As the founder of a SAAS ad serving company, I can say that as slick as (I think) my platform is, it's not a problem I would want to tackle again. There will be a large volume of technical challenges and required features to support.
It'd be like writing Apache or Nginx from scratch. It seems simple on the surface and then you wake up to all kinds of inconvenient and unexpected technical challenges.
I'm not sure Reddit's engineering resources are best allocated to building ad serving infrastructure and software. It was going to be an ongoing headache from the start, and worse, it sounds like it was build with a language and stack that was fairly new to the team.
My prediction is that it will become a high cost and difficult to maintain project that will also prove difficult to hire for when this engineering team gets tired of working on the (currently new and fun, soon to be old and scary) adserver and moves on to other jobs.
My point being that some challenges are best left to third parties who make solving some problem its full time job. I truly do not say that out of bias, just experience building and managing such a complex system.
They were already using a third party service. It was slow and opaque, so they ditched it.
At the scale of reddit, and because this is how they make their money, this is clearly something they want in house and something it would be a competitive advantage to control, if nothing else it gives them a much clearer conduit to their advertisers, and much greater control over things like ad selection.
The problem with Reddit ads isn't their tech, it's their people. The ad approval process is a farce - and human-managed. Oh, and those humans are assholes. You have to go through many denials - for no reason - submit a ticket to get another approver and approved - for no reason stated. It was the most upsetting process I've ever dealt with.
It seems odd that there's a stringent ad approval process when the site proudly lets Redditors post any garbage they want. I'd have expected anything SFW and not obviously fraudulent to be allowed.
It's obviously not very stringent. A lot of the ads they run lately are outright scams, including even advertising Scientology: https://i.redd.it/6cd1ricqc8j11.jpg
It sounds bureaucratic, not stringent. Lots of forms to fill out, and a lot of order, and probably not even many requirements to meet (but a lot of different ways saying you did meet them) but lost its purpose a long ways back.
More-pertinently, I wonder how many of the developers of reddit's new ad system themselves have ad blockers installed. Do any of them actually see the results of their work?
Reddit ads were what finally pushed me into install ublock origin about a year ago (redditor since 2007).
They had a misbehaving ad (downloaded a ton of "stuff" over and over and over). I reported it on one of the their support subreddits and was told "don't recognize the add urls. scan your system for a virus". It was a pretty good error report too (screen shots, console log, etc).
Installed ublock origin that day and haven't looked back.
FWIW, when I worked at reddit, I never ran an ad blocker. In fact, I didn't run one for about five years after, until my CPU started spiking on just about every web page I visited.
But even then, I whitelisted reddit.
So my guess is yes, they see the output of their work.
This is a pretty emotionally driven comment and would do well to provide some sort of concrete story behind why the ad approval process is a farce and why this particular group of individuals happens to be full of assholes?
I advertised for a travel site in the travel reddits. I never got a single ad approved "out the door" - only after I opened a ticket and asked why they were not approved did someone actually respond and approve it. The denial was within a few minutes of submission and the approval only after I opened a ticket in which case the response was "We're sorry, we've approved the ads" - but no one ever answered the question of editorial review.
It may appear "emotionally driven" because my experience with reddit ads has been terrible. I struggled through it, i followed the example ads, i created very topical ads and when i finally got all approved and done, they just didn't perform well either. I talked with peers in the industry and they all avoid reddit ads for the most part because of similar experiences. I haven't spent any money with ya'll since that bad taste experience.
for me, it would just be easier to site target reddit through google and do adwords for desktop/web traffic.
The editorial review literally feels like some redditor judging your ad on personal opinion vs an editorial review for passing some kind of targetable creative process. That's a terrible way to treat paying customers and i don't that experience on any other market i advertise on.
I agree that it's important to keep the money-making component of a business free from external dependency to a large degree, but I think there's some liability that's being ignored here. A 3 person team built such an important piece of Reddit in a language they never used in production? I hope the team was at least experienced in ad-tech.
It seems biased. I had a similar situation with a client of mine. They went out looked at 3rd party companies, and everything looked decent on paper.
Internally there were some napkin math and found out while the 3rd parties would save development time the returns of implementing features their customers were asking for now instead of waiting for 3rd party company paid for them to hire 3x the engineering staff the 3rd party company even had.
Size matters, Reddit is at the scale of tiny percentage gains, if they control everything and can drop a standard 90ms down to 10ms and that converts to a couple of percentage points on their revenue it is worth it.
