[HN Gopher] Evolving beyond 100B recommendations a day at Reddit
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Evolving beyond 100B recommendations a day at Reddit
Author : jovsa
Score : 59 points
Date : 2021-05-17 19:12 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reddit.com)
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| faitswulff wrote:
| 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.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| 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.
| fiona wrote:
| it seems likely from the "Quest" section that they're using
| "recommendations" in the broader sense to describe the inputs
| to feed rankings and other parts of the product besides
| subreddit recommendations. i'm imagining that a single load of
| the personalized homepage might require hundreds of
| predictions.
| 1024core wrote:
| 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.
| tomrod wrote:
| 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.
| bhaak wrote:
| Mods can ban everyone for almost any or even no reason. Unless
| some racist or otherwise illegal reason would be given, the
| Reddit admins keep their hands off bans.
|
| But the recommendation level came from Reddit, not from the
| mods of /r/india.
| fastball wrote:
| I'm not a big fan of Reddit as a company but that's not really
| their fault - that's a moderation problem (from the mods of
| /r/india). You liked the sub enough to comment in it so clearly
| it was a good rec!
| antibuddy wrote:
| 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.
| thatfunkymunki wrote:
| you're suggesting comments should not be visible on your
| profile? but visible on the page they are commented on? not
| sure how this would make sense.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| There is no technological solution to most social problems,
| and you can hardly expect Reddit to mediate social problems
| like ban appeals at scale (I mean, you can, but it won't
| happen for $ reasons).
|
| Most of the big subreddits are co-opted by toxic, power-mad
| moderators, or completely devoid of moderation entirely. A
| complete purge & reset wouldn't be a bad idea.
| gruez wrote:
| >I would shift the blame back to Reddit here, because they
| exposed data to mods that are completely unrelated to the
| subreddit.
|
| GP mentioned that he "commented a couple of times", which
| means that his participation in the other subreddit is
| public knowledge.
| 1024core wrote:
| "participation" can take multiple forms. As far as I
| remember, I actually challenged some of the more
| egregious posts I saw on /r/chodi, but didn't spend too
| much time there, as who has the time to educate the whole
| planet?
|
| If that other sub is so bad, then Reddit should ban it
| outright; why recommend it to users only to get them
| banned in other subs?
| gruez wrote:
| >If that other sub is so bad, then Reddit should ban it
| outright
|
| Because reddit is generally hands off when it comes to
| moderation. It generally doesn't replace moderators nor
| punishes moderators for their actions.
|
| >why recommend it to users only to get them banned in
| other subs?
|
| probably because the recommendation algorithm isn't smart
| enough to figure that out.
| andrewzah wrote:
| Anyone can build a bot that automatically watches any
| submissions to any subreddit, and bans those users from
| their subreddit. Like it or hate it, reddit is very hands-
| off with how subreddits are moderated beyond maintaining
| overall site rules.
|
| Most larger subreddits are managed pretty poorly.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| 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.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| 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.
| 1024core wrote:
| Maybe this is how Reddit is juicing the numbers; force
| users to create several alts, and voila! our DAU are
| up!!1!
| manigandham wrote:
| Reddit has disclosed that even your upvotes on other posts and
| comments that they deem unsavory can be used to automatically
| ban you.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I can only imagine someone condescendingly explaining that this
| was a test of your ethical character. By participating in it or
| other subreddits, like /r/BigChungus, you exposed _yourself_ as
| an agent of hate. And then someone who might as well have had
| their image traced for a picture on the also-banned
| /r/smuggies would say "The only winning move is not to play."
|
| Between that sort of nonsense and the redesign, they've Digg-ed
| themselves a hole and as soon as a viable competitor appears,
| it might just collapse as catastrophically.
| caslon wrote:
| I don't think so. I don't like reddit, but none of this is
| actually meaningful. Their active user rate has gone up
| exponentially since the redesign. People getting banned
| _globally_ is standard on other social media networks, and
| the vast majority of redditors aren 't banned from any
| subreddits (with actual global site bans being incredibly
| rare, too).
|
| There's no reason that reddit would collapse if they maintain
| the status quo, because the status quo (while worse) is still
| better than 90% of other sites on the internet. The average
| quality of user has gone down, but that's inevitable online.
| [deleted]
| tchalla wrote:
| > I check out /r/chodi (a sub full of memes and random talk)
|
| That sub seems to be regularly featured on
| r/AgainstHateSubReddits
|
| Misogyny
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/na9y...
|
| Racism
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/ly6n...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/jh3j...
