[HN Gopher] Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blac...
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Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
Author : bgc
Score : 155 points
Date : 2023-06-12 19:37 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| sofixa wrote:
| > A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused
| some expected stability issues, and we've been working on
| resolving the anticipated issue,"
|
| Calling bullshit on that one. If they had expected stability
| issues, and knew exactly which subreddits will go private and
| when, how is it possible they had so much "anticipated issues"?
| schaefer wrote:
| The world has finite resources... such as man-hours.
| sofixa wrote:
| Such a critical moment for the future of the company (mass
| boycott after controversial changes, presumably on the path
| to IPO; they really don't need any more bad publicity) should
| be an all hands on deck situation. Again, they've had
| advanced notice, and knew the full list of subreddits. They
| should have prepared better.
| TillE wrote:
| You're not going to significantly rewrite a caching system
| in a matter of days, not if you want to fix more problems
| than you cause.
| pohl wrote:
| > should be an all hands on deck situation
|
| [The Mythical Man Month has entered the chat]: Nine
| mothers, all hands on deck, should be able to gestate a
| baby in 1 month.
| tiffanyg wrote:
| At the risk of adding further low quality content, right
| here and now, this proposed "Mythical Mom Month" book is
| an intriguing pitch.
|
| Do you have a more detailed pitch sheet? :)
| falcolas wrote:
| I imagine a previously not-stress-tested component that has to
| do with searches/fetches with private subreddits went kaboom.
|
| Not too much of a stretch, IMO.
|
| A fantastic Schadenfreude generator, regardless.
| gfv wrote:
| When operating a complex system like Reddit, you know that
| _something_ is going to happen during a significant event, but
| you generally don 't know exactly what will break first.
|
| What's worse is that the system evolved as a response to the
| previous similar event, and what broke now is probably not what
| had broken in the past.
| jedberg wrote:
| My guess is that they knew the caches would get blown out and
| would have to refill with content from non-blacked out subs,
| and decided to just take the hit and let it ride, knowing it
| would recover itself soon enough.
|
| I mean, honestly that's probably what I would have done if I
| were still in charge.
| RSHEPP wrote:
| And in this case, use it as an opportunity to learn more
| about the system. Treat it as an experiment.
| realusername wrote:
| They have an outage every two weeks maximum so I also call
| bullshit on that one, Reddit hasn't exactly been the most
| stable website before.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > and knew exactly which subreddits will go private and when
|
| As someone who is close to a reddit mod, they did not know
| which subs would go private
| TheNewsIsHere wrote:
| I don't say this snidely, but more than 7,000 subs openly
| committed to going private in advance of today.
|
| I'm sure someone somewhere at Reddit was surprised by sub X
| or Y going private, but if they were surprised at half the
| largest subs that went private, then that would be as sad as
| it is amusing.
|
| Edit: typo
| mkl95 wrote:
| They should disclose what happens in their system when a
| subreddit goes private, and how it scales with subreddit size.
| Otherwise, I call BS.
| seydor wrote:
| I think reddit will never be the same after this, not because of
| the API thing (I dont agree with the blackouts), but because it
| shows how much they neglected their website. Over the years they
| have made it impossible to compete with the established
| subreddits. They have allowed a single uniform mob to take over
| the site, establish themselves as permanent tyrants and grow
| their ban lists to enormous scale. Even today with the blackouts,
| you can't find alternative subs to the closed ones, because new
| subreddits are hidden in search results and popular lists.
| Without this competition, how do they expect their subs to
| improve?
|
| It's as if their mismanagement has come back to bite them. Mods
| have been allowed to run the show and ruin communities for years
| and years.
|
| Very few people are using 3rd party apps but now they are causing
| inconvenience to millions for their own capricious reasons. I
| knew that the site was ran by a small powertripping group of mods
| but now that they make it so obvious it has kind of chepened the
| whole medium in my mind
| chongli wrote:
| This isn't a unilateral move by a small group of moderators.
