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?
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.
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.
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.
Reddit should be a quarter page box in a social psychology book about groupthink. It’s a shit website and there are better link aggregators.
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.
twitter is a close second for me. The bug that requires you to reload three times, inconsistent pop-ups demanding you to login, and slow interface. old.reddit.com is still ok, but yeah the redesign is terrible.
You would think metrics would be much better if the sites were a little more usable.
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
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
Have you tried browsing the site with an ad blocker enabled? It's likely all the ads from elsewhere. I do quite well with chrome and ad block plus.
Reddit might be the easiest short once they go public.
Gyfcat / gif slowness I think is a big part of this. Now that did not answer your question, but at least reddit routinely pokes fun at itself under /r/funny and /r/yesitstrue where its servers are depicted as 1 old overheated pizza box. Also 34% of all resources are spent running rule engines to "enforce" posting compliance.
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.
After using this mess of website reddit I am wondering why people didn’t like usenet and prefer centralised private and censored services.
reddit mobile breaks down 25% of the time for me...
So they could push you to use their Apps? There are very little incentive to improve their website.
It's written in Python and uses Cassandra.