|
| Islamophobia :
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/ndor...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/mu1a...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/m71k...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/nap7...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/mvha...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/nbh1...
|
| Transphobia
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/mm0l...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/mfot...
| drost wrote:
| I'm not saying those linked comments are not authentic, but
| r/AgainstHateSubreddits does post hateful content on
| subreddits they want to get banned.
| alach11 wrote:
| Does it matter? No matter who originally posted the
| content, if it's allowed by the mods and upvoted by the
| subreddit's users, that should reflect on /r/chodi.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| You're going to need to provide a citation for such a big
| claim.
| tomrod wrote:
| Sounds like a spontaneously organized social feedback
| community. Interesting.
| ipaddr wrote:
| An against hate subreddit that doubles as a hate factory
| against other threads? How modern..
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You can't fight hate with hate; you can bet your top
| dollar that those who try end up being worse than the
| ones they fight against...
| kevinh wrote:
| Is there any evidence for that assertion?
| dqv wrote:
| I used to be an active mod on a somewhat active
| subreddit, not going to say which one. I can say that it
| was rather suspicious to get pinged to an AHS thread made
| about a post that was less than 7 minutes old. There's a
| report button under every post, so the idea that this
| person couldn't have just used that instead of posting a
| big dramatic post makes me highly suspicious of AHS.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| > 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'?
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| 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.?
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| curl, grep and cat all have specific names that make sense.
|
| curl: cURL (library)
|
| grep: g/re/p "globally search for a regular expression and
| print matching lines"
|
| cat: as in, concatenate
|
| Gazette is just meaningless.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It is only one part of the recommendation service.
|
| Anyway, the reason you don't "name things properly" is because
| it's one of those truly hard problems (in a class beyond
| EXPTIME in input program functionality).
|
| By bypassing it you no longer have to worry about the
| connotations and you can do things like split the tool without
| having to worry if the name will stay the same or if which
| piece will retain the name.
|
| I would strongly recommend it.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| IT has always been full of non-descriptive names. Unix was a
| pun, Linux is named after its creator, Macintosh after an apple
| and programming languages are probably the worst offender with
| their single-letter names.
| wqsz7xn wrote:
| You're going to hate the cryptocurrency space :)
| nurgasemetey wrote:
| One advantage: googling by weird names is much easier.
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Why is it that when Reddit knows nothing about a user it presents
| itself as downtown Portland during rioting season?
| jovsa wrote:
| An inside look at how Reddit does recommendations
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Reddit has evolved to become a vast and diverse place
|
| In spite of the best efforts of the administrators...
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Reddit explains how they work super hard on a feature I go out of
| my way to disable and ignore.
| renewiltord wrote:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditEng/comments/neknjg/evolving_...
|
| Just in case you are also asked to install the app as a content
| gate.
| tgv wrote:
| Or replaced reddit.com by teddit.net, in this case
| https://teddit.net/r/RedditEng/comments/neknjg/evolving_beyo...
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I didn't realize that Reddit even recommends you content. And I
| can't tell the difference between before and after these
| recommendations are coming in. The blog post feels like one that
| Youtube made about their recommender system and how it didn't
| seem to work.
|
| Reddit has been sort of this weird place where they face the
| issues that Digg and Twitter have and want to slowly transition
| itself into some Facebook competitor but due to the communities
| that exist on the platform its a really hard sell. The new UI is
| harder to use and visually distracting. It feels like they just
| want you to use the App so you have to look at their
| advertisements.
| the_arun wrote:
| Quora too is very aggressive with recommendations... and ads.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| I love how every comment so far is about how much people dislike
| reddit.
| MattRix wrote:
| It's a bit silly considering that this site is pretty much the
| same as any Reddit subreddit.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| The structure, participants, and audience are a lot different
| here than 99% of subreddits. There are a few well-managed
| subs there, but once they reach anywhere remotely near the
| size of HN, they turn into either navel-gazing echo chambers,
| or incredibly heavy-handed moderated subs where most of the
| users who would contribute meaningful content get banned or
| shadowbanned.
|
| HN doesn't try to be everything to everyone like Reddit
| tries, and the moderation methods employed here are a lot
| less heavy-handed and take a few offenses before someone gets
| a meaningful ban or silencing.
| mynameisash wrote:
| 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.
| jaypeg25 wrote:
| Generally speaking, the smaller the subreddit the better
| the community. I really like the subreddit dedicated to my
| favorite baseball team. I like the /r/MLB subreddit too,
| but less so. The noise noise from everyone posting and
| trying to make the frontpage leads to an inevitable
| degradation in quality.