Talking from the experience of building out a system that handled +1B impressions a day, the actual ad serving isn't challenging at all these days. Reporting and ad setup from the user is much more challenging.
> if they control everything and can drop a standard 90ms down to 10ms
10ms, after request processing, ad selection logic, and faster-than-light packet travel? I think that's far too optimistic of an improvement. As the post said, 30ms was the goal. My adserver delivers in 20-40ms. But since ads are routinely loaded asynchronously, is speed concern truly valid? The adserver can usually make a selection and deliver before the content is fully rendered in the browser.
> Talking from the experience of building out a system that handled +1B impressions a day, the actual ad serving isn't challenging at all these days.
If you developed a system that delivers 1BB impressions per day (most large scale ad networks deliver only a modest multiple of that number) and didn't find it challenging, then it's either a very simple system or you're Elon Musk ;) That's 12k requests per second, generally uncached, hitting all sorts of internal services most likely.
I'm just saying that I think Reddit's best bet is to offload the task to a company that works on these problems full time. Or acquire one like AOL and Facebook. Unless the use cases are so unique and key to the company's future plans, avoid building in-house. And if you have to, perhaps it would be a larger effort than a 3 person team developing the thing in a language that the company never used in production before.
If it was straight ad delivery I'd agree that being closer to 10ms is achievable. But in the process of pulling in ad data, user profile data, running it through a selection algorithm that can be pretty complex for even a simple adserver, calculating and plugging in macros, gzipping, and doing that thousands of times per second per server, the latency tends to creep upward.
More/faster hardware can obviously help, but since everything's async from the browser's perspective you tend to run into higher costs and diminishing returns by pushing for the lowest latency possible.
They could have gone with Iponweb[1] or something like that but at Reddit's scale it might actually (for a change) make sense to roll their own.
They're one of the largest websites in the world now, so what holds for 'ordinary' websites and their best practices may simply no longer apply to Reddit.
The whole Reddit saga for the last few years is quite the story of turnaround management done well.
Yeah I was thinking that if what they need or are planning is truly unique or just needs to be homegrown (a la FB's ad system tightly integrated with first party data), maybe it really does make sense. Or maybe any alternative third party company they engaged tried to pitch them a huge/prohibitive contract.
But then I was thinking that if it's going to be so important, why a 3 person team with no experience running Go in production?
Honestly I think you make a good point and implicitly they could have used those resources instead to improve the user experience (for example, improve the sites efficiency and load times)
I advertised on reddit for our startup roughly one year ago and it was the worst ad management experience I have ever witnessed. For the size and age of reddit the advertiser backend was a real shame. The kind invoices they provide you is laughable, it feels like the whole backend was built by amateurs.
On top of that, the traffic we received from reddit was very bad for our e-sports/gaming-related website.
Hey bflesch, a year ago we weren’t even running our own ad server and had just released an early v1 of our new ads management interface. It probably felt like the “worst ad management experience [you] have ever witnessed” because the other major ad management platforms have multiple years and hundreds of engineers/designers on us :) We’ve made substantial progress since then, I’d encourage you to not judge us too early and give it another shot, the platform and products are improving rapidly.
p.s. If any engineers or PMs are interested in helping us build out a world class, high-scale ad platform please get in touch (email in profile). We are hiring for senior and above positions in NY and SF.
If you work in the ad group, my advice is to fix the ad approval process. I've never had such a disappointing experience in my life. Seems like the approvers have editorial control based on personal preference over any objective evaluation. Since reddit is all about the ebs and flows of whats hot and whats not, sure is a shame your advertising platform is a joke at monetizing that because of the terrible approval process.
Thanks for the feedback! We are completely revamping the approval process over the next few months so I am expecting substantial improvement in this area.
A means for rapidly selecting and loading an advert which will then be blocked by the users' browser.
(Although even without adblock, are there actually all that many overt ads on Reddit, other than the sidebar ad which nearly always is an ad for a different subreddit?)
Unfortunately, they're probably using the app because they got annoyed by how much the app is forced onto you while using the web version.
I however, will not relent.
I still use old.reddit.com, even on mobile, because the new React version is slow and constantly tries to get me to download the app so that they can show me ads.
Liveblogger here. This post was best-effort liveblogged while the talk was going on, so this typo was my fault. I've fixed it to say "2B votes per month", which reflects what was on the speaker's slides.
