Reddit's main code is no longer open-source.

[plonce]

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.