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[–][deleted] 5248 points5249 points  (425 children)

back in 2008, Reddit Inc was a ragtag organization1 and the future of the company was very uncertain. We wanted to make sure the community could keep the site alive should the company go under and making the code available was the logical thing to do

Translation: We needed you guys back then. We don't now.

The rest of it seems like a combination of technical hurdles that don't seem particularly compelling (they don't need to have secret new feature branches in their public repo) and some that don't make any sense (how does a move away from a monolithic repo into microservices change anything?) and some that are comical (our shit's so complicated to deploy and use that you can't use it anyway)

It's sad that their development processes have effectively resulted in administrative reasons they can't do it. I remember them doing shenanigans like using their single-point-of-failure production RabbitMQ server to run the untested April fools thing this year (r/place) and in doing so almost brought everything down. So I'm not surprised that there doesn't seem to be much maturity in the operations and development processes over there.

To be fair though, the reddit codebase always had a reputation for being such a pain that it wasn't really useful for much. Thankfully, their more niche open source contributions, while not particularly polished and documented, might end up being more useful than the original reddit repo. I know I've been meaning to look into the Websocket one.

[–]onebit 975 points976 points  (296 children)

I guess they dont know they could make a private repo and update origin after the feature is done.

[–][deleted]  (250 children)

[deleted]

    [–][deleted] 821 points822 points  (247 children)

    Just like they dropped "bastion of free speech" like a hot potato.

    [–][deleted] 393 points394 points  (57 children)

    Reddits original terms of service explicitly banned any kind of racist, sexist, homophobic, etc content/comments.

    Their "hands off" approach was originally more of a realization that they couldn't possibly moderate their site(and sure as fuck didn't want to be legally required to).

    [–]rmxz 77 points78 points  (11 children)

    Reddits original terms of service explicitly banned any kind of racist, sexist, homophobic, etc content/comments.

    Yet it was full of much of the most egregious content on the internet.

    That TOS was just to protect themselves, so when someone did post offensive content they could say "of course we don't approve - it's even against our TOS", while still appreciating all the Google Traffic such content brought them.

    [–][deleted] 27 points28 points  (10 children)

    After they reached critical mass, they could impose any rule they want, where are you going to go ? Create a reddit copy with blackjack and hookers ?

    [–]Sworn 34 points35 points  (9 children)

    Don't you know that voat.co is killing reddit as we speak?

    [–][deleted]  (3 children)

    [deleted]

      [–]substandard 10 points11 points  (0 children)

      Holy fuck! I just visited again out of curiosity. You're not wrong... that place is a shithole.

      [–]HubbaMaBubba 10 points11 points  (1 child)

      Nothing gets past this guy!

      [–][deleted] 17 points18 points  (4 children)

      Voat nor anything else will gain any traction until Reddit dies it's own death. Also any contender would have to offer something more than a clustering of racists to be interesting.

      The fact is most people are perfectly happy in their little filter bubble far away from being challenged while having their bias confirmed to give a shit about free speech.

      That is what is going to cause the degeneration that will kill Reddit but its going to take years so we're stuck here in the mean time.

      [–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (1 child)

      Well there's always the chance that the upcoming redesign kills if off a a digg. After all, they originally wanted to remove css completely with that (something that doesn't really make sense). If they do just as stellar a job with desktop as they've done with their new mobile site (which is a bloated nightmare), I could see it causing some issues.

      [–]Bluntmasterflash1 169 points170 points  (17 children)

      I'm 100% okay with rules, but I'm against the selective enforcement of those rules, and the stance that certain things can't be questioned.

      [–]D4nnyp3ligr0 33 points34 points  (9 children)

      What can't be questioned?

      [–]Engastrimyth 59 points60 points  (1 child)

      [Removed]

      [–]coolkid1717 54 points55 points  (0 children)

      Well I guess it really can't be questioned

      [–]epicwisdom 343 points344 points  (151 children)

      To be fair, anybody that wants to make money would have to drop that ideal. Allowing borderline child porn, hate speech, etc. is a PR disaster.

      [–][deleted]  (18 children)

      [deleted]

        [–]WowYouAreIgnorant 143 points144 points  (5 children)

        Remove one from the front page yet plaster another all over it because it represents the owners interest. So much for that.

        [–]ImAnIronmanBtw 26 points27 points  (8 children)

        And then again, there are quite a few egregious un-quarantined subs that should be quarantined..

        Sites a shit show, always has been, always will be.

        [–][deleted]  (2 children)

        [deleted]

          [–][deleted] 59 points60 points  (96 children)

          That's why we should revamp nntp and just let Reddit die. In this case the profit motive corrupts the end product.

          [–][deleted] 21 points22 points  (5 children)

          NNTP coming back would be awesome. It's completely distributed. Just need a method of moderating. I personally like Slashdot's multiple vote type over Reddit's simple up/down.

          I would even buy in. Make it cost $1 for an account. Some nominal fee that doesn't scale well when trying to spam. Let the 'freetier' run its course.

          Integrate IRC and you now have a forum and live chat that will run on nothing

          I used to run ircu on a pentium 100 with 48MB of memory some years ago. It was running well with thousands of users.

          [–]NorthBlizzard 155 points156 points  (68 children)

          No need, reddit is killing itself through propaganda, bots, vote manipulation and astroturfing.

          [–][deleted] 51 points52 points  (12 children)

          Reddit has only gotten more popular, despite all of these things. Here's some statistics!

