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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   4747 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 18, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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The primary software for forums was phpBB, and it was/is awful.

If you weren't there it's hard for you to understand how slow and awful phpBB was. Old reddit's use of JS to update the DOM was the top of the tech at the time.

I wasn't there depending on how old is the old Reddit you're referring to, I think I started browsing it around 2014 or so, but I don't think speed was that much a favorable comparison to phpBB, and even if it was originally, it's definitely not any more. Go to any still functioning phpBB forum (there are still a few out there), they're way faster than Reddit.

Reddit was founded in 2005, so the shared hosting php servers at the time were quite a bit slower than they are now. Also phpBB has probably added some javascript to avoid the full page refreshes on each click.

I'd go with the "shitty shared hosting servers" explanation. As far as I can tell phpBB is still doing a full page refresh, it's just that it's much faster than Reddit (or any major SocMed). This shouldn't come as a surprise, because it's Reddit, not phpBB that's awful. I once tried to start up a local instance of Reddit (it used to be open source, and I think the old code is still floating around somewhere), and my computer just gave up. By contrast the rdrama code The Motte uses, runs locally with no issues, and phpBB could probably run on a coal fueled kitchen stove. I'm also quite sure that all the Big Tech frontends are deliberately enshittified, because Nitter was running way faster than Twitter, Teddit was way faster than Reddit (before they started closing outside access), Piped is way faster than Youtube, etc. I think I've never seen an alternative frontend that didn't BTFO an official Big Tech one in terms of performance.

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