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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

#31

Post by jrockway »

kokey wrote: post #11
somethingroma wrote: post #7

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.

Where are people going to go this time? I feel like people usually copy their competitors which is why they consider redesigns worthwhile... but which Reddit competitor is Reddit copying here? I don't think there is one.

Obviously Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Snapchat kind of worry them, but then again, I feel like people are "done" with "social media" so I wouldn't be _really_ worried if I were Reddit. They have the advantage that they can give the user very interest-focused information; when you follow a friend on Facebook, you get their programming advice, baby pictures, and political rants. With Reddit, you get to skip the baby pictures and political rants.

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

#32

Post by overcast »

benjaminjackman wrote: post #12
minxomat wrote: post #3

> 12M posts per month, 2B posts per month Curious, which one is it? I suspect the former.

Maybe 12M articles / self posts, 2B comments?

Nah, no way on average an article gets 166 comments. That must be page views or something.

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

#33

Post by grey-area »

katzgrau wrote: post #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 Redd…

They were already using a third party service. It was slow and opaque, so they ditched it.

At the scale of reddit, and because this is how they make their money, this is clearly something they want in house and something it would be a competitive advantage to control, if nothing else it gives them a much clearer conduit to their advertisers, and much greater control over things like ad selection.

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

#34

Post by somethingroma »

evfanknitram wrote: post #25
somethingroma wrote: post #7

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.

Some of the issues I have had with the new design is pretty amazing. For example, when you open a specific submission it's opened in a "lightbox" which basically contains all the comment. If you click outside of the lightbox it's automatically closed which I guess is OK. So some time ago they made a new release and broke it so that if you clicked on the scrollbar to scroll down in the lightbox to see what people had…

Always good practice to rename 'bugs' and 'flaws' as 'features' and 'design'.

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

#35

Post by bflesch »

I advertised on reddit for our startup roughly one year ago and it was the worst ad management experience I have ever witnessed. For the size and age of reddit the advertiser backend was a real shame. The kind invoices they provide you is laughable, it feels like the whole backend was built by amateurs.

On top of that, the traffic we received from reddit was very bad for our e-sports/gaming-related website.

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

#36

Post by jrockway »

pjc50 wrote: 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?)

Judging from the types of screenshots Reddit users post, they're probably using the app, not a browser on their PC with an ad blocker.

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

#37

Post by overcast »

kokey wrote: post #11
somethingroma wrote: post #7

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.

Never really recovered? That event wiped out Digg completely, and is exactly what skyrocketed Reddit.

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

#38

Post by debacle »

reactor wrote: post #24
somethingroma wrote: post #7

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 still don't understand how come the CEO of reddit is okay with the redesign? It's worse enough that I had to install plugin to redirect to old.reddit.

This is one of the most frustrating things for me. Two weeks ago they'd set a cookie to redirect www. to old., then they removed that and now all of my old links take me to the redesign.

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

#40

Post by ihuman »

reactor wrote: post #24
somethingroma wrote: post #7

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 still don't understand how come the CEO of reddit is okay with the redesign? It's worse enough that I had to install plugin to redirect to old.reddit.

If you have an account, you can use the old version of reddit by default by unselecting "Use the redesign as my default experience"
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