We have some Perl scripts that are freaking immortal.
The rest of the code base started in Java, then Clojure, now it’s Go. The scripts are there still in their very-not-modern Perl style though. They have a self-evaluating behavior consisting of data blocks that are interpolated. To be honest, I’m not sure exactly how it works. Very discouraging for the casual passerby looking for some cleanup to do.
I’ve hated working on every Angular project I’ve worked on. No matter the team, the experience level or complexity, it’s always been an absolute misery.
I cannot understand how it was invented/why it exists, how smart people at Google convinced themselves to use it. I cannot understand how they let it escape into the wild or even why those not forced to use it, choose it.
I know I’ve begged before for this, and it’s pointless, but please if you’re in the position to, please consider snuffing it out and starting over.
It's worse, everyone jumped from Angular to the React bandwagon. I use these types of things as litmus tests for if I want to join a new company/team. No sense in cussing under my breath all day every day. It's really hard to smile after you just invented a new vulgar phrase to describe mangled tech.
The navigation is completely broken as well. Some things don’t close, back button might or might not work, never seems to remember where I was before, frequently rescrolling stuff.
This is all after ad blocking.
Without it, endless spam of embedded ads distracting me, wasting my time. Janky loading, page hangs on clicks.
I’m not sure wtf their engineering team is doing but the site’s basically broken. Maybe it’s the normal state of things. Before I was using some third party app that was working great until Reddit killed api access.
My usage of it has dropped as well. It’s just unpleasant to use now.
It's remarkable that a San Francisco tech company with 2,000+ employees can't seem to produce an app that's half as good as Apollo, an app developed by one guy in Canada.
Different incentives. Apollo was made by someone who loved making software and wanting to build something nice for people. Reddit is made by a corporation interested only in extracting as much wealth from the platform as possible, with as little regard for users as they can get away with.
For a while, until he made sure every holiday stuffed the app with a repeating pop-up (think 5+ times over the holiday) that asked users to subscribe. Even users that already paid for the “Pro” version.
I forgot what he did when Apollo closed down but it was another big moneygrab.
The app itself always stayed pretty great, but the steady ramp up in monetization got increasingly annoying over the years.
I remember the reports in r/apollo but I never experienced those issues myself. I don't know the guy personally so I can't make a judgement on if he was lying about that being a bug or not, but whatever the case it certainly wasn't something every user experienced.
> I've seldom met a dev who didn't enjoy the profession.
When you're an individual dev, if you think ads are bullshit, tracking is bullshit, /r/all is bullshit, non-chronological feeds are bullshit, infinite scroll is bullshit, promoting ragebait/clickbait to boost engagement is bullshit, gold/coins/stickers/premium is bullshit, inline images are bullshit, and anything that negatively impacts responsiveness/performance/stability is bullshit - it's within your power to improve the product - often by simply not implementing them.
When you're a dev for a big corporation like reddit, though, if your boss wants some bullshit that makes the product worse but more profitable, it's your job to make the product worse but more profitable.
Passionless devs exist in droves, but I've never met a dev who didn't enjoy the salary. It's not far fetched at all to say that an individual working on something they care about has different incentives than an employee earning their pay.
Dev pay in Canada isn't extraordinary in comparison to US salaries, but the average salary of an associate dev is in the top 25th percentile for all age groups, and the low end of the scale is above the 50th percentile for all age groups. Note that this does not include people with senior in their title.
I would say that any career that essentially guarantees above average pay compared to your age cohort for your entire career without the need for a degree is a rather extraordinary industry.
I once had a job in Louisiana where they gave me a $12 hourly raise because the guy they were hiring to be my subordinate was going to be making $7 more than I was currently earning.
There are many high caliber engineers who just do it for the paycheck. I’m not one of them, but given the crazy compensation, it’s no surprise the field attracts outsiders.
Under capitalism workers dont have autonomy to do what they want. They do what the bosses want who themselves do the dictates of the system, which is to maximize profit above everything else, in one form or another, for capital owners.
This is one of the main reasons why solo-dev passion projects vastly exceed quality, usefulness, etc than a commercial product. See also Windows Server vs Linux-based servers.
These are all good arguments in favor of Paul's assertion that "Reddit is unkillable".