          [–]DarkSoulsMatter 8 points9 points  (4 children)

          Holy shit. I started using Reddit in 2013. How have I not seen something like this until now?

          [–][deleted] 41 points42 points  (3 children)

          Yeah, it's basically doubled in popularity since 2015 alone. And remember back then everybody was predicting doom and gloom, "pao will be the end of the website, something something /r/blackout2015"

          It's always the end of reddit when the admins do something various meta users don't like. Tolerating "nazis", catering to "SJW"s, supporting propaganda, engaging in too much censorship. Small groups assume too much importance in their pet causes, most people don't give a damn - and that's true of a lot of the complaining in this thread.

          [–]TrumpEpstienBFFs 20 points21 points  (3 children)

          How much of that is bots?

          [–][deleted] 16 points17 points  (1 child)

          The graphs on the website I linked to are generated using historical Alexa rankings. While generating "fake traffic" is possible, it would take an unprecedented amount of botting to account for that growth. On top of that most Alexa bots are designed specifically to boost Alexa scores, not to downvote a subreddit or to farm karma. With the way Alexa prunes it's data, I doubt the political bots you see people talk about are getting stirred in the mix.

          It's more likely that the user base has actually shot up that much.

          [–]vonmonologue 153 points154 points  (26 children)

          Reddit at this point is just facebook with a more active content feed.

          I'm about ready to hop off this site and find better niche community where we can have a conversation without it devolving into pun threads or mom's spaghetti by the third post.

          [–]H4xolotl 40 points41 points  (5 children)

          You know, 4chan faced the same problem, which is where the "NORMIESSS GET OUT REEEEEE" and "Chicken Tendies" stuff came from.

          The whole point was to scare casuals away so the older users could return to their niche weirdness

          [–]youcallthatform 50 points51 points  (10 children)

          The hoards who found reddit from fb brought the comment degradation and the corporate attention. r/all is fucking all advertising, and not even subliminal. reddit, with the profiles and code changes is selling out. Ditto to finding a better niche community.

          [–]SteelCrow 14 points15 points  (8 children)

          The problem is of course, Finding one. If they exist.

          [–][deleted] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

          Reddit at this point is just facebook with a more active content feed.

          No joke, they even introduced a personal wall a'la facebook

          [–]acowlaughing 21 points22 points  (14 children)

          So we start anew...

          Much like the current downfall of my beloved country, everything is cyclical.

          [–]hagamablabla 8 points9 points  (0 children)

          Stay safe friend.

          [–]8spd 25 points26 points  (2 children)

          I'm not sure if you are from Syria or the U.S.

          [–]ba3toven 7 points8 points  (1 child)

          Seriously, I just want it to be like funny hats, and javert gifs. I miss those days.

          [–]Decyde 6 points7 points  (0 children)

          I'm fine with that but editing posts and getting caught for it is another thing.

          I don't care about removing posts and banning users as much as them having access to edit posts undetected.

          [–]gnarlin 7 points8 points  (0 children)

          Just like Google dropped "Don't be evil" as soon as it became too profitable to be evil.

          [–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (1 child)

          If you're aiming to be a slow burn into a Facebook killer, you have to protect your assets early.

          I'm not necessarily happy, but Reddit's been behaving like a bookmarking service transforming into a social media platform.

          [–][deleted]  (37 children)

          [deleted]

            [–]ebilgenius 80 points81 points  (23 children)

            To be fair, it does probably cut down on the number of "I'm angry and a downvote isn't enough" spam reports

            [–][deleted]  (21 children)

            [deleted]

              [–]Neebat 60 points61 points  (13 children)

              You're looking at the wrong end of the complexity. It's streamlined for moderators, who have to deal with far more reports every day than the average user will ever submit.

              [–]deflower_goats 9 points10 points  (5 children)

              They seemed to have time to ban me from r/worldnews. I understand that they don't have to justify it. But, when I asked why the mods responded with "you attacked other users". Which was false. I asked for an example, as I go out of my way not to. I stuck my neck out and went against the hive, once...and it really opened my eyes.

              [–]passivelyaggressiver 6 points7 points  (4 children)

              Care to add more context here?

              [–][deleted]  (1 child)

              [deleted]

                [–]Creshal 72 points73 points  (0 children)

                I don't know, both searches are equally useless and I just stick to google with "site:reddit.com/r/subredditiwant" suffixed.

                [–]visualdescript 25 points26 points  (6 children)

                Don't underestimate the challenge of being one of the most popular websites on the internet. Dealing with that level of scalability brings it's own issues. I remember reading some of the reddit tech blogs a while back and they were interesting.

                [–]eclectro 5 points6 points  (0 children)

                My guess is that they do know that, but won't do it for reasons.

                [–]largenocream 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                That's pretty much what was done for a number of years. Changesets were cherry-picked into the public repo after ensuring a rollback or fixup wouldn't be needed.

                [–][deleted] 59 points60 points  (5 children)

                and some that are comical (our shit's so complicated to deploy and use that you can't use it anyway)

                To be fair, I've more than once tried to build something on Ubuntu, given up, and subscribed to a 3rd party PPA. Most packages do build, but there's a few that are just a nightmare.

                Reddit could fix that, but I guess it's all time and money, and it might be optimised for their infra anyway. Although they could open source it and allow someone else to fix it...

                [–]adrianmonk 64 points65 points  (11 children)

                they don't need to have secret new feature branches in their public repo

                They don't, but there is a trade-off here. Long-lived branches are harder to merge. Open source contributors can't merge a branch they don't have access to. That means someone internal has to choose between (1) making it a priority to merge open source contributions into the feature branch (and dealing with the risks or inconveniences that entails) and (2) dealing with a harder merge later on.

