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Reddit was down for over two hours

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Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#101

Post by mehhh »

Sendotsh wrote: post #35
bitwize wrote: 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…

Sign me up. I’d happily contribute to that as much as I can, whenever my parents aren’t using the phone line.

Lemmy is a federated alternative to Reddit: https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy

Edit: Check out the dev instance of Lemmy! https://dev.lemmy.ml/

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#102

Post by paxys »

mike_d wrote: post #93
dymk wrote: 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…

Facebook the company has 40,000 employees, but I'm willing to bet the total number of engineers working on facebook.com vs reddit.com isn't too different.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#103

Post by function_seven »

_asummers wrote: post #80
thrownblown wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget to turn off call waiting. I always forgot to turn off call waiting....

I'm showing my youth here, but this is a legitimate question. Isn't call waiting just a thing that exists on the line? Did phones used to have a switch to toggle that? And what was the harm in keeping it on? When I had dial up, I don't recall having to consider call waiting.

Call Waiting used to be a feature that you paid monthly for.

As was Caller ID, Three Way Calling, Busy Number Redial, etc.

It's amazing how much incumbent telcos nickled and dimed little features like this. I think it was a couple bucks a month to have that feature.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#104

Post by [deleted] »

bitwize wrote: 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…

[deleted]

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#105

Post by Throw_Away_6381 »

Klonoar wrote: post #53
manigandham wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except UX is everything. 100s of billions in corporate value are based on nothing more than better UX. If only everyone who talks about usenet, IRC, and the rest could actually be bothered to update the experience to what modern users demand.

Citing UX in a thread about Reddit, the company with an almost universally hated redesign that moved away from a mostly text-based condensed format is... interesting.

I guess that is only the case for the HN bubble and a loud minority. Also, people are always complaining about UI changes. Personally, I prefer the re-design, even though it has a few flaws. The old design was awful.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#106

Post by Deimorz »

boobePhuu7iet7i wrote: post #39
dymk wrote: 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.

Do we know this was scheduled maintenance and not some kind of unexpected outage?

This definitely wasn't scheduled. Reddit does still do scheduled maintenance occasionally though (not often, usually only for something like a database version upgrade), and I think they're talking about that, not this specific incident.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#107

Post by sha666sum »

Alex3917 wrote: post #83
sha666sum wrote: post #62

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…

> the people who talk about USENET and IRC are people who don't want to be "updated" to what modern users demand. IRC is objectively terrible. If you ask a question, the only way to get the answer is if you stay logged in until someone answers you. That's like buying a phone that doesn't ring unless you're already holding it up to your ear, or an email client that deletes all your email unless you happen to be lookin…

I agree.

What makes IRC good is that it's a text-only chat with a wide range of highly configurable, blazing fast clients. Not supporting images, quoting or reactions could be considered a feature, since these distract from the actual conversation at hand (consider newbies clogging the conversation with screenshots, or 100 people adding reaction emojis to a message).

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#108

Post by mehhh »

Alex3917 wrote: post #83
sha666sum wrote: post #62

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…

> the people who talk about USENET and IRC are people who don't want to be "updated" to what modern users demand. IRC is objectively terrible. If you ask a question, the only way to get the answer is if you stay logged in until someone answers you. That's like buying a phone that doesn't ring unless you're already holding it up to your ear, or an email client that deletes all your email unless you happen to be lookin…

I disagree with your false equivalency. IRC is akin to a cellphone without voicemail, as when your disconnected from the network (cellular or IRC) you just don't get communications.

Scrollback and voicemail can be useful, but a good chunk of the population does not want either, hence unread backscroll and unconfigured/full voicemail boxes being very common.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#109

Post by hu3 »

mike_d wrote: post #93
dymk wrote: 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…

Not really a miracle. Reddit software is magnitudes simpler than Facebook.

Not to mention the quality is often sub-par. For example, many hate their mobile app with a passion and search field could as well just not exist when I tried.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#110

Post by stevenpetryk »

paxys wrote: post #31
coryrc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? 24/7 builds up to fragility like the NYC subway system or has huge costs. It's social media, not a hospital.

A website is not a subway system. There are no "huge costs" to having basic rolling deployments set up. In fact it's likely more expensive to have extended outages and maintenance windows, because it shows that there are humans running commands behind the scenes rather than automation.

Just wondering (sort of—I'm also slightly trying to point out that you're being a bit of an armchair Reddit ops person :)

What makes you think that the issue Reddit faced today would be fixed by rolling deploys?

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