Anyone else feels nostalgic?

submitted by cloudrabbit from self.whatever

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[–]cloudrabbit[S] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (14 children)

ruqqus is down, yeah, that's why I went for saidis + because the interface was 100% familiar. But I'm personally 50/50 on the old interface - I kinda like the modern look, even if the old one has less distractions. I worry most people would prefer the modern look of ruqqus and getting additional hosting infrustructure + optimizing the site is just a matter of time and they seem to be working on it right now.

[–]Extract 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (13 children)

From what I understand, their problems are in terms of architecture are pretty deep.
I am actually unsure people prefer modern look - I, for once, cannot stand the new reddit, and have had old.reddit.com turned on almost all the time.
Ruqqus interface shares the same problems - its lacks the simplicity and elegance the old reddit interface has. I truly believe the only reason it's more popular for now is because unlike magnora7, the creators (and users) of ruqqus actually take significant action to promote it everywhere they can.
If the users of saidit (us) did the same, I believe it'd overtake ruqqus in no time.

[–][deleted] 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (12 children)

i think you're spot on about ruqqus. they were talking about how a new js frontend is going to speed up the site, hah. I do wish them luck, and there are plenty of Redditors around to fill up both sites. The site policies are a big differentiator too.

[–]Extract 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (11 children)

Out of curiosity - I read in your post on r/redditalternatives at one point - is this the current repo for saidit?

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (10 children)

yep, we've got the same link down there in the footer

[–]Extract 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (9 children)

Wow, for some reason I always thought Reddit was written in PHP rather than python (and c).

Went over some of the models and controllers - the code seems well structured, but it's a shame it's clearly not documented (I assume some internal documentation existed in Reddit Inc. itself that never got published).

[–][deleted] 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

They documented a bit of stuff on the wiki, but it was geared much more toward a developer and not production install. They also started neglecting the open source version for years before they threw in the towel, because they had to unmerge all of their secret shit to push the latest open source code live. So they'd do like 1 big open source commit every few months. They left missing cron jobs and config params in the config file and all sorts of shit. It's been a rough few years getting it this far. And for all of that work, it's still tied to ubuntu 14 and commit X from a goddamn facebook repo from 2015.

It was token open source, the bastards.

[–]Extract 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Tell you the truth, if it would not involve tying my identity to the code, and thus damaging any future reputation with the "establishment" companies, I would have started working on a specific reddit clone years ago.

I was hoping to anonymously commit to at least this platform, but learning everything I saw there without documentation is sadly far too time expensive for me.

If there are ever small frontend things you might need in your platform (that can be added anonimously by sending the midified files to you to review / commit), do let me know.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

thanks man. yeah i've got like 4 github accounts myself, it's rough.

[–]cloudrabbit[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Tell you the truth, if it would not involve tying my identity to the code, and thus damaging any future reputation with the "establishment" companies, I would have started working on a specific reddit clone years ago.

Making a reddit clone could damage one's reputation with tech giants? Wow!

Say there are people who create the thedonaldwin site. Should they hide the fact they've made that site or false discrimination during job interviews?

[–]magnora7 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Reddit was originally written in LISP and Aaron Swartz was the one to port it from LISP to python, and that's the code we use today

[–]Extract 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Ah. Hard to believe how much he did for reddit, when you think about it.

He would certainly make something akin to saidit himself if he was alive today.

[–]magnora7 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yeah he was a software/programming genius, on top of being a sociological genius. He wrote so many useful web frameworks in his short time, it's incredible.

He would certainly make something akin to saidit himself if he was alive today.

I like to think so too. He's probably be working on some decentralization social media project akin to www.notabug.io or lemmy or mastodon. Or maybe he'd have found something even more important to work on. The guy could hit targets no one else could even see.

[–]cloudrabbit[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

What was spez' contribution when Reddit was starting out?

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Spez (Huffman) wrote the original LISP version of reddit.

From wikipedia:

During spring break of his senior year at UVA, Huffman and college roommate Alexis Ohanian[1] drove to Boston, Massachusetts, to attend a lecture[6] delivered by programmer-entrepreneur Paul Graham.[1][7] Huffman and Ohanian talked with Graham after the lecture and he invited them to apply to his startup incubator Y Combinator.[1] Huffman came up with their original idea, My Mobile Menu,[7] which was intended to allow users to order food by SMS.[1][7] The idea was rejected, but Graham asked Huffman and Ohanian to meet him in Boston to pitch another idea for a start-up; it was at this brainstorming session that the idea for what Graham called the "front page of the Internet" was created.[1] Huffman and Ohanian were accepted in Y Combinator's first class.[1][7] Huffman coded the entire site in Lisp.[8][9] He and Ohanian launched Reddit in June 2005, funded by Y Combinator.[5][10]

The site’s audience grew rapidly in its first few months, and by August 2005, Huffman noticed their habitual user-base had grown so large that he no longer needed to fill the front page with content himself.[8][11][12] At 23, Huffman and Ohanian sold Reddit to Condé Nast on October 31, 2006, for a reported $10 million to $20 million.[1][13] Huffman remained with Reddit until 2009, when he left his role as acting CEO.

Swarz came around in "fall 2005"

In early fall of 2005, Swartz worked with his fellow co-founders of another nascent Y-Combinator firm Reddit, to rewrite Reddit's Lisp codebase using Python and web.py

So according to that, it was launched in LISP in June 2005 and then Swartz re-wrote the whole thing in python in early fall 2005. So it sounds like reddit's LISP version was only operational for a couple of months in total! So basically the entirety of it's existence is from Swartz's code