|
| I remember a while back when /r/cfb was invited to join the
| front page and there was considerable pushback from members
| who were afraid the reddit-wide readership would ruin the
| quality of posts. Kind of an eternal september thing...
| Diederich wrote:
| > any Reddit subreddit
|
| I think you many 'any given Reddit subreddit', which is very
| true.
|
| To others comments below: the signal to noise ratio here on
| HN is pretty good, and the _average_ S /N on Reddit is pretty
| poor, but some subs over there are exceptional. For instance,
| https://old.reddit.com/r/askhistorians
| warent wrote:
| HN is about as different as you can get from Reddit. For
| example, Reddit encourages herd behavior, minimal-effort glib
| interactions, and addictive content. HN discourages herd
| behavior, is quite difficult for most newcomers because the
| higher effort required, and even includes a built-in anti-
| procrastination feature.
| mateo1 wrote:
| Well it wasn't, but it's rapidly becoming more like Reddit,
| in a bad way. Most of Reddit's 50M active daily users are
| under the age of 18 as it's apparent by the front page, and
| the last few remaining older users are driven away day by
| day.
|
| I've been using Reddit for 10 years now. I still mechanically
| go the comment section when I come across something
| interesting to find the link to the source. It's never there
| anymore. No intelligent discussions. No pointing out the
| obvious fakes and advertisements/astroturfing. People write
| long, idiotically fake posts just to get upvoted, to either
| farm karma or because they're children.
|
| Unfortunately with HN getting slowly flooded as well, I don't
| know where else to turn for an online news
| aggregator/discussion platform that fits my demographic.
| [deleted]
| mkl95 wrote:
| I have been actively using Reddit for 5+ years and I recently
| left Twitter after 10+ years.
|
| In my opinion Reddit can be a fine social network if you are
| selective about the subs you read. It has a degree of granularity
| that Twitter simply doesn't offer, and most subs are heavily
| moderated.
|
| The last few years my Twitter timeline was insufferable, and it
| didn't have a trivial solution -their algorithms work very hard
| at creating noise and upsetting people, to a disturbing point-,
| while Reddit allows me to improve my experience in a couple of
| minutes.
| TedShiller wrote:
| doesn't scroll for me
| mdoms wrote:
| 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, often for hours at a time. I could go on
| for hours about the terrible engineering of Reddit.
| superasn wrote:
| 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.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Yeah, the i/compact interface is deliciously good. I
| frequently use it as a reference for good mobile design
| danudey wrote:
| I'll add to this: of every website I use which recommends me
| things based on other things, Reddit does it the absolute
| worst. It's so bad that they have literally never recommended
| me a subreddit which was actually relevant to my interests.
|
| My favourite instance was when they assumed I liked
| "programming", based on having (accidentally, once) visited the
| /r/f5networks subreddit, so they suggested the Europa
| Universalis 4 modding subreddit.
|
| Lately, they've given up and are just recommending me "gaming"
| related subreddits, by which I mean literally any random
| subreddit that it thinks is related to "gaming", including
| subreddits for people who main a specific fighter in Super
| Smash Brothers or subreddits for random indie iOS TCG games.
|
| The only "recommendations" that seem remotely reasonable are
| basically trending posts, and that's just because them trending
| indicates a broad appeal for that specific post.
|
| Meanwhile, their mobile app is wildly unreliable; if I'm having
| any sort of network issues while I start it, it will fail to
| load any of my feeds, and then just refuse to try to load them
| until I kill the app again. Refreshing my feed will typically
| result in a new feed with new posts, about half of which have
| no text in them and just a giant blank space where the title
| and description should be.
|
| Reddit is a colossal nightmare, engineering-wise, and I
| wouldn't listen to a word they said about implementing
| technology.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Or when they ask things like "Is r/sysadmin for humor?"
|
| I guess if you're some sort of alien AI you'd think that's a
| relevant question... but otherwise what possible use would
| there be to ask it and take up valuable screen real estate
| (which could be used for ads or relevant content) asking it?
| ardfie wrote:
| Reddit's recommendations can be sharply contrasted with
| YouTube's, which I frequently find useful and novel.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| 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.
| smolder wrote:
| That's apparently their strategy, much like Facebook: impair
| the mobile web experience and push users to the app(s).
| logicslave wrote:
| The front end seems to me like it was written by a bunch of new
| grads. Its such a miserable experience.
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