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Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

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Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#111

Post by joecot »

stale2002 wrote: post #106
joecot wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better protest would have been for the moderators to all stop moderating. Turn off their automod filters, allow all posts. Show reddit what happens when their volunteer moderators just stop.

The problem with this strategy is that it gives reddit a valid excuse to remove subreddit mods. Having your sub be unmoderated is against reddit TOS, whereas taking a sub private is not yet against the official TOS. Process and technicalities like this matter a lot and can effect a platforms actions.

I agree that taking the subs private for 48 hours is a good first step. And I agree that subs staying private indefinitely is a good next step.

But if neither make headway, just going unmoderated is the logical next step. Yeah, reddit could take over moderating the subreddits. They can also do that if they're set private. But they don't want to. They outsourced that to volunteer moderators so they could get free labor. If they want to run their own moderation, and submit their own content, the reddit corporation can have fun with that.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#112

Post by JohnFen »

chx wrote: post #105
cryptonector wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the theory?

18 U.S.C. §§ 1030(a)(5)(B) > intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, recklessly causes damage; I would think it's reasonably easy to establish mens rea when someone switches their sub from public to private and back every few hours, even if manually done because what else would they want to do but take down Reddit? Not to mention the punishes much harshly "c…

IANAL either, but my reading of that is the "and" in there is important. That is, you'd have to be "intentionally accessing a protected computer without authorization" and recklessly cause damage.

Reddit mods are not accessing a protected computer without authorization.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#113

Post by btmiller »

seydor wrote: post #91

I think reddit will never be the same after this, not because of the API thing (I dont agree with the blackouts), but because it shows how much they neglected their website. Over the years they have made it impossible to compete with the established subreddits. They have allowed a single uniform mob to take over the site, establish themselves as permanent tyrants and grow their ban lists to enormous scale. Even today…

The subreddit experience is bifurcated into (at least) two camps: big/popular/default or small/curated/niche. The tyrannical behaviors are most often found in the former camp where being a moderator is synonymous with “internet power”. The latter is populated by enthusiasts tending to their communities.

I agree that Reddit won’t be the same after this, but there’s just not a ton of remaining value in the big defaults. They’re already plagued with low value, low effort content, low cardinality content. The true damage that’s being done right now is to the small communities which represent(ed) the best of Reddit. Out of the spotlight but deep in quality content for those that care about the topic. The inherent risk of stability is more certain now with Reddit’s new policies. And I suspect now with many subreddits weighing indefinite shutdowns that many users (perhaps more importantly: the best content creators) will scatter to the wind for greener pastures. Those that are left are given crappy apps, lots of ads, and hollow communities eagerly looking for something better.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#114

Post by kenhwang »

klodolph wrote: post #25
freespirit77 wrote: post #17

Could be due to home feeds not having enough cached content as a lot of the first page posts went private and had to be skipped? Would have led to have to go deeper in lists of posts to fill the first page and causing more cache misses and db reads and performance issues.

The way Reddit displays content is basically all caches, as far as I can tell. Every query you do is supposed to directly hit a cache of 1000 objects (like comments or posts). You can’t go past 1000, either through the web interface or through the API. Kinda frustrating design, IMO, speaking as an end-user.

It was always obvious when you scrolled past the cached content because errors or timeouts would start happening pretty frequently.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#115

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

jklinger410 wrote: post #72
sofixa wrote: post #29

> A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” Calling bullshit on that one. If they had expected stability issues, and knew exactly which subreddits will go private and when, how is it possible they had so much "anticipated issues"?

> and knew exactly which subreddits will go private and when As someone who is close to a reddit mod, they did not know which subs would go private

I don’t say this snidely, but more than 7,000 subs openly committed to going private in advance of today.

I’m sure someone somewhere at Reddit was surprised by sub X or Y going private, but if they were surprised at half the largest subs that went private, then that would be as sad as it is amusing.

