[HN Gopher] Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
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Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
Errors >Something went wrong. Just don't panic. > Sorry, we
couldn't load posts for this page. [RETRY]
Author : albert_e
Score : 749 points
Date : 2023-06-12 14:37 UTC (8 hours ago)
| fer wrote:
| spez to the investors:
|
| > No, you see, it was not a protest, it was simply a small
| outage, nothing to worry about.
|
| Joking aside, I have a few bots monitoring content and I saw ~10%
| drops in comment activity before the outage (vs. the baseline
| from last week).
| fumar wrote:
| You saw 10% comment drops in subreddits still available or are
| you saying 10% of comments overall on all of reddit including
| the privacy subreddits?
| fer wrote:
| On all still available. I don't expect (recently) privated
| subs to have a ton of activity anyway.
| fumar wrote:
| 10% drops in overall comments so average pre and post or
| 10% in comment rates? I only ask out pure curiosity. I
| don't expect Reddit will ever publish engagement impacts
| during this period.
| EMCymatics wrote:
| There is a lot of fake/controlled activity and frequently this
| is leveraged against tech executives.
| robertakarobin wrote:
| It seems many services are experiencing an uptick in outages at
| the moment: https://downdetector.com/
| arnaudsm wrote:
| I wonder if there is a correlation between industry layoffs and
| outages
| EMCymatics wrote:
| I'll be pissed if outlook goes down again
| albert_e wrote:
| As someone not responsible for Outlook, the last time we had
| Outlook/AS outage ... the sense of calm that I experienced
| knowing that no one is able to send me any emails even if
| just for an hour ... cannot be explained in mere words :)
| albert_e wrote:
| As someone not responsible for Outlook, the last time we had
| Outlook/AD outage ... the sense of calm that I experienced
| knowing that no one is able to send me any emails even if
| just for an hour ... cannot be explained in mere words :)
| aaronax wrote:
| This is not normal. I highly recommend some alterations to
| your workflow/notification settings/something. You should
| not spend your whole day getting stressed out by email
| toasts.
| jkells wrote:
| The scale on those graphs is wildly different.
|
| Office have 120 down reports per period. Reddit has 40,000.
| michelb wrote:
| Are there more sites that show incidents/outages in
| sites/networks like this? Aside from maybe looking up
| individual statuspages...
| leetbulb wrote:
| Pretty big blip for a lot of services https://downdetector.com/
| bhouston wrote:
| yup, some type of shared cloud infrastructure is definitely
| having problems. Reddit is just what we noticed first.
| scrum-treats wrote:
| Looks like both AWS and Azure. Reddit is on AWS (as is Apple,
| which is showing interruptions per downdetector).
| vidanay wrote:
| LOL, FPL looks like an EKG.
| TwoFactor wrote:
| The spikes for others sites aren't nearly as large - 100
| reports vs 50,000 for reddit
| tdstein wrote:
| Smells like a DDoS.
|
| It's difficult to know if this is a coordinated attack or a side
| effect of the ongoing protest.
|
| HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests Connection: keep-alive Content-
| Type: application/json Access-Control-Expose-Headers: retry-
| after, x-sentry-rate-limits, x-sentry-error Vary: Origin Date:
| Mon, 12 Jun 2023 14:49:00 GMT Content-Length: 45 Access-Control-
| Allow-Origin: https://www.reddit.com retry-after: 14 x-sentry-
| rate-limits: 14:default;error;security;attachment:organization:er
| ror_usage_exceeded
| paulproteus wrote:
| Allowing Apollo to operate would cost $20M in opportunity cost
| for Reddit. But _not_ allowing Apollo to operate has an
| opportunity cost in website downtime. I am amused!
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| Not sure that's a fair value. In this case the opportunity cost
| would be the amount Apollo would have actually paid (maybe $1M
| max) rather than $20M.
| r721 wrote:
| There's a spike on Downdetector's chart:
| https://downdetector.com/status/reddit/
|
| Nothing on redditstatus.com (yet?): https://www.redditstatus.com/
|
| UPD Currently on redditstatus.com:
|
| >Reddit Failing to Load
|
| >Identified - We're aware of problems loading content and are
| working to resolve the issues as quickly as possible. Jun 12,
| 2023 - 07:58 PDT
| r721 wrote:
| >Monitoring - We're observing improvements across the site and
| expect issue to recover for most users. We will continue to
| closely monitor the situation.
|
| >Jun 12, 2023 - 08:47 PDT
|
| https://www.redditstatus.com/
|
| >"A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused
| some expected stability issues, and we've been working on
| resolving the anticipated issue," Reddit told Engadget in a
| statement.
|
| https://www.engadget.com/reddit-suffers-a-major-outage-after...
| strathmeyer wrote:
| old.reddit.com doesn't load, reddit.com will load but you can't
| sign in, direct links still work
| scrum-treats wrote:
| Desktop Web, Mobile Web, and Native Mobile App all showing
| Major outage. AWS also showing issues via down detector.
| kozhevnikov wrote:
| I don't understand why they decided to remove the errors and
| post/comment backlog graphs instead of fixing them. It was a
| great way to see when to stop refreshing and go make coffee,
| while status remained green for while.
| chunk_waffle wrote:
| There's lies, damn lies, and status pages.
| ellisv wrote:
| As a statistician, I greatly appreciate this.
| brookst wrote:
| Status pages are the worst of all things to work on.
|
| First, deciding what to put on them is PM hell. Is it
| customer-facing? Developer-facing? Both?
|
| Then, for each item, how do you test so you can be really
| sure? Half the time tests will produce either false negatives
| or false positives. If your test writes data (like, say,
| posting a comment), is it a meaningful test of it's to a test
| or demo topic? But if it's to real topics, the test itself
| becomes user impacting.
|
| Or you can use traffic stats to estimate whether things are
| going well, but then your traffic stats are question.
| Something may report zero traffic when things are great, or
| normal traffic when things are broken.
|
| Then you have the classic "the tests are failing because the
| testing infra is broken, but production users are fine."
|
| There just isn't a good answer to most of the problems status
| pages face. So, yeah, they suck, but I think there may be a
| Godel argument here that it is not possible for them to be
| timely, meaningful, and accurate.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| Most of this is about automated status pages, but it
| doesn't apply to status pages where the incident response
| team manually says "yes there is a problem" and "ok all
| problems are fixed".
| brookst wrote:
| True, but those teams have the same problem. How do they
| know it's really fixed, for every scenario, for everyone,
| everywhere?
|
| They have a pretty good idea if something internal is
| broken, but it's very hard to know that everything is
| fixed.
|
| That said, I agree that manually updated pages are
| generally more useful and accurate than automated ones.
| It's just an extra tax on the incident team.
| 0x0f_4 wrote:
| this being intentional? doesn't seem to far fetched at this
| point...
| random_upvoter wrote:
| Monday morning, therefore a flood of bored office workers.
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| More speculation but seems logical: traffic is a) much different
| in size and patterns than usual and b) being driven to areas that
| usually have much lower traffic, meaning caching and scaling are
| both being forced up against patterns of site usage that have
| never been tested or planned for.
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| Indeed it was
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/12/23758002/reddit-crashing-...
| silver911r wrote:
| [flagged]
| hakube wrote:
| HN is also slow right now
| apricot wrote:
| Just tried to go to the site, got the "You broke reddit!" page.
| They don't know how right they are.
| Applejinx wrote:
| I just got that! Laughed my ass off. If ya say so!
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Such a friendly message for the user as an error. /s
| billwear wrote:
| might as well just rename it to "Deddit" and move on....
| londons_explore wrote:
| Reddit is up for me, and the homepage content actually seems, if
| anything, a little improved.
|
| There is lots of stuff from AskReddit and some tech subreddits
| I'm subscribed to. Gone is all the junk from /r/pics and memes
| etc.
|
| If my experience is common, this "48 hour blackout" won't have
| the intended effect.
| redmerchant2 wrote:
| If all you care about is news then it's interchangeable with
| any news aggregator.
|
| I'm in it for specialty subs which are all shut down. Hobby and
| niche interest subs which are the real life blood of the site
| IMO.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Oh, so that's why I started to get 503 errors from my archive and
| delete scripts.
|
| Certainly hitting the site harder today by trying to crawl 8
| years and 70,000 karma worth of comments in preparation for
| deleting the account than by browsing my usual subreddits.
| ptntp wrote:
| You Broke reddit.
| selykg wrote:
| Well they're definitely making it easier for me to avoid Reddit
| going forward. I really do not like using the mobile reddit app
| and the whole 3rd party api debacle has me looking at alternative
| communities and I've found a couple of good stand-ins for the two
| most frequented ones for me on Reddit.
|
| I can probably replace the video game related ones with some RSS
| feeds for some popular gaming news sites. No big deal there.
|
| I replaced r/financialindependence with bogleheads and r/guitar
| with thegearpage.
|
| I'll definitely miss some of the random subs, but whatever.
| Reddit has been a time sink for me for awhile this is a great
| excuse to move on.
| newman8r wrote:
| Would be cool to have a directory with alternative communities
| for every subreddit
| DaSHacka wrote:
| True, or even a centralized place for Reddit alternatives
| that's _not_ on Reddit...
| jmholla wrote:
| There's a Hacker News conversation about that right now:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36293789
| happytiger wrote:
| I'd imagine it's the massive number of user delete requests of
| people wiping their accounts in protest.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Certainly an abnormal usage pattern - I've personally tried a
| handful of backup and delete scripts, and have been waking up a
| lot of cold storage today.
|
| But how many many non-cached requests does it take to overwhelm
| the servers? Obviously scraping my comments page for years-old
| data is going to hit the backend hard and isn't going to have a
| traffic pattern at all like the front page of my subscriptions,
| but I'd assume that they had far more capacity available than
| would be required to handle that. The number of people
| currently running a Greasemonkey or Python script against the
| archive is higher than it's ever been, but it has to be a
| miniscule, infinitesimal fraction of their normal traffic -
| right?
| rightbyte wrote:
| Many back-ends are a house of cards depending on some cache
| to keep it from crashing. It would not surprise me if some
| small number of simultaneous deleters would crash it.
| user3939382 wrote:
| I just got a message from /u/reddit warning about "harrassment"
| because I respectfully disagreed with someone's woke politics.
| Hopefully it can stay out forever.
| swader999 wrote:
| So normal operations then.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I wonder if they forcibly tried to reopen the closed subreddits
| and due to cold caches the entire thing fell over as traffic
| started hitting the reopened ones?
| ecommerceguy wrote:
| How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake Accounts
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...
|
| Reddit has always seemed to have gotten a pass when it comes to
| being a cesspool of fake accounts, what we would call bots today.
| I'm really hoping it fails, it's leadership team has always been
| amongst the worst of the tech companies.
| dopa42365 wrote:
| Something that happened 15 years ago when reddit had 50 users
| isn't evidence for anything today, really.
| zeruch wrote:
| I think you're being a bit overblown. If it was just bots, it
| would have fizzled out sooner; the bot account trash has waxed
| and waned over time, but I suspect the big reason it worked is
| that for years it allowed any subcommunity to emerge naturally
| rather than trying to predicatively shape it.
|
| And there are many worse examples of leadership in tech than
| Reddit. If anything until recently most of its C-suite
| historically (post founders) has been uninteresting enough to
| care. No one on the scale of a Gates, Neuman, Ellison, etc.
|
| The recent turdstorm however, does signal a likely lamentable
| shift downward.
| rvba wrote:
| The bots didnt disappear. They just got better and harder to
| spot.
| abluecloud wrote:
| "A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused
| some expected stability issues, and we've been working on
| resolving the anticipated issue," spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt
| tells The Verge.
| ineedausername wrote:
| time to migrate to 4chan
| Veliladon wrote:
| Checking the default list against the private list is usually an
| O(1) because none of them are on the private list.
|
| Now almost all of them are. It's going from O(1) to basically
| O(n^2) worst case. For millions of users.
|
| I wonder why Reddit is down?
| leetcrew wrote:
| this doesn't make a lot of sense to me. do you have some
| archetectural insight, or just guessing?
|
| fetching a list of default/subscribed subs and comparing it
| against the whole list of private subs every time someone loads
| your homepage sounds like a pretty bad design. why wouldn't
| something as fundamental as a private/public flag be stored in
| the main db entry for the subreddit?
|
| either way, this doesn't seem like a probable root cause.
| checking a list of default subs against the list of private
| subs would be expensive under any circumstances. having all the
| default subs added to the private list wouldn't really change
| the already terrible performance by much. there just aren't
| that many default subs to begin with.
| chongli wrote:
| Every logged-in user gets a custom home page generated from
| their personal list of subscribed subreddits. They may be
| generating this page on a per-post basis rather than a per-
| sub basis, expecting that in the average case users aren't
| going to be subscribed to a bunch private subs that they have
| no access to.
|
| If that is the case, then generating the home page for a user
| is going to be hitting a lot of posts from private subs which
| have to be skipped over until enough accessible posts are
| reached to fill the page. And in the case of the official
| app, infinite scrolling is going to lead to constant pressure
| to generate the list of posts.
| jedberg wrote:
| Protip: If you desperately need your fix, load reddit in an
| incognito window. You'll get the last cached version from the
| CDN.
| Euphorbium wrote:
| I got a cant reach cdn error
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| I have a Reddit account some years old, a few score comments,
| mostly on closed subreddits.
|
| Took a bit for my profile page to show only the two comments left
| on unclosed subreddits.
|
| Might be that kind of thing.
| leetharris wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| rurp wrote:
| You're making quite a leap to go from "This company should be
| sustainable" -> "Every terrible decision they make to that end
| should be endorsed".
|
| There are good and bad ways to make money and Reddit is making
| a lot of terrible decisions lately.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| 'Reddit finally finds a way to become profitable' is not what's
| going on. Reddit's own claims are conflicting, they
| simultaneously argue that other apps are causing them massive
| losses in terms of opportunity cost while arguing that they
| represent an insignificant portion of users. They've argued
| that the apps are too inefficient in their API usage while
| their own app is no better, and despite their claims, they
| demonstrably haven't tried to actually work with app devs to
| resolve this.
|
| On top of that they're making these changes without having
| addressed the issues the 3rd party tools exist for despite
| having promised to do so for many years now. Them later
| backpedaling and attempting to carve out special exemptions for
| those only makes them look worse.
|
| It'd be a lot less egregious if they were like Twitter and just
| said the obvious about how they didn't want to allow 3rd party
| apps anymore. Instead they're engaged in this scummy game of
| lies about how they really want to work with the community, so
| it makes perfect sense that the community is opposing them.
| archon wrote:
| Pure speculation: With so many subs now private, they're hitting
| a performance wall searching for enough content to fill the front
| page. If I'm logged in and go to the site root, it throws an
| error. If logged out, it works. If I go to a specific (not
| privatized) sub, it works.
| coopierez wrote:
| I'm experiencing the same. /r/games is not private and it
| works.
| skulk wrote:
| Another anecdote: top posts of all time load for me, even top
| posts this week. But front page and r/popular don't.
