Rebuilding Reddit: A Case Study
summary
Reddit undergoes a front-to-back rebuild: mobile apps launched in 2016 and the web is rewritten with TypeScript + React rewrite, creating a single-page shell, new UX with three density modes including an ultra-compact mode, and a structured-styles system to replace user CSS. Engineering adds performance tooling to eliminate reflows, an event debugger, and a Kafka → BigQuery analytics pipeline. Rollout uses staged user testing; metrics show sustained engagement across a phased release to ~350 million monthly users.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:52Chriss background
- 1:42What is Reddit
- 3:05Rebuilding Reddit
- 5:38Prior Art
- 6:42Meta Meta Engineering
- 8:10Redesigning Reddit
- 10:21User testing
- 11:29Design issues
- 16:43Analytics pipeline
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