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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

#681

Post by onemiketwelve »

dbanon9 wrote: post #632
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question! And few people get to work at this scale, so it's not an unreasonable guess. I'll join you in speculating wildly about this, since, hey, it's kind of fun. IMHO sharding traffic by subreddit doesn't pass the smell-test, though. Different subreddits have very different traffic patterns, so the system would likely end up with hotspots continuously popping up, and it'd probably be toilsome to constantly ba…

A good, but wrong, assumption is to assume Reddit's engineers know what they're doing. The founding Reddit team was non-technical (Even Spez. I've been to UVA; it's not an engineering school; and spez had never done any real engineering before coming onto Reddit). They ran a skeleton crew of some 10ish people for a long time (none from any exceptional backgrounds. One of them was from Sun & Oracle, after their prime)…

I read this as a pretty scathing dressing down of incompetent engineering at reddit. But after having breakfast, what I'm realizing again is that perfect code and engineering are not required to make something hugely successful.

I've been parts of 2 different engineering teams that wrote crap that I would cuss out but were super succesfuly, and most recently I joined a team that was super anal about every little detail. I think business success only gets hindered on the extremes now. If you're somewhere in the middle, it's fine. I'd rather have a buggy product that people use than a perfect codebase that only exists on github.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#682

Post by dionidium »

wpietri wrote: post #552
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.

Hi! I've done a bunch of trust and safety work and I see this trope a fair bit. Please help me understand what the difference is between, say, platforming racist harassment because of a "political commitment to free speech" and platforming racist harassment because you just kinda like racist harassment? I get that it might be different in the heads of the people who have worked very hard to create those platforms. I'…

The argument goes like this:

There is probably a line. But you don't know where it is and neither do I. You and I might agree that X is to one side of that line, but if we ban that behavior, then we have initiated a process that we might call line-discovery -- the search for the line that X was to one side of -- and line-discovery is highly prone to outcomes that result in bans on content from the other side of that line. So we don't want to engage in line-discovery, even though there are obvious examples of things to one or the other side of the line.

You may think you can ban the obvious things without ultimately engaging in line-discovery, but, the argument goes, you are mistaken. You will ultimately find yourself doing line-discovery.

You start out with obvious-sounding prohibitions on racism and hate speech, but eventually you're arguing about, say, whether it's racist to report on polling showing that violent protests are unpopular. [0]

And that's because banning any speech always leads to line-discovery.

So it comes down to a question of which scenario is worse:

A. You ban obviously bad stuff while accepting some risk of banning things that aren't actually over the line.

B. You privilege all content to avoid that outcome.

Some people are outraged by this framing and think it's obvious that you would want to risk banning some behavior to the right side of the line if it means eliminating the most obnoxious speech. But, basically, that is not obvious to everyone, no matter how many times they are reminded that there is some really bad stuff out there. [1]

[0] https://reason.com/2020/08/27/protests-violence-david-shor-k...

[1] Interestingly, this is really not so different from the argument about evidentiary standards for punishing criminal behavior, except in that case the politics are flipped. There conservatives would rather risk punishing some innocent people if it means the absolute worst actors are guaranteed harsh punishment, but liberals think it's worth risking some amount of literal rape and murder in order to prevent punishing the innocent. So I think, actually, both sides are entirely capable of seeing this from the other side; they just don't want to.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#683

Post by Shocka1 »

kibwen wrote: post #180
tsunamifury wrote: post #84

Reddit being gone for a while actually makes me feel like the world is a better place. Somehow knowing even for a brief moment no one is there and I’m not missing out on anything makes me feel… more alive and excited to interact with the world. sounds bizarre I know… but I wish more social media shut down now.

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!)

I say this all the time - instead of Wednesdays though, I propose everyday.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#684

Post by nerdbert »

godshatter wrote: post #285
kibwen wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

In the world of Ready Player One, it was a terrible idea because most of the economic activity of that world passes through their servers. Stopping most economic transactions one day a week is maybe a little bit much. Here, it's a much better idea.

In the idiotic world of Ready Player One, the Jesus Gamer said that all kids would get five days of virtual school a week and then a minute later said that the entire system would be shut down for one of those days.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#685

Post by nerdbert »

ilyt wrote: post #485
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These asynchronous connections had terrible upload speed by design. As opposed to today, where connects have terrible uploads speed because ISPs don't want you to host servers. I've heard of people getting gigabit down, but only 16 mbps up.