| Regular users support the blackout in droves. We don't like
| Reddit corporate deciding to shut down 3rd party developers.
|
| Reddit is extremely entitled. They as a company create nothing.
| The users create everything and do all the work of moderation.
| Spitting in the eye of your all-volunteer staff on which you
| depend completely for your livelihood is corporate suicide.
| btmiller wrote:
| The subreddit experience is bifurcated into (at least) two
| camps: big/popular/default or small/curated/niche. The
| tyrannical behaviors are most often found in the former camp
| where being a moderator is synonymous with "internet power".
| The latter is populated by enthusiasts tending to their
| communities.
|
| I agree that Reddit won't be the same after this, but there's
| just not a ton of remaining value in the big defaults. They're
| already plagued with low value, low effort content, low
| cardinality content. The true damage that's being done right
| now is to the small communities which represent(ed) the best of
| Reddit. Out of the spotlight but deep in quality content for
| those that care about the topic. The inherent risk of stability
| is more certain now with Reddit's new policies. And I suspect
| now with many subreddits weighing indefinite shutdowns that
| many users (perhaps more importantly: the best content
| creators) will scatter to the wind for greener pastures. Those
| that are left are given crappy apps, lots of ads, and hollow
| communities eagerly looking for something better.
| phil21 wrote:
| > The tyrannical behaviors are most often found in the former
| camp where being a moderator is synonymous with "internet
| power".
|
| What's old is new again, I suppose!
|
| Similar happened on IRC back in the day. All the big channel
| wars and drama were over the big popular channels for
| internet points. I certainly participated in my fair share.
|
| Then you had the small channels of folks who were just pretty
| chill chatting about whatever random topic of interest.
|
| Might be nostalgia, but I still think the best balance of
| this was the phpbb/vbulletin era. The amount of "reference
| material" lost behind the walled gardens is crazy.
| cdme wrote:
| What happens if the mods were to coordinate cycling subs from
| private to public?
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Probably rolling outages
| TheAdamist wrote:
| Cfaa charges.
| cryptonector wrote:
| What's the theory?
| chx wrote:
| 18 U.S.C. SSSS 1030(a)(5)(B)
|
| > intentionally accesses a protected computer without
| authorization, and as a result of such conduct, recklessly
| causes damage;
|
| I would think it's reasonably easy to establish _mens rea_
| when someone switches their sub from public to private and
| back every few hours, even if manually done because what
| else would they _want_ to do but take down Reddit? Not to
| mention the punishes much harshly "conspiring" to commit
| such a crime. Careful there.
|
| IANAL, of course.
| JohnFen wrote:
| IANAL either, but my reading of that is the "and" in
| there is important. That is, you'd have to be
| "intentionally accessing a protected computer without
| authorization" _and_ recklessly cause damage.
|
| Reddit mods are not accessing a protected computer
| without authorization.
| anoonmoose wrote:
| They'll get replaced faster than they otherwise would have
| seydor wrote:
| Reddit hasn't replaced them for 10+ years. Free labour is not
| easy to find these days
| Tao3300 wrote:
| I think you'd be surprised. Nature abhors a vacuum and
| there will be many users waiting in the wings for the tiny
| internet power of that prestigious mod hat.
| seydor wrote:
| tell that to reddit though - they seem to be fine with
| the current situation and plan to keep the same mods
| until death do them part
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| This would be chaos. Most of the big subreddits have a
| combination of bespoke bots and complex automod configs that
| even the current mods struggle groking. Reddit would lose a
| ton of quality through poor moderation quickly if you put
| everything up for grabs.
|
| I think this would be a poor move.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| Looking at /r/all today, it seems like there's still enough
| big front-page subs with mods to at least temporarily
| reallocate responsibilities. Most of the big subs are
| controlled by "power mods" already who administrate many
| subs. I think there would absolutely be a significant
| longer term loss of quality, but my guess is that in the
| shorter term Reddit could just give the keys to those subs
| to the 'power mods' who have remained.
