Reddit.com appears to be having an outage • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#491

Post by slg » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:36 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #446

renewiltord wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're the same thing and used interchangeably. The sexual abuse is from the sharing lascivious pictures of someone taken without their consent, with the additional context that children are not understood to be capable of consent for sharing lascivious pictures. It is not physical abuse.

That... is an abuse of the word abuse. Also wouldn't that logic apply to pictures that were originally taken openly and innocently?

Use of the images can be abusive even if the creation of them wasn't. Revenge porn is an obvious example. Even legally and consensually created images can be used to abuse someone.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#492

Post by Eisenstein » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:36 PM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #437

Mordisquitos wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

They're the same thing and used interchangeably. The sexual abuse is from the sharing lascivious pictures of someone taken without their consent, with the additional context that children are not understood to be capable of consent for sharing lascivious pictures. It is not physical abuse.

What would you call whatever that japanese underage comic thing is? It features no persons and no one was abused yet it still illegal. I don't object to the term as applied, but I don't particularly feel great about the word 'abuse' being used for cartoon characters since it degrades the experience of human survivors.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#493

Post by lillesvin » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:37 PM UTC

jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #451

r0bbbo wrote: 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 would imagine that a normal visit generates more backend traffic, given that it needs to fetch posts, thumbnails, etc. whereas a visit to a private sub wouldn't need to check more than authorization.

I could easily be wrong though, I haven't done web development for years.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#494

Post by hanspeter » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:38 PM UTC

codetrotter wrote: post #375

flutas wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reddit error pages are not following any kind of trend. They’ve been like that since for ever. No reason to get upset.

If Reddit didn't follow this trend, they created it.

The tongue in cheek communication and cute illustrations on error pages started with web 2.0 and is now so prevalent that a regular system error message is a refreshing experience.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#495

Post by Ajedi32 » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:38 PM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #472

Ajedi32 wrote: post #391

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).

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

Copyright/trademark violations, shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, direct personal threats of bodily harm, basically a lot of stuff which is already widely considered to not be protected speech legally, but which is "speech" (or perhaps "press") in the plain language sense of the term (and importantly, is not exactly an "idea" in the plain language sense of that term).

I think it helps strengthen the argument rhetorically, since people can't as easily use the existence of such "exceptions" as an argument for adding more, or bypass the principle entirely with slogans like "freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach". (Suppressing the "reach" of certain ideas obviously does inhibit their free exchange.)

This approach hasn't been "battle tested" yet though so we'll see how it goes in practice.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#496

Post by pseudalopex » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:39 PM UTC

dymk wrote: post #381

Mordisquitos wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No. CP is a term used by 4chan and people unfamiliar with the topic. The detection, prevention, and enforcement community uses the term CSAM.

Lawyers and courts say child pornography because laws are not restricted to sexual abuse material. Drawn child pornography is illegal in many places for example.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#497

Post by rightbyte » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:39 PM UTC

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #161

happytiger wrote: post #121

I’d imagine it’s the massive number of user delete requests of people wiping their accounts in protest.

Certainly an abnormal usage pattern - I've personally tried a handful of backup and delete scripts, and have been waking up a lot of cold storage today. But how many many non-cached requests does it take to overwhelm the servers? Obviously scraping my comments page for years-old data is going to hit the backend hard and isn't going to have a traffic pattern at all like the front page of my subscriptions, but I'd assu…

Many back-ends are a house of cards depending on some cache to keep it from crashing. It would not surprise me if some small number of simultaneous deleters would crash it.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#498

Post by philjohn » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:40 PM UTC

dymk wrote: post #381

Mordisquitos wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No. CP is a term used by 4chan and people unfamiliar with the topic. The detection, prevention, and enforcement community uses the term CSAM.

For important reasons. Also why "revenge porn" is now referred to as non-consensual intimate imagery.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#499

Post by mfer » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:43 PM UTC

lillesvin wrote: post #493

jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 would imagine that a normal visit generates more backend traffic, given that it needs to fetch posts, thumbnails, etc. whereas a visit to a private sub wouldn't need to check more than authorization. I could easily be wrong though, I haven't done web development for years.

They use a microservice architecture. Some services could scale well in servicing all those assets. What handles checking access to private subs may not.

You can’t treat the scaling as a binary feature, that it does or doesn’t

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#500

Post by sleight42 » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:46 PM UTC

jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #451

r0bbbo wrote: 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.

Having worked at this scale, this is a fine guess! This scenario would have been a distant edge case for them. They likely didn't optimize for it. BOOM.