I mean, people still use it despite a complete cluster-bombed design, intense push towards monetization at the cost of user experience, atrocious management and clear dictatorial tendencies from the top muffin, etc. It seems not even Reddit itself can kill Reddit despite their best tries.
It's in the nature of their moat: millions of tightly focused small forums, each easy to duplicate on their own, but together making the Reddit account a gateway to an enormous chunk of the user-generated internet. You open a Reddit, and not, say, a Telegram channel, because that's where the users are, ready to form a coherent community around your topic.
What might finally do Reddit in, or at least open vast markets for copycats, is its intense need to fit inside the narrow Overton window of American politics, in order to be palatable as a publicly traded company. This has already led to extremely heavy handed bans of major reddits and things can only get worse. If it reaches the breaking point, you will see a mass migration of not only the ideology driven communities, but also the neutral ones like fandoms, hobbyists etc., because they will move to where the users are.
"All of a sudden"? I've heard that term used for probably twenty years now, if not more, originating (IIRC) with Warren Buffet. What does the moat of a castle do? Keeps the baddies out. What does the "moat" of a business do? Keeps the competitors out. To take a recent example, what would Nvidia's moat be? A strong argument could be made that it's CUDA. For the sake of argument, let's say anyone could throw a bunch of silicon on a PCB and make a GPU equivalent to Nvidia's. Doesn't matter, because your cheapo GPU won't run the CUDA software that makes Nvidia's dominance possible.
To offer one more example out of my butt, take Apple. The Apple brand makes up at least some of their moat. You could build an exact clone of an iPhone that even runs latest iOS (assume for the sake of argument that there's a way to get the OS on your hardware). Doesn't matter, unless you're ready to infringe on trademarks by putting an Apple logo on there, few will buy it because they want Apple, not a functional work-alike.
"Competitive moat." It's a term Warren Buffett has used often to describe businesses that have an advantage that blocks competitors, like a moat around the wall of a castle. Control over intellectual property rights is an example of such a moat.
Same, I know one of the current devs browses HN and commented a couple of months ago that there was still a contingent of devs on the team who want to keep old.reddit.com alive - not sure how long for though!
I'll miss AskHistorians. But thanks to Reddit having already weaned me from mobile usage, I'm psychologically ready to detach from yet another community.
> Reddit having already weaned me from mobile usage
That too. I'd like to thank whoever was responsible for Reddit's mobile redesign, because they cured my Reddit addiction. I can't count how many hours I've saved by not using their obnoxious, spammy new mobile UI.
For me, it is the API restriction that did it - Reddit is Fun was a stellar Android application, killing it ended my mobile usage. Everyone seemed aware it was going to be one of the effects of API restrictions - Reddit seems to have thought it was all right...
> I can't use anything of the newer interface without pulling my hairs.
Good luck with the "current" new design. The one that superseded old.reddit.com and got pretty decent is now on new.reddit.com, and the steaming pile of bull dung that is the current reddit.com if you're unlucky enough to get it forced upon you. And of course notifications on new.reddit.com will link to the bull dung version.
The thing is, this now matches Twitter/X: unpleasant in usability, increasingly unpleasant in content, lots of the good posters have left; BUT such a significant chunk of "normal" companies and users are doing social media through it that it survives nonetheless. And those frogs are pretty boil-resistant.
If there's a new game launched, where is the forum likely to be? Reddit. What search term do people add to try to bypass genAI content farms? Reddit.
> What search term do people add to try to bypass genAI content farms? Reddit.
I suspect that if reddit loses its more bespoke content, adding 'reddit' to searches will be far less useful. However, even if not, I think those days are numbered as AI becomes more useful and more integrated into search; and as it replaces traditional search.
I was a frequent and enthusiastic contributor to dozens of niche subreddits about various techy topics, chiefly because it was a great way to kill time while using the restroom, shopping with the wife, all manner of things that are notable in that I don't have a computer. After using Apollo for so long, the reddit app is downright torture and I refuse to use it. I still occasionally reddit on a computer since the mobile experience is abysmal both in app and browser, but I'd be shocked if I manage 5% of my previous rate of activity.
On the one hand, thanks reddit, I got a ton of free time back. On the other hand, that time was previously spent generating value for your website, so not sure that was a good move for you.