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| I would expect most of the 'top' categories are cached with a
| long-ish TTL. If Reddit's DB is down that would explain why
| those types of sorts are functioning.
| jeanlucas wrote:
| One thing that could be happening is many clients/bots/crawlers
| pinging pages that gone private now and that is overwhelming
| servers.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| Wouldn't that be easier on the server load? You're ust
| displaying the error page instead of actually grabbing the
| feed of the subreddit
| joecot wrote:
| That's if the bot is coded well. I've cut off bots from
| sites and services before, only to have them start to DOS
| because their response to an error was to just try again,
| immediately and forever
| shagie wrote:
| I'd draw people's attention to https://www.reddit.com/r/r
| edditdev/comments/13wsiks/comment/...
|
| > On March 14th, Apollo made nearly 1 billion requests
| against our API in a single day, triggered in part by our
| system outage. After the outage, Apollo started making
| 53% fewer calls per day. If the app can operate with half
| the daily request volume, can it operate with fewer?
|
| That's a backend server making a request that doesn't
| count against its rate limit as soon as it can again.
|
| The push notification backend is described as making a
| request every 6 seconds for each user. If it isn't
| backing off correctly and delaying a requeueing of the
| next job, that can drastically increase the request rate.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| this is Reddit, they only hire junior devs.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Depends...
|
| If a multitude of bots are written _immediately_ retry upon
| receiving an error without backing off, and are now stuck
| in loops of flooding the servers with requests, could the
| number of requests become a greater factor than the
| simplicity of the responses?
| roncesvalles wrote:
| You never know. Maybe their code throws an Exception
| (expensive in some languages) or logs something
| extra/differently if you access a private sub.
| aeyes wrote:
| Rule number one for high traffic sites with a lot of pageloads
| coming from search engines: Aggressively cache content shown to
| unauthenticated users. Since they don't really interact with
| the site, they probably won't even notice if it's a bit stale.
|
| They used to have a really good blog post about their caching
| infra which for some reason was deleted. Archive link:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210205121832/https://redditblo...
| turtleyacht wrote:
| Yeah :) Front page was a for loop and too many subreddits went
| dark
| EnderWT wrote:
| > According to Reddit, the blackout is responsible for the
| problems. "A significant number of subreddits shifting to private
| caused some expected stability issues, and we've been working on
| resolving the anticipated issue," spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt
| tells The Verge.
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/8/23754780/reddit-api-update...
| coding123 wrote:
| Whenever reddit is down, HN gets smashed.
| scambier wrote:
| Better to break it entirely than to show the blackout, I guess.
| chakintosh wrote:
| Seems HN is also having outages. I'm getting server errors trying
| to access posts.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| HN is experiencing some serious slowness, I wonder if everyone is
| checking here.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Putting my tinfoil hat on, could they be doing it deliberately?
| So spez can blame the drop in visitors on a random outage rather
| than the boycott?
| leetharris wrote:
| [flagged]
| kiklion wrote:
| > Reddit finally finds a way to possibly become profitable and
| everyone calls them scumbags focused on profit?
|
| If the numbers shared for the API costs is what it takes to be
| profitable, then it's not a site that will be profitable and
| Reddit will go under.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| this sounds like a bad faith argument.
|
| Everyone knows what profit motive is, cost of doing business,
| etc. Assume you're talking to people who know what it takes to
| run a website, and start, first, with the numbers that have
| been calculated.
|
| According to apollo app, to keep their 3rd party app running,
| reddit was requesting about $20 million dollars. If you go look
| at what apollo charges, it's significantly less than that.
|
| Reddit's defense of that charge isnt: Apollo is taking our
| users, our ad revenue and we want that to be in-house, in our
| own app, etc. They're saying "this is the cost of the API".
|
| Now, start there, and dial in your criticism to some actual
| details.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| This is not about making reddit profitable. It will not
| contribute to that goal. It will just kill everything that uses
| the API. The goal is control so that later changes can squeeze
| the community to death.
|
| They're charging 3rd party apps 20x what reddit itself can make
| from a user. The goal is to kill the ecosystem and bring it
| back into the fold.
|
| They even admitted as much when they said that they started
| thinking about this seriously when LLMs trained on reddit came
| out.
|
| If they wanted to make reddit profitable they would charge 3rd
| party apps what they themselves make from users, and float that
| rate. Like that 3rd party apps cost nothing, even save them
| money in engineering.
|
| Think about it this way: people are begging to do massive
| amounts of free work for reddit and their response is to banish
| all of those people.
|
| This has nothing to do with profits from 3rd party apps.
| olivierestsage wrote:
| I think that this is 10+ years of resentment on the part of
| Reddit's users against Reddit itself coming home to roost. The
| perception of Reddit's attitude to users for a long time now
| has been "well, we're making all these user-hostile changes,
| and we don't care what you think about it, peasant. You can
| just shut up and keep using old.reddit.com as long as we feel
| like giving you permission to do so, but one day that'll end
| too." I think for a lot of people this latest drama is just the
| last straw.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| It's not _what_ they 're doing, for the most part, but the
| _way_ they 're doing it.
|
| I don't think many people begrudge them to implementing a paid
| API to recoup the costs of third-party clients.
|
| But they've set the price way too high, with practically no
| warning, defamed an app developer and then went "lalalala we
| can't hear you" when people, rightly, pushed back.
|
| All while using dark patterns to push users to their
| (objectively awful) official web and mobile apps. Power users
| (especially mods) just can't use these to do what they need to
| do, Reddit doesn't care and now Reddit is - effectively -
| killing off 3rd party apps.
| lcrz wrote:
| No one is upset because reddit wants to make the API paid.
| Several 3rd party apps were looking forward to working with
| reddit in this regard.
|
| People are upset because:
|
| - Reddit has been terrible and dishonest in their communication
| - Reddit is dropping Twitter-like pricing out of the blue -
| These prices seem to have the goal of killing 3rd party apps
| instead of merely being 'realistic' or 'fair', like Reddit is
| claiming - Reddit is dragging well respected devs through the
| mud and trying to make them look like the bad guys
| Majromax wrote:
| The protest has also ignited because of the "dry tinder" left
| by Reddit's previous shortcomings. If third-party apps were
| just a niche product rather than something used by subreddit
| moderators _for moderation_ , then those selfsame moderators
| would be less likely to join the cause.
| cueo wrote:
| I think you're missing the bigger picture here. The audience is
| not outraged because Reddit is trying to be profitable, it's
| their execution which has enraged the entire community. First,
| the time frame given to the 3P apps is basically something
| which seems like an attempt to weed the more popular ones as
| soon as possible, eg: Apollo, RIF, Sync. Second, the CEO is
| openly propagating misinformation and slandering the
| developers, particularly the creator of Apollo.
|
| The devs are not asking for a free API forever, they just want
| Reddit to work with them and provide them with options - a
| sensible time frame and API pricing. Giving them a deadline of
| literally less than a month and an invoice of $20M doesn't show
| any goodwill at all on their part.
| cold_fact wrote:
| there's a very big difference between trying to become
| profitable and making a change that forces every 3rd party app
| to shutdown within 30 days because of an asinine price hike on
| their API
|
| The transparency has been horseshit from spez and the other
| admin. As it's been pointed out, when Apple bought Dark Sky, 30
| months were given to anyone using the API to adjust to the new
| landscape. These 3rd party apps that have been around longer
| than Reddit's app were given 30 days. And that doesn't even
| take into account the finger-pointing and immature behavior
| Spez threw at Christian (the Apollo app-maker)
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| > Reddit is not profitable.
|
| Seems like entirely through bad management. The choices made,
| from mostly serving links and text to hosting image and video
| which ballooned operating costs to expanding their workforce
| from 700 to 2000 while having no proyect worth putting that
| many people to work on.
|
| > Reddit finally finds a way to possibly become profitable
|
| Says who? Their API changes would not make them profitable. The
| changes, price and timeline show that the intent is to kill 3rd
| party ecosystem, not profitability.
|
| > scumbags focused on profit?
|
| Reddit is the only social media that has unpaid mods. Facebook
| pays people to keep conversation civil, reddit wants you to do
| that work for free while they release NFT profile pics.
|
| people are not angry at reddit for wanting to be profitable,
| people are angry because there have been 10 years of
| mismanagement, 0 mod support, aggresive anti user choices and
| the few tools that people use to make the website not want to
| pluck your eyes out being pulled under them with 0 recourse
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| Really though, if you have such a primitive understanding of
| the situation as this, why comment to begin with?
|
| Using restaurants as an example when there are companies all
| around the world that have achieved profitability as UberEats
| perpetually circles the drain is, frankly, dripping with irony.
| hgsgm wrote:
| There is daylight between "free" and "90% profit margin" that
| makes Reddit cost more than a premium streaming TV
| subscription.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| There is something to be said about a site that gets 100% of
| it's content from it's users without payment, 99% of it's
| moderation from it's users without payment. Turning around and
| trying to charge those same users for a different view of that
| data.
| ncallaway wrote:
| Being unprofitable and seeking profit does not entitle someone
| to bait and switch tactics. And that's simply what this is,
| just over a longer time-scale.
|
| Bait and switch tactics are immoral and in some cases illegal.
|
| Yes, companies should seek profitability, yes it's good for the
| infinite VC money to stop propping up unhealthy companies. No,
| unhealthy companies shouldn't seek to get to profitability by
| abusing their users.
|
| > I know people are upset about the CEO being a twat, but
| that's a separate issue.
|
| Is it separate? Given that he's being a twat to the specific
| person that originally raised the concerns
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| This is almost certainly a counter-protest from Reddit, Inc. in
| response to the subreddit blackouts.
| BasedAnon wrote:
| Hacker News seems to be struggling rn too. I'm guessing people
| started scraping Reddit, then it crashed so people are coming
| here instead.
| drcongo wrote:
| So does HN
| cramjabsyn wrote:
| Today is the coordinated reddit "protest" day. Some ideas off the
| top of my head...
|
| DDOS activity from pissed off stakeholders related to the protest
|
| System ops using their access to further blackout action
|
| A botched administrative action to reopen subs
| visarga wrote:
| Maybe they wanted to hide the protesting subs by making all
| reddit black out.
| fullstop wrote:
| I have to imagine that many people are deleting all of their
| comments / submissions.
| briffle wrote:
| I can't imagine the DB load of hundreds of thousands of
| people deleting all their comments. https://shreddit.com/
| capableweb wrote:
| It's very likely that a deletion at reddit is just setting
| "is_deleted" to true in a row, not actually a proper DB
| removal.
| nanidin wrote:
| correct, if you do the data export for your account you
| get all of the deleted comments/submissions in the
| resulting zip.
| kl4m wrote:
| What about rebuilding the caches for all those years old
| threads?
| [deleted]
| briffle wrote:
| I can't imagine the DB load of hundreds of thousands of
| people deleting all their comments.
| https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit
| timetraveller26 wrote:
| Whatever the cause is, not really good timing :)
| ck2 wrote:
| It's clearly a DDoS and that's not cool.
|
| 100% okay with the other protests but you don't DDoS websites
|
| Not to mention it's illegal in many countries.
| 0x0203 wrote:
| Seems entirely possible that this might be caused by a spike in
| traffic from everyone checking out the site to see how much of a
| ghost town it really is?
| comprev wrote:
| I am seeing a large percentage of NSFW tagged posts on
| old.reddit.com - not logged in (I don't even have an account) and
| browsing from generic BT home broadband in the UK.
| xyzzy4747 wrote:
| Karma at its finest.
| Glench wrote:
| God what a mess.
|
| If anyone else is interested in leaving Reddit I made a browser
| extension you can use to batch delete your Reddit posts and
| comments: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-
| reddit...
|
| Let me know how it works for you if you try it! Still fixing
| bugs.
| pepy wrote:
| probably connected with this
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65855608
| fareesh wrote:
| The average redditor would not care if they replaced a bunch of
| mods with people sympathetic to the cause of management (paid
| off).
|
| I would consider it highly improbable that this has not happened
| before - e.g. r politics
| bradlys wrote:
| I find these Reddit focused threads on HN to be lackluster. They
| read just like threads on Reddit do. Which is - uninspired, dull,
| and repetitive.
|
| I hope we stop talking about Reddit because the only people who
| seem to ever give a shit about that website and talk about in
| other places have these other attributes that make it dreadful to
| read their whinging.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| I blocked some fingerprint-BS-script and then it worked just like
| normal.
| activiation wrote:
| HN too, a few seconds ago: https://i.imgur.com/2vCWU0Y.png
| innocenat wrote:
| Reddit almost always have problem around this time everyday
| though.
| FPL_Truth wrote:
| The site doesn't have global outages every day, come on now.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Every day might be hyperbole but every week not so much
| innocenat wrote:
| If it doesn't it sure feel that way. Around 12am to 2am Japan
| time there will be a period of time where I simply cannot
| access Reddit.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Might be something unique to your own setup or location.
| Never noticed this myself in years.
| onli wrote:
| That's likely to be a routing problem, related to your ISP
| or something in between. Reddit really is not down that
| much.
| innocenat wrote:
| If it is because of that it sure isn't just me because
| Downdetector and RedditStatus also show blips in outage
| during those time.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| No it doesn't
| jonathantf2 wrote:
| Just getting a "You broke reddit" message - wonder if they've
| taken this time to do some maintenance or something?
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Happens every day.
|
| Either "You broke reddit" or "Our CDN failed to reach our
| servers."
|
| You would think that a company trying to have an IPO sometime
| in the near future would have a better control over basic shit
| breaking. There's nothing complex about their software and it's
| been breaking in the same way for years now.
| drumhead wrote:
| Old Reddit is working lol. If that's not a sign I don't know what
| is.
| r0bbbo wrote:
| Lots of speculation on Twitter about this--a failed attempt to
| re-open all closed subreddits and instate their own moderators. I
| can't imagine it'd be that, although I do enjoy the conspiracy,
| and more likely they were using the window of reduced traffic to
| make some larger changes and they went awry
| cfors wrote:
| Could also make a guess that the blackout has changed how their
| normal traffic patterns operate, causing some issues with
| autoscaling/hot partitions.
| mrzimmerman wrote:
| Yeah, my assumption was that something in some layer of their
| application isn't well optimized when asked to return posts
| from a subreddit that has "gone dark" in whatever fashions
| the mods chose to do that.
|
| For example, maybe it causes reads from the database take a
| lot longer than they normally would, locking up the database
| or causing the process the crash (again, that's just pure
| speculation).
| ilyt wrote:
| I'm guessing hit on the open subreddit mostly goes directly
| out of caching layer while hit on private one incurs DB hit
| to check whether user belongs there
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| That's what Deimos thinks: https://tildes.net/~tech/163e/re
| ddit_appears_to_be_down_duri...
| paulmd wrote:
| one I've been wondering about is user overview pages.
| People use those _a lot_ (it 's actually my bookmark for
| getting onto reddit) and yesterday I noticed that a post I
| made wasn't in my overview, and it's because that sub had
| gone dark early.
|
| What happens when a user has 99% of their posting in subs
| that are now hidden, and the API is programmed to produce a
| fixed 30 comments of history on the overview page? The
| answer is extremely deep database pulls... you might pull a
| year of comment history to get 30 comments that aren't
| hidden. And depending on how they do that, it may actually
| pull the whole comment history for that timespan, since
| most of the time posts aren't hidden like this.
|
| I worked at a backend team at work with some very
| overburdened legacy tables in mongo, and this is the kind
| of thing we'd think about. Yeah you can use an index, but
| then you have to maintain the index for every record, and
| change it every time a sub goes private/public (and we
| literally were hitting practical limits on how many indexes
| we could keep, we finally instituted a 1-in-1-out rule).
| And how often does that happen? Even deleted comments are
| overall probably a minority such that indexes don't matter,
| but, this is relational data, you have to know which
| subreddits are closed before you can filter their results,
| and mongo sucks at joins. And the mongo instance can become
| a hotspot, so, just filter it in the application instead
| for those "rare" instances. Even if they are doing it in
| mongo, the index/collection they're joining may suddenly be
| 100x the size, which could blow stuff up anyway.
|
| edit: for me, one overview page is now taking me back one
| month in comment history. And I comment a lot on subs that
| are currently closed, so it could easily be throwing away
| 5-10 comments for every comment it displays.
| hgsgm wrote:
| They don't have people to be moderators of all those subs.
| That's why subs have volunteer mods.