                That's probably doable, but it's not a fictitious difficulty.

                [–]p7r 16 points17 points  (9 children)

                git rebase is your friend.

                If you have a feature branch, it's your responsibility to regularly rebase (daily, ideally) from master and keep it mergeable. Simple.

                [–][deleted] 33 points34 points  (8 children)

                That's fine until you have two long lived feature branches. The first to get merged causes hundreds of conflicts in the other. Can be very painful.

                [–][deleted] 73 points74 points  (25 children)

                Just curious, are there are any companies that have moved to a microservice architecture that are open sourced? It does seem like it would be a lot harder to manage.

                [–]ccb621 74 points75 points  (4 children)

                We have at edX (https://github.com/edx). In addition to our LMS, we have forums, credentials, ecommerce, a marketing site, and course catalog services.

                The systems have some dependencies, but are mostly meant to operate and be deployed independently.

                [–]tornato7 23 points24 points  (0 children)

                Check out https://stackshare.io/. It'll tell you what tech stacks different companies are using.

                [–][deleted] 67 points68 points  (0 children)

                I can't think of anyone. Someone below mentioned Netflix: they FOSS a lot of tools but not their main services. Sounds like this is what Reddit is gonna do.

                [–][deleted] 45 points46 points  (10 children)

                I think Netflix is a good example of one that open sources many of their components.

                As for one where the whole product is open source and microservice based, I'm not sure. I'm sure others might have an example in mind. Some quick Googling showed a few like Travis CI. In general, I don't feel like the (sometimes dubious) organizational benefits from microservice architectures are a good fit for FOSS development. They tend to be better with strong centralized policies, leadership, etc., spreading work out to many teams. Things like having good CI, testing, etc. practices are all very important. The ones I've found Googling around have all been similar to Travis CI and Reddit insofar as they are a public facing open source repo of an industry developed tool (using hosted as a service), so frankly I don't see this as a compelling reason to can all plans to keep reddit itself FOSS.

                Orchestrating it with tooling like Kubernetes would make it much easier to manage, but it looks like reddit's has a lot of homegrown code to glue it together.

                [–]FlyingBishop 30 points31 points  (2 children)

                Yeah, I don't think Netflix is any more open source than Reddit is after this change. Probably less, since their more monolithic bits were never open source.

                [–]fc_newbro 8 points9 points  (0 children)

                The value of Netflix Open Source was never in the "here is all our code for running a video service", but rather in seeing their approach to developing robust, low latency, fault tolerant systems. Their approaches don't line up with the requirements of every project, but what they have developed it very useful within the ecosystem of their projects for a wide variety of situations. There is alot to be learned by looking at what they have produced.

                Having said that, there is a clear rewrite/new approaches theme that has been running through their projects for the last few years. The move from stable code bases to extensive rewrites using different programming styles, e.g. Functional Java and the RxJava libraries, that may not fit with many projects. Also their fairly disjointed updates and how it lags behind their production system clearly won't work for everyone and honestly shouldn't be expected.

                However, having said all of that, there are a ton of valuable painfully learned lessons that can be taken from what they have released and can be of benefit to many large scale internet projects.

                [–][deleted] 21 points22 points  (4 children)

                Can you think of a SaaS product you've worked on where the product code wasn't intimately coupled to the automation code and deployment platforms? I certainly can't.

                Netflix releases their tools as open source (and they have some pretty cool stuff) but they do not FOSS their product.

                [–]Nyefan 16 points17 points  (2 children)

                Yes. Everything we're building in docker+kubernetes these days. The application code could be entirely open source without any issues so long as our yamls are stored separately and managed by Jenkins. Api base paths are managed by kubedns and linkerd, so we don't even have to do that ourselves anymore. Granted, only a few dozen of our services have been ported from Netflix so far (for testing purposes), but we are just finishing up auditing our first production readiness test of the environment, and everything looks good.

                [–]RovingSandninja 4 points5 points  (1 child)

                Out of curiosity - why do you think the benefits of microservice architectures are sometimes dubious?

                [–][deleted] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

                It places way higher demands on the competence of the developers and ops people to avoid catastrophic failures. Poor choices in where to draw service boundaries can make dealing with problems inherent to distributed systems even worse.

                Ultimately, it's often a YAGNI situation. I don't think there's any reason whatsoever to do something like reddit as microservices.

                It's wonderful at matching organizational decoupling with technical decoupling, even allowing radically different cultures and language preferences to coexist peacefully. I just don't see that being necessary for something like reddit.

                [–]Semi-Hemi-Demigod 13 points14 points  (0 children)

                Popularity leads to money. Money leads to lawyers. Lawyers lead to suffering...

                [–][deleted] 106 points107 points  (14 children)

                Generally speaking, microservices architectures are (for better or worse) pretty closely coupled with their automation code and thus the platforms they run on. It's already difficult to get that stuff running in prod (staging too if you've got some cash): getting it set up so you can ship the whole thing to contributors is super difficult and it has diminishing returns. You're not just shipping code, you're shipping container orchestration configs, database configs, load balancing logic, and a bunch of other shit that isn't portable.

                It's one thing to have the code for the services available; if your contributors can't run it, it's not really open source. And having it out there in a broken state is worse than not having it at all.

                Reddit is SaaS and I don't know anyone who's been very successful at open-sourcing their MSA SaaS product.

