It's interesting to note the popularity of the website, and the massive traffic it handled, despite the lack of everything we assume necessary for a modern (social media) website
- no modern web frameworks
- no microservices/kubernetes clusters
- no algorithmic curation/moderation/recommendation algoritmhs
One wonders just how much of the modern engineering developed in the past decades, that cost a fortune to develop and run is actually necessary or even beneficial for running a modern social media website
I worked for a major internet company until 2020. HN would be aghast how much "if we failed to provide this service a good chunk of the internet would either go down or sites wouldn't function properly and the stock market probably would dip" stuff runs on redundant pairs of LAMP stacks and other unsophisticated old stuff HN would turn up its nose at.
"Redundant pair of LAMP stacks"
Damn you got two of those? That's advanced magic
Active/Passive and no one has ever done a failover test.
We did a failover test last time a motherboard failed. It went so well it made the news.
Should have had updated dependencies though.
otoh the entire site is no longer running because they fell behind on updates
yeah but the 'social media needs hyper-complex and opaque curation algorithms to control what the users see, otherwise it'd become unusable' argument is provably false. Companies just want to control the narrative and/or push ads/influencers/opinions into peoples faces, while trying to maintain the illusion of organic discussion.
Nobody that is over 30 thinks any of those things are necessary because we all remember them not existing and websites handling plenty of traffic fine.
I think no algorithmic curation is its strength. It means that even if an echo chamber appears anybody can still post their opinion and it doesn't get downvoted into oblivion when people disagree.