Live data from Hacker News

Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

news.ycombinator.com

471–480 of 696 posts

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like what he's done one bit, nor him personally, but this is a really big stretch and not really the level of comment HN should strive for. EDIT: to clarify -- a big stretch to connect editing comments (which was well-known to have happened) with other actions.

He admitted to doing it. https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/23/reddit-huffman-trump/

"Openly admitting" has a very different connotation than "fessing up after you get caught".

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is partly why I now prefer the term "free exchange of ideas" over "freedom of speech". I believe it more closely captures the essence of what makes free speech worth protecting, while also conveniently excluding stuff like this (among other things, like spam or antisocial behavior).

Interesting rhetorical move. What other kinds of communications are you in favour of censoring?

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#473
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could also make a guess that the blackout has changed how their normal traffic patterns operate, causing some issues with autoscaling/hot partitions.

Yeah, my assumption was that something in some layer of their application isn’t well optimized when asked to return posts from a subreddit that has “gone dark” in whatever fashions the mods chose to do that. For example, maybe it causes reads from the database take a lot longer than they normally would, locking up the database or causing the process the crash (again, that’s just pure speculation).

I'm guessing hit on the open subreddit mostly goes directly out of caching layer while hit on private one incurs DB hit to check whether user belongs there

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mean it's also worth noting that spez was CEO of Reddit and subreddits like that were allowed to exist for many, many more years.

[deleted]

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#475
post #6

Lots of speculation on Twitter about this—a failed attempt to re-open all closed subreddits and instate their own moderators. I can't imagine it'd be that, although I do enjoy the conspiracy, and more likely they were using the window of reduced traffic to make some larger changes and they went awry

Wild guess: visiting a private sub requires an extra call to a service/db to check if the user can view it. Normally there are only a small number of these checks because private subs were usually small communities. Now, many large subs having switched private is causing some poor mircoservice somewhere to get hammered.

I never worked at this scale, but could it also be that different subs are horizontally scaled and with so many people reverting to the subs that are still open the load is unevenly balanced?

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#476
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree, I really long for the days of simple "there was an error" messages. This trend of "you bwoke us" or "OOPSIE WOOPSIE!! Uwu We made a fucky wucky!! A wittle fucko boingo! The code monkeys at our headquarters are working VEWY HAWD to fix this!" messages is infuriating to me even more than a simple error.

I intentionally write boring, plain English, mostly painfully bland error messages for this exact reason.

I long for the intellectual honestly and emotional sturdiness of “Error 123 in Handler XYZ. You should never see this.”

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is partly why I now prefer the term "free exchange of ideas" over "freedom of speech". I believe it more closely captures the essence of what makes free speech worth protecting, while also conveniently excluding stuff like this (among other things, like spam or antisocial behavior).

Freedom of speech is a legal concept that clearly doesn't cover CSAM. Free speech is a principle but it also doesn't cover CSAM. Fire in a crowded theater doesn't actually work as a legal defense but obscenity does

That's another reason I prefer the term "free exchange of ideas"; by using different wording it helps avoid the confusion created by people conflating the general principal of such freedoms with any specific legal provisions that exist in the U.S. constitution. (Though I agree in this case my wording is in agreement with how the courts define "freedom of speech" in practice.)

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#479
post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Slashdot a reference to the current directory in Linux?

I feel like no, trying it out (though on my Mac using zsh and not a 25 year old Linux box) the slash being first makes it reference the root directory.

yes, the correct syntax would be: ./ not /.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#480

Today is the coordinated reddit "protest" day. Some ideas off the top of my head... DDOS activity from pissed off stakeholders related to the protest System ops using their access to further blackout action A botched administrative action to reopen subs

Maybe they wanted to hide the protesting subs by making all reddit black out.
Post reply on HN