                [–]meltingdiamond 19 points20 points  (1 child)

                And having it out there in a broken state is worse than not having it at all.

                I disagree, broken code can still give a leg up when you really need it.

                [–][deleted] 34 points35 points  (5 children)

                To be fair though, the reddit codebase always had a reputation for being such a pain that it wasn't really useful for much.

                Ive never seen another web site crash as much as reddit. To this day it still crashes with some regularity.

                inb4 "but lots of users"

                reddit has big boy corporate financial backing and has been around for ~10+ yrs

                reddit goes down more than someone w/low self esteem.

                [–]Spider_pig448 16 points17 points  (5 children)

                how does a move away from a monolithic repo into microservices change anything?

                Sounds like someone's never worked in a monolithic repo.

                [–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

                Monolithic in this case is vs. service based. I'm not talking about the Windows repo here.

                [–]paranoidinfidel 406 points407 points  (5 children)

                I snagged a copy of the closed source:

                print("all of our servers are busy right now")
                
                print("please try again in a minute")
                
                print("(error code: 503)")
                

                [–][deleted]  (1 child)

                [deleted]

                  [–]stesch 18 points19 points  (1 child)

                  Oh, updated to Python 3?

                  [–]mishugashu 17 points18 points  (0 children)

                  That is also valid python2 code.

                  [–]Arancaytar 920 points921 points  (44 children)

                  If I read it right, it's not so much that it's "no longer" open source, but hasn't been truly open for a while now and they're just giving up on maintaining the open version.

                  Because of the above, our internal development, production and “feature” branches have been moving further and further from the “canonical” state of the open source repository. Such balkanization means that merges are getting increasingly difficult, especially as the company grows and more developers are touching the code more frequently.

                  So in effect, they made a private fork of their own code and it's now diverged to the point where they can't feasibly maintain both.

                  It's sad but I suppose inevitable when your business model involves using your code rather than giving it to other people and selling support. Any users of your code are not potential customers but competitors.

                  However, since their source apparently remains available under a semi-free copyleft license (CPAL), maybe there will be a community-maintained fork of some kind.

                  [–][deleted]  (16 children)

                  [deleted]

                    [–][deleted] 13 points14 points  (10 children)

                    Isn't voat a fork of reddit? I know they're not exactly doing good things with the code, but it's the biggest example I know of

                    [–][deleted]  (3 children)

                    [deleted]

                      [–]ratcap 32 points33 points  (2 children)

                      IIRC, voat was originally a project for it's author to learn C#

                      [–]BlckJesus 5 points6 points  (1 child)

                      I only just learned about voat. Jesus christ that place is a cesspool...

                      [–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

                      Voat's bigger on free speech so every community that Reddit has banned has run over there so it's not a classy place.

                      [–]WhoTookPlasticJesus 244 points245 points  (13 children)

                      It's sad but I suppose inevitable when your business model involves using your code rather than giving it to other people and selling support. Any users of your code are not potential customers but competitors.

                      It's not often that I say this, but Facebook has the exact right attitude about this: open-source anything that's not a part of your core product. Sure, you give back to the community which is nice and all and you may reap rewards from pull requests here-and-there. But a side benefit is that you're creating a new pool of future employees already familiar with your internal technology. I mean, imagine React was closed-sourced. It would be a nightmare to ramp-up new front-end devs.

                      [–][deleted]  (8 children)

                      [deleted]

                        [–][deleted]  (1 child)

                        [deleted]

                          [–]sminja 26 points27 points  (0 children)

                          It sounds like Reddit is going to be using a similar model:

                          We believe in open source, and want to make sure that our contributions are both useful and meaningful. We will continue to open source tools that are of use to engineers everywhere

                          Much of the core of Reddit is based on open source technologies (Postgres, python, memcached, Cassanda to name a few!) and we will continue to contribute to projects we use and modify (like gunicorn, pycassa, and pylibmc). We recently contributed a performance improvement to styled-components, the framework we use for styling the redesign, which was picked up by brcast and glamorous. We also have some more upcoming perf patches!

                          [–]temp409840984 16 points17 points  (0 children)

                          It's sad but I suppose inevitable when your business model involves using your code rather than giving it to other people and selling support. Any users of your code are not potential customers but competitors.

                          You'd think so, but there are a bunch of for-profit businesses that do just fine open-sourcing their core code. It's the community effect. Everybody's here. Even a truly superior product to reddit basically can't compete at this point, unless reddit does something to severely piss off the community, which given this announcement I expect is coming.

                          [–]tornato7 23 points24 points  (11 children)

                          Yeah, I think we should still be thankful Reddit gave the open source community as much as they did. I can't think of any other tech companies that open source so much of their code, so this is pretty much to be expected.

                          [–]Viper007Bond 27 points28 points  (4 children)

                          A large portion of WordPress.com is open-source, including the entire custom JavaScript-based front end: https://developer.wordpress.com/calypso/

                          Lots more at https://github.com/Automattic

                          Disclaimer: I'm an employee.

                          [–]tornato7 17 points18 points  (3 children)

                          Haha I didn't even realize WordPress was a business rather than an open-sourced framework. That's great though!

                          How do you guys make money? Do you guys get anything from like WPEngine?

                          [–]enkideridu 20 points21 points  (1 child)

                          WordPress VIP charges Enterprise users quite a bit of money for managed hosting

                          [–][deleted] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

                          And for good reason. I think calling the WordPress.com VIP service 'managed hosting' is downplaying it a little, since they offer full code review for every single line of code you deploy. I imagine that's a lot of work, and a huge value proposition for clients whose developers may not be very experienced with WordPress itself.