Not really. For example cable internet (and ADSL) goes thru cable (shocking knowledge, I know). Cable have limited bandwidth, and as it is just a single cable, not RX/TX pair as it is for ethernet and it has limited bandwidth Which essentially means you have X bandwidth to distribute between upstream and downstream. And it's far more profitable to sell X 40/10 Mbit connections vs selling a bunch of 25/25 Mbit ones, w…

> Cable have limited bandwidth, and as it is just a single cable, not RX/TX pair as it is for ethernet and it has limited bandwidth

DOCSIS 4.0 supports 10Gb/s down and 6Gb/s up using that same coaxial cable that's been in your house for decades.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#687

Post by rldjbpin »

danron100 wrote: post #672
rldjbpin wrote: post #671

i am on the fence with this drama. while i have been struggling with using reddit for past few years, especially on mobile browser, i would like to see the company push through their objectives. to me, this situation highlights how much power mods have over a subreddit. while i recognize their role in maintaining communities without pay, the community exists because of all users that contribute to it. it didn't seem…

In a sub i manage (with 1k members), out of about 170 people who voted, 65% were in favour of participating in the protest. So i privated it for 2 days

i am no longer an active user to verify this, but i hope other subreddits had a similar approach to the blackout.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#688

Post by lcrz »

ChocMontePy wrote: post #253
lcrz wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is upset because reddit wants to make the API paid. Several 3rd party apps were looking forward to working with reddit in this regard. People are upset because: - Reddit has been terrible and dishonest in their communication - Reddit is dropping Twitter-like pricing out of the blue - These prices seem to have the goal of killing 3rd party apps instead of merely being ‘realistic’ or ‘fair’, like Reddit is claim…

> Reddit has been terrible and dishonest in their communication Partly true. They have been awful at communicating with the devs and with Reddit at large. The "dishonest" claim is debatable. > Reddit is dropping Twitter-like pricing out of the blue. False. That was a piece of dishonesty spread by the Apollo developer. Twitter's price is 3.5x Reddit's price, which is 3.6x Imgur's price. Reddit is midway between the tw…

Halfway logarithmically. Like 100 is halfway between 10 and 1000? That’s your argument irt the pricing?

If killing third parties wasn’t the goal, it’s very convenient that it killed so many third party apps, isn’t it?

It’s clear you haven’t seen communications from Reddit and the devs if you think that the people losing their livelihoods and projects they’ve been working on for years are somehow the bad guys. A lot of these devs would have been open to the proposed prices (or similar) if only Reddit didn’t give them only 4 weeks to come to terms with a multi-million price of doing business and implement any necessary changes. That’s a lot more than these apps currently make in revenue.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#689

Post by eloquenceN »

onemiketwelve wrote: post #681
dbanon9 wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good, but wrong, assumption is to assume Reddit's engineers know what they're doing. The founding Reddit team was non-technical (Even Spez. I've been to UVA; it's not an engineering school; and spez had never done any real engineering before coming onto Reddit). They ran a skeleton crew of some 10ish people for a long time (none from any exceptional backgrounds. One of them was from Sun & Oracle, after their prime)…

I read this as a pretty scathing dressing down of incompetent engineering at reddit. But after having breakfast, what I'm realizing again is that perfect code and engineering are not required to make something hugely successful. I've been parts of 2 different engineering teams that wrote crap that I would cuss out but were super succesfuly, and most recently I joined a team that was super anal about every little deta…

Agreed. In fact, I believe success stories actually skew the other way. Those that actually build something that gets off the ground and is successful will in many cases not have the time to write perfect code.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#690

Post by scubbo »

capableweb wrote: post #347
scubbo wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, define "endorsement". Permitting something to exist when you have the power to do otherwise is a mild form of endorsement. A commitment to free speech is, to an extent, an endorsement of all the speech that results.

> A commitment to free speech is, to an extent, an endorsement of all the speech that results. Absolutely not. I'd argue that anyone should be free to talk with others about their opinion, but that doesn't mean I agree with that opinion. And letting then speak without shutting them down doesn't mean I agree either, just means I agree that they should be able to speak freely. What kind of dystopian viewpoint is that?…

> I'd argue that anyone should be free to talk with others about their opinion,

I _think_ I agree with that. Don't hold me to it, but it feels right.

> but that doesn't mean I agree with that opinion.

Yup, sure, agreed.

> And letting then speak without shutting them down doesn't mean I agree either, just means I agree that they should be able to speak freely.

There is a world of difference between "not actively preventing someone from speaking" and "setting up a system whereby someone's speech is enabled and broadcast". Casting this to the real-world - if someone's yelling their opinions on a street corner, and I simply walk by without stopping them, then no, that's not an endorsement. But if I notice them yelling, and walk up and hand them a microphone - or (more closely mirroring social media setups) I install a public-access microphone, and stand there observing who uses it without trying to control it - then yes, through inaction I have endorsed what they choose to do with it.

> What kind of dystopian viewpoint is that? You go around stopping everyone from saying stuff you disagree with?

In areas I control and am responsible for, yes. If a guest in my home started spewing (what I consider to be) unacceptable speech, then (depending on my history with and pre-existing respect for them), I'd either take them aside and ask them to reconsider their choices, or jump straight to asking them to leave.

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