What back-end do sites like Voat and reddit use?

18    10 Jul 2015 22:59 by u/Juscelino

The most important thing to understand about this is that I am NOT attempting to create another Voat / reddit type of website. However, I love the way that they work, as far as posting and upvoting and downvoting.

I am not a programmer, but I am an I.T. professional, and I am always willing to learn new things. Basically, I am looking to create a specific online service, but I want to use the Voat / reddit format.

Please forgive me if these questions sound stupid, but I am simply using them as an example of the information that I am trying to find out. Are these sites simply MySQL databases with a graphical interface? Is it a lot more complicating like Perl or some type of programming language?

As I said, I am willing to put in the time to learn about the technologies. I just need to know what the technologies are. Please advice. Thank you in advance.

11 comments

7

Voat is actually open source. You can check the source code here and a lot of information about the back end: https://github.com/voat/voat

Voat is fully build on a microsoft stack, which is programmed in c# with the ASP.NET framework, and SQL server as database. Where as reddit (https://github.com/reddit/reddit) functions on a more used linux stack, with python.

Very interesting to browse the source code!

1

In addition, when I checked a couple weeks back, it appeared Voat uses the SignalR stack.

1

It is actually quit interesting that C# is used, it is one of the few languages I developed in that can scale enormously and have an incredible fast development cycle. And the .NET platform you can mix C++ with F# and VB and C# that each has its own specialty without need to jump through hoops.

0

I use the Microsoft stack myself so it was nice to see code I recognize on the voat source code.

That said, MSFT servers are way more expensive than linux one (almost 2:1) so it hurts scalability somewhat.

1

http://str8c.me/

"Reddit" written in C.

1

that's just so... wrong ... and kind of cool