Why not? Most front page posts have several thousand posts, which seems like it might be enough to offset the 0 comments that most submissions will get.
The front page is obviously not representative in any way of 99% of the posts made on the platform. Look at the slew of posts made on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/all/new/
Liveblogger here. This post was best-effort liveblogged while the talk was going on, and this is an error transcribing the talk on my part. I've made a fix to remove this line since it's misleading. Sorry about that!
What's more likely: there is an error in transcribing or the developers of one of the worlds largest websites think the first RPC protocol was written in 2007 (over, say, REST, which their entire API is built on).
It can be surprising how little code you're actually using from the Go-Kit project, and how it's really more of a structure for your app.
It will not save you time typing: each route can have a transport request decoder and response encoder (encoder's are often shared), a request and response type, the actual business logic, a function that takes the request struct, applies it to the business logic function and returns a response object, a function that takes the previous function and connects it with the transport machinery (building the actual endpoint), and possibly middleware implementations.
However, by teasing all of these things apart from the very beginning it's very easy to come back later and add a circuit-breaker, or (as the article says) switch your transport from HTTP to grpc (or support both).
Half of the times it just sits there blank.
Sometimes it loads in 2-3 seconds. Rest of the times it loads within 1 sec.
Rarely, it also shows a default ad( I work in same industry, hence the term).
Ads on reddit are incredibly deceptive. I'm not sure why advertisers tolerate it. 98% of the ad clicks on mobile are surely fraudulent through being intentionally accidental. The ads are designed to look exactly the same as real posts at a glance, with a username, post date, upvote/downvote arrows, deceptive title meant to make it look like a real post, comment section, share link, and image thumbnail. Reddit users are all conditioned to believe that they can tap a thumbnail and be shown a larger preview while staying on the site. On these ads, it takes them to the advertiser's site instead.
I agree with OP. My 99% clicks on reddit mobile ad are unintended. It is very annoying, for if I press the back button to early, then the firefox browser will back too the page previous to the page containing the ad I clicked. So generally, I will wait the ad fully loaded then press the back button.
It looks like it's made to appear as much like non-ad content as it possibly can while still maintaining plausible deniability on your part.
We stopped advertising on reddit after the rise of the_donald and other white supremacy subs led to our ads being placed next to a lot of bigotry and white supremacist content, even in subreddits you'd generally consider innocuous. The hate groups have spilled over into most subs now.
Reddit has become the Something Awful forums without an entry fee. What did you expect? How else are advertisers supposed to capture that millennial and post-millennial dollar through a platform like that?
Some of the issues I have had with the new design is pretty amazing. For example, when you open a specific submission it's opened in a "lightbox" which basically contains all the comment. If you click outside of the lightbox it's automatically closed which I guess is OK. So some time ago they made a new release and broke it so that if you clicked on the scrollbar to scroll down in the lightbox to see what people had commented then the lightbox with all the comments closed.
I submitted some complaint in their redesign subreddit but immediately random people replied to say that this was as designed and I should use keyboard to scroll, and not the scrollbar. But then the issue was that when the lightbox was shown it wasn't focused so I first had to use mouse to click in the lightbox to focus it and then use keyboard arrows to scroll.
It really is a good example of everything that is wrong with the SPA approach today. Browser history abuse, skeleton/placeholder text rendering instead of actual content, never-ending loading spinner on the browser tab, problems with authentication between sessions. Just open up your network panel and try clicking around and watch your console light up like a christmas tree. Then switch to the old layout and compare the two.
To put a cherry on top of it, the new layout now intersperses ads into the post lists and styles them to look like posts.
Additionally, ever since reddit decided to host it's own media, it no longer possible to directly link to a video or image. I don't want to send a link to my friend of comments about a gif. I want to just send him the damn gif. For this reason alone I'll continue to use imgur.
I'll be really bummed out the day I can't click "switch to the old layout", but I'm sure the time when they're removing that is coming.
It looks like we're finally seeing a series of decisions being made that caters stockholders instead of users of the site. They managed to hold out for this long, but I guess the day has come where it has finally happened. The big difference between reddit and all the other sites that have done this, is reddit used to be the hip place people went to get away from these kinds of user hostile moves.
The only question left now: is reddit so entrenched in it's position that it won't lose ground to a newcomer from the fallout of these decisions? Probably, but I know I'll definitely be keeping my eye out for competition that is gaining steam.
