HN is a very simple application. Handling a high volume of traffic for a simple application is a very different problem from scaling a highly complex application.
HN is simple, yes. But it could be made more complicated. Personalized feed and data analytics are two complicated things that come to mind. Staying simple is often a choice, and it’s a choice not many companies make.
HN is a straight forward forum. Reddit is one level above that: generalized forums as a service.
Anything HN has had to implement, Reddit has to implement at a generalized, user-facing level, like mod tools.
Frankly, we underestimate how hard forums are, even simple ones. I learned this the hard way rebuilding a popular vBulletin forum into a bespoke forum system.
Every feature people expect from a forum turns into a fractal of smaller moving parts, consideration, and infinite polish. Letting users create and manage forums is an explosion of even more things that used to be simple private /admin tools.
Mod tools are not accessed and used by all users. So the load of mod-tools on the servers is probably negligible.
I agree, most software is deceivingly simple from the outside. Once you start building it, you become more humble about the effort required to build anything moderately complex.
Mod tools aren't used by the majority of users, correct. But the existence of mod tools does make the logic and assumptions of the application different. Now you've got a whole set of permissions and permissions checks, additional interfaces, more schema, etc.
Its not that the mod tools are constantly being used, its that there's now potentially far more code complexity for those tools to even exist.
is reddit really a complex application (regardless of how they build, scale, or deploy it)? Although that makes me wonder, what makes an application complex?
Hacker News changes more often than people think, just not the layout because people here are weirdly fetishistic about it.
Since I've been here they've added vouching for banned users (and actually warning people beforehand) thread folding, Show HN, making the second chance pool public, thread hiding, the past page, various navigation links and the API. They've also been trying to get a mobile stylesheet to work. They've also mentioned making various changes for spam detection and performance. And the url now automatically loads a canonical version if it finds one, and the title is now automatically edited for brevity. And I've probably missed a few things.
And HN isn't a simple application by any means. Go look at the Arc Forum code - it isn't optimized for readability, or scalability or reliability, but joy - for the vibe of experimental academic hacking on a Lisp. It's made of brain farts. Hacker News is probably significantly more complex than that for being attached to a SV startup company and running 'business code' and whatnot.
I mean, that’s not really that much is it. And that’s the point, HN really doesn’t change much. Whereas Reddit, for better or for worse, has a much higher output of new user facing features.
