[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why is Reddit so slow and unreliable?
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Ask HN: Why is Reddit so slow and unreliable?
Among the mega high-traffic websites reddit seems to be the slowest
and most unreliable. Many times it simply won't load, or log you
out for no reason. Why do you think reddit never manages to improve
its infrastructure?
Author : ent101
Score : 21 points
Date : 2021-09-08 21:34 UTC (1 hours ago)
| dd444fgdfg wrote:
| i used their iOS app, and they seem to have an outage around once
| every two weeks. other than that the performance is fine. it must
| be a front end problem
| callesgg wrote:
| Um i noticed this to. The IOS app runs smooth but the website
| is barely functional on IOS. It is not uncommon for me to give
| up and close down Reddit cause i can't open a post.
|
| I have until now just assumed they want the website to suck so
| that you are more likely to install the APP. But now as I think
| about it a bit deeper that seams a bit to crazy.
| dd444fgdfg wrote:
| I suspect it's less a case of them wanting the web client to
| suck, and more a case that the people who decide priorities
| don't care about the web client.
|
| I'd bet there's some super frustrated PM/TL who knows what to
| do and wants to fix it but isn't allowed to spend any time on
| it.
| logicalmonster wrote:
| The cynic in me has to guess that too much of their development
| efforts are geared around disrupting and managing viewpoints that
| their users and corporate sponsors find problematic.
|
| To give a small example: back when a certain subreddit used to
| frequently appear in /r/all Reddit apparently wrote code to
| prevent it from ever appearing there again.
| [deleted]
| jieegn wrote:
| They closed-sourced their repo, changed the interface, pushed
| coins, denied hotlinking and instead forces to visit the site to
| view videos, added obfuscated analytics, etc.
|
| In short, they want money, and they don't care if you have to
| suffer for it.
| hamburgerwah wrote:
| They pay their engineers below and in cases half of market rates,
| place no organizational value on quality engineering, their
| CEO/head engineer is a buffoon and they have a history of
| screwing people with regard to equity compensation. It's not a
| complicated explanation at all.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Well their JavaScript "new" site sucks so horribly that it even
| brings my heavy gaming PC to its knees.
|
| Clearly they have no clue what they're doing (probably at
| management level, even bad devs can do better than this) or they
| have a ton of legacy code they're trying to write around.
|
| But even the old one had its issues. Deep threads with thousands
| of posts would often crash when you clicked the "read more" to go
| deeper and instead redirected to the top. So it could be that's
| where it's at. I assume a complete code review / partial rewrite
| would be very hard to justify at Reddit's scale.
|
| I'd use the old one but I find it so clunky. Even though it has
| the same density of hacker news it lacks all its grace.
| ent101 wrote:
| There are many frontend issues for sure. But I just don't
| understand why so many HTTP requests to the site fail. E.g.
| pages are simply blank about 20% of the time.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Aha that's not really what I'm seeing on my side. I very
| often get the error page with the "funny" picture but not 20%
| for sure. Maybe it's user dependent or only affects some
| subs?
| ent101 wrote:
| A hard refresh for me is a roll of dice, I usually expect
| it to fail.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| reddit mobile breaks down 25% of the time for me...
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Same here. I'll click a link to go to the mobile app, and it
| doesn't load anything. Go back and open in mobile Chrome and it
| loads just fine.
| snwfog wrote:
| I am also very annoyed that Reddit is slow, bloated and forces me
| to use their app.
|
| I built an alternative Reddit client, if you know TweetDeck, then
| you might like Rdddeck.
|
| https://rdddeck.com
| [deleted]
| connor-brooks wrote:
| An alternative frontend that was mentioned on HN earlier today:
| https://github.com/spikecodes/libreddit
| ncr100 wrote:
| Use the API via the mobile app RIF (Reddit Is Fun) for Android
| and avoid the site's anti-usability-patterns like the plague.
|
| * https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I assume they want to nudge everyone onto their app so they can
| bypass ad blocking and anti tracking efforts.
|
| Just like Instagram, tiktok, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc.
| thrashtitan wrote:
| The ironic thing is, their app is down _more often_ than the
| website!
| sdze wrote:
| After using this mess of website reddit I am wondering why people
| didn't like usenet and prefer centralised private and censored
| services.
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(page generated 2021-09-08 23:01 UTC)