| skhr0680 wrote:
| A meme pointing out that u/spez was a mod of r/jailbait in 2008
| was the top post on r/all a few hours ago
| chakintosh wrote:
| Back in the day you could create a subreddit and invite
| anyone to mod it. The invite would be automatically approved.
| I suspect this is what happened here.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| Doesn't seem that unbelievable when you look into some of the
| other stuff he's done. For example he secretly used his admin
| powers to edit user comments from users he didn't like or who
| criticized him.
| EMCymatics wrote:
| It is really really wild for other comments to try to
| pretend the comment above is about something other than the
| admin (spez) using his powers to edit reddit comments of
| people he didn't like or political opponents.
| mmastrac wrote:
| I don't like what he's done one bit, nor him personally,
| but this is a really big stretch and not really the level
| of comment HN should strive for.
|
| EDIT: to clarify -- a big stretch to connect editing
| comments (which was well-known to have happened) with other
| actions.
| koprulusector wrote:
| This is something I've seen repeated on Reddit often.
| Virtually any meta thread on Reddit about Reddit will
| have several comments containing these allegations. I
| can't imagine how much time someone might need to spend
| to dig through all the noise to get to the truth, but it
| rings of something that might have a kernel of truth,
| given the prevalence and uniformity of such accusations.
|
| In either case, it's easily as speculative as the parent
| comment above, maybe slightly more so, since the parent
| came from Twitter.
| drak0n1c wrote:
| >"Yep. I messed with the "fuck u/spez" comments,
| replacing "spez" with r/the_donald mods for about an
| hour," Huffman, who co-founded Reddit with Alexis Ohanian
| in 2005, wrote.
|
| He did not admit to it until evidence was compiled and
| hit the front page, and let it appear for part of the
| week to participants and onlookers as if there was
| massive internal strife.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/23/reddit-huffman-trump/
| tipsysquid wrote:
| the accusation of editing comments I believe to be
| confirmed as fact, everything else I am not sure of.
| mrgalaxy wrote:
| Parent commenter shouldn't have said secretly. That was
| something he openly admitted to doing.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-
| stev...
| bbarnett wrote:
| _That was something he openly admitted to doing._
|
| Not true! He did _not_ openly admit to doing this.
| Instead:
|
| * he did it, and told no one at all
|
| * was caught doing it, after people figured it out
|
| * then, admitted he did it
|
| This is absolutely not the same as "openly admitting it".
|
| He _did_ secretly edit comments.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| I believe the issue the commenter above was taking was
| that just because someone commits, for lack of a better
| term, comment fraud, we shouldn't jump to suggesting he's
| also a paedophile.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Oh, i took that comment to suggest that the downtime
| could _(mostly jokingly, i assume)_ have something to do
| with Spez dealing with a post he didn 't like.
| [deleted]
| DANmode wrote:
| It was secret/nontransparent until he admitted to it.
|
| Still misleading, I agree.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| He admitted to doing it.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/23/reddit-huffman-trump/
| croes wrote:
| I think it's about
|
| > was a mod of r/jailbait in 2008
|
| not the comment editing
| danudey wrote:
| "Openly admitting" has a very different connotation than
| "fessing up after you get caught".
| EMCymatics wrote:
| This didn't get enough exposure
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| Completely out of line to connect admin abuse with
| pedophilia.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is true, but if I were a creator and
| admin of a site, I'd assume I'm automatically a mod of every
| subreddit or subforum. It doesn't necessarily mean spez was
| specifically moderating that sub.
| 3836293648 wrote:
| There's a difference between an admin having mod access to
| every subforum and being listed in that specific subforum's
| list of moderators
| oofta-boofta wrote:
| [dead]
| karaterobot wrote:
| What's funny about this to me is that the actual moderators
| of r/jailbait thought "I know how I can insult u/spez, I'll
| make him a moderator of my sub, so he'll look like a scumbag,
| like I am"
| gpm wrote:
| "Pointing out"
|
| Fabricating? Or do you have some reason to believe this is
| true.
|
| The wayback machine doesn't list him as a mod (SFW): https://
| web.archive.org/web/20100420183707/http://nl.reddit....
|
| PS. Wow, the sidebar makes that sub seem even scummier than I
| assumed it was.
| chomp wrote:
| This isn't that surprising, you used to be able to add anyone
| on the entire site as a moderator and it'd autoaccept. It's
| doubtful he actually moderated it in any capacity. He's still
| moderator of some random subreddits.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| I'm surprised he didn't get more flack for this when he last
| courted controversy by changing posts critical of him.
| mort96 wrote:
| What surprises me is that he's not ousted by the board yet.
| Surely at this point he's causing more trouble than he's
| worth?
| mjr00 wrote:
| Part of spez's job is to be the lightning rod for
| controversial decisions. The board I'm sure is pushing
| for the same things (increases in pricing, driving users
| to the official app) in order to boost metrics before the
| IPO. Aside from the somewhat pointless AMA where his
| frustrations came out a bit too much, if you assume that
| the effective removal of API access had to happen, what
| do you think he's done wrong during this?
| TheNewsIsHere wrote:
| Many take exception to his handling of Reddit's
| relationship with Apollo and Christian Selig
| specifically.
|
| Steve Huffman has reportedly told employees that Selig
| threatened Reddit. Selig posted a (perfectly legally
| recorded and disclosed) call recording showing the
| alleged "threat" was a misunderstanding over which the
| Reddit employee on the call apologized immediately.
|
| Huffman serves in an official capacity at the Anti-
| Defamation League. People are (rightly, I think) critical
| of his handling partly in light of that.
| baud147258 wrote:
| Maybe he knows where all the skeletons are buried, so the
| board removing him would be to difficult (or they're not
| ready to pay his golden parachute/buy his silence)
| nilespotter wrote:
| Nobody likes spez and reddit is the worst of the worst in
| terms of what the Internet could be and what it is. Reddit is
| where know nothings pontificate as if they were experts on
| anything and everything while congratulating each other. It
| used to be a great site, now I'm ashamed I ever used it and
| I'm embarrassed for people who mention they use it.
|
| That said, that meme is propaganda and defamation. Anyone
| could add anyone as a mod anywhere for a time, and
| violentacrez added spez "for the lulz" or however people like
| that think. I'd be beside myself it there's evidence that he
| was an active moderator working on that sub. Although, given
| the prevailing winds of the modern left, in a few years he'll
| probably be trying to claim that he was.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| > Although, given the prevailing winds of the modern left,
| in a few years he'll probably be trying to claim that he
| was.
|
| I'm genuinely curious what the fuck you mean by this.
| luroc wrote:
| He probably alludes to the common conservative trope that
| jews/blacks/environmentalists/gays/trans people are
| 'pedophiles' (depending on which era you look at)
| nilespotter wrote:
| Jews and blacks?
| nilespotter wrote:
| Pedophilia is coming en vogue on the left. If you can't
| see it now, you'll see it soon. Spez will likely claim
| that he really was a /r/jailbait moderator for leftist
| credibility, I would guess 3-5 years from now.
| yokoprime wrote:
| > Reddit is where know nothings pontificate as if they were
| experts on anything and everything > ... > that meme is
| propaganda and defamation
|
| > ... > given the prevailing winds of the modern left
|
| Are you making up facts and mixing them in a soup to mimic
| your favorite bigoted influencer?
| Chiron1991 wrote:
| [dead]
| aw1621107 wrote:
| It's worth noting that a very old user (/u/andrewsmith1986
| IIRC) responded that at that time it was possible to add
| arbitrary users as mods without needing
| interaction/feedback/etc. from the user in question. If that
| was the case, then any user being a mod on any particular sub
| at that time doesn't really mean much.
|
| Obviously I can't reference the comment in question right
| now, but I'll try to remember to circle back and add a
| reference when(/if?) Reddit comes back up.
|
| Edit: /u/andrewsmith1986's comment can be found at https://ol
| d.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/1477psa/all_3_ar...
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| This counter-narrative is also misleading
|
| Consider: spez was the voluntary "mod" of the entire
| platform as CEO, and he maintained that subreddit.
|
| Excusing him for the unsolicited mod invite is just optics
| management. It would be like saying lowtax had no
| responsibility as co-signer for the existence of subforums
| that his paid or unpaid staff maintained.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It seems like a funny distinction to make in the first
| place. Was he an admin of the site when it was hosting that
| sort of stuff? Anyone who was an admin at the time is
| responsible for the policies that allowed it to exist on
| the site...
| roncesvalles wrote:
| I mean it's also worth noting that spez was CEO of Reddit
| and subreddits like that were allowed to exist for many,
| many more years.
| [deleted]
| aw1621107 wrote:
| Sure, and one can absolutely criticize him for that, but
| I think if one wants to criticize how /r/jailbait and
| similar subs were handled it's better to do that directly
| rather than making a more nebulous insinuation that
| stands on weaker ground.
| predictabl3 wrote:
| Anyone trying to lose weight and skip a meal today? Open
| a reddit client and do a subreddit search with "teen" as
| a prefix. Or don't, you know. Silly me for assuming that
| this had been solved after _any_ of the various sketchy-
| porn related subreddit purges.
|
| I'm not naive, user content is hard to moderate. But is
| it hard to say "any subreddits with these keywords go on
| a list for review"?
| oxygen_crisis wrote:
| It's not just that he allowed them to exist, he created a
| special one-of-a-kind "Pimp Daddy" trophy to award to the
| moderator of r/jailbait and r/creepshots.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/TrophyWiki/comments/mohrlg/reddi
| t_t...
|
| There is some whitewash in the comments there:
| "[violentacrez] received the trophy because all the work
| he did to moderate the site..." as if he got the award
| for keeping things clean, but consider that he
| contributed the vast majority of those subreddits'
| content himself by cruising social media for salacious
| pictures of minors to share while he was in his 40's, and
| the award is named "Pimp Daddy."
| dionidium wrote:
| And it would in turn be worth noting that the creators of
| reddit had a philosophical and political commitment to
| free speech that drove their light-touch approach to
| moderation. It's not like the existence of that subreddit
| is evidence of an endorsement on their part.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Lascivious pictures of clothed children count as CSAM in
| many jurisdictions. Free speech is fine but did they not
| have lawyers until 2015?
| WindyLakeReturn wrote:
| At the time reddit was not some unknown back corner of
| the internet and had already begun working with law
| enforcement to enforce anti-CSAM laws due to material
| being treaded in private messages and private subreddits.
| That it took a media exposure take down the specific
| subreddit indicated that it was likely on the legal side
| of the line, through it was going close enough to the
| line to make others uncomfortable. If the material was
| actually illegal, wouldn't it have made reddit the
| largest clear-net site containing CSAM? In such a case, I
| find it hard to conceive that media exposure and not
| legal actions is why led to it shutting down, and with no
| admins being arrested it seems the most reasonable
| assumption left is that it was on the technically legal
| side.
|
| This would likely be like the use of underage subjects in
| nudist art, painted, drawn, or photographed. Such art is
| generally not considered pornographic and are legally
| protected, and some even displayed in museums and the
| like, yet websites will still ban the material to not
| have any relationship to it and to not have users trying
| to push the boundary. I'm speaking to the extent that
| rules are enforced, many websites have issues with
| enforcing rules in general due to the amount of user
| generated content being much larger than the amount of
| moderation available, so there will be something slipping
| through moderation from time to time.
| pr0zac wrote:
| I mean yeah all that, but on the other hand, the
| subreddit was literally called r/jailbait.
| Zak wrote:
| They didn't have image or video hosting at the time, just
| links and comments. Their legal exposure was pretty
| limited.
| tredre3 wrote:
| Can you give us one example of a jurisdiction where a
| photo of a teenager in bikini would count as CSAM?
| throwaway17_17 wrote:
| * Note: This IS NOT Legal Advice *
|
| Most states in the US could use a photo of a teenager in
| a bikini as enough 'evidence' to bring charges of
| Possession of Pornography involving a Juvenile, depending
| on what the actual photo depicts. Whether the contents of
| the image could be found to substantiate a conviction for
| the charge would be a trial/appeals issue. Nudity is not
| required for an image to be considered CSAM in most US
| states (or at the federal level), there are also Federal
| precedents that make cartoon depictions of under-aged
| characters count as CSAM.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| [flagged]
| dymk wrote:
| No. CP is a term used by 4chan and people unfamiliar with
| the topic. The detection, prevention, and enforcement
| community uses the term CSAM.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Lawyers and courts say child pornography because laws are
| not restricted to sexual abuse material. Drawn child
| pornography is illegal in many places for example.
| hattmall wrote:
| How do they determine the age of a person depicted in a
| drawing?
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Appearing under a certain age is enough.
| bamfly wrote:
| It's the _only_ term I 'd ever seen for it, in any
| context, until the last couple years. And I'm not a
| 4channer. Pretty sure it's just another euphemism-
| treadmill thing. (not that I mind in this case, I think
| the new term's fine, and certainly not worth fighting
| over)
| dymk wrote:
| Like I said, people are unfamiliar with the topic. In the
| industry, CSAM is the term used.
| bamfly wrote:
| What's "the industry"? The relatively new industry in
| moderating Internet communication? I've certainly only
| seen the term "CSAM" coming from cops and prosecutors
| very recently, and they're rarely shy about using their
| jargon in public communication.
|
| [EDIT] I believe you that it's the term in vogue _now_ ,
| to be clear, but I'm skeptical it was as dominant, even
| if present, until relatively recently. If it was, then
| that entire _world_ only recently started using it
| consistently in public communication, certainly. But,
| again, it 's also fine, I don't mind the new term.
| philjohn wrote:
| For important reasons. Also why "revenge porn" is now
| referred to as non-consensual intimate imagery.
| renewiltord wrote:
| They're the same thing and used interchangeably. The
| sexual abuse is from the sharing lascivious pictures of
| someone taken without their consent, with the additional
| context that children are not understood to be capable of
| consent for sharing lascivious pictures. It is not
| physical abuse.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That... is an abuse of the word abuse.
|
| Also wouldn't that logic apply to pictures that were
| originally taken openly and innocently?
| solumunus wrote:
| This is a hill to avoid dying on.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I want to reserve the phrase "child abuse" for real child
| abuse, so that it gets taken as seriously as possible and
| not diluted. I think that is a sufficiently good
| motivation to stand on this hill.
| [deleted]
| slg wrote:
| Use of the images can be abusive even if the creation of
| them wasn't. Revenge porn is an obvious example. Even
| legally and consensually created images can be used to
| abuse someone.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Under a broad definition of just "abuse", yes.
|
| But "sexual abuse" is a specific thing, and socially
| attacking someone with revenge porn is not at all "sexual
| abuse".
|
| It's a different category, just like punching someone in
| the face is a different category.
| slg wrote:
| From the Wikipedia article on the subject[1]:
|
| >The practice has also been described as a form of
| psychological abuse and domestic violence, as well as a
| form of sexual abuse.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_porn
| renewiltord wrote:
| I suspect there's a transformation through intent.
|
| This does lead to poor policing (like the famous Google
| banning man for taking photo of his child's genitals to
| send to doctor story).
|
| It appears that in present-day English people use the
| word 'abuse' to mean more than physical abuse. If you're
| a prescriptivist that may upset you, but isn't that the
| nature of being a prescriptivist? Does it perhaps _beg
| the question_ "why be a prescriptivist?"? Aren't you,
| perhaps, _literally_ standing against the world?
| Eisenstein wrote:
| What would you call whatever that japanese underage comic
| thing is? It features no persons and no one was abused
| yet it still illegal. I don't object to the term as
| applied, but I don't particularly feel great about the
| word 'abuse' being used for cartoon characters since it
| degrades the experience of human survivors.
