It seems like they really gave in to the luxury that we all want with code that gets old: The Total Rewrite.
I don't think it's always a fatal mistake, especially in something as relatively simple as Reddit. It still seems like a mistake to not transition to their new system piece-meal. I've witnessed this first hand a few times already in doing contract work. I'm pretty gun shy about it now and I definitely buy into what Joel said a lot more than I did before.
I guess this is why you don't significantly change the process. In this case, Reddit changed the process of submitting comments (It's now Ajax so that it doesn't refresh the page) and now everyone is going absolutely nuts trying out the new feature.
They only saved themselves by having the beta be in a separate subreddit. Could you imagine if this was rolled out to the main page?
The massive comment-spam is because it's a beta. There are several main forces at work:
1) People know it's gonna get wiped anyway, so they aren't shy about commenting.
2) Their job is to find bugs, not to discuss things. They're being diligent.
3.) For a while, there was a bug where every time you edited a comment it would post a reply instead. A bunch of us were testing Markdown and various XSS exploits; each time we edited, a new comment was added.
4.) Another prominent bug had to do with receiving messages and comment notifications. In order to exercise that, people had to comment.
5.) Folks are testing unicode. There's a lot that can go wrong with Unicode.
Okay. I thought it was like all other betas, where people use the product the way they normally use it and report bugs, instead of consciously trying to stress it to its limits, especially with social software.
It's not a contest. We don't want News.YC to be popular. We don't want to deal with heavy server loads or spam or any of the other schleps that come with popularity. The ideal thing for us would be to have the 10,000 best hackers and no one else.
Interesting. I admit I hadn't heard it from you directly, but my impression was that news.yc was shooting to bring the old school reddit back to the world. I assumed the reddits are trying to do the same. If they're shooting for popularity and you're shooting for goodness, I guess there's no competition, but I think a lot of people see the sites at odds with each other.
We're trying to hit a point reddit passed through on the way to becoming more popular, but then stay there.
I don't know what the reddits' goals are for this new version, but I assume it's not to make the site less popular. And if they have a big, mainstream audience, that will inevitably affect both the stories and the comments.
If the audience of this site is 10k like pg says, they can't be worried at all. They probably wouldn't even care if it were 100k, ultimately, since they're shooting for the millions.
I don't think it's always a fatal mistake, especially in something as relatively simple as Reddit. It still seems like a mistake to not transition to their new system piece-meal. I've witnessed this first hand a few times already in doing contract work. I'm pretty gun shy about it now and I definitely buy into what Joel said a lot more than I did before.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles/fog00...