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Reddit has been going through some issues for many on Monday, with the outage happening the same day as thousands of subreddits going dark to protest the site’s new API pricing terms.
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.
Too much load? Reddit is down.
Not enough load? Believe it or not, also down.
I'd love to know what it is about subreddits going private that caused issues.
Maybe some overload caused by a process having to dig deeper to find best/top posts?
I like this idea. I imagine that with the top subs being dark the automated top posts that get scrounged up may be too terrifying for the front page and they hit the panic button while they scramble to curate through the absolute worst filth they've ever seen.
“It’s merely coincidence. But starting Wednesday, our servers will be more robust and you can browse the site using our official app.” - Spez, while sniffing a decanter of human shit
It’s entirely possible that they’ve made some assumptions about what a “normal” level of traffic looks like when writing code for their backend, which has caused some things to break when that has changed.
Not our fault if their code is shit.
When Reddit forcibly opens everything back up:
knock knock
“Who’s there?”
”Mods. Hired mods.”
“Hired mods?”
Seems like all the traffic had to go somewhere...
Lots of love for the Beehaw and other Lemmy admins this morning. It's never fun suddenly having to 10x scale. Although it sounds like everybody else on the internet is getting a heavy traffic load today too.
I think the most fun, unintended consequence is that there were some assumptions baked into the Reddit codebase and the large number of Private subreddits has caused massive disruption and outages for them. While others have speculated it might be a tactic to hamper the affects of the protest, it sure seems real plausible to have not anticipated 6K subreddits going private overnight.
As an engineer, this sounds most plausible - they had proactive detection and resolution in place against various attacks and system failures, which got triggered due to the massive drop in public subreddits/users/activity, and made everything worse. Honestly, this isn't a scenario their engineers could have easily predicted...
As a former sysadmin and a [still, for the moment] reddit moderator, my bet is that most of the subreddits that switched to private forgot to (or didn't know to) go into "new reddit" and switch off the thing that allows people to request being added to the now-private subreddit.
A HUGE influx of people pounding on the "let me in, add me to the sub" button, which sends modmail, may have overloaded the whole modmail system, which in turn sometimes goes kaflooey for no apparent reason (my theory is: it gets bored).
I see this as a positive aspect of the protest.
I am also amused that random people are pounding on the door for access, as if they think approved submitters are having a private tea party inside.
I was having a little look through the Wikipedia article for Digg, to remind myself how their downfall went about. Found this absolute banger of a quote 😂
Anyone else notice how friendly, calm, and civil the posts and discussions have been away from Reddit? This place reminds me a lot of the early days.
Frankly, I think it's entirely because of the self-selected nature of the people migrating, and the fact that the whole federation thing is mildly confusing so only people who have made sense of it and worked out how it works are here. If/when it becomes more obvious and popular beyond early-adopters, it'll be targeted by all the same bots and propagandists and chudiots as anywhere else.
Replaced RIF with Jerboa on my home screen; I can't say I won't miss it though, wish there was a "Lemmy is fun" already
Didn't know we had an app. The RiF developer is working on an app for Tildes, which bums me out, RiF was my weapon of choice.
I've only convinced one real life friend to become interested in reddit, I asked her if she'd heard about all the drama there, and found out she'd been using the official app all this time...she was super shocked when I told her the stories about peoples' phones heating up using that thing.
- Week 1
I like your optimism!
I think Spez is gambling on the apathy of his website's core audience and on moderators being unwilling to indefinitely lock their subreddits. Relatively few communities have vowed to close their doors indefinitely (/r/videos and /r/iphone are the only two big ones I'm aware of) and I also think a lot of major ones are unwilling to escalate their protests beyond the original planned 48 hour blackout.
At this point I predict that Reddit will survive this, even if they're going to lose a sizeable chunk of their user base by eliminating third-party apps. There are a sizeable number of moderators that are still willing to work with Reddit and they can definitely replace those who shut off their subreddits.
Digg v4 happened because a better alternative already existed in the form of Reddit. At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem, while many of its users joked that they were just a vessel for regurgitated content that was posted on Reddit the day before. The damage had already been done, to the point where users jumped ship in droves the moment Kevin Rose dropped the disastrous overhaul of Digg...