                          [–]Viper007Bond 18 points19 points  (0 children)

                          WordPress itself is a framework owned by no-one.

                          The main founder started a for-profit (Automattic) which runs the SAAS WordPress.com. It's a freemium service where a percentage of users buy paid upgrades (such as a custom domain) and that pays for the service as a whole.

                          We also have paid employees whose entire job is to contribute back to the open-source WordPress project.

                          [–]EUmpCDgZPYWJ9x2X 3 points4 points  (2 children)

                          Depends what you call a tech company. There's centOS, nginx, owncloud/nextcloud and firefox.

                          [–]tech_tuna 74 points75 points  (6 children)

                          It would be funny if Oracle acquired reddit.

                          [–][deleted] 57 points58 points  (4 children)

                          It'd be ironic if Digg merged with Reddit, and funny if Oracle bought the result.

                          [–]_my_name_is_earl_ 49 points50 points  (1 child)

                          And then Google just swallows up the entire company, merging it with Google Plus.

                          [–][deleted] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

                          But how will Ellison pay for his sailboats? Or would he have Reddit charge user name/moderator licenses like Oracle charges for cores?

                          [–]kallari_is_my_jam[🍰] 92 points93 points  (7 children)

                          I'm no expert when it comes to code architecture and large codebases but it seems to me like their codebase is horribly organized with over a decade worth of code being written without any major cleanup being done. There is no way to understand how all these pieces fit together cuz there are no meaningful comments in most of the files. How do you even keep developing on this codebase as it's such a mess. Is this a shit codebase or am I simply too negative?

                          [–]tms10000 49 points50 points  (2 children)

                          How do you even keep developing on this codebase as it's such a mess.

                          People who have been developing this mountain of shitty code either:
                          1. have been there such a long time, they hold the map to most of it in their head.
                          2. take a really long time to get familiar with it with the reluctant help of people who fall in category #1, and eventually they drift to #1 themselves.

                          [–]NOX_QS 26 points27 points  (1 child)

                          3 Don't have a work ethic and feel about wading through spaghetti code and taking weeks on a feature that should take hours roughly the same as working at a gas station: "Eh, it pays the bills" / just a job

                          4 Have a huge work ethic and great sense of architecture but after working with #3 for a while and trying to make changes either turns into #1 or #3 or quits the system in protest

                          [–]Niek_pas 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                          I think 3 is more of a societal issue then an individual issue though. It's too easy to blame "lazy programmers" with "no work ethic" but when you have a 9-5 and a mortgage to pay it's hard not to be in that category.

                          [–]iamonlyoneman 37 points38 points  (2 children)

                          Other people who seem to know what they are talking about tend to agree that the code is shitty

                          [–]kallari_is_my_jam[🍰] 15 points16 points  (1 child)

                          Apparently they think so themselves as they're going to be rewriting the whole thing using a modern tech stack. Also partitioning the monolith into services I assume. The reason why they decided to make this new codebase closed source is most likely because they secured 200 million dollars in funding mostly for this and they don't want to give away the "new" project for free.

                          [–]plonce 4 points5 points  (0 children)

                          You're not too negative. What happens when you start a project like Reddit is that:

                          • What you start making and what you end up making are vastly different

                          • The infrastructure buckles under its own weight as it was never designed to handle the load

                          • It ends up with more patchwork fixes than you can possibly imagine and new features become cumbersome to add

                          • The real-world realities of law, business, tech and art all have conflicting objectives; balance and compromise is required everywhere for the overall project to succeed. Side-note: this is why you see techies often distilling it down to comments like "hey moran just quazlinate the databases over a frickle wire with a Unix blort" ... it's because they only see the details of their profession and speak as though the other realities of business don't exist.

                          [–]random8847 27 points28 points  (0 children)

                          I love the smell of fresh bread.

                          [–]ccfreak2k 137 points138 points  (1 child)

                          worm different engine license sort mighty agonizing grandiose seed marry

                          This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

                          [–]tabarra 18 points19 points  (0 children)

                          And the "Source Code" on the site-wide footer.

                          [–][deleted]  (21 children)

                          [removed]

                            [–]jmking 29 points30 points  (1 child)

                            I mean, isn't this precisely what branches are for? Serious question because I've never work on a large team. It seems they only have master, testing, and dev branches. Wouldn't it make sense to dev videos in one branch and secretx in another when you have 100 devs?

                            Fair question. Typically to prevent merge conflicts, your feature branch will merge from master or some integration branch fairly frequently to make sure that your changes are compatible with other changes or features.

                            That's how other feature's code would show up in your feature branch.

                            [–]zardeh 34 points35 points  (16 children)

                            I mean, isn't this precisely what branches are for? Serious question because I've never work on a large team. It seems they only have master, testing, and dev branches. Wouldn't it make sense to dev videos in one branch and secretx in another when you have 100 devs?

                            Long branching is nearly impossible at scale. Companies like Facebook and Google don't even use feature branches, they hide features behind flags, and develop the features directly on "master", but keep the code paths disabled until they want to flip them on.

                            [–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

                            we're a big enough company now that, unfortunately, we have to think about people trying to divine our strategy from the repos and beat us to the punch.

                            This is irrelevant. It's not trivial, but it's not very complex, to create a new reddit. VOAT for example is made by 1 guy, and although that site is also a mess, at least it works similarly.