>I suspect that's the real purpose of the redesign
I mean at this point I don't think there's any doubt whatsoever. Is there even a plausible other explanation?
I only lurk on reddit but it's rather comical how bad it's become. And not just the interface, the content too, /r/all is basically Facebook with a slightly younger audience and you have to get deeper and deeper into niche subreddits to find worthwhile discussions.
Reddit has just gotten too big. So much of the bigger subs are fluffed with surreptitious sponsored content, reputation management, etc. I would have thought that that was where Reddit made the real money, by providing a back-end to make ads look like organic content, by helping moneyed backers influence discussion toward their monetised and brand-building ends.
If Reddit isn't charging and managing those using their platform for that purpose -- not an insignificant number, surely -- they are fools.
This seems to be the key/blocker for a decentralized internet, well social apps at least. If someone can solve discoverability, it'll make a lot of things possible.
I remember when Digg was bigger than Reddit and then after a certain Digg site redesign they lost a significant number of their users to Reddit and never really recovered.
Where are people going to go this time? I feel like people usually copy their competitors which is why they consider redesigns worthwhile... but which Reddit competitor is Reddit copying here? I don't think there is one.
Obviously Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Snapchat kind of worry them, but then again, I feel like people are "done" with "social media" so I wouldn't be _really_ worried if I were Reddit. They have the advantage that they can give the user very interest-focused information; when you follow a friend on Facebook, you get their programming advice, baby pictures, and political rants. With Reddit, you get to skip the baby pictures and political rants.
Just because you think people are "done" with "social media" doesn't mean Reddit execs do. They are definitely changing look and feel to be more like instagram and facebook hoping to poach users or at least widen their userbase by lowering the barrier of entry. One of the primary goals of the redesign was changing look and feel to make the site more approachable to a wider audience. They claimed after extensive testing that the old site scared off many potential users because it was "hard to use" (IMO it just looked old, and therefor bad/lame).
I think the underlying problem is that people want a platform for self-promotion (hence buying followers on Instagram), but most subreddits and maybe the site itself prohibit self-promotion. As a result, many people will never be interested (including me; I use it for pictures of cats, but nothing important).
I mostly went to HN. My own migration was Slashdot → reddit → HN. I'm on lobste.rs too, which feels like it's in the growth stage. Fewer comments, but fewer bad comments still. HN is nowhere near reddit levels of decay, which is nice.
If memory serves, the primary driver of reduced traffic to Digg 4.0 was the fundamental shift in how their submission mechanism worked, not in a change to their layout. I recall some kind of promotion mechanism where superusers gained some amount of control over their "front page" equivalent.
Also, unlike Digg, Reddit hasn't been bleeding members to another site for some time now, so there's nowhere for Reddit users to go if they become dissatisfied. Does anyone have any ideas about why that is? Reddit is not, fundamentally, a hard product to emulate, and yet I know of no site even remotely as popular nowadays (HN aside, of course). Slashdot, Fark, and sites like those all seem to have mostly been consumed by Reddit. Is it the strong network effects that Reddit has, or does Reddit's moderation system provide a unique way of hosting a community that no one has reproduced?
There was post on here awhile ago from an engineer working at digg during the v4 launch that was pretty interesting. https://lethain.com/digg-v4/
I think Discord has been siphoning off some of the users on the gaming related subreddits, but it fundamentally serves a different purpose so its not a wholesale replacement.
Network effect is one for sure. I'm not a fan of the redesign (and submitted my thoughts several times), but the content is there, and it's a reasonable platform overall.
I feel like that would have happened this time if there were a viable alternative. I know if they kill the ability to opt out of the new redesign I will be looking a lot harder for one.
Hasn’t reddit front page become really bad? When I joined there were a lot more textual posts, now it’s all images and memes. More 9gag-y. Maybe taking askscience and atheism and all these subreddits out of the FP was a really bad idea? I wish there was another category next to hot, all, new: an interesting one with a pre-selection of mostly textual subreddits
I still don't understand how come the CEO of reddit is okay with the redesign? It's worse enough that I had to install plugin to redirect to old.reddit.
It's all but guaranteed that if Reddit removes old Reddit and forces new Reddit on everyone third party web clients with ads that generate money for someone else will pop up and fill the gap.
It looks like that option is only available on old reddit. If I opt out of both beta tests and the redesign in the "Account settings" section of my user settings, I go back to old reddit by default.
