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Reddit was down for over two hours

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Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#231

Post by jmull3n »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #67
manigandham wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ever been to Ikea?

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#232

Post by jmull3n »

buboard wrote: post #175
cwkoss wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've specced out a decentralized reddit alternative a little bit, but have too many side projects. Someone please take this and build it. Let me know if you try, would love to spectate and advise on development. The key is there shouldn't be a globally consistent front page. Sorting should be done on an individual basis. Upvotes boost signal signal to peers and downvotes squelch. By propagating content scores transit…

do you guys use reddit's frontpage? I never. I hang out in a few subs i check very often and try to be part of the communities. frontpage is just so random

Yes but I manage my subreddit subscriptions

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#233

Post by mullsork »

Beefin wrote: post #182
mike_d wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

500 employees is still alot. Especially given the technology ecosystem that exists for leverage. The revenue piece is an interesting one because i was an early adopter and remember the revenue struggle. Gold/silver doesn't cut it because it relies on generosity. FB/Twitter are an ads business. Is that really not too lucrative of a field for reddit?

There are ads on Reddit already. I only ever use their website with an, but I get ads on the iOS app.

I've been seeing a significant rise in the usage of gold/silver/platinum lately, used heavily for banter on r/soccer (and for rewarding quality content as well.)

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#234

Post by kamaal »

Deimorz wrote: post #216
kamaal wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>they could have rewritten the site from the ground up They did. They even tossed out Common Lisp and bought in Python because they thought it would fix their problems. It didn't.

That was in December 2005, less than 6 months after the site launched. Reddit was tiny and didn't even have subreddits or comments yet. This is what it looked like: https://web.archive.org/web/20051205025706/http://reddit.com... The problems they're dealing with 14 years later as one of the top sites on the internet aren't even slightly comparable.

Sure, may be its time to move to something like Clojure or Golang now?

Python is a good scripting language, But if you are developing backend applications for this scale you probably need some serious JVM language. Or even Golang works fine.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#235

Post by hobofan »

opmac wrote: post #171
throwaway1777 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you miss the part where Reddit has 500 employees whereas FB has 40000? There was a point in Reddit history where there was literally 1 engineer.

What's your point? Wikipedia is Alexa rank 10 and has ~300 employees.

What's your point? Wikipedia is developing even slower than Reddit. Not that it would need to, though.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#236

Post by hobofan »

paxys wrote: post #122
stevenpetryk wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wondering (sort of—I'm also slightly trying to point out that you're being a bit of an armchair Reddit ops person :) What makes you think that the issue Reddit faced today would be fixed by rolling deploys?

I definitely am (but we are on Hacker News after all). Without knowing anything about this particular issue, at a basic level I'd think any non-trivial site should have a system of rolling out changes to a small percentage of servers and have automated monitoring that fires alerts if it notices any disruptions in functionality. If nothing goes wrong then gradually roll out to 100%. If something does then stop the rol…

From my experience that mostly only applies to the application layer. Especially updates on distributed databases are often not as easy as "stop and rollback" as you have to achieve a stable quorum or other similar dynamic states like that which you can't easily achieve from restoring a snapshot. There your best shot often is to learn how to deal with all the failure scenarios manually and do as many tests on a staging system until you feel comfortable.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#237

Post by hobofan »

conception wrote: post #213
dumbfoundded wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean Steemit?

Yeah this already exists and was done pretty well actually.

Except for the part of how the Steem token works, which basically means that built-in unmarked ads are needed for the economy to work.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#238

Post by thatguyagain »

linza wrote: post #225
inscionent wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no! They have a business model!

Yes, oh no. Dark patterns are closer to fraud than to a legitimate business model I'd recommend to my friends and family. Nigerian princes selling you gold is a business model too.

The company you work for, how do they make money? Do they market their products?

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#239

Post by alfozan »

mike_d wrote: post #93
dymk wrote: post #12

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.

"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…

Alexa rankings are meaningless for services that are mostly accessed via mobile: https://www.quora.com/Does-Alexa-include-app-usage-in-its-st... https://www.quora.com/Does-Alexa-track-traffic-from-iPhones-...

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#240

Post by adrianN »

jmull3n wrote: post #231
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ever been to Ikea?

Ikea is a pretty much perfect shopping experience. It's the opposite of a labyrinth. There is exactly one path through the shop for people who want to just see everything and there are clearly marked shortcuts if you only want to see one area.
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