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Comment by andoon | Hacker News Reader

The entire reddit website goes down every night, especially during weekends, sport matches, etc, so there you have your answer.

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Is that hyperbole or are you really experiencing that much downtime of Reddit? I see it occasionally but it's never down for long, the odd "servers are busy" message usually disappears after a single refresh.

Pages take a long time to generate all day, but during peak hours they take a minimum of 4 seconds each (depends on what page you're loading, if it's got lots of comments, etc), and many times they simply timeout. The engineers at reddit have been unable thus far to fix it.

This isn't my experience.

I'm not the same guy you were just talking to but in my experience on mobile Safari, I get "something went wrong, visit the homepage" when I navigate around reddit far too often. What's funny is it actually tends to resolve itself if I wait a second or two, but yeah, reddit engineering and infrastructure is not well equipped to handle the amount of traffic they receive. It's gotten better, but it's still not what you'd expect from the internet's front page.

The main website is OK as is i.reddit.com but their mobile client is hilariously bad in a "I can't believe they thought this was ready" way, it takes an age to load, it stalls out all the time, the tap targets are too small, it has the classic "oh you hit this when you meant that and then clicked that, lets spin the wheel on where you really end up" problem that slow mobile apps have.

I know they deal with insane scale yadayada but it's simply not ready.

That and the horrific dark pattern on the "We want you to have the best, massive red/orange button marked continue that takes you to the app store and the tiny weeny little "continue to mobile site" underneath".

I don't want your damn app, stop asking me.

If I was cynical I'd think they didn't care about the mobile site been awful as it drives people to the app.

Last time I tried it, their app was even worse than the mobile website though.

I can't agree with you. The sheer fact that I know well what the reddit error page is refutes this. In fact it's one of the few sites I frequent that I know even have an error page.

Maybe it's regional.

It probably is regional, yes, because I simply can't believe every time I write a comment like this here or somewhere else I'm told reddit works fine. It gets on my nerves every single time I visit at night. (Western Europe)

I almost never have a problem on desktop, but using iOS safari (and the mobile reddit site), I often see the error page. I think it's a view/rendering issue, and ends up being displayed rather than a loading modal, but I could be wrong.

Nor mine - although search essentially never works on the first try, and sometimes the second and third tries.

same. reddit was really bad some good years ago, but it's quite stable now.

The search is consistently broken, but the rest of the site seems to have good uptime now, much better than it once was.

Search has never worked. I always use Google site: modifier and have never had an issue.

Search worked pretty reliably up until 7-8 months ago for me

maybe three years ago it did, but reddit has gotten drastically more stable since then. It still has the occasional downtime, but now it's more like every couple months than every couple days.

Reddit itself has been very stable these last few years. Reddit search on the other hand is a complete crapshoot even to this day.

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