| freespirit77 wrote:
| Could be due to home feeds not having enough cached content as a
| lot of the first page posts went private and had to be skipped?
| Would have led to have to go deeper in lists of posts to fill the
| first page and causing more cache misses and db reads and
| performance issues.
| derefr wrote:
| Very likely; before the crash, I noticed that the home page
| failed to load, but individual subreddits continued to load.
| klodolph wrote:
| The way Reddit displays content is basically all caches, as far
| as I can tell. Every query you do is supposed to directly hit a
| cache of 1000 objects (like comments or posts). You can't go
| past 1000, either through the web interface or through the API.
|
| Kinda frustrating design, IMO, speaking as an end-user.
| kenhwang wrote:
| It was always obvious when you scrolled past the cached
| content because errors or timeouts would start happening
| pretty frequently.
| subarctic wrote:
| It'd be funny if the engineers at reddit decided now was a good
| time to upgrade postgres or do some other kind of scheduled
| maintenance, and just not worry about downtime because the
| blackout is on anyway.
| AH4oFVbPT4f8 wrote:
| Deniability is a powerful tool, and considering their track
| record this year, this decision wouldn't rank among their
| worst.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Unless there is some serious damage control happening from
| corporate which makes them unable, I think a team of engineers
| would talk themselves into doing this 99% of the time.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Or rolling out the big blackout override switch
| poyu wrote:
| Easy:
|
| ``` UPDATE subreddits SET is_private = FALSE WHERE is_private
| = TRUE AND updated_at BETWEEN 2023-06-11 AND 2023-06-12; ```
|
| Bonus: Run it every hour
| EA-3167 wrote:
| I don't think anyone doubts that Reddit could pretty easily
| unlock those subs, but without mods there to run them it
| would be a legal nightmare. How long before illegal
| material was flooding the site beyond the capacity of the
| admins alone to manage?
|
| I'd also worry that if Reddit moved in that direction, the
| mods would feel like they didn't have control over their
| own subs and bail. I don't believe that Reddit can afford
| that, especially given how many subs and what %age of the
| user base we're talking about here.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| > How long before illegal material was flooding the site
| beyond the capacity of the admins alone to manage?
|
| I guess that depends on how many people are willing to
| risk prison just because they're mad at Reddit. Or on
| what automatic moderation capabilities Reddit has. Not a
| moderator, so I honestly don't know how much work it does
| or doesn't take. They probably count on volunteer mods to
| filter spam and whatnot, but for legal compliance? Highly
| doubtful.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| I think I was unclear, that's my bad. I'm not talking
| about the average person "protesting" that way, I'm
| saying that Reddit is _already_ flooded with illegal and
| ad-unfriendly stuff, the mods are the ones who spend
| their days picking up that trash. If you open the subs,
| but the mods are still on strike (and forcibly opening
| their subs is unlikely to change that) then who 's doing
| the janitorial work?
|
| I'm not a mod, but I have several friends who are, and
| you wouldn't believe the sheer amount of gross nonsense
| they have to sift through. Even ignoring the relatively
| banal death threats, there are always questionable
| elements trying to sell drugs (both Rx and other),
| running scams, offering malware, and worse.
| Timon3 wrote:
| Aaaaand suddenly hundreds of private subs are public
| because they changed anything else :)
| throwaway4837 wrote:
| My unpopular theory is that the Reddit blackout increased Reddit
| usage, having the opposite of the intended effect.
| speedgoose wrote:
| That's also my first bet. The strike was well covered in many
| medias.
|
| Looking at the google trends, it was a big spike today compared
| to the classic daily workload:
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&q=%2...
| Salgat wrote:
| This is more indicative of people just searching about
| reddit, possibly to figure out why the site they normally use
| is having issues.
