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Reddit was down for over two hours

reddit.statuspage.io

91–100 of 283 posts

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#91
post #27

Y'know, the toll that all this activity takes on Reddit's servers gave me an idea for a sort of distributed Reddit. News links and stories assorted into topic-based groups, with the option for users to comment or respond to others' comments in a threaded discussion. It would be completely decentralized and belong to the users, not some central media company. We could call it Users' Network, or USENET for short. We co…

Where is the new "alt."?

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i miss the fail whale. IMO, their javascript UX is awful... impossible to see all the comments in a thread! what sort of nonsense is that? old.reddit.com ftw

https://i.reddit.com/ ft-mobile-w

Wow it's so fast an the image links are links to actual images, not the post page with an image embedded on it.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#93
post #12

Reddit is the only major social media/aggregator I can think of that actually has to go offline for scheduled maintenance still. I can’t imagine the kind of shitshow it must be internally. Imagine if Facebook or Twitter had to go down regularly for “maintenance”. Heads would roll.

"We are a startup that inherited a 15 year old website" was one of the things that resonated when I worked there.

Facebook is Alexa #5 in the US and has ~40,000 employees. Reddit is #6 and has ~500 employees. Twitter is #17 and has ~4,000 employees. (Numbers taken from quick Google searches)

They have some super talented engineers that work miracles with band aids and bubble gum.

Edit: Yes I understand not all employees work on everything. I was trying to give a sense of scale. Reddit is a tiny company with a massive website and no way to make money. If you have ideas - they are hiring.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#94
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, who does the moderation, new group creation, and antispam? Those were always problems.

Exactly. Will this new platform provide a safe space for the brilliant minds at /r/fatpeoplehate? /s The problem with all anti-censorship platforms is that they become hate platforms by default, because only people who get deplatformed have an incentive to move there, and it’s mostly hateful loudmouths who get deplatformed.

Personally, I think the solution is just to give users options to censor others from their perspective instead of just trying to create some utopia that is free from hatred of any kind - which is impossible.

Personally, I prefer having these disgusting people out in the open. When they do something horrendous, the paper trail can be long and damning - making it much easier to convict them. These people are usually proud of their deviancy and advertise it without shame.

The notion that if we just ban all the sick people they will just go away and never do anything evil is ludicrous. The evil is already in their hearts, hiding it won't heal it.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#96
post #74
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much does reddit make, I wouldn't be surprised if it operates at a loss.

It definitely does, just like so many VC funded companies, but they could afford to fix their deploys. The reddit back end is notoriously bad and, judging by their new UI, it isn't getting better.

What's the point of making a site reliable if it costs you money to operate? Their strategy is totally different from a Twitter or facebook. All their cycles are busy trying to figure out how to turn a profit.

And the new ui is trash.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#97
post #93
post #12

Reddit is the only major social media/aggregator I can think of that actually has to go offline for scheduled maintenance still. I can’t imagine the kind of shitshow it must be internally. Imagine if Facebook or Twitter had to go down regularly for “maintenance”. Heads would roll.

"We are a startup that inherited a 15 year old website" was one of the things that resonated when I worked there. Facebook is Alexa #5 in the US and has ~40,000 employees. Reddit is #6 and has ~500 employees. Twitter is #17 and has ~4,000 employees. (Numbers taken from quick Google searches) They have some super talented engineers that work miracles with band aids and bubble gum. Edit: Yes I understand not all employ…

Meh... they could have rewritten the site from the ground up, including any sort of data migration, multiple times over by now. I have never worked there, but outside looking in, it seems like there is a significant lack of technical vision from them.

Other big players like Facebook, Twitter, etc, are literally inventing pivotal parts of the modern web technical stack. What has come out of reddit?

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#98
post #27

Y'know, the toll that all this activity takes on Reddit's servers gave me an idea for a sort of distributed Reddit. News links and stories assorted into topic-based groups, with the option for users to comment or respond to others' comments in a threaded discussion. It would be completely decentralized and belong to the users, not some central media company. We could call it Users' Network, or USENET for short. We co…

I've specced out a decentralized reddit alternative a little bit, but have too many side projects. Someone please take this and build it. Let me know if you try, would love to spectate and advise on development.

The key is there shouldn't be a globally consistent front page. Sorting should be done on an individual basis. Upvotes boost signal signal to peers and downvotes squelch. By propagating content scores transitively through the network proportionally to trust scores, users can moderate their own feeds by voting and managing their friend list.

Users have a peer list, containing a list of server/users on it. Each peer has a user-managed 'trust weighting'. Each user has a list of "good content" (ideally hash identified for content addressability), with each item having a score based on that user's votes and votes from peers, weighted by that users trust in that peer.

Periodically, your server contacts all of your peers, and asks them for their good content list. The scores from peers are multiplied by your own trust weight for that peer, and you build a personal "good content" list that merges the lists from each of your peers together (and drops insufficient scores).

You are presented with a score-descending-sorted page of content. Whenever you upvote something, it increases your score weight for that content as well as the trust weight for each peer who sent you the recommendation, and vice versa for downvotes. Votes are transmitted to peers as a crypto signature of the content hash, but when retransmitted to peer-of-peer, they only see the intermediary's aggregated and trust weighted merged scores.

The specifics of the algorithms on how you calculate and adjust weights can be configurable by each individual user, the protocol only cares that peers are able to produce some kind of score list.

Dividing content into topics is a bit trickier, could just label content with tags. I think it may be preferable for each user to have multiple topic focused 'personalities' that are basically distinct user accounts with unique peer lists and votes. In that way, I could follow Dave-gardening without having to follow Dave-sports.

For this example I'm using 1 user per server for simplicity, though not required. All users could be on same server, which is probably best for MVP to avoid implementing p2p networking stuff until validated.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#99
post #27

Y'know, the toll that all this activity takes on Reddit's servers gave me an idea for a sort of distributed Reddit. News links and stories assorted into topic-based groups, with the option for users to comment or respond to others' comments in a threaded discussion. It would be completely decentralized and belong to the users, not some central media company. We could call it Users' Network, or USENET for short. We co…

Sounds like Aether[1]. In contrast to the Usenet, it is peer-to-peer, instead of federated. It does also have moderation, voting, and a pretty UI – things that are arguably missing in the Usenet. (And it doesn't use blockchain.)

[1]: https://getaether.net/

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, the people who talk about USENET and IRC are people who don't want to be "updated" to what modern users demand. I don't know if you've had a look around you lately, but the modern internet is a dumpster fire. Anyways, ideally you would be able to connect to services with whichever client you want. You could use a pretty eye candy client, or then not. With the web, however, it's an impossible feat to impleme…

Modern internet is both good and bad. Depends on the site. Generalizations don't work. However if those technologies are to ever be popular than they'll need to be redesigned to keep pace with what the vast majority expect, which is in response to the OPs comment. Otherwise you can already go post on usenet right now. > "Anyways, ideally you would be able to connect to services with whichever client you want." Make i…

Is it companies, that would or should do it? Colleges and other publicly-funded entities are who did it the first time. Companies can only do what's profitable. (Or what they can convince investors will someday be profitable, but we can ignore that aberration in the long term.)
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