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| > yet it still illegal.
|
| Not in the U.S., federally at least, where the justice
| department's guidance specifies that CP is media which
| "appear to depict an identifiable, actual minor."
|
| https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-
| fede...
| [deleted]
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| This is partly why I now prefer the term "free exchange
| of ideas" over "freedom of speech". I believe it more
| closely captures the essence of what makes free speech
| worth protecting, while also conveniently excluding stuff
| like this (among other things, like spam or antisocial
| behavior).
| Worldblender wrote:
| Thank you; I was wanting another term so as to not
| conflated "freedom of speech" with something considerably
| different. I want to make things unambiguous/clear as
| possible.
|
| It does infuriate me when some people may use "freedom of
| speech" as their excuse for "You must let me have a place
| to speak", when that isn't even guaranteed in the first
| place.
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| Freedom of speech is a legal concept that clearly doesn't
| cover CSAM. Free speech is a principle but it also
| doesn't cover CSAM. Fire in a crowded theater doesn't
| actually work as a legal defense but obscenity does
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| That's another reason I prefer the term "free exchange of
| ideas"; by using different wording it helps avoid the
| confusion created by people conflating the general
| _principal_ of such freedoms with any specific legal
| provisions that exist in the U.S. constitution. (Though I
| agree in this case my wording is in agreement with how
| the courts define "freedom of speech" in practice.)
| thakoppno wrote:
| > Fire in a crowded theater doesn't actually work as a
| legal defense
|
| It may actually be a defense.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_
| the...
| lukifer wrote:
| As discussed ITA, that case was later overturned; and
| it's worth remembering that its origin was as an analogy
| to justify criminalizing pamphleteering against the draft
| [0] (one could not imagine a more salient example of
| "political speech")
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
| wpietri wrote:
| Ooh, that's good.
|
| It also makes it clearer what's going on when people are
| waving the "free speech" banner over things like
| harassment and abuse. Allowing abuse not only doesn't
| increase the free exchange of ideas. It also often
| directly decreases it because it drives off people who
| get targeted by racism, sexism, et cetera, ad nauseam.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| When the use cases for a given signal have proven to be
| reliably overwhelmed by the abuse cases for that same
| signal, the signal is no longer making a net positive
| contribution to freedom, causing net harm rather than
| help. At this point I don't think such a signal should be
| protected as free speech.
| ilyt wrote:
| Well, it's freedom of speech, not freedom of pics
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Freedom of the press does often get lumped in with speech
| in these sort of discussions, for good reason. That's
| another reason I prefer "ideas"; it's agnostic to the
| medium through which the ideas are conveyed (though
| again, in this specific case the images in question
| weren't intended to convey an "idea").
| arp242 wrote:
| Wouldn't that potentially also exclude "obscene" things
| such as nudity? Or things like flag burning, or
| provocative art?
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I think flag burning and provocative art are
| unquestionably intended to convey "ideas". In fact, they
| fit into that category far more cleanly than they do into
| "speech" in my opinion.
|
| Nudity... depends on the purpose but probably not. I
| agree that's unfortunate if your stance is that there
| should be no restrictions on porn, but I'm not sure the
| arguments for why freedom of speech is a good idea really
| apply to porn in the first place. I think it'd be better
| to make that argument on its own merits rather than try
| to conflate the two.
| arp242 wrote:
| > I think flag burning and provocative art are
| unquestionably intended to convey "ideas".
|
| That seems very open to interpretation to me; it seems to
| me these kind of things express a "feeling" much more
| than an "idea", and they might also be considered
| "antisocial" that you mentioned in your previous comment.
|
| I meant "nudity" only in the sense of "nudity", nothing
| more. e.g. "I want to make a nudist TV cooking
| programme", or stuff like that. No concrete "ideas" are
| being exchanged with that as such.
|
| I'm not a free speech absolution by any means, but I have
| generally favoured the exact opposite: "free expression"
| instead of "free speech" as that covers so much more. I
| think we can have an expansive "free expression" which
| includes many things while also having reasonable limits
| on that based on e.g. "does this reasonably harm people
| in a significant way?"
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Yeah, I suppose there is some ambiguity there. Though I'd
| argue a standard like "does this harm people?" would even
| more open to interpretation and prone to abuse. Just
| about any idea can be framed as "harmful" to some person
| or group given a sufficient level of motivated reasoning
| (in fact, almost all modern cases of mass censorship seem
| to try to justify themselves that way). I much prefer a
| clear principle with few or no exceptions.
|
| I suppose there may be room for both. "The freedom to
| exchange ideas" is after all a subset of "freedom of
| expression" (though not necessarily of "freedom of
| expression, with a bunch of exceptions").
| arp242 wrote:
| In your "ideas" phrasing the exceptions seem implicit
| rather than explicit by virtue of not covering
| everything. I think it's better to be explicit about "you
| can do whatever you want, except [..]".
|
| That some people will try to abuse this seems inescapable
| no matter what; we'll still be argueing the details 200
| or 2,000 years from now because there is no way to
| capture any of this in clear neat rules. The best we can
| do is come up with some decent set of ground rules which
| convey the intent and purpose as best as possible. This
| is why we have judges to, well, judge, and "reasonably
| harm people in a significant way" seems like a lot
| clearer of a guideline for this than a much more vague
| "ideas".
|
| Flag burning wasn't protected as free speech in the US
| until 1989. I have a list of stuff that was banned or
| censored in the past that would be considered
| unobjectionable by almost everyone today, and I suspect
| things would have been better if we had "freedom of
| expression" instead of "freedom of speech" (or "free
| exchange of ideas", for that matter).
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Fair point. I agree with the sentiment of "you can do
| whatever you want, except [..]", in the sense that I
| think we should err on the side of personal freedom. To
| be clear, I don't think focusing on "the free exchange of
| ideas" means other freedoms aren't important, and I'm not
| proposing a constitutional amendment or anything. It's
| just that from a rhetorical perspective I prefer to use
| terminology that encourages the strongest possible
| interpretation of the argument I'm making, and I think,
| for me at least, "the free exchange of ideas" does that
| best for all the reasons I named in my original comment
| and its replies.
| WindyLakeReturn wrote:
| It doesn't seem to do anything other than play word games
| with what counts as an 'idea' instead of what counts as
| 'speech'. An attempt to reset the existing case law,
| philosophy, etc., without facing it head on. Perhaps we
| need to reconsider if images count as speech. What about
| algorithms? Is an algorithm an idea? Even if it is an
| algorithm that generates an image?
|
| The issue I see developing is that any attempt to carve
| out what is not desired by some group is going to create
| standards that will let other groups carve out what
| wasn't intended in the first place. Look at how
| encryption is under attack and one common way it is
| attacked is by claims of how it promotes the spread of
| CSAM. So government asks for reasonable backdoors that
| will only ever be used to stop such material, yet tech
| circles realize that any such backdoor will allow for
| arbitrary power to block any material.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Interesting rhetorical move. What other kinds of
| communications are you in favour of censoring?
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Copyright/trademark violations, shouting "fire" in a
| crowded theater, direct personal threats of bodily harm,
| basically a lot of stuff which is already widely
| considered to not be protected speech legally, but which
| _is_ "speech" (or perhaps "press") in the plain language
| sense of the term (and importantly, is not exactly an
| "idea" in the plain language sense of that term).
|
| I think it helps strengthen the argument rhetorically,
| since people can't as easily use the existence of such
| "exceptions" as an argument for adding more, or bypass
| the principle entirely with slogans like "freedom of
| speech isn't freedom of reach". (Suppressing the "reach"
| of certain ideas obviously _does_ inhibit their free
| exchange.)
|
| This approach hasn't been "battle tested" yet though so
| we'll see how it goes in practice.
| wpietri wrote:
| Hi! I've done a bunch of trust and safety work and I see
| this trope a fair bit. Please help me understand what the
| difference is between, say, platforming racist harassment
| because of a "political commitment to free speech" and
| platforming racist harassment because you just kinda like
| racist harassment?
|
| I get that it might be different in the heads of the
| people who have worked very hard to create those
| platforms. I'm just not seeing any different in its
| effects on the world or on the targets of the racial
| harassment.
| jnky wrote:
| > Please help me understand what the difference is
| between, say, platforming racist harassment because of a
| "political commitment to free speech" and platforming
| racist harassment because you just kinda like racist
| harassment?
|
| The difference is intent. Intent matters. Intent is the
| difference between murder and manslaughter, or between a
| conspiracy and mere speech.
| wpietri wrote:
| Intent matters _sometimes_. To _some people_. But here,
| in either case the intent is to enable terrible people
| to, e.g., shout the n-word at people. So I don 't see
| much of a difference in those terms.
| rchaud wrote:
| > a philosophical and political commitment to free speech
|
| Surely this is a meme by now? Any CEO that has ever said
| this about a website they control is just pandering to
| the crowd. Musk's Twitter has complied with more
| government takedown requests than the previous regime
| had.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
|
| If anyone would say it and mean it, it was probably this
| guy. He was quite the activist before he committed
| suicide.
| [deleted]
| callalex wrote:
| It is now, but it was very different at the time. The old
| guard of the internet supporting absolute freedom of
| speech didn't used to be associated with Nazis. Some good
| examples that still exists today are the Electronic
| Frontier Foundation and to some extent the American Civil
| Liberties Union.
| AnonCoward42 wrote:
| [flagged]
| djcannabiz wrote:
| Would you mind explaining what #Stolzmonat means or what
| is behind it? I see that it is german for pride month. Is
| it meant to be ironic or something like that?
| manicdee wrote:
| It's a counter-protest by white male supremacists ("neo-
| nazis"/Proud Boys) who believe that diversity and
| equality diminish them. It's a parody of Pride Month.
| AnonCoward42 wrote:
| [flagged]
| strato-cumulus wrote:
| I'd be all up for an initiative that attempts to burst
| the liberal bubble which seems to reject the possibility
| that people have other things to do than follow the
| latest inclusivity trends online, but come on. You know
| well what this is about. Had to scroll like 3 posts down
| to find out that this panders to reactionary clowns[0].
|
| If this were a protest I would expect polemic discourse,
| yet the "official account" is just throwing shit around
| and screaming with excitement when someone "gets
| offended"[1].
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/BjoernHoecke/status/1664190277282
| 611200 [1] https://twitter.com/stolzmonat
| AnonCoward42 wrote:
| Note: If the wrong people take part, abandon ship.
|
| More seriously: I don't care. If Hoecke proclaims the
| water is healthy, I don't stop drinking water.
| #Stolzmonat is honestly a good thing especially because
| everyone can take part. If we now start the game of
| distancing (and that never stops) we can also just use
| the old hashtag.
| strato-cumulus wrote:
| Read the twitter bio of that movement's page and tell me
| your definition of "everyone" here.
|
| If you don't support Stolzmonat's agenda, then you are
| probably not welcome - pretty much the same as with
| Pride. What's the difference then?
| AnonCoward42 wrote:
| Who is not welcome? Wokies? Yeah, if you want to hate on
| people because of their race, sex, sexual orientation or
| such, you're likely not welcome. Happy #Stolzmonat.
| eropple wrote:
| #Stolzmonat is categorically not "more inclusive". It's
| reactionary spittle.
| AnonCoward42 wrote:
| [flagged]
| scubbo wrote:
| I mean, define "endorsement". Permitting something to
| exist when you have the power to do otherwise is a mild
| form of endorsement. A commitment to free speech is, to
| an extent, an endorsement of all the speech that results.
| wwtrv wrote:
| > Permitting something to exist when you have the power
| to do otherwise
|
| That's an excewptionally broad definition and would sound
| pretty scary with no context.
| wwtrv wrote:
| > Permitting something to exist when you have the power
| to do otherwise
|
| That's an exceptionally broad definition and would sound
| pretty scary with no context.
| manicdee wrote:
| The context is discussion of social media platforms where
| the platform already owns all the content and has the
| tools to decide what gets published and what doesn't.
| capableweb wrote:
| > A commitment to free speech is, to an extent, an
| endorsement of all the speech that results.
|
| Absolutely not. I'd argue that anyone should be free to
| talk with others about their opinion, but that doesn't
| mean I agree with that opinion. And letting then speak
| without shutting them down doesn't mean I agree either,
| just means I agree that they should be able to speak
| freely.
|
| What kind of dystopian viewpoint is that? You go around
| stopping everyone from saying stuff you disagree with?
| foogazi wrote:
| > I'd argue that anyone should be free to talk with
| others about their opinion, but that doesn't mean I agree
| with that opinion.
|
| Sure, when "talking" is done via sound waves or someone
| else's medium it's different
|
| But if you have free-speech parties at your place and
| people spray paint messages on your house then you are
| now "hosting"
|
| You decide which words you leave or paint over
| welshwelsh wrote:
| Platforms like reddit are in no way similar to personal
| property like a house that you live in.
|
| A better analogy would be, imagine _you rent your house
| to someone else_. You make a rule that tenants may
| display political messages in their windows, but only for
| one political party.
|
| That would be illegal. You can prohibit _all_ signs if
| you want, but specifically choosing what signs someone
| gets to display violates their first amendment rights and
| could trigger a fair housing lawsuit. It doesn 't matter
| that you aren't the government and that you own the
| property.
| Golden_Wind123 wrote:
| [dead]
| dangond wrote:
| Enabling and endorsement are two different things, no
| need to conflate the two. If I'm a dentist and tell my
| patient that they could use any toothpaste they want but
| that I don't recommend the specific brand that they use,
| how is that an endorsement in any way? I'm allowing them
| the choice without endorsing in this case.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| In your analogy, the dentist is selling the bad
| toothpaste and saying "Go pick any from the shelf over
| there but not that one". Why is he selling it then? The
| dentist can't say "well it's a free market" as if that
| somehow absolves him. He sells the bad toothpaste, that's
| a tacit endorsement.
|
| You can be a proponent of free speech and not allow
| people to stand on your porch yelling heinous things, but
| that's not what Reddit was doing. They knowingly profited
| from that speech.
| cmh89 wrote:
| >And it would in turn be worth noting that the creators
| of reddit had a philosophical and political commitment to
| free speech that drove their light-touch approach to
| moderation
|
| That's nonsense. The Sears debacle showed that reddits
| leadership team was fine with deleting posts if it was
| going to cost them money to not delete them.
|
| That 'political commitment to free speech' sure
| disappeared quickly when r/jailbait and u/violetacrez hit
| the main stream media.
|
| spez was fine with hosting a community of child predators
| because it was one of the most popular subs. It was the
| top recommended result when you searched for reddit on
| google.
|
| You can support free speech without _actively providing a
| community for predators_
| nicolas_t wrote:
| What was the Sears debacle?
| paradox460 wrote:
| Sears had an XSS injection issue, where you could change
| their breadcrumbs by manipulating the URLs. Some
| redditors changed and shared a link to a grill as a "Body
| part roaster" and had fun. Sears found out and got mad
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/2009/08/21/reddit-sears-grills-
| that...
| cmh89 wrote:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/9clji/where_d
| id_...
|
| reddit used to be owned by Conde Nast. Sears got upset
| about a post and complained to Conde Nast, who then told
| spez to take it down. If you have a political commitment
| to 'free speech' that folds if you might have to face
| some consequences for defending it, you don't have that
| strong of a commitment in my opinion. Certainly not
| strong enough to justify hosting a community of child
| predators
| moomin wrote:
| Many people have said this better than me, but there are
| plenty of people who have thought they can do better than
| the current status-quo regarding user-generated content
| on the internet.
|
| They end up conforming or losing money. There's no one
| reason for this. You try to run a website visible to the
| world, you're gonna be subject to a world full of
| reasons.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| dionidium, dedicated defender of promoted jailbait access
| and hosting
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| >It's not like the existence of that subreddit is
| evidence of an endorsement on their part.