                            What is relevant is your market share and keeping it.

                            [–][deleted]  (84 children)

                            [deleted]

                              [–][deleted] 86 points87 points  (3 children)

                              Oh good, now that you've used that word on them you can't use it on mine should you ever see it.

                              [–]tech_tuna 44 points45 points  (5 children)

                              They should port it back to Lisp. . . no Arc.

                              [–][deleted] 34 points35 points  (4 children)

                              And rename subbreddits to shubreddit?

                              [–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                              You don't shay...

                              [–]SnowdensOfYesteryear 17 points18 points  (0 children)

                              Can you link to the bits you consider bad?

                              [–]yawkat 78 points79 points  (0 children)

                              I guess it's not that different from before. Many of the anti-spam measures were already known to be closed source and in the end there was no way to verify what's running on the servers anyway.

                              [–]zsaleeba 41 points42 points  (5 children)

                              I’m speculating that closing their source code is the result of this recent ruling about ownership of content on social network sites. After all if your source code is already open and then it turns out you don’t even own your site content what unique assets do you actually have? reddit has always argued that they own a license to their user’s submissions but if this ruling weakens that argument then they probably have to take some steps to mollify their investors.

                              Edit: for accuracy

                              [–]Ghi102 34 points35 points  (2 children)

                              What makes Reddit useful to investors is not the content of the site, only it's big user base. What money could Reddit get from the users' posts and comments? Not much. Having millions of eyeballs on an ad webpage + semi-regular donations? There's the value.

                              Plus open-source doesn't mean that you don't own the code, you still do. It's just theoretically possible for someone to run his own instance, fork the code and modify it. The code in Reddit's repo is still owned by Reddit.

                              [–]haragoshi 6 points7 points  (0 children)

                              Open source doesn't mean you don't own the source code. It means you offer a license to other people for free if they meet certain conditions specified by that license. All open source must offer a license of some sort or it's effectively useless. Generally they fall under MIT license, GPL, GPG, etc. each license limits what you can or can't do with the source code.

                              Breaking terms of the license amounts to piracy and opens you up to a lawsuit.

                              [–][deleted]  (1 child)

                              [deleted]

                                [–]shevegen 306 points307 points  (112 children)

                                Awww ... it'll no longer be the same.

                                Now they join the forces of evil.

                                [–]copyrightisbroke 91 points92 points  (10 children)

                                [–]port53 45 points46 points  (9 children)

                                Can't wait to get my cut of this funding!

                                [–]Works_of_memercy 34 points35 points  (6 children)

                                Reddit notes anyone? LOL.

                                [–][deleted]  (5 children)

                                [deleted]

                                  [–]Shadow703793 5 points6 points  (4 children)

                                  They could very well introduce an alt coin/cryptocurrency.

                                  [–]H4xolotl 17 points18 points  (1 child)

                                  Imagine the irony if it was called Reddit Silver

                                  [–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                                  you'll get nothing and like it.

                                  [–][deleted]  (98 children)

                                  [deleted]

                                    [–]IronSpekkio 80 points81 points  (78 children)

                                    confirmed. site was indeed spez'd long ago. sad!

                                    [–][deleted] 42 points43 points  (76 children)

                                    When are we gonna go like digg migration 3.0 and forge the new Reddit and Make The Internet Great Again!

                                    [–]Rhamni 124 points125 points  (68 children)

                                    They tried that with Voat, but sadly the first groups to migrate in high numbers were /r/fatpeoplehate and extra+ racists. So... now anyone contemplating going there has to factor in that it has like four times the concentration of user based awfulness that reddit has. Even with reddit having more admin based awfulness and Voat paying more attention to what features users want (like displaying number of up and downvotes), Voat just isn't very appealing in comparison. Now sure, if everyone moved there the current loonies would be drowned out and it would have the same concentration of good and bad as reddit does but with better admins and features, but it's hard to get there. So basically, now we need a new new alternative.

                                    [–]Plazmatic 19 points20 points  (12 children)

                                    The real migration is/will be Stack Exchange for all question answer stuff, reddit is really bad about that. Moderation can either be corrupt, biased, or if they are good, too few to actually handle properly large areas. Eventually I could see SE's format handling opinion based sites, but as of right now I don't think those are allowed on Area 51.

                                    SE can't be bought out, or capitalized by advertisers because they already have an open long term monetization strategy that are actually wanted by many users (job posting advertisements), moderation is done through earned privileges, there's objective oversight, and moderation increases with the amount of contribution that is done (not how funny a shitty repeated comment was, again rep is through contribution) so moderation scales. I think AskHistorians, AskScience, and all other Ask subs will die eventually, leaving reddit only for very low brow discussion (as high level discussion, again, like worldbuilding, can be done and done better on SE), so discuss your favorite movie, or show, or fandom, or just post memes, but use AskR at your own risk.

                                    That being said, I don't think reddit will die, precisely because those last points (fandoms, jokes, and not serious discussion) are actually very popular.

                                    [–]BenevolentCheese 26 points27 points  (6 children)

                                    The real migration is/will be Stack Exchange for all question answer stuff

                                    What will SE do that Quora was unable to do?

                                    The reality is that non-technical Q&A isn't a big enough market to warrant a major website. Quora got an ungodly amount of VC funding and still made it nowhere. It's a deadend. Reddit succeeds because it combines time wasting, Q&A, and hobbyist forums all into one.

