111–120 of 283 posts
Y'know, the toll that all this activity takes on Reddit's servers gave me an idea for a sort of distributed Reddit. News links and stories assorted into topic-based groups, with the option for users to comment or respond to others' comments in a threaded discussion. It would be completely decentralized and belong to the users, not some central media company. We could call it Users' Network, or USENET for short. We co…
Reddit is the only major social media/aggregator I can think of that actually has to go offline for scheduled maintenance still. I can’t imagine the kind of shitshow it must be internally. Imagine if Facebook or Twitter had to go down regularly for “maintenance”. Heads would roll.
Steam is worse - weekly "maintenance" on Tuesday evening, where everyone is disconnected for ~10-20 minutes. It's common knowledge not to play at that time if the game uses Steam networking, otherwise you'll be kicked mid-session with a "Lost connection to Steam" error message and lose all your progress. And yes, this is happening in 2019.
heck blizzard has authentication services outages too
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Every user engagement metric has increased since the redesign. Unfortunate for some of us, and it doesn't preclude the metrics measuring the wrong thing, but that's reality on the ground. Same reason why Gmail is a bloated mess, because that's what the metrics show is wanted by users.
> Every user engagement metric has increased since the redesign. Doesn't that just mean that users are spending more time on the site because it's so much more of a pain to get what they actually want out of it? Like, you could increase "user engagement" of a shopping mall by turning it into a labyrinth and rearranging the shops every day.
I don’t think most people know how to handle anything but an infinite scrolling page.
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Don't forget to turn off call waiting. I always forgot to turn off call waiting....
I'm showing my youth here, but this is a legitimate question. Isn't call waiting just a thing that exists on the line? Did phones used to have a switch to toggle that? And what was the harm in keeping it on? When I had dial up, I don't recall having to consider call waiting.
I think at one point it was a value-added service, and you had to pay extra on your phone bill to enable it, but once it was enabled you could turn it on or off at will.
When I was a teenager (in the 1990s), our house had three phone lines. One was for voice calls, and it had call waiting turned on permanently. Another was for modems (first BBSes, then dial-up Internet), and had call waiting turned off permanently. A third was paid for by my Dad's employer, he used it for work calls, work faxes, and call up his work's modem bank to send/receive email, I don't know what he did with call waiting settings.
My Dad ordered three phone lines, but only had two pairs running in to the house. So they ran another cable, which I think had 12 pairs in it, but only three were ever connected. My Dad was smiling about how future-proof they made it. Nowadays, only one of those pairs is still active, and I expect within the next 1-2 years that pair will be turned off too. Analog POTS phone system being phased out in favour of VoIP (the Internet comes into the house over coax, not copper pair.)
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They’re Alexa rank #16 globally - that they’re having trouble monetizing their userbase just means they have absolutely no idea what they’re doing.
I think they just don't sell as much data as something like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
I dont know if they started selling this data directly. Last I spoke to ad people there, they had plans to build out their own tracking and analytics infrastructure, to improve things like geo-targeted ads, as their capabilities were lacking signficiantly.
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They also have very frequent cases where the site throws up an error page or is completely unreachable because it is under heavy load. I can't think of another major social network that has those problems on a weekly basis either.
Not recently, but Twitter's "fail whale" became famous due to problems Twitter had under heavy load.
Y'know, the toll that all this activity takes on Reddit's servers gave me an idea for a sort of distributed Reddit. News links and stories assorted into topic-based groups, with the option for users to comment or respond to others' comments in a threaded discussion. It would be completely decentralized and belong to the users, not some central media company. We could call it Users' Network, or USENET for short. We co…
https://notabug.io/ (beware of content: anonymous decentralized reddit!)
@go1dfish runs NAB and all the code is at https://github.com/notabugio/notabug .
It is built with my P2P graph protocol ( https://github.com/amark/gun ), + he has some custom implementations of it.
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> Every user engagement metric has increased since the redesign. Doesn't that just mean that users are spending more time on the site because it's so much more of a pain to get what they actually want out of it? Like, you could increase "user engagement" of a shopping mall by turning it into a labyrinth and rearranging the shops every day.
Reddit is a corporation with a large amount of VC investment. Profit is a primary goal, and engagement that shows more time and thus more revenue is exactly what they want.
Also, Protip: in case anyone still doesn’t know, go to old.reddit.com for the previous, better interface. Who knows how long it will be kept alive though.
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"We are a startup that inherited a 15 year old website" was one of the things that resonated when I worked there. Facebook is Alexa #5 in the US and has ~40,000 employees. Reddit is #6 and has ~500 employees. Twitter is #17 and has ~4,000 employees. (Numbers taken from quick Google searches) They have some super talented engineers that work miracles with band aids and bubble gum. Edit: Yes I understand not all employ…
Meh... they could have rewritten the site from the ground up, including any sort of data migration, multiple times over by now. I have never worked there, but outside looking in, it seems like there is a significant lack of technical vision from them. Other big players like Facebook, Twitter, etc, are literally inventing pivotal parts of the modern web technical stack. What has come out of reddit?
Someone's never done a data migration while serving 1M+ qps!
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You know, the people who talk about USENET and IRC are people who don't want to be "updated" to what modern users demand. I don't know if you've had a look around you lately, but the modern internet is a dumpster fire. Anyways, ideally you would be able to connect to services with whichever client you want. You could use a pretty eye candy client, or then not. With the web, however, it's an impossible feat to impleme…
> the people who talk about USENET and IRC are people who don't want to be "updated" to what modern users demand. IRC is objectively terrible. If you ask a question, the only way to get the answer is if you stay logged in until someone answers you. That's like buying a phone that doesn't ring unless you're already holding it up to your ear, or an email client that deletes all your email unless you happen to be lookin…