Edit: typo

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#116

Post by EA-3167 »

graeme wrote: post #104
superkuh wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, there's plenty of people just waiting to take over even the smallest of niche subs. I saw it firsthand back during the 2nd wave of gentrification in spring 2018 when a bunch of commercially uncomfortable subreddits like r/gundeals and their users (like my 2008 reddit account) were banned. The subreddits I moderated like r/radioastronomy were given to other users to moderate within a month or two. Reddit eventual…

I checked into the history: 1. A reddit request was made in 2018 when you were banned. This was manually approved by the admins: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/8m8cdm/reque... 2. The new mod heavily restricted posts, seemingly for three years. They declined to reply to messages for nine months, until a new Reddit request happened on Jan 3 2021. A comment in that thread said "there hasn't been a new p…

I'm pretty sure that Reddit doesn't have enough paid employees to undertake that sort of vetting at the scale required, even if they wanted to. I think they're probably just hoping and praying that this all blows over, that most mods are more addicted to their communities than anything else.

It's a very cynical move, but you've laid out in exquisite detail why it's their ONLY move, other than walking back their policy. While the company as a whole would benefit from that walkback, I think Mr. Huffman himself would probably lose his job.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#117

Post by phil21 »

btmiller wrote: post #113
seydor wrote: post #91

I think reddit will never be the same after this, not because of the API thing (I dont agree with the blackouts), but because it shows how much they neglected their website. Over the years they have made it impossible to compete with the established subreddits. They have allowed a single uniform mob to take over the site, establish themselves as permanent tyrants and grow their ban lists to enormous scale. Even today…

The subreddit experience is bifurcated into (at least) two camps: big/popular/default or small/curated/niche. The tyrannical behaviors are most often found in the former camp where being a moderator is synonymous with “internet power”. The latter is populated by enthusiasts tending to their communities. I agree that Reddit won’t be the same after this, but there’s just not a ton of remaining value in the big defaults…

> The tyrannical behaviors are most often found in the former camp where being a moderator is synonymous with “internet power”.

What's old is new again, I suppose!

Similar happened on IRC back in the day. All the big channel wars and drama were over the big popular channels for internet points. I certainly participated in my fair share.

Then you had the small channels of folks who were just pretty chill chatting about whatever random topic of interest.

Might be nostalgia, but I still think the best balance of this was the phpbb/vbulletin era. The amount of "reference material" lost behind the walled gardens is crazy.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#118

Post by EA-3167 »

poyu wrote: post #96
Tao3300 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or rolling out the big blackout override switch

Easy: ``` UPDATE subreddits SET is_private = FALSE WHERE is_private = TRUE AND updated_at BETWEEN 2023-06-11 AND 2023-06-12; ``` Bonus: Run it every hour

I don't think anyone doubts that Reddit could pretty easily unlock those subs, but without mods there to run them it would be a legal nightmare. How long before illegal material was flooding the site beyond the capacity of the admins alone to manage?

I'd also worry that if Reddit moved in that direction, the mods would feel like they didn't have control over their own subs and bail. I don't believe that Reddit can afford that, especially given how many subs and what %age of the user base we're talking about here.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#119

Post by Timon3 »

poyu wrote: post #96
Tao3300 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or rolling out the big blackout override switch

Easy: ``` UPDATE subreddits SET is_private = FALSE WHERE is_private = TRUE AND updated_at BETWEEN 2023-06-11 AND 2023-06-12; ``` Bonus: Run it every hour

Aaaaand suddenly hundreds of private subs are public because they changed anything else :)

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#120

Post by Tao3300 »

EA-3167 wrote: post #118
poyu wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy: ``` UPDATE subreddits SET is_private = FALSE WHERE is_private = TRUE AND updated_at BETWEEN 2023-06-11 AND 2023-06-12; ``` Bonus: Run it every hour

I don't think anyone doubts that Reddit could pretty easily unlock those subs, but without mods there to run them it would be a legal nightmare. How long before illegal material was flooding the site beyond the capacity of the admins alone to manage? I'd also worry that if Reddit moved in that direction, the mods would feel like they didn't have control over their own subs and bail. I don't believe that Reddit can af…

> How long before illegal material was flooding the site beyond the capacity of the admins alone to manage?

I guess that depends on how many people are willing to risk prison just because they're mad at Reddit. Or on what automatic moderation capabilities Reddit has. Not a moderator, so I honestly don't know how much work it does or doesn't take. They probably count on volunteer mods to filter spam and whatnot, but for legal compliance? Highly doubtful.

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