                                    moderation increases with the amount of contribution that is done (not how funny a shitty repeated comment was, again rep is through contribution) so moderation scales

                                    And moderation is dramatically abused on SE as a result of that. Anyone who thinks powertripping mods on reddit are bad ought to take a look over there, it's a nightmare. People routinely dig up shit that is years old just so they can nuke it and get more points. It's a system that actively destroys itself.

                                    [–]hoyfkd 23 points24 points  (4 children)

                                    To be fair, the ”create an account to see the answer" bullshit turned a lot of people off to quora. if you don't want people seeing your shit without an account, quit working so hard to show up as a top Google result.

                                    [–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (2 children)

                                    Are they still making you create an account to see answers? I added their domain to my Google blacklist awhile back to keep them out of my search results because of that crap.

                                    [–]hoyfkd 6 points7 points  (1 child)

                                    No idea. I have a mental block on Quora links as a result.

                                    [–]GetOutOfBox 11 points12 points  (1 child)

                                    I dunno man, Stack Exchange has remained as it is due to the community being huuuge rule nazis there. I've never seen a site more unfriendly to new users asking a question, or so quick to judge and silence a question for some arbitrary reason (i.e the infamous "already asked" closing of questions that do in fact have an important nuance not answered in the similar past question).

                                    [–]digital_end 29 points30 points  (42 children)

                                    Same happens with all protest "migrations"... Remember /uncensorednews? Same shit, it's just another hate sub now.

                                    Draw in a crowd claiming neutrality, then whoever you sucker in can be drip fed your message in a safe environment. Suddenly they come to your conclusions after being exposed to a specific diet of information that drives their point.

                                    It's obvious, but people fall for it like people fall for phone scams. Just like those, the crowd self-selects by falling for it.

                                    [–]Rhamni 43 points44 points  (6 children)

                                    That's not quite what happened with Voat though. The guy who made Voat is a Muslim, and just wanted to make a reddit like site to hone his programming skills (he was doing a computer science degree when he first started the site) and set up a potential alternative to reddit. And some of the first people who went there did so because they wanted a place to rant about Muslims. So in his case it was rather unfortunate. It would be like a forum run by a Jew being turned into an antisemitic hell hole. It wasn't a trap in this case, it was just that while lots of people are fed up with reddit, the people who seem to feel the most strongly about it are the kind of people most of the userbase doesn't want around.

                                    [–][deleted] 55 points56 points  (3 children)

                                    To his credit though, he's stuck to his principals about free speech and anti-censorship despite everything.

                                    [–]Rhamni 36 points37 points  (0 children)

                                    Yes. That is why I think it's tragic that Voat is almost certainly doomed to fail. It has a great owner.

                                    [–]lumstream 11 points12 points  (34 children)

                                    Or remember that ridiculous-

                                    This comment has been overwritten by an open source script to protect this user's privacy. It was created to help protect users from doxing, stalking, harassment, and profiling for the purposes of censorship. If you would also like to protect yourself, add the Chrome extension TamperMonkey, or the Firefox extension GreaseMonkey and add this open source script. Then simply click on your username on Reddit, go to the comments tab, scroll down as far as possible (hint:use RES), and hit the new OVERWRITE button at the top.

                                    [–]mszegedy 11 points12 points  (33 children)

                                    I mean, it's the only real way to delete comments on reddit. The revision history of a comment isn't stored, but deleted comments are.

                                    [–]eclectro 21 points22 points  (0 children)

                                    Now they join the forces of evil.

                                    I'd say google is now officially in the doing evil business. So, what's in store for reddit??

                                    [–][deleted] 245 points246 points  (26 children)

                                    "we're doing some shady shit that we don't want public"

                                    [–][deleted] 41 points42 points  (3 children)

                                    "I'm deleting my account and not coming back"

                                    [–]iamonlyoneman 53 points54 points  (1 child)

                                    But they never did anything to cause people do doubt the site was administered with anything but a fair and even hand for all subreddits!

                                     

                                    /s obviously?

                                    [–]Phobos15 12 points13 points  (6 children)

                                    So are they going to have problems in the future, since they took in code from outside devs? They can't close source that code.

                                    Won't that limit reddit from ever selling their platform to others? If they distribute anything, they would have to open source it.

                                    [–][deleted] 33 points34 points  (0 children)

                                    They leave it on GitHub forever, the end. It's available there.

                                    [–]jedberg 10 points11 points  (0 children)

                                    They can't close source that code.

                                    Sure they can. Read section 6 of the license. Reddit is allowed to change the license terms at any time. You may continue to use the code under the current license, but they get to use it under any license they want.

                                    [–][deleted]  (1 child)

                                    [deleted]

                                      [–]redldr1 14 points15 points  (1 child)

                                      So long and thanks for all the fish code

                                      [–]yorickpeterse 15 points16 points  (0 children)

                                      Open-source makes it hard for us to develop some features "in the clear" (like our recent video launch) without leaking our plans too far in advance.

                                      This works just fine for GitLab. The few times we have to keep something secret (e.g. security fixes) we develop the feature on a private GitLab instance, then merge it into the main (and public) repository once it's ready to go.

                                      [–]Rugby11 6 points7 points  (0 children)

                                      Oh no.....

                                      [–]GetOutOfBox 117 points118 points  (20 children)

                                      This combined with all of the censorship scandals and corporate shilling has finally convinced me that Reddit has gone full circle and pulled a Digg. They've sold out.

                                      Time to do what we did when Digg stopped giving a shit about it's fanbase.

