

it's slow... it's unstable... it's... [reddit] beta! - aston
http://blog.reddit.com/2007/08/its-slow-its-unstable-its-beta.html

======
staunch
It seems like they really gave in to the luxury that we all want with code
that gets old: The Total Rewrite.

I don't think it's always a fatal mistake, especially in something as
relatively simple as Reddit. It still seems like a mistake to not transition
to their new system piece-meal. I've witnessed this first hand a few times
already in doing contract work. I'm pretty gun shy about it now and I
definitely buy into what Joel said a lot more than I did before.

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles/fog00...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles/fog0000000069.html)

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palish
Jeez.. Take a look at <http://beta.reddit.com/>

I guess this is why you don't significantly change the process. In this case,
Reddit changed the process of submitting comments (It's now Ajax so that it
doesn't refresh the page) and now everyone is going absolutely nuts trying out
the new feature.

They only saved themselves by having the beta be in a separate subreddit.
Could you imagine if this was rolled out to the main page?

~~~
nostrademons
The massive comment-spam is _because_ it's a beta. There are several main
forces at work:

1) People know it's gonna get wiped anyway, so they aren't shy about
commenting.

2) Their job is to find bugs, not to discuss things. They're being diligent.

3.) For a while, there was a bug where every time you edited a comment it
would post a reply instead. A bunch of us were testing Markdown and various
XSS exploits; each time we edited, a new comment was added.

4.) Another prominent bug had to do with receiving messages and comment
notifications. In order to exercise that, people had to comment.

5.) Folks are testing unicode. There's _a lot_ that can go wrong with Unicode.

~~~
palish
Okay. I thought it was like all other betas, where people use the product the
way they normally use it and report bugs, instead of consciously trying to
stress it to its limits, especially with social software.

~~~
staunch
This _is_ the way it usually goes on social sites, you just didn't know that.
Reddit's beta page looks like a Slashdot beta page from 2000.

~~~
palish
Cool :) learn something new every day.

------
aston
The contest between reddit and pg heats up...

~~~
pg
It's not a contest. We don't want News.YC to be popular. We don't want to deal
with heavy server loads or spam or any of the other schleps that come with
popularity. The ideal thing for us would be to have the 10,000 best hackers
and no one else.

~~~
aston
Interesting. I admit I hadn't heard it from you directly, but my impression
was that news.yc was shooting to bring the old school reddit back to the
world. I assumed the reddits are trying to do the same. If they're shooting
for popularity and you're shooting for goodness, I guess there's no
competition, but I think a lot of people see the sites at odds with each
other.

~~~
pg
We're trying to hit a point reddit passed through on the way to becoming more
popular, but then stay there.

I don't know what the reddits' goals are for this new version, but I assume
it's not to make the site less popular. And if they have a big, mainstream
audience, that will inevitably affect both the stories and the comments.

~~~
yters
What are your thoughts on combining the programming subreddit and this site?

------
rob
Anyone know what language it was made in?

~~~
palish
I'd assume Python.

~~~
aston
Minus web.py

