Reddit management: Please don't pull a Digg.
[this is lengthy.. thanks for reading]
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I wrote a reply to a comment on the thread about the Conde Nast spinoff rumors and it got lengthy. I figured it (and some bonus thoughts) might be better as a submission so everyone could weigh in.
jedberg refuted the article's theory in no uncertain terms but I have other concerns.
Conde Nast is undoubtedly monitoring the media and the rumors. We have an opportunity to send a message to the higher ups.
All indications are that, at least as far back as the v4 beta, Digg no longer had a meaningful plan. They became completely deaf to their users. I take Rose's recent ship-jumping as confirmation that there was no intricate play underway.
Students of business will be reading case studies about Digg for years to come: how to take a lucrative online community worth $175M and reduce it to ashes.
Hopefully Reddit isn't destined for a similar fate. Between Conde Nast's seemingly disconnected management of Reddit, the engineering issues, and the staff turnover Reddit certainly enjoys ample opportunities for catastrophic errors in judgment to be made in the near-to-medium term.
Reddit is a valuable asset. The "powers that be" ought to put give much consideration to the the Reddit community's loyalty. Quality comments and submissions continue to grow at unprecedented rates in spite of the absolutely maddening performance issues. This illustrates the loyalty of Reddit's userbase; more so, even, than our willingness to pay for the decidedly hollow Gold product offering.
tl;dr: Reddit is an incredible asset because of its community. Digg and MySpace each had a community, too. Don't ignore yours ours.
Posted Mar 27, 2011, 1:28 PM UTC
What if the very existence of a community turned out to be detrimental to the major stakeholders' interests? What if ad revenue turned out to be insignificant compared to the "damage" caused by easy access to less-known sources? Are things like Reddit destined to be organic and cyclical? And if so, which is next?
It would be sad if Reddit vanished, however this type of site could be run on much smaller hardware with much better performance if it was given a redesign. Sites with a lot more more traffic than reddit are running very nicely on a lot less hardware.
Without trying to sound insulting, there's no amount of hardware in the world that will overcome bad design.
I don't want to endorse an oversimplification like "smaller hardware," but I must concur with the general point.
I have looked through the Reddit source on occasio and the Reddit site could be much more responsive using less hardware resources without any changes to the user experience.
This would require an overhaul of their codebase and likely different architecture/software choices. It would basically be like building Reddit from scratch. As someone who does this for a living, trying to estimate the labor involved in that is an interesting exercise in itself. Maybe that's for another post..
There's an article from last year that said that reddit was running on 20 database servers. I have a strong suspicion that reddit could be redesigned to use one or two database servers and offload the page building and content caching tasks to code designed specifically for that purpose.
A general purpose database isn't always the right tool for the job.