Will Reddit tell us the technical story behind r/place 2022?

11 points by quux 4y ago ↗ HN

As a participant in r/place I have all kind of crazy memories and stories now but I can only imagine what it must have been like for the technical team that put together r/place I for one would absolutely love a post from them.

How did they built the canvas to scale as well as it did with millions of users making changes at the same time?

* How many servers were involved, what was the architecture?

* how did they make it work so well on web and mobile?

* What challenges they built for?

* What crises came up that they never planned for?

* Did the anti cheating stuff work as well as they hoped?

* What went well?

* What didn't go well?

* Where did they get lucky? * How will they improve for next time?

TLDR: Reddit pls share technical postmortem doc for r/place with the community :)

Posting on HN because this question was deleted by the r/place mods when I asked there. Maybe on HN it will get some traction and get on the radar of the right people at Reddit to get a response.

7 comments

[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 47.1 ms ] thread

willmeyers 4y ago ↗

Josh Wardle, the original creator of /r/place in 2017 goes into a brief postmortem in one of his talks here: https://youtu.be/OXzfvYoFQFo (around 14min mark)

quux 4y ago ↗

Didn't realize Wardle created the 2017 place but that makes so much sense. Thanks!

battles 4y ago ↗

Also here https://www.redditinc.com/blog/how-we-built-rplace

jaredsohn 4y ago ↗

Wardle also made 'The Button' from April Fools Day 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Button_(Reddit)

[deleted] 4y ago ↗

(comment deleted)

londons_explore 4y ago ↗

Most pixels, in most seconds, don't change.

So the rate of change of pixels is actually much lower than a simple HD video feed.

So you can simply broadcast all pixel changes from all participants to all other participants. No sharding or anything clever is necessary, even for mobile clients.

Then you have a separate 'bitmap server' which listens to the feed and builds an image to serve to new clients so they don't have to replay the whole feed from the start when they connect.

quux 4y ago ↗

Does that scale to over 1 million users loading and reloading the canvas and around 1 million peak users posting updates at the same time?