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Comment by mdoms | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know what technologies are used in the backend at Reddit? Not that their frequent outages are the result of language or framework choices - that's just plain old developer incompetence - but I wonder if they have chosen some technologies that are beyond the capabilities of the types of chowderheads who would work at a place like Reddit.

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> that's just plain old developer incompetence

People who make flippant comments like this have most certainly never worked at high scale sites.

If you had, you'd appreciate the challenges when you're one of the biggest sites on the Internet.

While this is true, Reddit is definitely the worst of the big sites when it comes to useability.

Not even close. Nextdoor is way ahead of Reddit in the unusability wars.

At least Reddit still offers https://old.reddit.com.

I've never even heard of nextdoor, and it's ranked way below reddit in terms of most visited sites

Of course I could say I've never heard of similarweb.com. But let's not quibble over which site is bigger. Trust me, you ain't seen bad until you've seen Nextdoor.

That would be irrelevant since I never claimed similarweb to be a website comparable in traffic and scale to Reddit. We are discussing how Reddit is the worst implementation of one of the top websites on the planet. I never said there weren’t worse websites but show me one with Reddit like traffic that is worse.

I have worked on very high scale sites including ones that get shit on regularly on hacker news - Jira Cloud. I don't care where you work, there's no excuse for the amount of downtime reddit experiences. It's incompetence, and I don't care if you think I'm being a big meany.

In the 14 years of using reddit (unfortunately obsessively), I have rarely experienced downtime. From redditstatus.com I see that there have been no failures for the previous 90 days, except for yesterday. I'm wondering what has been your experience with the site.

And, on what basis are you being so extraordinarily dismissive of their technical capabilities? I have engineered many large-scale systems in my life (not at reddit scale), and I know that it takes some serious engineering and operational smarts to keep such a system alive.

When you run websites / APIs, nobody remembers the months of time stretch while your site was up -- they just remember the hour of downtime when you go down.

My site only handles ~ 350 million requests a month but even at that small scale, it's very tough.

Right, but the GP seemed to indicate that reddit outages are a common enough occurrence i their experience to declare them chowderheads, and I was skeptical about the stated downtime. Neither my experience nor reddit's own stats corroborate what they are saying.

They were source available for like a decade and their tech stack is a fairly open book from what I recall.

sounds like something someone would write after they finished their bootcamp capstone project and thinks they could make anything.

I don't agree with the GP tone but you're kidding if you've used Reddit recently and don't think its hot garbage. There is a notorious login redirect bug that has existed for years. When you can't even get the login right you know there are tons of other issues.

Upvoting doesn't work without error a percentage of the time, 'load more comments' on profiles has almost never worked. The list goes on.

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