|
| It is though. 230 be damned. These were not small or
| hidden communities. They were frequently on the front
| page. Generally, and especially in this case silence is
| violence. The optics of that sub and the frequenters
| thereof are terrible. Do you want to try and justify
| their inaction further or concede this point? It should
| have never been allowed in the first place. Spez/Reddit
| at al should continue to be shamed for their long-
| standing tacit approval of these communities. Earning
| respectability requires public contrition for bad
| decisions that affect the public and non participants. As
| is typical, the communities were only shuttered when the
| victims cries grew loud enough to affect their brand
| image. Cf fph, wpd, fappening, t_d, Boston bomber fiasco,
| all the racist subs, and countless other controversies
| that spez/Reddit fumbled. Reddit deserves to close. The
| management team is evidently not competent or mature
| enough for the task and has repeatedly proven that their
| inability to learn from their mistakes and failure to
| become the proactive stewards needed will result in
| preventable harm to people who do not even use the
| platform.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > the creators of reddit had a philosophical and
| political commitment to free speech that drove their
| light-touch approach to moderation
|
| The notion that reddit ever was a bastion of free speech
| is absurd. They didn't "light touch" on upskirt, revenge,
| and kiddy porn because of "philosophical and political
| commitment to free speech", they did it because they
| didn't want to accept any more responsibility for content
| than they absolutely had to, and that's because it is not
| financially viable to moderate large communities using
| paid labor. _That_ is why you see so many social media
| companies pushing against rules for online content; not
| because they 're champions of free speech.
|
| If it were about "a commitment to free speech", they
| wouldn't allow completely unaccountable and anonymous
| members to delete content, silently mute users, and ban
| users....including employing automatic tools that would
| ban people preemptively based on subreddits they posted
| in, or automated tools for powermods to ban someone
| across all the subreddits they moderated.
|
| If you pissed off a powermod, your account could end up
| getting banned from nearly all the major, common
| subreddits - not just from theirs, but they'd communicate
| in private channels to other powermods that they wanted
| someone to be banned elsewhere.
|
| Oh, and they were happy to moderate, severely, anyone who
| revealed any personal details about a reddit user. Which
| conveniently helps protect people doing stuff like
| upskirting and posting revenge porn.
|
| "philosophical and political commitment to free speech",
| my ass.
| freejazz wrote:
| > light-touch approach to moderation
|
| Heh. So what did they moderate? things besides jailbait?
| How free!
| kaiken1987 wrote:
| Oh man that's a username I have seen in a log time. Wasn't
| there a theory that they were multiple people using a
| single account?
| Zak wrote:
| I remember the change to requiring people to accept an
| invite. Adding people as moderators of distasteful
| subreddits without their consent was a common form of abuse
| just prior.
| veave wrote:
| It's easy to prove, this is the code change that added the
| moderator invitation system: https://github.com/reddit-
| archive/reddit/commit/db7b531a7180...
| chromakode wrote:
| I added that invitation flow in response to widespread
| abuse of the 1-way add moderator button. As an aside, the
| invitation message felt too bland and clinical during
| dev, so I added "gadzooks!" to the beginning, which
| became a meme for a while.
| rodgerd wrote:
| He was also part of the team that gave the owner of the sub
| awards. It's not really credible to claim that spez wasn't
| somehow very enthusiastic about it.
| adhvaryu wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/1477psa/all_3_a
| r...
|
| >Back in the day, you used to be able to add anyone as a
| moderator and it auto accepted.
|
| >People would make shitty subs and add people, take a
| screenshot, shut down the sun or make private, then use
| that screenshot to start a witch hunt. Violentacrez could
| have added you as a mod of the sub and you'd be in the same
| situation.
|
| >TL:DR I used to mod a sub with Barack Obama and Snoop
| Dogg.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Other users apart from u/andrewsmith1986 also confirmed
| this, in that thread. Sounds plausible.
| invokestatic wrote:
| Back when Obama hosted an AMA on Reddit, a bunch of users
| added his account as a moderator to a bunch of subreddits,
| including some pretty objectionable ones. This prompted a
| change that moderators would be invited instead.
| [deleted]
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Maybe the protest was so successful at driving traffic away
| from Reddit it looked like something was broken to their
| monitoring which tried to failover unsuccessfully? If that
| happened it might be the first case of a site being brought
| down by the polar opposite of a DDoS.
| ryanstorm wrote:
| Attempting this to be more of a discussion prompt than
| speculation, but as an advertiser or other consumer analytics
| customer of reddit, would this sort of protest and the
| potential fallout be concerning? I'm not sure if all this is a
| drop in the bucket for those customers or if it's significant.
| If it was significant, would reddit be scrambling to save face
| for these advertising customers? An outage like this would
| certainly skew the difference in their analytics for today's
| relative traffic.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > a failed attempt to re-open all closed subreddits and instate
| their own moderators
|
| My first thought this morning was "if I was reddit, I would re-
| open all closed subreddits and instate my own moderators"...
| I'm kind of surprised they didn't. I'd have to imagine that if
| they wanted to, the attempt wouldn't fail - this seems like it
| could be done almost trivially.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| They'd just replace their unpaid workers by paid ones and
| annoy the userbase even more in the process. Doesn't sound
| like a great plan.
| Algent wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if so many big subreddits being dark is
| causing issues around denied API calls.
|
| As for the forced reopening, beside the conspiracy this is
| something that could happen. It's a private company, moderator
| on strike are a loss of business, they would be 100% in their
| right to remove all the "traitors" (I'm not saying this would
| be a smart move, simply that if they really plan to go down
| this self destructive path it's the best time to do this and
| prove potential investor they still have control).
| abluecloud wrote:
| where the hell are they going to fine thousands of willing
| users to become mods of thousands of communities, overnight?
| Deestan wrote:
| That's easy.
|
| Less if you add "competent" to the qualifications list :)
| brightlancer wrote:
| I think there are millions of folks on Reddit who would
| jump at the chance to be a petty dictator of a subreddit.
| brightlancer wrote:
| > It's a private company, moderator on strike are a loss of
| business, they would be 100% in their right to
|
| Legally, of course. Morally, it is completely unacceptable.
| This isn't "oh they're jerks"; this is "the system is
| broken".
|
| A meatspace analogy:
|
| You host a weekly gathering at a restaurant. You decide to
| temporarily boycott the restaurant to protest some behavior
| of theirs -- your actions are a loss of business, _so the
| restaurant decides to host your weekly gathering without
| you_.
|
| We'd never accept that in the real world, but for some reason
| we do online -- we fall back to the legal argument that It's
| A Private Business (which is true) and completely ignore that
| Reddit doesn't own the community, that the community doesn't
| _belong_ to Reddit. They own the platform (the restaurant);
| they don't own the community.
| Algent wrote:
| Oh I completely agree this would be the most stupid thing
| they could do. I wrote it because this is something I can
| picture happening at some point (I do expect the protest to
| multiply), you say they don't own the community but I'm
| pretty sure they think they can control it.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| definitely not the case, reddit has stated that they would not
| be doing that, at least for the two-day protest. would be
| incredibly bad PR at this scale, especially after repeatedly
| and directly making this statement.
|
| however, they have stated that may do this if the protest
| extends beyond the 48h mark.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| HN getting hugged, too.
| [deleted]
| nonstopdev wrote:
| That is an interesting point. Would assume your subreddit isn't
| yours so at any point you could grow and generate content and
| users and Reddit could take it over and add in their own
| moderators?
| tester457 wrote:
| > (I used to work as a backend developer at Reddit - I left 6
| years ago but I doubt the way things work has changed much)
|
| > I think it's extremely unlikely that this is deliberate. The
| way that Reddit builds "mixed" subreddit listings (where you
| see posts from multiple subreddits, like users' front pages) is
| inefficient and strange, and relies heavily on multiple layers
| of caches. Having so many subreddits private with their posts
| inaccessible has never happened before, and is probably causing
| a bunch of issues with this process.
|
| https://tildes.net/~tech/163e/reddit_appears_to_be_down_duri...
| jallen_dot_dev wrote:
| Wild guess: visiting a private sub requires an extra call to a
| service/db to check if the user can view it. Normally there are
| only a small number of these checks because private subs were
| usually small communities. Now, many large subs having switched
| private is causing some poor mircoservice somewhere to get
| hammered.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| I never worked at this scale, but could it also be that
| different subs are horizontally scaled and with so many
| people reverting to the subs that are still open the load is
| unevenly balanced?
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| Good question! And few people get to work at this scale, so
| it's not an unreasonable guess. I'll join you in
| speculating wildly about this, since, hey, it's kind of
| fun.
|
| IMHO sharding traffic by subreddit doesn't pass the smell-
| test, though. Different subreddits have _very_ different
| traffic patterns, so the system would likely end up with
| hotspots continuously popping up, and it 'd probably be
| toilsome to constantly babysit hot shards and rebalance.
| (Consider some of the more academic subreddits vs. some of
| the more meme-driven subreddits -- and then consider what
| happens when e.g. a particular subreddit takes off, or goes
| cold.)
|
| Sharding on a dimension that has a more random/uniform
| distribution is usually the way to go. Off the top of my
| head (still speculating wildly and basically doing a
| 5-minute version of the system-design question just for
| fun), I'd be curious to shard by a hash of the post ID, or
| something like that. The trick is always to have a hashing
| algorithm that's stable when it's time to _grow_ the number
| of shards (otherwise you 're kicking off a whole re-
| balancing every time), and of course I'm too lazy to sort
| that out in this comment. I vaguely remember the Instagram
| team had a really cool sharding approach that they blogged
| about in this vein. (This would've been pre-acquisition, so
| ancient history by Silicon Valley standards.)
|
| As for subreddit metadata (public, private, whatever), I'd
| really expect all of that to be in a global cache at this
| point. It's read-often/write-rarely data, and close-to-
| realtime cache-invalidation when it _does_ change is a
| straightforward and solved problem.
| adra wrote:
| For really really large sets, you'll still eventually
| want to reduce read compute costs by limiting specific
| tenants to specific shards in order to reduce request fan
| out for every single read request. If say I get a super
| quiet forum, would it make sense to query 2 shards or
| 6000? Clearly there's a loss of performance when all read
| requests have infinite fan out.
| dbanon9 wrote:
| A good, but wrong, assumption is to assume Reddit's
| engineers know what they're doing.
|
| The founding Reddit team was non-technical (Even Spez.
| I've been to UVA; it's not an engineering school; and
| spez had never done any real engineering before coming
| onto Reddit). They ran a skeleton crew of some 10ish
| people for a long time (none from any exceptional
| backgrounds. One of them was from Sun & Oracle, after
| their prime).
|
| Same group that started with a node front-end, python
| back-end monolith, with a document-oriented database
| structure (i.e., they had two un-normalized tables in
| Postgres to hold everything). Later they switched to
| Cassandra and kept that monstrosity -- partly, because
| back then no one knew anything about databases except
| sysadmins.
|
| Back then they were running a cache for listing
| retrieval. Every "reddit" (subreddit and the various
| pages, like front-page, hot, top, controversial, etc.)
| listing is kept in a memcache. Inside, you have your
| "top-level" listing information (title, link, comments,
| id, etc.). The asinine thing is that cache invalidation
| has always been a problem. They originally handled it
| using RabbitMQ queues: votes come in, they're processed,
| and then the cache is updated. Those things always got
| backed up, because no one thought about batching updates
| on a timer (or how to use lock-free) (and no one knew how
| to do vertical scaling, and when they tried, it made
| things even harder to reason about). You know what genius
| plan they had next to solve this? Make more queues. Fix
| throughput issues by making more queues, instead of
| fixing the root cause of the back-pressure. Later, they
| did "shard"/partition things more cleanly (and tried
| lock-free) -- but they never did any real research into
| fixing the aforementioned problem (how to handle millions
| of simple "events" a day... which is laughable thinking
| back to it now).
|
| That's just for listings. The comment trees are another
| big bad piece. Again, stored un-normalized -- but this
| time actually batched (not properly, but it is a step
| up). One great thing about un-normalized databases and
| trees, is that there are no constraints on vertices. So a
| common issue was that you could back-up your queue
| (again) for computing the comment trees (because they
| would never get processed properly) (and you could slow
| the entire site to a crawl because your message broker
| was wasting its time on erroneous messages).
|
| Later, they had the bright idea to move from a data
| center to AWS -- break everything up into microservices.
| Autoscaling there has always been bungled.
|
| There was no strong tech talent, and no strong
| engineering culture -- ever.
|
| -------
|
| My 2 cents: it's the listing caches. The architecture
| around it was never designed to handle checking so many
| "isHidden" subreddits (despite that they're still getting
| updates to their internal listings) -- and it's coming
| undone.
| sleight42 wrote:
| Having worked at this scale, this is a fine guess! This
| scenario would have been a distant edge case for them. They
| likely didn't optimize for it. BOOM.
| raldi wrote:
| It could also be that the cache-hit rate is like 1/10th
| normal with the would-be front page full of smaller
| subreddits today.
| burnte wrote:
| My personal guess is it's down on purpose so they can say
| only 5% of subs who said they would go dark actually did, we
| just happened to have a service outage that day so they can
| push their own narrative t investors. Spez doesn't care
| anymore, he's focused on that IPO payday and to tell with
| everyone else. He's a liability to the company now, but the
| board isn't acting.
| cyral wrote:
| Here's a site which tracks how many subs have been made
| private. It's actually crazy that it's up to 93% of them
| now: https://reddark.untone.uk/
| growt wrote:
| It's funny that /r/therewasanattempt and
| /r/whatcouldgowrong are on that list but still public (or
| public again?)
