Cleaning up some low-usage features
web.archive.org
Hey folks, Over the next few weeks, we’ll be removing a few old low-usage features from old.reddit.com. These features may be familiar, so we...

It begins…

Found out via this post

Interesting side-note, reddit’s anti-VPN policies and blocking some archivers like ghostarchive.

  • @[email protected]
    15•1 month ago

    Tbh these really are low-usage features, I didn’t know about any of them, aside from the snoovatars that I’ve always found stupid. So I don’t think anyone could be pushed away from the site because of this.

    OTOH, if they’re low-usage, why remove them? Do they spend too much bandwidth, CPU, whatever??

    • @[email protected]
      17•1 month ago

      OTOH, if they’re low-usage, why remove them? Do they spend too much bandwidth, CPU, whatever??

      It’s generally desirable to remove old code and features to make the code neater. It’s also possible that some bug happened because of those features.

      • @Valmond
        24•1 month ago

        It’s usually better to not touch code that is working, it won’t become “clean” just because you deactivate some stuff and if you do try to actually remove code (to “clean” things, whatever that means in a setting bigger than a small project), good luck not breaking anything.

        Source: oldtimer software dev

        • @pingvenoEnglish
          10•1 month ago

          Code that exists still needs to be updated and maintained. It interacts with the rest of the code. Sure you can leave it lying around, but at a certain point the technical debt is going to catch up to you.

          • @Valmond
            4•1 month ago

            Man do I have news for you…

            I mean I don’t like it, but the number of time I have seen crappy 20-30 year old code that’s completely shit, ingrown into everything else…

          • @AA5B
            2•1 month ago

            Maybe you can afford this in your personal projects but I have yet to work at a company willing to invest in that. Sure, a conscientious developer might clean up things they’re working on, but old code usually gets ignored until the pain of keeping it gets too great, until someone is forced to do something about it

            • @pingvenoEnglish
              2•1 month ago

              Oh, sure, I’ve been there. Am there. And Reddit may have gotten to that point with these features where maintenance costs overtook the costs of removing them.

    • @Evotech
      2•1 month ago

      Old code still needs to have unit tests, maybe they use libraries you need to keep patched etc

      Better to remove