| EMCymatics wrote:
| It is nice to see all of the toxic subreddits delete themseles.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| I operate a certain health condition subreddit. The main
| subreddit for this condition is highly toxic (which is why I
| created an alternative a few years ago).
|
| Anyway, it turns out the primary (toxic) subreddit for this
| condition is taking part in the strike, so a lot of users
| have come over to my alternative subreddit, and they are glad
| to have found it because they were getting fed up with the
| toxicity of the other place.
|
| Unfortunately I'm sure it will be back to normal in a couple
| of days.
| falcolas wrote:
| It would certainly change usage patterns. And there are enough
| popular subreddits who didn't go in on the outage, so there's
| content to be had.
|
| The adage "there's no such thing as bad press" could definitely
| apply, given how broadly covered this is (I mean, hell, I saw
| it show up on NPR).
| pkju62dqmx wrote:
| Currently over 90% of subs are private or restricted.
|
| https://reddark.untone.uk
|
| Re-hosts of that site have the figure even higher.
| [deleted]
| cpncrunch wrote:
| That is in no way accurate. It says 7806 subreddits, but
| there are actually over 3 million subreddits, so the figure
| is actually only 0.24% rather than 90%. It's wonderful what
| you can do by just faking statistics!
|
| I also don't see some subreddits listed there that are part
| of the strike.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Like reading a list of war dead. Always remember where you
| were and what you were doing on that fateful day when
| r/amateurcumsluts went dark, and the heroic sacrifices made
| on that hill.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| > there are enough popular subreddits who didn't go in on the
| outage
|
| Yeah, this morning I noticed only _one_ sub that I follow was
| actually private. I was going to mention it here, but I
| forgot which one it was - and now I can 't find the one that
| was blacked out.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| I have not read a reddit devblog or anything like that. My guess
| is they are doing some kind of caching of posts via
| elasticsearch/redis or something similar. It must depend on the
| privacy settings of a sub.
|
| So when 1000 subs go private, they potentially had to update
| hundreds of millions of comments.
|
| Anyone else have a theory?
| amyjess wrote:
| My theory is that the algorithm that produces the front page
| relies on the largest subreddits all being public. But if it
| can't draw on posts from the largest subs, it'll have to dip
| into a bunch of smaller subs, and the part of the algorithm
| where it delves deeper and deeper into less popular subreddits
| is _terribly_ optimized and puts a huge strain on the servers.
| 2bitencryption wrote:
| the cynic in me says, they're being DDOSd (I mean, they pissed
| off millions of internet nerds who have their own definition of
| justice), and instead of admitting it they're using the
| opportunity to blame the subreddit mods.
|
| then again, not sure why that messaging would be any better for
| them than admitting to a DDOS...
| manicdee wrote:
| Blame the user makes sense because they don't want to show
| how fragile Reddit is while they're trying to attract
| investors for the IPO.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| That makes sense to me. It would be one variant of a larger
| theory of "a subreddit going private is an expensive process
| that is poorly optimized because it's normally so rare".
| Another variant would be that clicking the "go private" button
| might do something like start a huge cascade of queries/calls
| to mutate the status of individual posts and comments (and
| possibly hence also trigger the massive cache invalidation you
| mentioned). Possibly also "going private" infra, whatever it
| is, is some bespoke snowflake that doesn't autoscale (since
| it's never needed to and there was always something better to
| be doing with engineering time, or people just forgot).
|
| One theory I have seen floated but which seems unlikely to me
| is that this was some kind of internal sabotage. I could maybe
| buy this if the protest was about a war or human rights issue
| or something, but I really don't think any IT pros would be
| willing to risk jail time for this one.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Would a better protest be rapidly switching subreddits from
| public/private?
| falcolas wrote:
| Too easy to shut down, since there's a finite number of mod
| enabled accounts.