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| /r/amitheasshole staying public is funny too
| vitorgrs wrote:
| Subs that are supposed to go down. This don't list all
| sub. A own a small sub that is not there, for example.
| mlyle wrote:
| And most of the ones that "haven't" have restricted
| submissions... e.g. no new posts.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| I've tried a few listed as public that are actually
| private. reddit is darker than the report (as they
| mention)
| [deleted]
| thesh4d0w wrote:
| The site is decieving, it's 93% of the ones that
| committed to going dark. It's not 93% of all subreddits.
|
| If you search for r/news for example, it's nowhere on
| that page.
| lillesvin wrote:
| I would imagine that a normal visit generates more backend
| traffic, given that it needs to fetch posts, thumbnails, etc.
| whereas a visit to a private sub wouldn't need to check more
| than authorization.
|
| I could easily be wrong though, I haven't done web
| development for years.
| mfer wrote:
| They use a microservice architecture. Some services could
| scale well in servicing all those assets. What handles
| checking access to private subs may not.
|
| You can't treat the scaling as a binary feature, that it
| does or doesn't
| bamfly wrote:
| All that other stuff's easy to cache. Authorization's
| cacheable, too, kinda, with some trade-offs, but they may
| not have bothered if it'd never been a problem before. Or
| this _particular_ check my have been bypassing that
| caching, and it 'd never cause a problem before because
| there weren't that many of those checks happening.
|
| You start getting a lot more DB queries than usual,
| bypassing cache, the DB's remote, it's clustered or
| whatever, now you've got a ton more internal network
| traffic and open sockets, latency goes up, resources start
| to get exhausted...
| jallen_dot_dev wrote:
| Sure, but that type of traffic is expected and they can
| handle it with things like caching and autoscaling. I'm
| suggesting that a part of the system that usually doesn't
| get a lot of requests wasn't designed to handle a huge
| influx of requests.
| paulmd wrote:
| Yup, this seems super plausible. Even things like the
| frontpage feed and user comment history probably work on the
| assumption that most of the data they're pulling is probably
| visible (which leads to the "just filter it in the backend"
| approach), but also every external link or bookmark into a
| now-private sub will trigger the same kind of check.
|
| This is likely shifting load in very unpredictable ways...
| I'm sure a sibling comment is right that it's probably less
| load overall in general, but it'll be going down codepaths
| that aren't normally being exercised by >95% of requests and
| aren't working on the assumption that _virtually all content_
| is being hidden.
|
| There's probably some microservice instances that are
| currently melting themselves into a puddle until they can
| deploy additional instances, additional DB shards, or roll
| out patches to fix dumb shit that wasn't dumb until the usage
| assumptions were suddenly inverted. Meanwhile there's tons of
| other instances that are probably sitting idle.
| HeavyStorm wrote:
| Came here just to say this.
|
| Speculation, but having major subs private change the load
| profile which may result in the outage. Reddit certainly
| wasn't optimized for this.
| award_ wrote:
| Yep, this is definitely just speculation, but I think this is
| it. Code/queries that worked fine at small load for private
| subs just doesn't work at scale when tons of subs are
| private.
| CodeCompost wrote:
| Isn't the source code of Reddit on GitHub? At least it used
| to be...
| geekthattweaks wrote:
| They have two older versions up but nothing recent.
| core-utility wrote:
| Wouldn't want the recent stuff anyways (except to
| pontificate)
| FractalParadigm wrote:
| They stopped updating/supporting the code about 6 months
| before the big redesign (last push Oct '17, redesign
| launched Apr '18). Call me a bit of a conspiracy-
| theorist, but they just happened to raise $200 million on
| their Series C less than 3 months prior to abandoning
| their commitment to open-source.
| munk-a wrote:
| Personally I'd like to believe that the servers themselves
| are standing in solidarity with the blackout over the API
| changes. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
| ben7799 wrote:
| Wild. Probably 50% of the subs I subscribed to are gone, and
| some of the others have deleted all the content and locked
| posting to the sub.
|
| Others look like they got the hostile takeover and a new mod.
| lsaferite wrote:
| Could you point out some that appear to have had a hostile
| takeover? I'd love to check it out.
| paxys wrote:
| Pointless speculation. Reddit has constant outages of this
| exact nature almost weekly. There's nothing special about this
| one.
| ljm wrote:
| 80% of requests to Reddit via their web UI are basically 500s
| or CDN errors.
|
| Hyperbolic I know, but that's what it _feels_ like.
| nprateem wrote:
| I've been a long-time user of Reddit (I still remember when
| WSB had only 12m users) and I can't remember an outage.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Reddit definitely doesn't have outages like this almost
| weekly. Maybe ten+ years ago, but it's rare now.
| flutas wrote:
| Reddit 100% has stated that it was because of the sub
| blackout.
|
| > According to Reddit, the blackout is responsible for the
| problems. "A significant number of subreddits shifting to
| private caused some expected stability issues, and we've been
| working on resolving the anticipated issue," spokesperson Tim
| Rathschmidt tells The Verge.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/12/23758002/reddit-
| crashing-...
| ilyt wrote:
| Them "anticipating" "expected" issues with... people
| visiting reddit less sounds a bit weird...
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Making a ton of subs private does a lot more than change
| view counts.
| jonathantf2 wrote:
| Does it? I usually use Reddit on my lunch about this time
| every day and I can't remember the last time it was down.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Presumably you are using old.reddit.com
| riffic wrote:
| outages are incredibly common everywhere
| philote wrote:
| I run into issues on occasion, usually with loading
| comments. I use the web interface.
|
| Interestingly, HN is being really slow for me right now and
| also gave an error when I first loaded it. Maybe something
| more global is going on, like network or cdn issues?
| ktm5j wrote:
| Me too on the HN issues. East Coast US here
| gonzo41 wrote:
| I'm also seeing HN being sluggish. But I have crap
| Australian internet so YMMV.
| piva00 wrote:
| It is sluggish and throwing some errors. I have a 1Gbps
| internet connection via fibre in Sweden, so definitely
| it's not an issue with your connection.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I have a gigabit internet, am in Eastern Europe, most US
| services have 40ms or so latency -- pretty strong link.
|
| I had to reload this page 5 page until I was allowed to
| post a reply. Something is definitely going on.
| pyeri wrote:
| But this time it's different because most high traffic subs
| have already gone dark, so the traffic must be minimal as
| there will be very few posters relative to what the server
| can handle. And yet, I'm getting "You broke reddit" when I
| try to visit which is quite ironical.
| rozap wrote:
| Maybe it's expensive to generate the 403 for a private
| subreddit.
|
| A place I once worked had a 404 handler that was extremely
| expensive, but nobody noticed for a while because 404s are
| relatively rare. One time a vulnerability scanner took down
| the site because it was just hitting known vulnerability
| paths which all 404'd. The code that executed during a 404
| was n^2.
| rspoerri wrote:
| As long as n=1 it's no problem :-)
| rozap wrote:
| That's exactly why the problem didn't reveal itself for a
| while :)
| treis wrote:
| Probably a massive shift of traffic to still open subs.
| That'd probably take it down due to caches suddenly having
| all the wrong data. No inside info, though.
|
| HN seems to be groaning under the load too and might go
| down with Reddit.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Reddit definitely doesn't have outages like this almost
| weekly. Maybe 10+ years ago, but it's rare now.
| atchoo wrote:
| It's often not working for me in the UK e.g. "You've broken
| reddit" and "Can't reach CDN".
|
| Maybe it is a regional thing?
| Merad wrote:
| Eastern US here. I will get those errors a few times a
| week but I'd say 80% of the time it works on a refresh
| and most of the rest of the time it's back within 30s.
| vitorgrs wrote:
| I use Reddit daily and I get the outages pretty frequently
| (twice a month?)... From Brazil.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| I see outages browsing Reddit almost daily - either the
| "can't reach cdn" error or the generic "you broke it"
| error.
|
| I always just assume the uptimes absolute dogshit.
| jeremy_k wrote:
| Not true at all in regards to 10+ years ago. Once at week,
| if not more, Reddit fails to load for me. I refresh the
| page and it appears I've been logged out. Continue
| refreshing the page until my session is revived and things
| are back to normal. I'll often open a post and the header
| will load but Reddit will fail to load the comments with a
| click to retry loading comments.
| cleandreams wrote:
| This has literally never happened to me. I started using
| it almost daily 3 years ago.
| nullityrofl wrote:
| You can't be using Reddit very often if you think these are
| a relic from 10+ years ago. I would say I experience a
| Reddit outage at least weekly. My friends and I have a
| running joke about how often it's down.
|
| The official Reddit Status Twitter account proves that it
| happens very, very regularly:
| https://twitter.com/redditstatus
| 29083011397778 wrote:
| To be clear: You mean you have timeouts and failures
| using Reddit's own "new and improved" web UI and mobile
| client? Because using RedReader, old.reddit.com, and
| other third-party apps, I don't actually recall the last
| time Reddit _didn 't_ load for me.
| nullityrofl wrote:
| No, I only ever use old.reddit and BaconReader. I've
| never used the new UI or the official app.
|
| The official Reddit Status Twitter confirms this is a
| pretty common occurrence:
| https://twitter.com/redditstatus
|
| The "elevated error rates" always presents as an "oops,
| you broke reddit!" landing even on old.reddit. I imagine
| since it is an "elevated error rate" rather than a total
| outage that it might be localized to geo or some other
| kind of shard. I'm on the US West Coast, though, so I
| can't imagine I'm in a minority.
|
| (Which is confirmed by the number of people responding to
| GP.)
| nullfield wrote:
| Well, BaconReader is likely dead at the end of the month
| with their API changes (along with Apollo, Sync, Reddit
| Is Fun, etc.)
| activiation wrote:
| Probably DDoS more likely today
| b3orn wrote:
| Did they DDoS themselves trying to fake numbers to show
| that the blackout has no effect on daily active user
| counts?
| activiation wrote:
| That would be funny
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| No, it doesn't
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I can't imagine it either, though it wouldn't be outside the
| realm of some of the stupidity that has gone on. But it would
| almost certainly be the death knell for the site - those
| subreddits who didn't "go dark" now would.
| nicce wrote:
| An alternative conspiracy theory: put Reddit down for two days
| to hide the existence of the protests from major users.
|
| E.g. many Google searches lead into private communities now.
| Word is spreading.
| rangledangle wrote:
| This is my guess. Looks better on the record, since people
| are committing only 48 hours anyways (for whatever reason,
| should be permanent).
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| "You can't take us down! We'll take _ourselves_ down, so
| there."
| bombcar wrote:
| If people see the dead reddit dude they just assume it
| broke and come back later.
|
| If they see a "this sub is private because reddit is dumb
| and also evil" they may come back later, they may not.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Honestly, looks as reasonable as anything else about this
| thing.
| seanalltogether wrote:
| having all these subs go private is probably slowing down the
| business logic for generating everyone's front page.
| mnsh wrote:
| HN is feeling janky too, not sure if it's related to this.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| HN is acting slow in responsiveness too, DDoS?
| taneq wrote:
| Where else do you think the wave of reddit users will crash?
| Slashdot? Some federated assemblage like Mastodon or Lemmy? An
| indie clone trying to be to reddit what reddit was to digg? I'm
| guessing all of the above.
| FPL_Truth wrote:
| The "federated" alternatives are such crap. It's so user-
| unfriendly and confusing, there is no way a normal person
| would be able to enjoy browsing crap like lemmy/kbin.
| internetter wrote:
| > It's so user-unfriendly and confusing
|
| This viewpoint is confusing to me. Conceptually, it's no
| different than email, and we all get by just fine on it
| mingus88 wrote:
| That's a plus for me. I'm nostalgic as hell for the era of
| the internet where the barrier to entry meant your peers
| needed half a clue to be there.
|
| If the collapse of sites like reddit and twitter are what
| is needed for a return to smaller user-operated and user-
| owned sites to flourish, then so be it. I won't miss the
| memes.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Glad it's not just me. I usually use this site as a test to see
| if my connection is good.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| You know there are websites made for that purpose like
| speedtest.net, right?
| tester457 wrote:
| But those don't come with complimentary dopamine upon
| success.
| tivert wrote:
| Ironically, old.reddit.com appears to be (partially) working
| right now:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/142l1i0/archiv...
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/142l1i0/archiv...
| EthicalSimilar wrote:
| > Our CDN was unable to reach our servers
|
| Not for me.
| cocoa19 wrote:
| Not for me, I get a "you broke reddit" message.
| EMCymatics wrote:
| news.ycombinator is also very slow
| memetomancer wrote:
| So... I visited Reddit before coming here and finding the HN
| thread...
|
| Most of the site is rebelling, but I took the time to visit,
| intending to give them impressions, just to see how they are
| holding up. And of course they aren't really holding up as we can
| see.
|
| But their handling is unbelievably tone deaf - I was greeted by
| the message that _I_ broke Reddit. They gave me the grade of
| 'F'. I refreshed the page and they showed me a cartoon corpse.
|
| I get that it's a tongue-in-cheek leftover from happier times,
| but considering the circumstances it sure came off as hostility
| aimed at the few people willing to give them a chance on this
| dark day.
|
| I mean, I was really just rubbernecking... so maybe i deserved it
| for my schadenfreude, but still. It is casual hostility directed
| at the source of their user generated content. It's not in good
| taste. But I suspect it would never occur to the entitled mindset
| of their leadership.
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| > I was really just rubbernecking
|
| I was thinking that because today is the first day of the
| protests, which have garnered a lot of attention by media and
| individuals, that traffic might actually spike because everyone
| is checking in to see how it's going.
| TX81Z wrote:
| "Checking in to see it going down" is the sole reason for my
| once monthly sign in to Twitter.
| bbbobbb wrote:
| Those error pages are actually infuriating. Maybe I'm just
| getting older but seeing "You broke reddit" and all the other
| shit annoys the hell out of me. It's their website, the error
| should be "we fucked sometning up, sorry" and be done with it.
| SilasX wrote:
| Similarly, the self-important prima donnas of Mozilla who
| think the fate of the universe depends on forcing their
| shitty "zarro boogs found" in-joke on the general population
| -- or rather, the subset of users who are only there because
| they're already frustrated by a bug ... that they now can't
| find an existing ticket for.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Looks like this is from 2008, so they just never updated it.
| https://github.com/reddit-
| archive/reddit/commit/4778b17e939e...
| znagengast wrote:
| The page has changed over the years, there used to be a
| much more apologetic version "Reddit broke (sorry)"
| https://github.com/reddit-
| archive/reddit/commit/4778b17e939e...
|
| So they actually made the intentional decision to change it
| back to the much more accusatory "you broke it", I'm not
| sure exactly when that occurred but I suspect it was
| roughly the time spez took over.
| stinos wrote:
| _seeing "You broke reddit" and all the other shit annoys the
| hell out of me._
|
| Could be getting older indeed, but his one, and "guru
| meditation error", almost make me act like younger me again
| feeling a sudden urge to smash my monitor into pieces
| ryanstorm wrote:
| Imagine being a non-tech savvy user or someone who
| understands the world more literally than figuratively. That
| sort of message could be pretty confusing for them.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Windows 95. "This program has performed an illegal
| operation and must be shut down"
|
| "WTF AM I GOING TO JAIL?"
| cjs_ac wrote:
| This was my grandmother's reaction. She turned the
| computer off, closed the curtains, turned the lights off,
| and waited for the police to show up.
|
| She also used to cheat at jigsaw puzzles by gnawing at
| the pieces so they would fit.
| paulddraper wrote:
| That was an unexpected turn.
| jerjerjer wrote:
| Users can't read error messages anyway.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| It depends on the type of user, even among the non-tech
| savvy.
|
| A message as simple as "Sorry, reddit is receiving too
| much traffic right now and can't handle your request. Try
| loading this page later.", 99% of people will understand.
|
| But there's that 1% of people that aren't just non-savvy,
| they're _willfully_ non-savvy to the point where words
| stop having meaning to them just because they 're
| referring to something related to a computer. The type
| where if you ask them something as simple as "Is the
| computer turned on?", they say they don't know.
| Meanwhile, the screen is showing their desktop.
| capableweb wrote:
| I don't think showing "you broke reddit" for a 5xx
| request counts as an error message. If it was a 4xx,
| maybe.
| flutas wrote:
| I agree, I really long for the days of simple "there was an
| error" messages. This trend of "you bwoke us" or "OOPSIE
| WOOPSIE!! Uwu We made a fucky wucky!! A wittle fucko boingo!
| The code monkeys at our headquarters are working VEWY HAWD to
| fix this!" messages is infuriating to me even more than a
| simple error.
| TheNewsIsHere wrote:
| I intentionally write boring, plain English, mostly
| painfully bland error messages for this exact reason.
|
| I long for the intellectual honestly and emotional
| sturdiness of "Error 123 in Handler XYZ. You should never
| see this."
| codetrotter wrote:
| Reddit error pages are not following any kind of trend.
| They've been like that since for ever. No reason to get
| upset.
| boneitis wrote:
| Following the trend, trend setting, been like that since
| for ever, or something else: name it what you will.
| Whatever it is, I'd certainly call out the presence of a
| (less than welcome, imo) trend.
| hanspeter wrote:
| If Reddit didn't follow this trend, they created it.
|
| The tongue in cheek communication and cute illustrations
| on error pages started with web 2.0 and is now so
| prevalent that a regular system error message is a
| refreshing experience.
| Vrondi wrote:
| Those are the usual standard Reddit down error pages, though.
| Nothing unique to this outage or today. They've had those for
| years.
| bbor wrote:
| > I get that it's a tongue-in-cheek leftover from happier
| times
| rchaud wrote:
| This is the kind of thing you don't have to worry about with
| 3rd party apps. Old Reddit was the best dumb pipe ever, I'll
| miss it.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Reddit being gone for a while actually makes me feel like the
| world is a better place.
