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Comment by mdoms | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

Reddit’s recommendations can be sharply contrasted with YouTube’s, which I frequently find useful and novel.

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.

That's apparently their strategy, much like Facebook: impair the mobile web experience and push users to the app(s).

I’ve noticed sometimes it’s dismissals and sometimes not.

The other huge problem with reddit is that they aren't profitable, so far as I know. It would be one thing if the problem was just that their site was ugly, slow, frequently down, stuffed full of useless "features", and needlessly difficult to use BUT they were making tons of money. If that were the case, while you might not want to exactly recreate them, you could make the argument that they were at least doing something right. As is (so far as I know) they also don't even make money despite their immense traffic.

All of the value of reddit comes from the users adding, sorting, and moderating content. The people running the site actively make it worse and they aren't profiting by doing so.

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.

Yeah, the i/compact interface is deliciously good. I frequently use it as a reference for good mobile design

They've had 5-10 second page load times for over a decade now. I just don't get it. Not fixing search I can understand (they want you to stay on the site longer and not just find what you want and dart), but a regular page load I just don't get.

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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