| joecot wrote:
| A better protest would have been for the moderators to all
| stop moderating. Turn off their automod filters, allow all
| posts. Show reddit what happens when their volunteer
| moderators just stop.
| graypegg wrote:
| I still think this is coming. After the 48hr strike, how
| many mods are going to turn their sub back to public,
| look at their mod inbox filled with confused and angry
| users, and then see some pending non-response from Reddit
| post-strike, and wonder why they do this?
| pessimizer wrote:
| You never want to threaten people with a good time.
| stale2002 wrote:
| The problem with this strategy is that it gives reddit a
| valid excuse to remove subreddit mods.
|
| Having your sub be unmoderated is against reddit TOS,
| whereas taking a sub private is not yet against the
| official TOS.
|
| Process and technicalities like this matter a lot and can
| effect a platforms actions.
| joecot wrote:
| I agree that taking the subs private for 48 hours is a
| good first step. And I agree that subs staying private
| indefinitely is a good next step.
|
| But if neither make headway, just going unmoderated is
| the logical next step. Yeah, reddit could take over
| moderating the subreddits. They can also do that if
| they're set private. But they don't want to. They
| outsourced that to volunteer moderators so they could get
| free labor. If they want to run their own moderation, and
| submit their own content, the reddit corporation can have
| fun with that.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > to mutate the status of individual posts and comment
|
| AKA why you should normalize your data models.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Meh it's a tradeoff usually. De-normalize for better read
| performance at the expense of some complexity and worse
| update performance/semantics.
| eropple wrote:
| This is true, but FWIW (it probably wouldn't save you
| here, too much is changing too fast) something like a SQL
| materialized view can very often give you both the
| chocolate and the peanut butter.
| putnambr wrote:
| My theory is that some middleware applications have policies to
| scale to zero or one based on traffic patterns, when scaled
| down due to lack of traffic things start breaking.
| jedberg wrote:
| Posted elsewhere, but yeah that's my theory too (having
| actually helped built it in the first place). My guess is the
| caches got blown out because the entire system is built on the
| idea that most people are looking at the most popular content.
|
| When you close down all the most popular content, you have to
| dig deep into the long tail for fresh content.
|
| Also, my guess is that the code for building homepages is not
| optimized for having a lot of skips due to private Reddits,
| since most people have probably never been subscribed to a
| private reddit, or if they have it wasn't for very long, or
| even if for very long, never more than one or two at at time.
| biesnecker wrote:
| Makes sense to me. I remember several lunch conversations at
| FB about whether or not we even could restart the site with
| totally cold caches. I'm sure it was possible but it wouldn't
| have been clean or pretty.
| _dain_ wrote:
| _> I remember several lunch conversations at FB about
| whether or not we even could restart the site with totally
| cold caches_
|
| so you're saying, we just have to knock it out _once_ , and
| it'll be gone forever? that makes things easier ...
| jedberg wrote:
| We did restart reddit with cold caches a few times when I
| was there. It took hours to recover but eventually caught
| up if it happened near peak. If we did it during low
| traffic it wasn't too bad.
|
| But that was 13 years ago, no idea how it would do today.
| :)
| biesnecker wrote:
| I'm sure Facebook could too (their disaster recovery
| planning and drills were always top notch) but I'm glad I
| won't be oncall if it ever happens :-D
| hospitalJail wrote:
| The subreddits that are most popular are on high performance
| servers while the subreddits that are less popular are on lower
| performance servers?
| tester457 wrote:
| Here's a guess from a former reddit dev.
|
| > (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...
| philip1209 wrote:
| Cache invalidation makes sense.
|
| Could also be some kind of fanout query that assumes the top
| subreddits are open and wastes CPU cycles.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I've noticed that my comment history in privatized subreddits
| are now unavailable, so I wonder if it's related to that.