|
| Somehow knowing even for a brief moment no one is there and I'm
| not missing out on anything makes me feel... more alive and
| excited to interact with the world. sounds bizarre I know... but
| I wish more social media shut down now.
| efdee wrote:
| And yet, here you are, posting about it.
| Croftengea wrote:
| Reddit is still a vast archive of valuable advice on many
| topics. I developed a habit of adding "reddit" to my search
| requests whenever I want to get unbiased user opinions or
| product recommendations.
|
| For me, today is not only the day when the most of reddit is
| down but also web search experience is significantly degraded.
| somuchjob wrote:
| I do the opposite. Finding reddit links in a search result
| page just lets me know I'm in for a world of disappointment
| in modal pop-ups (on mobile), modal blockers to see the full
| comment thread, and then unhelpful/missing/flippant and
| generally unhelpful comments at the end of all that anyway.
|
| Especially when I search for vehicle/mechanic advice the old
| school forums just can't be beat for their value, even though
| many are ghost ships with no active users anymore.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| On mobile, yeah, it's awful. They have absolutely destroyed
| the mobile experience, especially if you're not logged in.
| And why would I be logged into reddit on my phone's
| browser, when I use BaconReader to read reddit?
|
| On desktop though, it's an entirely different experience.
| I'm always redirected to the old layout, so I don't have
| the stupid anti-user shenanigans.
| dtjb wrote:
| social search vs. reference search
| greenie_beans wrote:
| i do the opposite. legitimately, "site:reddit.com <search
| query>" is like step 2 or 3 for me when looking for leads
| on information or product suggestions, product reviews,
| travel ideas, hidden gems, places to fish, etc. if you know
| how to cut through all the noise then it's a gold mine --
| you can find information just about anything. even just
| finding basic terminology about a thing then you can
| research the word.
|
| as for the modals, just visit the reddit thread by
| prepending `old.` to the url. like `old.reddit.com` and
| then you can see everything without all that annoying
| stuff. also sign up for a reddit account but based on your
| comment doesn't sound like you'd be open to that.
| rvba wrote:
| The problem is that now 'everyone' knows the reddit trick and
| marketers sit there all day writing sponsored posts +
| upvoting them with bots / bought accounts.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| I do the same. With that said something will come along. As
| is the case with these things once the "new standard" becomes
| the "standard" it becomes astroturfed with fake reviews and
| manipulation. Reddit is a bit less trustworthy on this front
| than it used to be.. i suspect at least.
|
| I wouldn't mind some fresh blood even for this purpose.
| lawkwok wrote:
| I hope it humbles whoever builds the next platform. Nothing
| lasts forever no matter how entrenched it is in the
| zeitgeist.
|
| Once something gets big enough, it becomes impossible to
| moderate and eventually it will fall out of fashion and
| lose its original intent. Look at Etsy and Amazon.
|
| I'm finding people are rearely loyal customers to a brand
| long-term. Rather, they want whatever platform gets them
| what they want. People jump from sites like Aliexpress to
| Wish to Shein to whichever webiste has the most latest and
| marketing team.
| accrual wrote:
| It would be great if Reddit served static pages of old topics
| separately from the main site. Topics more than a few years old
| are unlikely to change in any substantial way, so why not have
| them conveniently available as a static page easily viewable
| and parsable for future purposes.
| [deleted]
| tenpies wrote:
| [flagged]
| kibwen wrote:
| I propose shutting down all social media on Wednesdays,
| indefinitely.
|
| (Sure, this idea is taken from Ready Player One, but that
| doesn't mean it's a bad idea!)
| godshatter wrote:
| In the world of Ready Player One, it was a terrible idea
| because most of the economic activity of that world passes
| through their servers. Stopping most economic transactions
| one day a week is maybe a little bit much.
|
| Here, it's a much better idea.
| gl-prod wrote:
| It should be the law, 2 days without social media.
| blurri wrote:
| I think these takes are just silly. Humans being gone would
| make the world a better place. Getting rid of social media, the
| internet etc doesn't make all the bad humans suddenly go away.
| taneq wrote:
| You might say they're experiencing an outrage.
| Freaky wrote:
| block out quick on egress from any to <reddit>
|
| It's for your own good.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Pure speculation on my part, but I bet they're getting hugged.
| Just a good ol' fashion "traffic pattern has changed and now
| you're being hugged to death," at a scale not even Reddit can
| rapidly address.
|
| My guess is it's caused by (but indirectly) the Reddit Strike.
| Here's the thing: because Reddit doesn't require you to be logged
| in to see posts in most subreddits (especially the most popular
| ones), having those subs go private has caused a bunch of poorly-
| maintained automated infrastructure to hit its barely-tested
| retry/fallback code. How many repeater / archiver bots for
| subreddits are out there? Who knows. So now a bunch of bespoke,
| heterogeneous bots are saying "Oh, I got a nonstandard response
| from that page... Probably a transient issue, I'll try again in
| 30 seconds with no backoff. And of course, I'm faking my
| thumbprint to just look like a regular Chrome instance so I don't
| trip the bog-standard bot detection that'd stop me from doing
| what my creator wants me to do."
|
| So I bet Reddit admins woke up today to a firestorm of
| continuously-failed-retried queries and they're having to figure
| out how to separate wheat from chaff in realtime.
|
| A related, but different, potential explanation: Reddit never had
| to test at scale the performance of bouncing users from private
| subreddits and it turns out that query is _itself_ expensive for
| some reason that didn 't come up in small-scale testing, so now
| Reddit's own infrastructure is setting itself aflame as the world
| is waking up, pinging the most popular subreddits, and triggering
| a near-query-of-death every time they do it.
| rockbruno wrote:
| HN is also really slow, this could be a wider-spread backend
| issue like when that one CDN took down half of the internet with
| it.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Unless HN is equally slow while logged out that's just HN being
| "really slow"
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| HN is fairly snappy if you're logged out. Opening this thread
| in a private browsing mode showed content immediately.
| albert_e wrote:
| yes I too noticed HN has become really slow in last 10-15
| minutes
| ilyt wrote:
| It seems to coincide with /r/programming getting set to private
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Saw a surge on https://bitecode.dev as well and it's just a
| small blog so people must really get bored.
|
| Twitter doesn't seem affected though.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Yeah HN is taking ~5 seconds to load anything, and weirdly
| sometimes it shows that it's waiting on Algolia, even when I'm
| loading regular HN pages (not searching).
| noodlenotes wrote:
| I'm having issues on every website I've tried. Spotify songs
| not downloading, Twitter images not loading, Google and CNN
| taking a few minutes to load.
| bluedino wrote:
| Would love more detailed information on the actual issues and
| fixes (if any) from the HN admins if they want to share.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| The Lemmy instance I'm on has also slowed to a crawl.
| laurent123456 wrote:
| Many websites are having performance issues -
| https://downdetector.com
|
| It's as if Reddit had been taking the pressure off the rest
| of the internet all this time, and now that there's a
| blackout people actually starts working and visiting other
| websites
| redsaber wrote:
| that would be funny, the traffic normally contain on Reddit
| will be redirect to other websites causing a chain of
| traffic issues to both Reddit and other websites
| sapiogram wrote:
| HN tends to slow to a crawl every time Reddit is offline,
| because Redditors come here instead.
| 13of40 wrote:
| Conspiracy theory: Hacker news is actually just a thin layer
| of code with a subreddit as its back end.
| djbusby wrote:
| This is known to be false.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| Not anymore with the new increased API costs soon! /s
| intj wrote:
| Subreddit no, but do you ever check IPs of the websites you
| visit to see if they are hosted by Azure, AWS or some other
| CDN? I know I don't.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| Truly unfortunate, perhaps there's value to be had with
| Reddit after all
| gyanreyer wrote:
| I was just looking at the documentation site for VSCode
| extensions and it was absolutely C R A W L I N G. As much as I
| love to clown on VSCode being slow, it definitely feels like
| I'm starting to see a pattern of degraded performance for a lot
| of sites.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Or all the ppl missing Reddit are on HN to fill the need.
| elegylegacy wrote:
| That's literally why I'm here right now.
|
| I usually browse Reddit with my morning coffee, this has been
| a pleasant alternative
| moffkalast wrote:
| It seems pleasant at first, then you realize that 90% of
| comments on every post are cynical negativity and I'm not
| entirely sure if spending much time around here is a good
| thing because it'm starting to absorb it.
| esperent wrote:
| Yes, HN is a very cynical and negative place, and it's
| interesting how quickly I stop noticing that if I visit a
| few days in a row. But if I don't visit for a week and
| then come back, it's starkly obvious.
|
| It's also not exclusively negative and cynical, of
| course, and there are some great insights to be found
| here. I think you're being unfair with 90%. Maybe more
| like 70%?
| yannyu wrote:
| Is there any tech-oriented forum that isn't largely
| cynical and negative?
|
| Is there any social media that isn't largely cynical and
| negative?
|
| I also notice how my mindset changes when I don't visit,
| which really just makes me think I should stop engaging
| in 90% of online discourse and discussion.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Feels like reddit is at least has a larger percentage of
| memes and shitposting so there's less overall negativity,
| but there's also less substance.
| avgDev wrote:
| Idk once you experience enough world, it is quite hard
| not be cynical. I guess I fit right in.
| garciasn wrote:
| I deleted Apollo and the official Reddit app (which I used
| to post posts) and I'm done. I had been a user for ~12
| years and had 150K+ comment karma.
|
| They fucked up and now I'll spend more time on here and /.,
| is my guess. Unless there are other strong dork communities
| I should be looking into.
|
| Edit: Ask HN thread showed up on my last question:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36293789
| takeda wrote:
| There's also tildes.net (like early Reddit set up as non
| profit, invite only, but not hard to get an invite) and
| also open source distributed https://join-lemmy.org/
| EamonnMR wrote:
| When you say "not hard to get an invite" what do you
| mean?
| takeda wrote:
| There's an e-mail on the website to request an invite
| (it's in contacts). This is what I did and got invite
| next day.
|
| They also regularly open the invite threads here:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/tildes/
|
| Also people who have been there for a while (not me) can
| invite their friends.
| pizzalife wrote:
| 16 year club here.. same. I came to reddit from the digg
| DVD exodus. Time to drop this habit.
| norrland4ever wrote:
| What is /. ?
| devilcius wrote:
| slashdot.org
| happyhaller27 wrote:
| Slashdot
| katbyte wrote:
| slashdot. it was (i think) the first news aggregator
| everyone used, then digg, then reddit.
| omniglottal wrote:
| slashdot.org
| lost_padawan wrote:
| Slashdot
| gkbrk wrote:
| Slashdot
| ojizero wrote:
| I believe he means Slashdot (https://slashdot.org).
| proamdev123 wrote:
| Slashdot
| evandale wrote:
| Slashdot
| comprev wrote:
| As others have said, it's Slashdot - which got it's name
| from trying to spell out the web address over the phone.
| Silly and confusing...
|
| h..t..t..p..colon..slash..slash..slashdot..dot..org
|
| When you see "Hacker News Hug" on here (recently due to
| Cloudflare's issues) or Reddit's "Hug of Death", the
| original was "Slashdotted", when tech people hosted
| personal sites on their _own_ home DSL (even Dial-up via
| Dynamic DNS!) connections. These asynchronous connections
| had terrible upload speed by design.
|
| If their webpage hit the front news of Slashdot, their
| upload bandwidth very quickly ran out due to the torrent
| of traffic!
| nkohari wrote:
| Isn't Slashdot a reference to the current directory in
| Linux?
| pr0zac wrote:
| I feel like no, trying it out (though on my Mac using zsh
| and not a 25 year old Linux box) the slash being first
| makes it reference the root directory.
| comprev wrote:
| yes, the correct syntax would be: ./ not /.
| Sai_ wrote:
| Dot is the current directory.
|
| With ~, ~/. could mean your home directory if your shell
| recognises ~ as $HOME.
|
| Don't think /. aka slashdot has any intrinsic meaning in
| Linux.
| comprev wrote:
| It could be but the version I remembered was trying to
| tell someone the website over the phone.
|
| Perhaps someone on HN has a more reliable source than my
| brain?
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| How do you create the name for a website by trying to
| tell someone how to get to it over the phone? Doesn't the
| DNS entry have to exist first?
| comprev wrote:
| "Hey check out this website I discovered - it's called
| Slashdot" "It's called what!?" "Slashdot" "How do you
| spell that?" "http://slashdot.org" "Hang on, what? How
| many slashes and dots?"
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| So the conversation of what might happen occurred before
| the site was created?
| comprev wrote:
| See the FAQ for an official answer -
| https://slashdot.org/faq
|
| I probably got the telephone part mixed up but was right
| about being confusing to read aloud.
|
| Can't get a better source that /. itself!
| TX81Z wrote:
| I didn't give you permission to make me feel this old
| this early in the week.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > These asynchronous connections had terrible upload
| speed by design.
|
| As opposed to today, where connects have terrible uploads
| speed because ISPs don't want you to host servers.
|
| I've heard of people getting gigabit down, but only 16
| mbps up.
| ilyt wrote:
| Not really. For example cable internet (and ADSL) goes
| thru cable (shocking knowledge, I know). Cable have
| limited bandwidth, and as it is just a single cable, not
| RX/TX pair as it is for ethernet and it has limited
| bandwidth
|
| Which essentially means you have X bandwidth to
| distribute between upstream and downstream. And it's far
| more profitable to sell X 40/10 Mbit connections vs
| selling a bunch of 25/25 Mbit ones, where most people
| there won't be using upload all that much.
| rimunroe wrote:
| My brother writes xkcd. In 2006 I was living at home
| while attending community college. At the time, his site
| was still hosted on the old HP desktop that used to sit
| in our family room and now sat in his old bedroom. One
| day I was playing in an unofficial Counter-Strike
| tournament when one of his comics (possibly "Pi
| Equals"[1]) got posted to either Slashdot or Boing Boing.
| My ping immediately went from probably ~25 ms to over
| 300, and then I timed out completely. I think it took us
| a couple hours to get our connection back, which I assume
| involved getting a new IP address.
|
| Sadly, I didn't win the tournament.
|
| [1] https://xkcd.com/10/
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > My brother writes xkcd.
|
| Username checks out.
| lamontcg wrote:
| The best posts are sometimes found in the comments
| tezgon wrote:
| This strip had a profound effect on my life after I read
| it for the first time. To this day it still means a lot
| to me. Thank you for sharing your story and to your
| brother for sharing his art.
|
| https://xkcd.com/154/
| comprev wrote:
| Please thank your brother! Some of his work has genuinely
| turned shit days into a positive ones over the years.
| absoflutely wrote:
| Slashdot
| jlokier wrote:
| Slashdot, one of the oldest big tech/nerdy news and
| comment web forums (like HN) on the net. In many ways it
| pioneered voting and moderation systems we see today.
| https://slashdot.org/
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot
| [deleted]
| UltimateEdge wrote:
| slashdot.org
| evandale wrote:
| Slashdot
|
| https://slashdot.org
|
| I've started looking at that and arstechnica for my tech
| news replacements.
| slashtab wrote:
| slashdot
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| Slashdot.
| mplanchard wrote:
| slashdot.org
| MivLives wrote:
| Slash dot, an older tech site news that was popular pre
| digg/reddit
| deadcat wrote:
| Slashdot website, which was once a massive tech
| discussion site.
| M3GZ wrote:
| Slashdot, I assume
| terrytwillstein wrote:
| Slashdot.
