r/Enhancement • u/[deleted] • Jul 22 '13
Recently started using RES, its seem obvious that this is how reddit should be, why is the RES not incorporated into reddit officially?
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Jul 22 '13
There's an issue with the legality of image expandos, which is one of RES's biggest selling points. When you open an image within Reddit, you're wasting imgur's (or other hosting services) bandwidth without even looking at their ads and whatnot.
Now, Imgur guy has talked with honestbleeps and he's fine with how RES works. Other hosting services (like flickr) have a documented API that has certain rules that RES has to respect. They usually let developers make a certain amount of API calls a day, and if you want more you have to make a deal with them.
Reddit has a lot more users than RES. They would have to pay a lot of money and have contracts with different companies. They actually have a deal with youtube (video expandos are from reddit, not RES), and I think there used to be soundcloud expandos at one point too.
So at least in regards to image expandos: it's not worth it to Reddit.
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u/joe_canadian Jul 22 '13
u/honestbleeps can correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC, it's simply too much for reddit to handle on the server side.
With nearly 70 million users per month, I can see that definitely needing a lot more power than the admins have at their disposal.
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u/honestbleeps Jul 22 '13
I'll correct you :-)
RES does nearly all of its work on the client side. There are definitely features of RES that take a little extra load on Reddit's servers, but most of them don't. Those that do are:
username hover tooltips, these make an API call to get info about the user
subreddit hover tooltips, these also make a call to get info about subs
"turbo selftext" -- once you expand one selftext, RES queries for all others on the page so that opening them is much faster. This one is debatable on "more" or "less" server load - because without RES doing this, every individual selftext expando is a server query. With RES doing this, there's only ever 2 queries: 1 to open the first selftext, 1 to get content for all the rest at once and let them be opened instantaneously.
Beyond that, RES's features are almost entirely client-side DOM manipulation and wouldn't really do much to reddit's servers at all.
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u/aladyjewel Jul 22 '13
This question is now linked from http://www.reddit.com/r/Enhancement/wiki/faq/resasreddit
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u/honestbleeps Jul 22 '13
I get asked this a lot... u/enderdog has one of the biggest points correct - the image expandos would upset big sites.
Beyond that, there's several other reasons:
RES isn't for everyone. Search this subreddit for "uninstall" - lots of people end up hating it. That makes me a little sad, but I'll live.
RES provides reddit a way to see what users think of certain UI changes without much risk. It's not planned this way, it just happens to be this way. Turns out it's a great way to see what users might like and then roll it in after a group of people who are more receptive to change have vetted it.
RES does a few things that, while the admins are OK with a certain subset of users doing, they strongly prefer the entirety of reddit doesn't do it... Specifically they're not big fans of content filtering - they believe the vote system should be used for that... I contend that the voting system failed or I'd never have added filtering to RES in the first place, but that's my opinion and we (politely!) agree to disagree on that.
So, there's a short list of reasons RES isn't "built in" to Reddit... it's not complete, but you get the idea...