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Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

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Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#351

Post by sixothree »

bbbobbb wrote: post #217
memetomancer wrote: post #170

So... I visited Reddit before coming here and finding the HN thread... Most of the site is rebelling, but I took the time to visit, intending to give them impressions, just to see how they are holding up. And of course they aren't really holding up as we can see. But their handling is unbelievably tone deaf - I was greeted by the message that I broke Reddit. They gave me the grade of 'F'. I refreshed the page and the…

Those error pages are actually infuriating. Maybe I'm just getting older but seeing "You broke reddit" and all the other shit annoys the hell out of me. It's their website, the error should be "we fucked sometning up, sorry" and be done with it.

Agreed. I dislike all of the colorful cutesy stuff Google does to humanize their awfulness.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#352

Post by fotta »

according to [0], '“A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” said Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt.'

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/12/reddit-goes-down-just-as-a...

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#353

Post by flanbiscuit »

memetomancer wrote: post #170

So... I visited Reddit before coming here and finding the HN thread... Most of the site is rebelling, but I took the time to visit, intending to give them impressions, just to see how they are holding up. And of course they aren't really holding up as we can see. But their handling is unbelievably tone deaf - I was greeted by the message that I broke Reddit. They gave me the grade of 'F'. I refreshed the page and the…

> I was really just rubbernecking

I was thinking that because today is the first day of the protests, which have garnered a lot of attention by media and individuals, that traffic might actually spike because everyone is checking in to see how it's going.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#354

Post by nicolas_t »

cmh89 wrote: post #340
dionidium wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it would in turn be worth noting that the creators of reddit had a philosophical and political commitment to free speech that drove their light-touch approach to moderation. It's not like the existence of that subreddit is evidence of an endorsement on their part.

>And it would in turn be worth noting that the creators of reddit had a philosophical and political commitment to free speech that drove their light-touch approach to moderation That's nonsense. The Sears debacle showed that reddits leadership team was fine with deleting posts if it was going to cost them money to not delete them. That 'political commitment to free speech' sure disappeared quickly when r/jailbait and…

What was the Sears debacle?

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#355

Post by KnobbleMcKnees »

More speculation but seems logical: traffic is a) much different in size and patterns than usual and b) being driven to areas that usually have much lower traffic, meaning caching and scaling are both being forced up against patterns of site usage that have never been tested or planned for.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#356

Post by brookst »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #317
brookst wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Status pages are the worst of all things to work on. First, deciding what to put on them is PM hell. Is it customer-facing? Developer-facing? Both? Then, for each item, how do you test so you can be really sure? Half the time tests will produce either false negatives or false positives. If your test writes data (like, say, posting a comment), is it a meaningful test of it's to a test or demo topic? But if it's to rea…

Most of this is about automated status pages, but it doesn't apply to status pages where the incident response team manually says "yes there is a problem" and "ok all problems are fixed".

True, but those teams have the same problem. How do they know it's really fixed, for every scenario, for everyone, everywhere?

They have a pretty good idea if something internal is broken, but it's very hard to know that everything is fixed.

That said, I agree that manually updated pages are generally more useful and accurate than automated ones. It's just an extra tax on the incident team.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#357

Post by WindyLakeReturn »

roncesvalles wrote: post #329
dionidium wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it would in turn be worth noting that the creators of reddit had a philosophical and political commitment to free speech that drove their light-touch approach to moderation. It's not like the existence of that subreddit is evidence of an endorsement on their part.

Lascivious pictures of clothed children count as CSAM in many jurisdictions. Free speech is fine but did they not have lawyers until 2015?

At the time reddit was not some unknown back corner of the internet and had already begun working with law enforcement to enforce anti-CSAM laws due to material being treaded in private messages and private subreddits. That it took a media exposure take down the specific subreddit indicated that it was likely on the legal side of the line, through it was going close enough to the line to make others uncomfortable. If the material was actually illegal, wouldn't it have made reddit the largest clear-net site containing CSAM? In such a case, I find it hard to conceive that media exposure and not legal actions is why led to it shutting down, and with no admins being arrested it seems the most reasonable assumption left is that it was on the technically legal side.

This would likely be like the use of underage subjects in nudist art, painted, drawn, or photographed. Such art is generally not considered pornographic and are legally protected, and some even displayed in museums and the like, yet websites will still ban the material to not have any relationship to it and to not have users trying to push the boundary. I'm speaking to the extent that rules are enforced, many websites have issues with enforcing rules in general due to the amount of user generated content being much larger than the amount of moderation available, so there will be something slipping through moderation from time to time.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#359

Post by rozap »

pyeri wrote: post #137
paxys wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pointless speculation. Reddit has constant outages of this exact nature almost weekly. There's nothing special about this one.

But this time it's different because most high traffic subs have already gone dark, so the traffic must be minimal as there will be very few posters relative to what the server can handle. And yet, I'm getting "You broke reddit" when I try to visit which is quite ironical.

Maybe it's expensive to generate the 403 for a private subreddit.

A place I once worked had a 404 handler that was extremely expensive, but nobody noticed for a while because 404s are relatively rare. One time a vulnerability scanner took down the site because it was just hitting known vulnerability paths which all 404'd. The code that executed during a 404 was n^2.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#360

Post by Zak »

roncesvalles wrote: post #329
dionidium wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it would in turn be worth noting that the creators of reddit had a philosophical and political commitment to free speech that drove their light-touch approach to moderation. It's not like the existence of that subreddit is evidence of an endorsement on their part.

Lascivious pictures of clothed children count as CSAM in many jurisdictions. Free speech is fine but did they not have lawyers until 2015?

They didn't have image or video hosting at the time, just links and comments. Their legal exposure was pretty limited.
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