Rarely does internet slacktivism work, and there are still some scabs willing to jump the picket line and keep their subs operating as normal. Some of us remember the days of the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 boycott when everyone vowed to boycott the game over having no dedicated servers, then went out, purchased it en masse and made Activision Blizzard break sales records.
Whether Reddit make drastic improvements to the official Reddit app remains to be seen. If I've learned anything it's that Reddit's admins are snakes and you cannot trust them.
The only good that's come from this is that Lemmy and Tildes finally have active user bases. Never have I felt a sense of community from a Reddit alternative since the early days of Voat (long before it was commandeered by white supremacists.)
I don't see Lemmy replacing Reddit, since the fediverse is complicated by nature and Lemmy has similar issues to Mastodon, where the discoverability of content outside of your main instance is practically fucking nonexistent.
At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem
I do not disagree with anything you said, and I agree that Reddit (as they want it to be) will come out of this just fine. That being said, Reddit does have a lot of the same major problems Digg had at the time, especially astroturfing and spam content, and I don't expect that to go away. Over the past couple years most of the posts on the front pages are often bot generated and/or posted karma farms, and it's becoming more and more common to see bot brigades in the comments of everything, manipulating the dialogue.
I've commented loads on here that I haven't felt a sense of community on Reddit in years, and it's getting more and more cookie cutter and instagrammy by the day. It's become something I just mindlessly scroll through instead of ever really engaging with, and tons of the posts are really just socially engineered ads. I'm really liking Lemmy, it feels like a fresh start. I miss a lot of the content, but I love that it's more engaging. IDC if it doesn't become the most popular thing, if I can come here and actually engage with people/content rather than just amble through it apathetically, I'm 100% down.
To be fair Voat was commandeered almost immediately or at least within a few days. I remember bouncing back very fast when I found out specifically why so many going there wanted "free speech." I chose to eat corporate shit rather than that malignant anti-social shit at the time. I don't like eating any kind of shit, and it doesn't seem as likely here as it seems like social responsibility is generally being given precedence over allowing fascists to say whatever they want.
I removed my reddit app of choice (Sync), and left the spot on my home screen empty. I probably tapped that spot instinctively 20 plus times today. It's just muscle memory for what to pull up when I have some time to kill. The Fediverse seems like an estimated, but there is a shocking lack of cute animals here
Put Jerboa in that spot like I did and use that habit to your advantage!
It was really sad to go to my Reddit profile and see how long I've been using it.
To think that for over 13 years, I've been using Reddit daily and for MULTIPLE hours a day. It has probably caused untold amounts of impact on my growth as a person. Its like breaking up with a lifelong partner, what a strange feeling.
13 year club here too. It sure seems like a lot of us long timers have been the first to move. I guess there’s a certain sense of ‘I’ve seen where this goes’ from experience with other sites in the past.
I have typed the letter "o" for "old.reddit" about six or seven times today out of habit. Thanks to the Beehaw team for providing a space which is better than a simple substitute in many ways. I am simply incapable of operating any of the newer reddit interfaces, so once "old." is history that will be it for me totally.
I’ve been so happy with the tone and discussions here. I am hopeful that as we continue to grow we will see lots of people from Reddit, but that we will all check the reddit culture at the door. It feels really nice here.
Caught myself googling “something something Reddit” today and realized this is gonna be harder than I thought. Really liking it here though and hopefully this gets the user base up to a point I can start googling “something something beehaw”
The NSFW community (lemmyNSFW.com) has exploded due to the blackout.
Praise porn-Jesus, horny be his name.
Well, the Denver Nuggets finally won their first ever NBA championship while the NBA subreddit was closed. It'll be interesting to see what happens when the sub reopens since - from what I understand - the decision to close that sub was not very popular with the users.
How is it possible, that with 90% of subbreddits set to private, the number of posts and comments created on reddit do not decrease according to https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/?
Activity only decreased by 20-30% if I'm being generous looking at the graph. How is this possible, is the graph accurate? How can 10% of subreddits be so active, like nothing happened? That would meanthe remaining 70-80% of activity is happening in 10% of the subreddits which are still open! Which is craaazy.