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| Slashdot, if I had to guess
| mjhagen wrote:
| This hurts.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Yeah, I had a 4 digit user id. Getting old is weird.
| garciasn wrote:
| Same. Although having a 4-digit ID even 20+ years ago was
| something of an oddity based on my interactions with
| local Slashdot meetups at the time.
| darknavi wrote:
| https://slashdot.org/
| anthlax wrote:
| Slash dot
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| Literally "slash dot".
|
| https://www.slashdot.org/
| trostaft wrote:
| Did the same, but I took a step further and deleted my
| account. I had been using the site for over a decade, I
| knew that if I didn't cut off the path behind me I'd be
| tempted to linger.
|
| I'll miss my local and hobby subreddits. I hope I find
| something to replace them.
| iak8god wrote:
| I'm boycotting reddit this week, and I will never use
| their app, but I just don't know where else to go for
| communities related to niche non-tech interests, and
| state & local stuff. I guess Facebook groups, but FB is
| practically unusable these days.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| Just a few weeks ago I went through the exercise of
| closing my FB account because I was getting all of my
| local NYC discussion from subreddits, instead. Poor
| timing I guess.
|
| If reddit bungles this whole thing, the loss of /r/asknyc
| will be truly tragic. Such a great way to crowdsource
| local recommendations without the extra veneer of tourist
| feedback on top.
| rmahadev wrote:
| [flagged]
| lawkwok wrote:
| It will be very sad. It's been a pleasant era for Reddit-
| fu.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| lobste.rs
| rthomas6 wrote:
| I would like to participate there, but it is invite only,
| last I checked.
| ruined wrote:
| hop on the irc and say hello, you'll get an invite.
| xattt wrote:
| Eternal June for HN begins...
| rthomas6 wrote:
| Nah, floods of new users have come before. The lack of
| images, politics, and drama, combined with the "boring"
| design drives the undesirables away, leaving behind
| people who like talking about tech and other interests.
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| Politics is very much on HN. It's a part of the same
| filter bubble as the rest of big tech:
| https://i.imgur.com/taGzsZP.jpg
|
| It's thinly veiled behind more passive aggressively
| written prose than reddit, but it's here. No images, I'll
| grant, but as someone mistaken for conservative by
| liberals and liberal by conservatives I can assure you
| it's very much political.
| avgDev wrote:
| HN will always retain some of the new comers. I was first
| reddit user then HN.
|
| HN instantly brought me "old" internet nostalgia. Geeks
| just talking about things in a mostly open minded way.
| Lack of memes, politics and "boring" design will be all
| positives for some.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Began with covid :)
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| So long as media posts aren't allowed and dang isn't
| overwhelmed I think we'll be alright. Politics will
| probably change a bit though, if there is a big
| migration, and it'll become a bit more impersonal.
| shusaku wrote:
| 100 quick posts to this thread is good evidence if this
| 7speter wrote:
| I came to see what was going on with reddit. If it was an
| outage or something.
| js212 wrote:
| Same!
| philistine wrote:
| Exactly! Lots of people treating internet traffic like a
| on/off switch for each website. But ultimately the traffic is
| people, and people act like a liquid in large enough
| quantities. They flow in other directions.
| cvhashim04 wrote:
| Yes
| Permik wrote:
| You're absolutely correct.
| shanefromfargo wrote:
| What's up guys!? That's me. Really enjoying my time on HN so
| far. It reminds of what Reddit used to be like.
| melech_ric wrote:
| I think you're being facetious here, but HN does have a
| more than passing resemblance to early Reddit.
|
| I remember reading Joel Spolsky's blog when he promoted
| Reddit. I jumped over for look and stayed. Threads and
| discussion were heavily tech focused. The format was a nice
| departure from slashdot, and there was a lack of digital
| "turf" wars. (Subreddits came along years later.)
|
| 16(?) years on - Reddit has metastisized into something
| different. I still enjoy parts of it, but it's definitely
| not the same beast it was in the beginning.
| sureglymop wrote:
| Let's hope this place doesn't get overrun...
| fundad wrote:
| Maybe cloud flare
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36294750
| xmdx wrote:
| Cloudflare is having issues and I noticed HN is going down for me
| (takes multiple reloads to work) so might not just be them.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Given that neither Reddit nor Hacker News use Cloudflare...
| entropie wrote:
| If I was a reddit admin I would think it might be smart to use
| the outage to bring software updates.
| omniglottal wrote:
| If you think an unscheduled outage is a good opportunity to
| deploy new features, I can see why you're not an admin...
| entropie wrote:
| I (obviously) meant the majority of subreddits going dark [1]
|
| [1] https://reddark.untone.uk/
| bluepod4 wrote:
| This isn't unusual. I don't use Reddit often and have seen it out
| several times this year, which says a lot.
| asylteltine wrote:
| On the day of the blackout? Yeah total coincidence
| Moose_the_Goose wrote:
| <conspiracy> Disgruntled user ddos attack? or So Reddit can
| blame the lower traffic on technical issues. </conspiracy>
| LordOmlette wrote:
| It is likely related to the blackout due to the reddit CEO being
| dishonest about the upcoming API pricing changes. You can read
| more here:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1476fkn/reddit_bl...
|
| Er, you will be able to read more at that link whenever reddit
| comes back online :-/
| cente wrote:
| No? Making some subs private doesn't have anything to do with
| the site blackout.
| darknavi wrote:
| From elsewhere in the thread:
|
| > According to Reddit, the blackout is responsible for the
| problems. "A significant number of subreddits shifting to
| private caused some expected stability issues, and we've been
| working on resolving the anticipated issue," spokesperson Tim
| Rathschmidt tells The Verge.
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/8/23754780/reddit-api-
| update...
| Timon3 wrote:
| How do you know? Someone else posited the theory that the
| frontpage service has to search for posts for too long due to
| the blackout. How do you prove this is not the case?
| post-it wrote:
| Can't prove it's not aliens.
| Timon3 wrote:
| Another sibling comment was added 2 minutes ago, where
| Reddit themselves state that the blackout is the cause:
|
| > According to Reddit, the blackout is responsible for
| the problems. "A significant number of subreddits
| shifting to private caused some expected stability
| issues, and we've been working on resolving the
| anticipated issue," spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells
| The Verge.
|
| Maybe you should think a bit harder about the difference
| between "this thing that is actively happening could be
| the cause" and "aliens could be the cause"?
| godshatter wrote:
| If they anticipated it, why did it become an issue?
| Timon3 wrote:
| I do not work for Reddit. Maybe they have some press
| contact info on their page you could try? Or Twitter or
| something?
| lazycouchpotato wrote:
| Deimos, former Reddit admin and creator of tildes.net
| currently thinks they're related: https://tildes.net/~tech/16
| 3e/reddit_appears_to_be_down_duri...
|
| EDIT: Reddit themselves confirmed that the outage was related
| to subs going private.
|
| > "A significant number of subreddits shifting to private
| caused some expected stability issues, and we've been working
| on resolving the anticipated issue," said Reddit spokesperson
| Tim Rathschmidt.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/12/reddit-goes-down-just-
| as-a...
| yosito wrote:
| How does one get a user account on Tildes?
| HaZeust wrote:
| Be invited by a pre-existing user.
| lazycouchpotato wrote:
| It's currently invite-only. I have a few left, but I'm
| not sure how to send you one privately.
| Pr0ject217 wrote:
| Every page I visit is now a private community... really?
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| Yes, it's a wonderfully successful boycot:
|
| https://save3rdpartyapps.com/
|
| Twitch: https://m.twitch.tv/reddark_247
| Pr0ject217 wrote:
| Oh, thank you.
| rovr138 wrote:
| I wonder how they handle private subs.
|
| If it's certain users, they can't simply cache the private page.
|
| With everyone checking, this would add a lot of overhead. With
| apps like reddark, and other bots running this would create a lot
| of load.
|
| There's also an archive team project running so that's a LOT of
| nodes hitting the site.
| konraditurbe wrote:
| Scaled down a few instances to save a few bucks while traffic
| will be down due to protests, calculated wrong.
| tdstein wrote:
| Smells like a DDoS.
|
| It's difficult to know if it is a coordinated attack or an
| unexpected side effect of the protest.
|
| HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests Connection: keep-alive Content-
| Type: application/json Access-Control-Expose-Headers: retry-
| after, x-sentry-rate-limits, x-sentry-error Vary: Origin Date:
| Mon, 12 Jun 2023 14:49:00 GMT Content-Length: 45 Access-Control-
| Allow-Origin: https://www.reddit.com retry-after: 14 x-sentry-
| rate-limits: 14:default;error;security;attachment:organization:er
| ror_usage_exceeded
| aeyes wrote:
| That is a response from Sentry telling you that they are rate
| limiting error ingestion for Reddit, probably because they have
| a lot of errors at the moment.
| thehumanmeat wrote:
| Definitely smells like some sad reddit mod got upset and is
| enacting "payback".
| scrum-treats wrote:
| Could be the government. Telecom is impacted as well.
| capableweb wrote:
| There is also a DDPA (Distributed Digital Preservation
| "Attack") ongoing that maybe make things worse too.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| This is just the usual message you get when they are overloaded.
| Goes to show how successful this "boycott" is.
| graeme wrote:
| Over 90% of subreddits are currently dark. Impossible they had
| an excess of traffic
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| By far not 90% of the subs are dark. It's 6000 subs out of
| 500,000, or 1.2%.
|
| Most people don't care at all about this blackout and are
| just checking the homepage anyway, which will always pull
| content no matter what.
|
| Reddit always has issues at this time (NA wakes up, EU gets
| off of work), nothing unusual.
| transcriptase wrote:
| It's easily 90% of the subs that people actually go to
| Reddit for.
|
| Nobody cares about the 400 subscriber subreddit from some
| small town in Idaho with 3 people online at any given
| moment.
| Infinity315 wrote:
| 1.2% of subs does not imply that 1.2% of the user base is
| gone. A lot of those 500k subs have less than 5k
| subscribers. Only a small portion of subreddits contribute
| to the vast amount of content on reddit.
| hendersoon wrote:
| It's likely true that most people just browse, don't login,
| and don't subscribe to subreddits they enjoy. Of course
| those people don't contribute to their site either,
| although they do see the advertisements.
|
| Anyway for those of us that do login and follow specific
| topics, I can speak for my own experience, which is that
| every single subreddit I read was shutdown this morning
| other than r/worldnews and r/diablo4.
| hgsgm wrote:
| The lack of subreddits could be driving users to the same
| remaining part of the site, interfering with load balancing
| graeme wrote:
| You're right. I took an overly naive view of how a complex
| system would respond to such an unusual event.
| r00fus wrote:
| Sounds more like - we don't want anyone to know it's a ghost
| town here (metrics will prove protestors correct) - so let's
| say it was a system down issue - and then claim there was no
| meaningful protest.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Yeah you must be onto something! It must be that! I'm sure
| spez set that all up with the same lizardmen that organized
| 9/11 for the CIA!!!
| rightbyte wrote:
| Reddit faked their initial users to make the site seem
| used. Pulling the plug during protests surely is in the
| realm of possibility for what they could do.
| Timber-6539 wrote:
| So does HN for me.
| 942 wrote:
| Thousands of subs are down to protest Reddit's upcoming API
| charges.
| 13of40 wrote:
| What I see is interesting behavior, though:
|
| 1. The page loads but no content is shown on either the home
| page or my profile page.
|
| 2. It says I'm not logged in.
|
| 3. It has a list of recent subs I've looked at.
|
| I have no idea what their architecture looks like, but I would
| guess it's statically served javascript that gets all of its
| data from some web API, and that API is down.
| Semaphor wrote:
| kbin.social, reddit and hackernews all down or slow. It's a virus
| affecting reddit-likes!
| two_handfuls wrote:
| Nice try. We're not visiting Reddit on 12th-14th.
| jaysinn_420 wrote:
| Or ever again? I deleted Apollo from my phone last night, and I
| haven't had a bookmark for their awful website in years. Any
| future visits would be misclicks, just like birdsite.
| fotta wrote:
| according to [0], '"A significant number of subreddits shifting
| to private caused some expected stability issues, and we've been
| working on resolving the anticipated issue," said Reddit
| spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt.'
|
| [0] https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/12/reddit-goes-down-just-
| as-a...
| dehrmann wrote:
| I wonder when we'll start seeing internal drama leaking out.
| Engineers are rarely happy to be woken up on Monday morning
| because of decisions by leadership.
| kshacker wrote:
| What I am presenting below is a joke. Their counts went way low
| so the monitoring said something is odd a drop of 50% is quite
| abnormal and failed them over. Same story on the other side. Now
| they are trying to change the thresholds to say that do not alert
| or fail over on these thresholds. But while they were doing that
| they got their EKS bill and they realized they can make / save
| more money just by being down.
| samstave wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/806/
| oldstrangers wrote:
| Daily reminder that no one has any idea what they're doing.
| Twitter failing, Reddit being murdered. Improvisational Business
| Comedy.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _Daily reminder that no one has any idea what they 're
| doing._"
|
| Both these quotes apply uncomfortably well to Silicon Valley
| global tech companies and their owners:
|
| > "...what civilisation is, is 6 billion people, trying to make
| themselves happy by standing on each-others shoulders and
| kicking each others teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.
| And yet, you can stand back and look at this planet and see
| that we have; the money, the power, the medical understanding,
| the scientific knowhow, the love and the community to produce a
| kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us;
| the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary and
| we do not fight back against the dehumanising values that are
| handed down as control icons. This is something ... I mean, I
| don't really want to get off on this tare because it's a
| lecture in its self but ... culture is not your friend. Culture
| is for other people's convenience and the convenience of
| various institutions; churches, companies, tax-collection
| schemes and what have you. It is not your friend. It insults
| you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are
| well treated by culture, yet we glorify the creative potential
| of the individual, the rights of the individual, we understand
| the felt presence of experience is what is most important. But
| the culture is a perversion; *it fetishises objects, it creates
| consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness,
| endless forms of false understanding* in the form of squirrely
| religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish
| themselves and dehumanise themselves by behaving like machines;
| *processors of memes* passed down from Madison Avenue and
| Hollywood."
|
| Separately:
|
| > "Don't get the idea that it's this liberal rap about how
| everybody has a piece of the action. You know, the Jews know
| something, the Buddhists know something, the Huichol know
| something. Nonsense! Rubbish! Nobody knows anything. These are
| different kinds of shell games that have been worked out by
| priestly castes of people to keep things under control.
| Institutions seek to maximize control, control, control! That's
| what they're into. Did you think they were in the business of
| enlightening you? Saving your soul? Forget it! Control is what
| this is all about. And to the degree that we commit ourselves
| to ideology, we are poisoned. Any ideology--Marxism,
| Catholicism, objectivism, you name it. Rubbish. All rubbish."
|
| - Terence McKenna
| smiley1437 wrote:
| Is reddit being down causing hackernews to get hammered?
|
| It's as slow as the Apple news day
| samstave wrote:
| I just wonder what the internal reaction to apex's comments have
| been?
|
| Or investor relations?
|
| Or YCs input tosses, mayhaps? Does PG stay in touch?
| hgsgm wrote:
| The front page is full of posts and most of them link to the
| "page not found" error page, and most of the rest link to "you
| don't have access" (I forget the exact wording).
| bobbob1921 wrote:
| Same for me on Reddit (page not found)- Also hn is throwing
| occasional "can't serve your request" errors
| samstave wrote:
| I suspect a cloudflare outage.
|
| based on the images from downdetector, a major IX/BGP-peering
| site went down.
|
| Thats why you see the upstream up-tick in outage/delay reporting
| before the site outages.
|
| Som IX went down.
| thenulldevice wrote:
| [flagged]
| kstrauser wrote:
| Dang it, null. What have you done? _What have you done?_
| miroljub wrote:
| HN is also very slow. Looks like it can't handle all the traffic
| when Reddit is down. After all, it looks like these's significant
| overlap between Reddit and HN users, as much as HN folks see
| itself as a kind of elite when comparing to Reddit.
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