice the redesign. I'd even go as far to say that I like the "infinite scroll" and the way topics are displayed on the same page as the feed.

However, the reddit mobile experience leaves much to be desired, and I will never install their app.

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