Comment by honestbleeps on 25/01/2017 at 20:53 UTC

9 upvotes, 3 direct replies (showing 3)

View submission: Out with 2016, in with 2017

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it seems opinion on it is split, and that's fine.

I can see both sides.

to me, it reads like RES is a factor preventing them from innovating. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Comment by tehlemmings at 25/01/2017 at 23:31 UTC

4 upvotes, 0 direct replies

To me it feels like they're acknowledging that a large enough portion of the community engages with the site significantly less when RES is broken. It may come off a though they're blaming RES to say it, but I'm not sure that's the intention. Either way, it'd be disingenuous to say they're not thinking about RES when they update the site. I know I would be.

It's one of the things I hated most when I used to work on popular user-driven websites. If an 3rd party tool gets too popular you start seeing the effects breaking that tool has on your traffic. You push through a change, and suddenly traffic takes a noticeable dip for a few hours/days. So you try and bundle the changes together so it happens less often; sometimes it helps, other times it leads to longer traffic dips. Either way it still hurts.

In the end, you're forced to acknowledge that a 3rd party tool is important enough that you have to work around it's existence and your user's dependence on it. Which may be why Reddit is trying to bring the important features into the site itself, to reduce the dependence and reduce the impact changes will have because of the tool.

It's just a bad situation to be in. If the Reddit devs are like me, they'll view it as a failure of theirs. The features and functionality *they* are missing is hurting the site, and someone else is saving them from that pain.

IDK, just my two cents. I'd take it as compliment and an acknowledgement that they're thinking about the RES devs.

Comment by robertgentel at 25/01/2017 at 21:00 UTC

2 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Only in the sense that all technical debt is. Any developer should understand that very clearly and not get offended. Their own code is in the way too, this is just pedestrian technical debt we are talking about, not faults and aspersions.

Comment by smellyfeetyouhave at 25/01/2017 at 21:07 UTC

0 upvotes, 1 direct replies

I interpreted it in the way of them being considerate of all the users using RES as well. I see how you could see it as a negative thing, but it came across to me as "we know how much people care about RES so we want to be sure we don't massively break RES, even if it holds back changing the site at times".

This mixed in with the fact that they don't want to break custom styles and the fact that the codebase is ancient, gives me the impression he meant it moreover that they do this because they care about the users.

If you look at the post Spez made below,

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5q4qmg/out_with_2016_in_with_2017/dcwcfyn/

It's clear from this the intention is to not majorly ruin the site by upsetting the users and what they like. If that means holding back on certain changes to improve the overall experience, so be it.