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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

#21
post #11

How long before they admins swoop in and change ownership of the blacked out subreddits?

What does that really accomplish? Reddit mods are often bad enough as is, imagine what Reddit scab mods would be like. It would also be a huge invitation for the displaced the rest to make life unbearable for those new mods and the handful of admins overseeing them. Reddit as a community would make for one hell of an intellectual DDOS.

I seem to remember someone saying something about how a small number of users mod the vast majority of Reddit in terms of the number of users within the subreddits they control. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a black market for mod status. Might not be such a bad thing if the establishment was totally uprooted.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#24

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.

Very likely; before the crash, I noticed that the home page failed to load, but individual subreddits continued to load.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#25

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.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#26
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that really accomplish? Reddit mods are often bad enough as is, imagine what Reddit scab mods would be like. It would also be a huge invitation for the displaced the rest to make life unbearable for those new mods and the handful of admins overseeing them. Reddit as a community would make for one hell of an intellectual DDOS.

I seem to remember someone saying something about how a small number of users mod the vast majority of Reddit in terms of the number of users within the subreddits they control. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a black market for mod status. Might not be such a bad thing if the establishment was totally uprooted.

I suspect that still results in a huge amount of moderation work to do … Reddit’s advantage is that people do that for Reddit for free.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#27

How long before they admins swoop in and change ownership of the blacked out subreddits?

That would seem to setup a situation where Reddit has to fill a gap of a huge amount of moderation work that they previously didn’t have to do / people did that for them for free.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#28

How long before they admins swoop in and change ownership of the blacked out subreddits?

I personally believe they will wait to see which ones remain shuttered. 48 hours is not very long to wait to maintain your free civilian labor. After that, they'll definitely reclaim the shuttered subreddits with new moderators.

Reddit is odd.... while most communities hate the mods, they hate admins far more. Admins taken over a subreddit would kill it in the eyes of the users.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#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"?

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#30

How long before they admins swoop in and change ownership of the blacked out subreddits?

The main reason why reddit works as a platform is because its mods and subreddit regulars do a lot of unpaid work. Where is reddit going to find enough people to work for free on such short notice?
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