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Reddit updates look after rough 6 months and ahead of reported IPO
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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They don't have the talented programmers needed to make API changes happen.
reddit is an old school internet site. In that it was originally hacked together by very motivated people. But once the novelty wore off, and the tech debt started piling up, the motivated people either left or got promoted. It should have been trivial to add things like headline editing, but that never happened because their code and DB is a huge huge mess.
Overshadowed by the API fuckup was something that really spoke to how badly off they are. They deleted old private messages! Their schema or infrastructure is so utterly fucked up that they couldn't roll back whatever made that happen. People lost years of communication, just gone. No backups, no "go to this new page to download an archive of your messages", nothing.
It should have been easy to incorporate rate limiting into the API. It should have been easy to serve ads to 3rd party clients. It should have been a no brainer to charge heavy/advanced API users a nominal monthly fee. Mod tools should have been implemented over a motherfucking decade ago!
Utter incompetence. Completely clueless. Fucking useless.
It really angers me because they had it handed to them on a plate. But instead they fucked around and found out.
I don't think they're incompetent. They run a platform with millions of users, and a metric ton of data moving back and forth with good reliability.
I really don't think they're incompetent, I just think their business types prioritize all the wrong things. Why should they implement mod tools if the community is willing to do it for them? Why implement post title editing if it's not going to attract new users? Why implement rate limiting if they can funnel people to the official app by essentially forcing other clients to shut down?
It's not incompetence, it's business types trying to juice the numbers to get a higher IPO. They did pretty well until they pissed off the moderators, and that's not something I expect a business type that only cares about quarterly earnings to consider.
Reminds me of their old server donation drives every few months way back in the day. Those were also the days of "Reddit's down again, imma go mess around on [random flash site] for a bit"