Edit: Also, and this is strictly second-hand info from the Apollo dev who obviously is far from an unbiased source, but I have to admit alongside the thing just being objectively worse to use, my views of the reddit corporate structure also soured significantly. I think what they did with the API changes was a boneheaded move to be sure, but the way they went about it was so uniquely shitty to the people who had built small businesses around theirs that it truly boggled the mind. The dev for Apollo posted quite a bit around the "negotiations" if one wants to be generous and call them that in the lead up to the API changes, and the CEO just blatantly lied about him numerous times, in obvious ways, trying to paint him as this entitled kid in such a way that as a millennial, I have to admit I am THOROUGHLY sick of. Reddit as a company simply jacked the price, with barely any notice, refused to negotiate on a single point throughout and made numerous bad-faith claims about the developers who were (understandably) caught off guard.
Like if you just want to close the API, fine, close it. But then that would paint reddit as the obvious bad guy, so instead they went round the back way with this "api price change" that was so ludicrously expensive that no app could possibly cover it, and then reddit gets to PR speak the thing as "well we tried to work with developers" in a blatantly bullshit way without technically lying. It's gross and tiresome and frankly, insults the intelligence of every reddit user.
I can't say for certain if this wasn't the case that I'd still be using it more, as the app and mobile experiences are truly shit even without that. But this certainly has cooled my fervor to try to find ways to use it.
On the other hand, that time was previously spent generating value for your website, so not sure that was a good move for you.
This is what I'd like to believe, but I fear it does not really make a difference. Reddit's audience has grown far beyond its initial tech roots and the quality outside a small subset of subreddits is... let's just call it devoid of content. It's barely a blip on the radar if the early adopter drop out, because they are by now a tiny subset of the population.
And I guess that's fine. Platforms have their lifecycle. And when a social media network is for-profit, the early adopters are often only important for the initial bootstrapping. Luckily there are nice places like LWN, HN, Lobste.rs and other more niche communities.
> It's barely a blip on the radar if the early adopter drop out, because they are by now a tiny subset of the population.
The thing is, when people append 'reddit' to their search query, who writes the posts that get linked? When someone is looking for a home wifi router and types 'mesh wifi6 reddit' in google and a post comes up from /r/homenetworking, it is almost certainly a response to a question from someone about setting up a wireless network, or it is a guide or a review by someone who just posted to get their knowledge out there. Who writes those? Not the people who upvote videos of dudes getting into a fight in Burger King.
Moderation and how horrible is the Reddit app is the thing that turned me off most.
The fact that Reddit keeps growing despite it's flaws and terrible management, let alone moderation, says a lot about the combination of a simple but effective product and critical mass.
I think it is direct threaded Forth but there is a conditional token table in there (tokens.asm). Thought it might be some clever hybrid of threading techniques, but I don’t see how tokens is used.
It's a build option, the variable 'tokenised' controls whether it builds tokenised or direct threaded. The macro DX outputs either a token or word depending on whether a token is available and whether 'tokenised' is set.
I play around with White Lightening occasionally because of the ease of making games with it on C64 and the comprehensive documentation (PDFs of it have been preserved).
Seriously. You can also buy a Firewalla or similar and activate the auto-blocking of porn sites with a button. I also block Roblox for a good chunk of the day too haha. But my 6 yr old figured out he could hop of wifi and use the cellular connection to get around the Roblox ban.
You can't prevent adolescents from accessing porn. I used to dial-up to playboy.com. Magazines were available too as dad's just left them out. Kids know VPNs nowadays too.
Their idea of having everyone submit government ID to view website content is ridiculous.
You can join the military at 17. But in Texas, I guess you can't look at porn for another year.
> Pornography has well researched addictive and other negative properties
Has it actually? I know phrases like "porn addiction" are casually used, but the last time I looked there wasn't much study of it in terms of the science of addiction. Most of the people self-reporting porn addiction were experiencing distress because of the incompatibility of their porn use with their religious beliefs, but their use itself wasn't extreme or pathological per se.
Which doesn't mean there aren't problems with it, or that it can't cause extreme problems for some people. But in my exposure to addiction medicine, it's treated more as a psychosocial compulsion like shopping or video game addiction.
> Pornography has well researched addictive and other negative properties
There's a lot of misleading or outright misinformation about the effects of pornography. For instance one study claiming an incredibly high rate of abuse depicted in pornography categorized ejaculating on someone's face as abuse. It's also very hard to research because it's difficult to establish controls: almost all men watch pornography.
