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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

#661

Post by wpietri »

redeeman wrote: post #649
wpietri wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intent matters sometimes . To some people . But here, in either case the intent is to enable terrible people to, e.g., shout the n-word at people. So I don't see much of a difference in those terms.

how about this example: twitter would silence and deplatform some guy using the oh so terrible "n-word" ("because sticks and stones may..." is not a thing anymore). Now because this person is deplatformed, I cannot find his "hatespeech" when doing a quick background check, so I hire him in my company as responsible for recruiting. Now he makes sure no "n-words" get employed. big win? whomever votes to silence the guy…

If the only possible way you can catch a bigoted manager is by hoping that he spent a lot of time hurling racial abuse at Black people under his own name, then I think you really need to work on your management processes.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#662

Post by wpietri »

jnky wrote: post #653
wpietri wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intent matters sometimes . To some people . But here, in either case the intent is to enable terrible people to, e.g., shout the n-word at people. So I don't see much of a difference in those terms.

Well it obviously mattered enough for the Founding Fathers of the US to enshrine freedom of speech in the Bill of Rights, and in the last 200-ish years it also mattered enough for US courts not to overturn or politicians of various parties to change it. Now where I'm from (Germany), not just "hate speech" is against the law, but it's also unlawful to insult another person. It's complicated, but for the latter it's mo…

You're conflating a lot of things here. One is the free exchange of ideas with freedom to harass people. Another is legal versus socially accepted. A third is the difference between "the cops should be able to arrest your for X" and "I am choosing to spend my days creating a platform for X". These are all importantly different.

You're also shading over exactly who gets free speech. If digital Klansman get to freely harass black people, many of those black people will not participate in public spaces, silencing them. Indeed, that sort of ethnic cleansing is often the goal of racial abuse. See, e.g., Loewen's "Sundown Towns". So whatever "free speech absolutists" think they're up to, in practice the result is often a diminishing of the free exchange of ideas that the Founding Fathers were clearly pursuing.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#663

Post by humansubjects »

commandlinefan wrote: post #574
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

> a failed attempt to re-open all closed subreddits and instate their own moderators My first thought this morning was "if I was reddit, I would re-open all closed subreddits and instate my own moderators"... I'm kind of surprised they didn't. I'd have to imagine that if they wanted to, the attempt wouldn't fail - this seems like it could be done almost trivially.

I think you are underestimating the amount of unpaid labor that keeps reddit functioning

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#665

Post by cranekam »

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.

If a DB check is needed to see if a sub is private or not it has to happen for every request. You can’t just limit the check to private subs because it’s not known if they are private or not at the time.

Reddit goes wrong often so I expect this outage could have any number of causes.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#666

Post by dendriti »

jnky wrote: post #653
wpietri wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intent matters sometimes . To some people . But here, in either case the intent is to enable terrible people to, e.g., shout the n-word at people. So I don't see much of a difference in those terms.

Well it obviously mattered enough for the Founding Fathers of the US to enshrine freedom of speech in the Bill of Rights, and in the last 200-ish years it also mattered enough for US courts not to overturn or politicians of various parties to change it. Now where I'm from (Germany), not just "hate speech" is against the law, but it's also unlawful to insult another person. It's complicated, but for the latter it's mo…

I don't think this is a very accurate description of how things work in Germany. It's exceedingly rare in any Western jurisdiction for the aggrieved party to press charges. This power is usually left to government prosecutors, who are probably more impartial than the complainant.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#667

Post by numpad0 »

wpietri wrote: post #660
numpad0 wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it won't work. Freedom of speech limited to well composed political speech is not what it sounds. Modern day China(PRC) guarantees in the constitution that kind of freedom of speech, just they label any speeches that isn't conformant to current Party statements to be terrorism conspiracy. Even Nazi Germany had that constitutional clauses. It just starts from porn and ends in gas chambers. And in the middle is…

I dare you to make less sense. But if you try, please start with something more related to what I actually said, thanks.

So you haven't seen how a real communist party label opposing voices as not-a-speech? They literally do that. You'd think the problem is in their arbitrary mislabeling, not the selective application of freedom, sure, it isn't a problem at all so long you're the chooser.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#669

Post by jallen_dot_dev »

cranekam wrote: post #665
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.

If a DB check is needed to see if a sub is private or not it has to happen for every request. You can’t just limit the check to private subs because it’s not known if they are private or not at the time. Reddit goes wrong often so I expect this outage could have any number of causes.

> You can’t just limit the check to private subs because it’s not known if they are private or not at the time.

That's not necessarily true. Perhaps the status of subreddits is cached (because there's no reason to hit the DB 100 times/second to check if r/funny is private or public). But for a given request to a private sub, it would need to check each user.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#670

Post by Timon3 »

godshatter wrote: post #651
Timon3 wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not work for Reddit. Maybe they have some press contact info on their page you could try? Or Twitter or something?

That was more of a rhetorical question.

Which one of these possibilities is more likely?

a) it was the incredibly rare event affecting most of the popular content on the page, which the host themselves state it was

b) it was something completely unrelated

I know which one I'd put money on!

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