| kevincox wrote:
| It could even be that lots of queries to generate pages just
| fetch private posts and comments. The assumption was that
| users will not be subscribed to lots of subreddits that they
| have access to so skipping these posts is typically
| negligible and not worth using a more complex query for. If
| the fraction of skipped items becomes significant these
| queries will be doing lots more work. Its pretty believable
| that some very common query getting 25-50% more expensive
| will be more server capacity then Reddit has available.
|
| Another possible explanation is that operations on private
| subreddits are not as optimized as it is expected that they
| have a small number of subscribers and take up a small amount
| of total resources. These assumptions would be flipped.
| EMCymatics wrote:
| Well that is how wallstreetbets freezes the subreddit to log
| all of the potentially actionable comments.
| delecti wrote:
| I'm skeptical. Most of the outages I've been involved in have
| been for way dumber reasons than that. Based on my dumb
| experience, my guess is that the handling for a user trying to
| access a private subreddit stressed some system that doesn't
| make sense to even exist.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Twitter was like this at one point, flipping over from public
| to private was one of the most resource intensive things an
| individual user could do... especially with a long tweet
| history, because it involves changing every tweet.
| Anonasty wrote:
| It seems that Reddit will go down like Digg did.
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| More likely that people will simply forget in 3-4 weeks, like
| literally every other issue that can sort of blow over.
| willio58 wrote:
| Unfortunately, I've been hearing this for like a decade and it
| doesn't seem to ever happen.
| wmeredith wrote:
| Digg.com's implosion was so dramatic because Reddit was there
| to immediately start serving the same users just about the
| same thing. There are obviously plenty of other things Reddit
| users can do with their time, but there isn't a monolith
| solution waiting in the wings to very closely replace Reddit
| with almost the exact same thing. Its destruction will be
| much more prolonged.
| Solvency wrote:
| I thought it was a cloudflare outage.
| [deleted]
| almost_usual wrote:
| Pretty sure Reddit uses Fastly as a CDN.
| stillbourne wrote:
| [flagged]
| swarnie wrote:
| Great comment, Reddit can't resume fast enough.
| thewataccount wrote:
| Can you elaborate? For us cloudflare has been incredibly
| reliable and incredibly cheap, although we'd consider
| moving if there was a better option.
|
| I'm not aware of this perception, have you had issues with
| cloudflare? Does fastly have a better offering?
| stillbourne wrote:
| It was a joke.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I see Reddit themselves confirmed that the blackout caused the
| outage, but just to be clear Reddit is a very unstable website
| and outages are commonplace. It's clear their engineering team is
| not exactly top notch (or have been poorly resourced).
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| I'd love to see an API only version of Reddit where people build
| the clients on top of it but are forced to serve ads from the
| global provider, from which they get a generous cut.
| stillbourne wrote:
| How long before they admins swoop in and change ownership of the
| blacked out subreddits?
| Longlius wrote:
| The main reason why reddit works as a platform is because its
| mods and subreddit regulars do a lot of unpaid work. Where is
| reddit going to find enough people to work for free on such
| short notice?
| jstarfish wrote:
| > Where is reddit going to find enough people to work for
| free on such short notice?
|
| Enter: an army of scab accounts ending in _GPT.
| cryptonector wrote:
| That's more expensive than free mods.
| falcolas wrote:
| They don't have to be good mods. There's precedent for a
| handful of mods to moderate a huge swath of subreddits.
| wmeredith wrote:
| Not without third-party tools, there isn't. Lol
| EA-3167 wrote:
| What does that really accomplish? Reddit mods are often bad
| enough as is, imagine what Reddit scab mods would be like.
|
| It would also be a huge invitation for the displaced the rest
| to make life unbearable for those new mods and the handful of
| admins overseeing them. Reddit as a community would make for
| one hell of an intellectual DDOS.