This is one of the most frustrating things for me. Two weeks ago they'd set a cookie to redirect www. to old., then they removed that and now all of my old links take me to the redesign.
"Maybe they are planning for the audience they want rather than the one they have?"
That's definitely a reasonable possibility since it appears to me to be formatted for the Instagram crowd.
"Or maybe they just feel safe since there aren't any alternatives?"
Possible as well but ironic since its creating a space for an alternative.
I like this sites design. Clean, simple, and nothing superfluous. Seems to understand people are here for the user shared content and not the site itself so it stays out of the users way.
This was my opinion until I spent a week using it. Now I don't even notice the redesign. I'd even go as far to say that I like the "infinite scroll" and the way topics are displayed on the same page as the feed.
However, the reddit mobile experience leaves much to be desired, and I will never install their app.
There have been multiple threads on Reddit where people pick apart the new design and I've never seen somebody from Reddit show up to defend their changes. Not just opinions on design, but low quality javascript code. It makes me believe they know it's shit too, but it's all they have.
What are the actual complaints with the new design? I've been using it on and off and I can't say I've noticed any major issues. Though I'll admit most of my browsing is one on the mobile app these days.
First and foremost it's unnecessary and is not fixing anything.
Second, it forces learning a new layout and system. I don't understand instead of gradual changes in UI to improve experience they went with whole new thing.
Third, it's slow, bloated, and really hard to navigate through. Old version can display more pertinent information per screen resolution.
In a nutshell, hinders user experience without any noticeable improvement.
Finish product is bad design because initial idea was bad design to begin with (i.e. the idea to fix nothing and break everything).
I like the aesthetic changes to the UI, it definitely looks more modern and less cluttered. But it's the severe cut in features that annoys me.
* No way to easily access personal multi-reddits
* Saved/Hidden/Blocked have disappeared
* A lot of information in the subs sidebar doesn't show up anymore (things like related subs, wiki and so on). Now it's limited to rules and welcome message.
The multi-reddits thing is especially problematic to me. If you've subscribed to many subs, it becomes unmanageable without them.
I get obnoxious multi-second lag when entering text into a comment box on my phone, even on a thread that only has a couple comments. It's... befuddling how this made it to production and remains. And no, I don't want to use your stupid app. I'm not a fan of loading 1000's of shitty apps on my phone when a simple web page is sufficient.
Somehow the scrolling is also broken on their mobile site, and that can't be by accident. Is it some sort of javascript middle finger to urge users to move to their app? I've never experienced scrolling issues like that on any other site, ever.
That they make their mobile site intentionally unfriendly and frustrating is infuriating.
I get scroll lag on the redesign with my desktop computer. But that seems to have been resolved as I just checked.
Still, the interface is much clearer on old Reddit, new Reddit really shows the optimization of watching pictures and videos instead of articles and comments.
I've never noticed because I never opted-in to the new site design. That was a pretty sane default, thankfully.
There was some wonkiness where my profile preference to have thumbnails not shown kept getting overridden for some reason, but that seems to have stopped.
I like my HTTP package to actually speak as good an approximation of HTTP as it can, so fasthttp wouldn't be my first option.
Furthermore, the HTTP stack doesn't show up on most web servers' profiles. net/http is better understood by the community, interoperates with libraries better (e.g. golang.org/x/oauth2), and is better supported.
The main issue with net/http is that it generates a lot of garbage which is definitely going to show up in your profile if you're handling a lot of requests per second.
Allocation pressure imposed by net/http has never been a top K source of profile CPU burn in any service I’ve ever written, and I’ve written plenty of high-performance, high-QPS services. fasthttp is rarely if ever a good idea.
It'd be like writing Apache or Nginx from scratch. It seems simple on the surface and then you wake up to all kinds of inconvenient and unexpected technical challenges.
I'm not sure Reddit's engineering resources are best allocated to building ad serving infrastructure and software. It was going to be an ongoing headache from the start, and worse, it sounds like it was build with a language and stack that was fairly new to the team.
My prediction is that it will become a high cost and difficult to maintain project that will also prove difficult to hire for when this engineering team gets tired of working on the (currently new and fun, soon to be old and scary) adserver and moves on to other jobs.
My point being that some challenges are best left to third parties who make solving some problem its full time job. I truly do not say that out of bias, just experience building and managing such a complex system.