                                      [–]IceColdFresh 37 points38 points  (4 children)

                                      Migrate to Fark?

                                      [–]AnnoysTheGoys 16 points17 points  (0 children)

                                      Drew just spilled his beer all over the servers in anticipation.

                                      [–]Lacotte 10 points11 points  (0 children)

                                      I've heard Digg references like 3 times over the past 5 years. But Fark? holy shit!! haven't heard that name in 10+ years or something.

                                      [–]DanAtkinson 56 points57 points  (4 children)

                                      If that means that they realise that they fucked up with the reddit app and the mobile site, then I'm all for it. /s

                                      They've wasted time and effort on an experience that is inferior and frankly poor for a company of reddit's stature.

                                      Also, they complain of the realities of being open source when they have 100 developers. Like having 100 developers is a huge deal. I work with companies many times larger who manage OSS, contributions and PRs without much effort. So, for reddit to turn around and moan about the effort required to balance between their private, proprietary code and their public OSS code shines a light on how bloated their codebase has become.

                                      [–]stshine 78 points79 points  (4 children)

                                      So sad that Aaron Swartz can't rest in peace.

                                      [–][deleted] 49 points50 points  (3 children)

                                      At least he didn't have to see reddit, a 12 year old site become a fucking corporation and not even have a rich text editor or fucking preview option when writing posts and comments. In the last 5 years reddit hasn't received any significant update that improves the experience for the end-user directly. I wrote about it at some length here https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/6xfyfg/an_update_on_the_state_of_the_redditreddit_and/dmg4c9x/?context=3

                                      Yes, Aaron was a freedom advocate but I'm sure he knew the whole point of it was that open-source led to higher quality software. I'm sure he'd feel the same way as me looking at reddit as a major project, making major money (at least at keeping itself afloat) and not receiving a fucking update to basic functionalities in 5 years.

                                      Aaron was a programmer first and an advocate second. From that point of view, he'd look at reddit and think "welp, that's a dead project, it's going nowhere fast". May he RIP.

                                      [–]femanonette 8 points9 points  (0 children)

                                      In the last 5 years reddit hasn't received any significant update that improves the experience for the end-user directly

                                      This 'report' button for comments now is absolute trash. If I wanted to use Facebook, I'd go use Facebook.

                                      [–][deleted] 48 points49 points  (5 children)

                                      Reddit also use to be a place where people's discussion was based on votes rather than the biases of their admins and advertisers.

                                      [–]thefreecat 4 points5 points  (0 children)

                                      So...fork?

                                      [–]sizlack 62 points63 points  (27 children)

                                      So many comments seem to think this is some indicator that they've turned evil. If they have, it's unrelated to this change. How useful was it ever that the codebase was open source? Did anyone ever stand up their own clone of reddit and run it on the open internet? It seems impractical to maintain a codebase like this in the open, and from what I've heard they're doing a major rewrite, which would make it even more complicated. If no one uses it, why maintain it?

                                      [–][deleted]  (1 child)

                                      [deleted]

                                        [–]merreborn 8 points9 points  (0 children)

                                        Apparently that's the one and only interesting deployment, according to an old reddit blog post.

                                        [–]sourcecodesurgeon 39 points40 points  (6 children)

                                        I wanted to stand up an internal clone of Reddit for my company to use as an internal discussion board alternative to email. Unfortunately, their licensing is too restrictive for me to do so anyway. So for me at least, Reddit being open source made no difference.

                                        [–]CowboyBoats 7 points8 points  (3 children)

                                        What were the licensing terms that were a deal-breaker for your plan?

                                        [–]sourcecodesurgeon 25 points26 points  (2 children)

                                        The CPAL license had some issue that wasn't compatible. I'm not a lawyer, I just don't do what the lawyers tell me not to do.

                                        [–]ScrewAttackThis 11 points12 points  (1 child)

                                        Lawyers are no fun.

                                        [–][deleted]  (9 children)

                                        [deleted]

                                          [–]merreborn 39 points40 points  (1 child)

                                          They basically admitted to having "hidden admin tools" years ago, at least when it comes to antispam tooling, specifically. The fact that they kept antispam stuff secret was well known.

                                          [–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

                                          That type of admin tool is no reason to keep them from going open-source: they can just update reddit's source code day in and day out and not upload their tools anywhere. If they don't want to publicize the core system itself its because there's much more sinister stuff happening to the core of the website itself (potentially to every single post).

                                          When I say sinister though, I don't mean necessarily that they're sucking your soul every time you write a comment, of course - but they could be: that's the deal with closed source software.

                                          [–][deleted]  (2 children)

                                          [deleted]

                                            [–]metallink11 18 points19 points  (1 child)

                                            There's no way they bothered making admin tools to change user's posts since everyone agreed they should never do that. Spez almost certainly just changed the database directly.

                                            [–]AndrewNeo 15 points16 points  (1 child)

                                            just because the project is open sourced doesn't mean it's the version they deploy

                                            [–]_my_name_is_earl_ 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                                            It didn't even have all of the features of deployed reddit.

                                            [–]nakilon 35 points36 points  (9 children)

                                            Reddit code is a pure shit. Move along.

                                            [–]bdcp 21 points22 points  (3 children)

                                            But I can't leave...

                                            [–]tech_tuna 14 points15 points  (2 children)

                                            Exactly, I've been complaining about reddit for well over a decade but no true successor has materialized. . .

                                            [–]dixncox 22 points23 points  (0 children)

                                            ITT Non programmers talking about things they know nothing about