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| I seem to remember someone saying something about how a small
| number of users mod the vast majority of Reddit in terms of
| the number of users within the subreddits they control. I
| wouldn't be surprised if there was a black market for mod
| status. Might not be such a bad thing if the establishment
| was totally uprooted.
| evan_ wrote:
| > a small number of users mod the vast majority of Reddit
|
| I think it's more like there are a small number of users
| who are mods on a huge number of subs, but there are other
| mods that focus more directly on the actual moderation of
| those subs.
| duxup wrote:
| I suspect that still results in a huge amount of moderation
| work to do ... Reddit's advantage is that people do that
| for Reddit for free.
| falcolas wrote:
| > What does that really accomplish?
|
| To borrow from another comment buried below: I think the
| company cares more about the appearance of "business as
| usual" in the face of an IPO than the opinions of the users.
|
| In their eyes, this is all nothing more than a tempest in a
| teapot; a small pothole on the road to public investor
| dollars.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| I can sort of understand the mentality, but right now
| Reddit looks like a terrible IPO prospect. It isn't
| profitable, it's poorly managed, lacks transparency,
| depends on volunteers to function on a daily basis, and
| when they make a move to make themselves profitable their
| user base rebels in a fairly public and humiliating way.
|
| All of this in the post-Fed rate hike world where money
| isn't free. Besides I feel it's important to remember that
| Reddit has been talking about an IPO for many years, and I
| doubt it's going to happen now.
| falcolas wrote:
| I personally believe they will wait to see which ones remain
| shuttered. 48 hours is not very long to wait to maintain your
| free civilian labor.
|
| After that, they'll definitely reclaim the shuttered subreddits
| with new moderators.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| Reddit is odd.... while most communities hate the mods, they
| hate admins far more. Admins taken over a subreddit would
| kill it in the eyes of the users.
| falcolas wrote:
| I think the admins will care more about the appearance of
| "business as usual" in the face of an IPO than the opinions
| of the users who would notice a moderator replacement.
|
| In their eyes, this is all nothing more than a tempest in a
| teapot; a small pothole on the road to public investor
| dollars.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| the API thing was that, it is moved beyond that now, and
| admin action on that level will make the API issue an
| after thought...
|
| If they do that, forget IPO, there will be no more reddit
| at all.
|
| right now they already missed the IPO point years ago,
| today for a company to have a successful IPO they need
| more than good MAU numbers, and this API change was never
| going to get to the profitability numbers they need for a
| good IPO
|
| Their IPO dreams were fucked long before today
| falcolas wrote:
| The internet forgets too quickly. And so long as Reddit
| can present a "everything's awesome" front, their IPO
| will likely take off.
|
| Having /r/Pics down permanently because of a protest
| would be a problem, but a poorly moderated /r/Pics would
| not. The quality would just go down, and Reddit would get
| a good justification for locking it down.
|
| "No, /r/Pics wasn't shut down because of the protest, it
| was shut down because there were too many law-breaking
| posts. And you know how tough we have to be on those
| kinds of posts."
|
| At least, that's my take on how most investors would look
| at it. Investors love companies who focus on
| profitability, regardless of their long term perspective.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| There seems to be a disconnect to what I am saying...
|
| You seem to believe a low quality /r/pics would bring in
| traffic, even more weirdly you seem to believe the admins
| shutting down /r/pics because of illegal content, is
| better for profitability then it being shut down because
| of a protest, not sure how that works....
|
| Traffic, and users drive profitablity, High Quality User
| Generated content drives that traffic and attracts users
|
| If reddit loses high quality user generated content,
| there is no traffic, and thus there is nothing to sell to
| be profitable, no ads, not API, nothing
|
| it would not matter if /r/pics was shutdown in protest,
| or shutdown because of poor moderation, it is still shut
| down, and thus no profits from it.
|
| investors love companies that are profitable, especially
| right now when the cost of capital is very high.
