Posts tagged Reddit
Reddit Went Down: Blame Amazon, the Cloud or Both?
Mar 18th
Reddit went down for a period of six hours early Friday morning, making it look as bad as any service does when its millions of visitors suddenly can’t get to their beloved community.
It’s not a good thing. But according to one former Reddit employee, who left Reddit for Hipmunk last week, the problem has been going on for months with Amazon Web Services (AWS). “Keltralnis,” writes that in the past year the issues have even escalated to the office of the CIO. Ketralnis is the user name for David King.
In the comments to the post, people question Amazon Web Services as the right provider for the service. And in hindsight, King says in a comment that Reddit should have moved off Amazon last Fall.
Sponsor
Worst of all, community members are worried about the service having continued outages. That’s a bad place to be. No service wants to have this kind of problem.
The debate, much to King’s lament, is now becoming a conversation about the cloud. Is that far fetched? It is a bit but it does surface some issues to consider about broad services such as AWS.
Reddit user knowitistrue writes:
IT guy here. Specifically I am a data storage/data center specialist. It pains me to see the “cloud” illusion come crashing down on a great product like Reddit.
What also strikes me in this whole situation is how squeezed these guys seem to be on budget. I’ve worked for very small companies that own a SAN that could easily handle reddit that they purchased for less than $50,000. True, SANs can be very expensive (in the millions), but a good one with enough storage can be had for a good price in today’s market.
For the uninitiated, a SAN is a Storage Area Network. It’s essentially mirrored RAM in front of a shit load of disks (in every way redundant down to the power supplies). Nice SANs are usually fibre channel connected and optimized to be super reliable and redundant.
How is this different from Amazon? Amazon is a “cloud” service. This means that what Reddit is seeing as disks are actually abstractions sitting on top of a layer of code Amazon has created above a physical SAN to allow for growing/shrinking of resources, general “cloudiness” and ultimately to allow Amazon to charge for every resource, be it storage or compute time.
It’s no secret among most IT folks that the cloud really isn’t cheaper than rolling your own infrastructure for reasons exactly like this.
Reddit, if you ever need consulting, I’m available.
Reddit gives a more diplomatic perspective in its blog post:
Amazon’s Elastic Block Service is an extremely handy technology. It allows us to spin up volumes and attach them to any of our systems very quickly. It allows us to migrate data from one cluster to another very quickly. It is also considerably cheaper than getting a similar level of technology out of a SAN.
Unfortunately, EBS also has reliability issues. Even before the serious outage last night, we suffered random disks degrading multiple times a week. While we do have protections in place to mitigate latency on a small set of disks by using raid-0 stripes, the frequency of degradation has become highly unpalatable. To Amazon’s credit, they are working very closely with us to try and determine the root cause of the problem and implement a fix.
Over the course of the past few weeks, we have been working to completely move Cassandra off of EBS and onto the local storage which is directly attached to the EC2 instances. This move will be executed within the month. While the local storage has much less functionality than EBS, the reliability of local storage outweighs the benefits of EBS. After the outage today, we are going to be investigating doing the same for our Postgres clusters.
Amazon Web Services could not be reached for comment.
What do you think?
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Reddit Hosts Q&A With Team Behind IBM’s Jeopardy-Winning Watson Supercomputer
Feb 18th
This week, an IBM supercomputer dubbed Watson took on Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a competition, pitting natural language processing and machine learning versus two Jeopardy champions. The three-day tournament ended on Wednesday with Watson soundly whooping its competitors. Now that it’s over you might wonder how it was done? What problems did the team behind Watson run into along the way? What’s next?
If you head on over to social bookmarking site Reddit, you can ask them yourself. The site has gotten the IBM research team behind Watson to agree to hold a Q&A with Redditors and is fielding questions for the next several days.
Sponsor
The Q&A is being held in the IAmA subreddit, where users of the site often offer themselves up to the community to field questions about whatever they feel others might be interested in. (A “subreddit”, by the way, is a user-created subsection of Reddit that caters to a particular topic.) “IAmA” is a shortened way of saying “I am a…” and can also be interchanged with “AMA,” which stands for “ask me anything.” The IAmA subreddit is full of user-created interviews other Redditors, celebrities, academics, scientists and more.
Currently, users can submit questions to the topic. Over the next several days, users will be able to vote on these questions and the IBM Research Team will answer them on Tuesday, Feburary 22 at noon EST.
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian wrote today about what he thinks makes Reddit as successful as it is (it recently broke 1 billion monthly pageviews), pointing to the IAmA subreddit. IAmA “is an endless treasure trove of fabulous content being created within reddit,” wrote Ohanian.
To take part in the Q&A, simply head on over, sign up for a free account if you don’t have one, and fire away.
Oh, and currently, the number one question? “Can we have Watson itself/himself do an AMA?” The answer? “We’re working on it 
“
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Social News Site Reddit Reports Nearly 3X Growth in 2010
Jan 3rd
Social news site Reddit posted year-end numbers this afternoon including January and December page view stats that climbed from 250 million pageviews to 829 million, an increase of nearly 3X.
Former ReadWriteWeb writer Frederic Lardinois wrote up the numbers on his personal blog Newsgrange (we miss you, Frederic!) and said he did not believe that Digg’s troubles this year were the cause of Reddit’s growth. But I think it’s hard to believe that wasn’t a major factor. Digg has long been the much bigger social news site but has slowed to a crawl after users grew unsatisfied with changes made by management seeking to make the site more democratic, more personalized and more mainstream. The resulting exodus couldn’t help but have contributed at least some growth to Reddit, a site that’s very similar in function if very different in tone. Either way, the moral of the story may be that social news, voted on by users in aggregate, is not dead.
