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Evolving beyond 100B recommendations a day at Reddit

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Re: Evolving beyond 100B recommendations a day at Reddit

#31

Post by superasn »

mdoms wrote: post #5

Reddit is literally the last organisation on Earth I would take engineering advice from. I appreciate they are operating at a very large scale and that has its own challenges, but it is by far and away the worst engineered product I use. I really do mean from soup to nuts, Reddit is just garbage software. The modern front end is obviously and plainly terrible. The backend is slow and suffers very frequent downtime, o…

There is always https://i.reddit.com, the only reason why I still use it once a month maybe. Props to them for keeping that endpoint alive.

But I agree. I used to have the same respect for Reddit as I do for HN (I even donated to it when this buying stars thing wasn't around) but clearly the site is not even a shadow of it's former self. The last straw for me was when they started showing "Only available in mobile app" bullshit.

Now to me they are in the same league as FB, i.e. their engineers may be doing some cool stuff but I can't help feel sorry for people who work there.

Re: Evolving beyond 100B recommendations a day at Reddit

#32

Post by mynameisash »

MattRix wrote: post #23
Judgmentality wrote: post #14

I love how every comment so far is about how much people dislike reddit.

It’s a bit silly considering that this site is pretty much the same as any Reddit subreddit.

At a technical level, I'd more or less agree with you. But from a content and community perspective, I disagree that it's pretty much the same.

IMHO, the signal-to-noise here is amazing; not perfect, but _so_ much better. If I really want memes or jokes, I'll go back to reddit (and I occasionally do if I want some mindless downtime). I get a lot more insightful information and community interaction here than there.

Re: Evolving beyond 100B recommendations a day at Reddit

#33

Post by tomrod »

1024core wrote: post #7

I used to browse /r/india . Then one day Reddit recommended I check out /r/chodi (a sub full of memes and random talk). So I said sure, visited it, commented a couple of times. Next thing I know, I'm banned from /r/india. For participating in a sub that was recommended by Reddit itself ! And there's no appealing these bans.

You think that's bad, consider some of the ex-member affiliated subreddits for high demand religions. One in particular is monitored closely by official (employed by said religion) and unofficial member representatives and if any joint/xpost occurs it is immediate ban. The official side has been demurred as a "news clipping service" in the past.

Same thing, different day, just a new platform to continue these kinds of failing sociological controls.

Re: Evolving beyond 100B recommendations a day at Reddit

#34

Post by arcturus17 »

mdoms wrote: post #5

Reddit is literally the last organisation on Earth I would take engineering advice from. I appreciate they are operating at a very large scale and that has its own challenges, but it is by far and away the worst engineered product I use. I really do mean from soup to nuts, Reddit is just garbage software. The modern front end is obviously and plainly terrible. The backend is slow and suffers very frequent downtime, o…

The front-end is a disaster, especially on mobile.

It provides a paradigmatic example for people who believe SPAs are an invention from Satan himself. I actually love React and could have an SPA built that is a 100x better - but that is neither here nor there. The problem is that some features are half-assed or simply not implemented. The comment tree is a disaster, and pretty much in every interaction I discover new problems and bugs.

Cheery on the cake is that lately I am clicking on certain posts and getting a message along the lines of "We cannot verify whether this content is suitable for work and therefore cannot place ads against it. Please download the app to view it."

What. The actual. Fuck.

I understand why from a company perspective an app is more interesting to you than a mobile site, but you haven't managed to persuade me in all these years why I need an app for what amounts to viewing content, saving my subreddit selection, and posting an occasional comment. If your strategy is to simply kick us out of the mobile site, then fine - I will stop using your site. I guarantee it.

Re: Evolving beyond 100B recommendations a day at Reddit

#35

Post by faitswulff »

hinkley wrote: post #28

Reddit has 52 million daily active users You are sending 100B recommendations to 52 million daily users, that's 2000 recommendations per user per day . How many new subreddits do you think your users need to be made aware of in a given 24 hour period?? Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

I doubt active users account for all of the recommendations. Consider inactive users who are on Reddit‘s mailing list. Those emails probably include recommendations as well.

Re: Evolving beyond 100B recommendations a day at Reddit

#36

Post by logicslave »

mdoms wrote: post #5

Reddit is literally the last organisation on Earth I would take engineering advice from. I appreciate they are operating at a very large scale and that has its own challenges, but it is by far and away the worst engineered product I use. I really do mean from soup to nuts, Reddit is just garbage software. The modern front end is obviously and plainly terrible. The backend is slow and suffers very frequent downtime, o…

The front end seems to me like it was written by a bunch of new grads. Its such a miserable experience.

Re: Evolving beyond 100B recommendations a day at Reddit

#37

Post by dj_mc_merlin »

throwaway3699 wrote: post #21

> Gazette: Feature Stores and Model Prediction Engine When did developers stop naming things properly and go straight to weird codenames? What is wrong with 'recommendation service'?

I do not think I would necessarily have more of a practical idea what to expect out of a "recommendation service" than "Gazette". Sure, it's related to recommendations in some way, but that might as well be next to useless technically. A 10 minute introduction on the various services and one could get their head around them even with silly names. Are you bothered your webserver is called nginx or by curl or grep or git or cat etc. etc.?

Re: Evolving beyond 100B recommendations a day at Reddit

#39

Post by Judgmentality »

faitswulff wrote: post #35
hinkley wrote: post #28

Reddit has 52 million daily active users You are sending 100B recommendations to 52 million daily users, that's 2000 recommendations per user per day . How many new subreddits do you think your users need to be made aware of in a given 24 hour period?? Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

I doubt active users account for all of the recommendations. Consider inactive users who are on Reddit‘s mailing list. Those emails probably include recommendations as well.

There are still fewer than 10 billion people on the planet. I realize people can have multiple accounts, but realistically let's limit it to something like 1 billion actual users. Why does everybody need 100 recommendations a day?

It's a slight tangent, but it seems somewhat relevant - they're not only making so many recommendations, but the recommendations seem to be universally hated (judging by the comments here). It's like they're bragging about how epic their fuckup is.

Re: Evolving beyond 100B recommendations a day at Reddit

#40

Post by spookthesunset »

Manuel_D wrote: post #26
antibuddy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would shift the blame back to Reddit here, because they exposed data to mods that are completely unrelated to the subreddit. Another problem is the non-existing appeal process.

Using a VPN and alt accounts are practically a necessity. I have 3 main accounts: one only posts on niche hobby forums, one for "clean" subreddits (/r/news, pics and the like), and one for anything remotely controversial.

Similar here. I differentiate by how little I care about revealing my actual identity and location. Like for hobbies and stuff I really don’t care if people know my approximate location. But for some stuff… dudes are crazy. Would rather not get doxxed.
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