| "focusing on profitability" is not the same as delivering
| profitability. Investors right now want results, not
| power points about how they project the results being
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| They seem to honestly believe that increasing
| monetization is an equally existential question for the
| platform. IPO or no IPO, they can't run off of VC funding
| forever, and they say they aren't currently profitable.
| this_user wrote:
| A long time IMO, because that would just escalate the
| situation. At this point they are going to wait and see in the
| hopes that the majority of people lose interest after a few
| protests. Then they can just push through the changes.
|
| If they take over these subs, you just radicalise the users,
| and you now have to find new moderators for these subs. In a
| worst case scenario, users actually start migrating to another
| platform.
| graeme wrote:
| Finding new moderators would be a incredible challenge. If
| someone _wants_ to be a moderators badly, that is usually
| disqualifying.
|
| You get an immense amount of power with very little
| accountability except to the community. Put that in the wrong
| hands and you can destroy a community incredibly quickly.
|
| Or, put power in the hands of a dilettante, and you get overrun
| with spam and insults very fast.
| superkuh wrote:
| Nah, there's plenty of people just waiting to take over even
| the smallest of niche subs. I saw it firsthand back during
| the 2nd wave of gentrification in spring 2018 when a bunch of
| commercially uncomfortable subreddits like r/gundeals and
| their users (like my 2008 reddit account) were banned. The
| subreddits I moderated like r/radioastronomy were given to
| other users to moderate within a month or two. Reddit
| eventually admitted it was wrong about banning r/gundeals and
| reinstated the sub but my account was never unbanned.
|
| And any sub with serious activity will have power mods
| submitting applications for take-over so they can
| commercialize it.
| graeme wrote:
| I checked into the history:
|
| 1. A reddit request was made in 2018 when you were banned.
| This was manually approved by the admins: https://www.reddi
| t.com/r/redditrequest/comments/8m8cdm/reque...
|
| 2. The new mod heavily restricted posts, seemingly for
| three years. They declined to reply to messages for nine
| months, until a new Reddit request happened on Jan 3 2021.
| A comment in that thread said "there hasn't been a new post
| in ages!", confirming your replacement had locked the place
| down: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/kpf08
| 3/reque...
|
| 3. Sometime between Jan 3 and Jan 19th, the request was
| approved. Likely closer to the 19th, the day the new mod
| posted: https://www.reddit.com/r/radioastronomy/comments/l0
| j6qj/new_...
|
| Sub seems alright now, but after a three year long false
| start with an inactive mod who locked the place down.
|
| Further, it took up to 16 days to handle the request. For a
| very small sub. And I've seen reddit requests take much
| longer.
|
| Now reddit would have to, at a stroke, replace at least
| 8,000 of their most active subs, all at once, and make sure
| they don't appoint people who are insane, or draconian, or
| power hungry, or in it for their own profit, etc.
|
| I don't see this working. You may have some knowledge of
| /r/radioastronomy in those periods which contradicts what I
| wrote, but the public record suggests the transition
| wouldn't bode well for mass replacing every single
| moderator at once.
|
| 92% of reddit is down right now.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that Reddit doesn't have enough paid
| employees to undertake that sort of vetting at the scale
| required, even if they wanted to. I think they're
| probably just hoping and praying that this all blows
| over, that most mods are more addicted to their
| communities than anything else.
|
| It's a very cynical move, but you've laid out in
| exquisite detail why it's their ONLY move, other than
| walking back their policy. While the company as a whole
| would benefit from that walkback, I think Mr. Huffman
| himself would probably lose his job.
| vkou wrote:
| Oh, that's easy, if they are looking for scabs to mod a
| million+ sub, I volunteer myself immediately. I've got a lot of
| great ideas that I'm really eager to try out.
|
| The only thing that I'll be able to guarantee is that you'll
| _really_ not like me as a mod.
| duxup wrote:
| That would seem to setup a situation where Reddit has to fill a
| gap of a huge amount of moderation work that they previously
| didn't have to do / people did that for them for free.
| [deleted]
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