Sponsor
Reddit users pride themselves in their generosity towards the rest of the world. The site raised almost a million dollars for Haiti and other global crises this year. It also began a new program wherein users can donate their activity data on the site to independent researchers, something which thousands chose to do and which we wrote about enthusiastically in October as a potential model for all other social sites.
While comparisons with Digg are hard to avoid (Digg was bigger, is far more juvenile, into cults of personality, swamped with spam-for-hire sleaze-bags, antagonistic towards women, unsuccessful in building niche communities and without an attractive mobile site) it’s only fair to acknowledge that building sites like these is much harder than it might appear. Yahoo’s Digg copy-cat site Buzz, for example, was heralded as the game-ending giant entry into this market when it was launched two and a half years ago but the December announcement of its pending closure warranted less than a sniffle compared to the uproar about Yahoo saying it was closing social bookmarking service Delicious.
For reference, the 800 million monthly pageviews Reddit saw in December is the same number that Netscape.com was seeing in 2006 when AOL decided to turn it into a social news Digg-competitor. That effort angered Netscape news portal users, who revolted until the social news effort was moved to Propeller.com, itself just a memory now.
Meanwhile, Reddit keeps getting better and much, much bigger. Or, if this was as they say on Reddit too long didn’t read, here’s how the team summarizes the news: “2010 was a great year for reddit, and 2011′s gonna be so awesome it’ll make 2010 look like 2009.”
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Boxcar 4.1 Shows Some Bacon Love, Adds Reddit Notifications & More
Nov 16th
The latest version of Boxcar, the push notification organizing app extraordinaire for the iPhone, has just hit the app store and with it came a couple new services that we think you (and many of your bacon-eating, narwhal-loving friends) are going to really enjoy.
Version 4.1 comes with expanded Twitter support, a handful of usability updates, and support for Foursquare, Gowalla and, you guessed it, Reddit.
Sponsor
The Latest, Greatest of the Late
Boxcar 4.0 actually hit the App Store last week with a brand new design and a bunch of new services. Google Buzz, Google Voice, Github and a couple others were all added, as was the ability to reply to Tweets directly from within the app.
We spoke with Boxcar CEO Jonathon George and asked him a little bit about the new services. He told us that Boxcar would begin offering alerts for friends’ check-ins on Gowalla and Foursquare, with additional functionality coming in the future.
"The long term plan here," said George, "is to deliver notifications for anything and everything on the web, anywhere you would like."
Nevermind That Jazz, Boxcar Has Reddit!
As for Reddit (our personal favorite addition in this update, if you couldn’t tell), Boxcar goes a little bit further.
"For smaller subreddits that don’t get much traffic, you can put in the name of the subreddit and a ‘threshold’," he explained. "We’ll send you a notification anytime a post crosses that scoring threshold."
For the uninitiated, that means that whenever a submission to the social bookmarking site is voted favorably upon by enough people, you’ll get notified.
Additionally, Boxcar has notifications for Reddit accoutns, meaning you can get push notifications for Reddit messages (or "orangered!", as he put it), comment replies and self-post replies.
The final addition deals with Twitter. Boxcar now lets users get notifications for whenever a user of their choosing tweets. They say something and you know – that simple.
Et Tu, Brute? (What About Twitter Push Notifications?)
Of course, with today’s announcement that Twitter would be adding push notifications to its iPhone app, we had to ask George how Boxcar would continue to hold its ground in that realm. The simple answer is that it’s a more full-featured, customizable solution, but let’s let George speak for himself. He offered five points:
- Find out when people favorite your tweets, retweet you, add you to a list or begin following you.
- Choose from any of our 20 sounds rather than using the default SMS tri-tone sound.
- Use Boxcar with any Twitter client.
- Quiet time for all of your notifications.
- Unified inbox for all of your push notifications.
For the power Twitter user, that certainly beats getting pinged only for @mentions and replies. We’re sold.
And if you’re on Reddit, well, I’m honestly not even sure what you’re doing still reading this. Go get the latest version of Boxcar in the App Store and give Boxcar an upvote, already!
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Blackhat SEO ‘cheats’ Reddit – Register
Oct 11th
|
Blackhat SEO 'cheats' Reddit
Register A London-based "blackhat SEO" has demonstrated a means of gaming the popular link-exchange site Reddit, … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Reddit Prospers From Digg v4 Debacle
Sep 3rd
Since the release of the newest version of Digg, v4, launched last week, the less-than-warm reception has caused a massive influx of traffic to their rival – Redditt. Launched less than a year after Digg, Redditt hasn’t been as popular, but they did have very loyal users. However, starting Sunday night, the four-person team has seen the amount of new users, uniques, and page views increase in staggering numbers.
Senior programmer, Chris Slowe, states that the unique page views alone have increased 50% – they have been averaging about 900,000 a day since Monday morning. Also, they are reporting between 13 and 14 million total page views per day. Approximately 25% of the sites visitors were people who went on to register for the site and become “baby redditors” as Chris calls them on the site’s blog.
With their numbers growing so rapidly, the folks over at Reddit were honestly surprised that the site didn’t go down. Their blog also says that most days they are performing around peak capacity for the site and they “never could have survived an unexpected surge like that.”
Evelyn Rusli of Tech Crunch talked with Slowe and he says that they are currently working on new features to keep the “Redditors” happy and to make sure the site can sustain it’s new, larger user base, including redesign of the UI.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Reddit Prospers From Digg v4 Debacle
View full post on Search Engine Journal