I have a theory - maybe we are underestimated the amount of bots on the site and they operating like nothing happened in the open subreddits? If this would be the case (and I'm gonna enter speculation and conspiracy territory here), but what if certain parties have quotas to fulfill for advertisers or propaganda machines, so they have to post (using bots or other means)?
I struggle to find the cause of this anomaly, of course you wouldn't see 1:1 decrease in subbreddits going dark and activity, because people are subscibed to plethora of subbreddits. But I thought that it'll be at least 50-60% decrease in post activity. Worst case scenario is that these are real users creating real posts and comments, because that would make this protest moot - It would just show reddit management that the community doesn't matter, general public who come to the site will still interact with the remaining slop, advertisers rejoice.
If 200,000 people would rather figure out how to make all their individual forum softwares work together in synchrony than put up with your bloody app, Reddit, maybe you have a pretty shitty app?
Dunno. I never installed it coz I never install any apps if I can help it, and I know how to use a web browser. But if a quarter of a million people would rather subject themselves to the complexities of distributed information networks and the politics of inter-instance blocking than use your bloody app, Reddit, maybe you have a pretty shitty app?
It's like the kids today don't know what a web address is with their obsession with apps. They seem to prefer to download an executable than read a text document. If even them, a million zoomer kids who are normally obsessed with apps, if even they would rather entertain the idea of a communications commons not owned and controlled by oligarchs than use your app, then maybe you should have just used yer IPO money to buy Apollo?
Dunno. I've never installed either. Sounds sketchy. I distrust apps.
This morning I deleted all my posts, comments, and accounts on the aliensite. 4 accounts total, and over 10 years of data. I hope others will do the same. At least for the sake of the app devs. They deserve better.
There is something very cathartic about deleting 11 years worth of posts and comments....
I’ve been posting this to subs that haven’t blacked out:
Reddit wants to begin selling API data access to large AI companies at a really high margin so those AI companies can train their data on the content we generate and contribute to reddit, and reddit can make a shit ton of money on that.
This data API is also how third party apps and mod tools access reddit. Rather than charging apps a lower tier and AI companies a large one, reddit has instead decided to charge everyone for that data access.
As a result, not only are third party reddit apps going away because they’d have to charge huge fees to their users, but so are a lot of the tools that reddit’s unpaid volunteer moderators use to moderate subs, which means moderation quality is going to drastically drop soon.
In addition, the official reddit app is terrible for accessibility, and does not work with things like screen readers that blind or partially-sighted people use. These issues have been reported to reddit since alienblue became the official reddit app, reddit does not care to put money into fixing them. third party apps do this. people who rely on these apps to be able to even use reddit are basically getting kicked off reddit for being disabled.
All so reddit can cash in on all the content the communities of reddit produce, without compensating the content creators nor paying the unpaid volunteer moderators whose lives they just made way more difficult.
Louis Rossmann described it as “FU pricing“. This is a product they don’t want to sell. If someone is actually crazy enough to pay that price, they can certainly provide the service very easily with a huge margin.
Gathering all the remaining users under the same ad infested app was the main goal here. That’s where the real money is.
I just joined kbin and have no idea what i'm doing lol. ended up making this account on fedia and another on kbin.social since they can't seem to see the same posts. not sure what to do long term...
Reddit kinda feels like a sinking ship right now. I wonder how many subreddits will go public again?
Childish smirk of the day...
https://reddark.untone.uk/ shows that r/SexInFrontOfOthers is public.
I've been curious as to what the end user experience on reddit might look like today and tomorrow. The blackout tracker seems to show fairly typical activity though. https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/ That perplexes me.
Maybe people are still checking reddit like usual, but many posts are hours old in the private subreddits that they may subscribe to? I know a percentage of subreddits didn't go dark, but those wouldn't be big enough to cause engagement to stay at the usual levels. Anyone hazard a guess as to what's up?
Oh...thank you guys for keeping up with all the chaos from us new folks slamming your servers!
Is Beehaw accepting donations for server costs? I can only imagine that the hosting bill is going to be preeeeeetty steep this month…
Interesting. The comments are now lagging well below normal. Here's a screenshot from the blackout tracker. The red arrow shows how reddit is still spamming lots of new posts, but comments are much lower than usual. Normally, at the peak times, comments are at or even above the number of posts. Not today though.
