Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

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://old.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/1477psa/all_3_ar...

He admitted to doing it.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/23/reddit-huffman-trump/

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.

'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.

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!)