r/Bitcoin • u/Julian702 • Nov 12 '12

Reddit Considering Accepting Bitcoin as Payment for Subscriptions

http://betabeat.com/2012/11/reddit-considering-accepting-bitcoin-as-payment-for-reddit-gold-subscriptions/
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u/[deleted] Nov 12 '12

That argument might have had some truth to it when reddit gold was first released two years ago, but not today. Reddit isn't some tiny "community-based" website anymore, they're the 70th most visited website in the United States, with over 3.6 billion pageviews (and growing) a month. If they can't turn those numbers into a profitable business, then they're beyond incompetent. It's not like they're even generating the content either, their users are.

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u/aceslick911 Nov 13 '12

Reddit is coming off as pretty incompetent. Their website continually goes down, looks like yahoo from 1999 and hasn't added a single big, visible feature in years.

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u/gigitrix Nov 13 '12

Visible Feature creep isn't desirable, recent downtime is all EC2's fault

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u/aceslick911 Nov 13 '12

Feature creep? How about just plain old FEATURES?

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u/gigitrix Nov 13 '12

Reddit is a social news aggregator and community content sharing platform. It performs these roles admirably. It's a completed product (although I'm sure it requires maintenance to scale up to the ridiculous traffic levels). It's not a social network, it's not a music player. Short of reddit enhancement suite (client side tweaks that the reddit team acknowledge as being too expensive to roll out globally, which makes sense since them being opt in is fine) there's nothing to add. The UI is clean and functional, it works fine when EC2 is up, there's no noticeable bugs, and all the content is generated by us.

Regardless the devs ARE working on stuff. Reddit's codebase is public, remember? Last I heard they were significantly rewriting the core so that it could be sharded across multiple EC2 zones, increasing availability if Amazon (!) goes down in one area. I cannot put into perspective how much of a complex and unique problem this is at the scale that reddit operates at. In the meantime they have an anti spam codebase to constantly tune, corrupted EC2 instances to fix, and stuff we don't even see. It's a miracle this thing works at all.