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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

#591

Post by comprev »

RoyGBivCap wrote: post #523
comprev wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be but the version I remembered was trying to tell someone the website over the phone. Perhaps someone on HN has a more reliable source than my brain?

How do you create the name for a website by trying to tell someone how to get to it over the phone? Doesn't the DNS entry have to exist first?

"Hey check out this website I discovered - it's called Slashdot" "It's called what!?" "Slashdot" "How do you spell that?" "http://slashdot.org" "Hang on, what? How many slashes and dots?"

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#592

Post by thesh4d0w »

cyral wrote: post #562
burnte wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal guess is it's down on purpose so they can say only 5% of subs who said they would go dark actually did, we just happened to have a service outage that day so they can push their own narrative t investors. Spez doesn't care anymore, he's focused on that IPO payday and to tell with everyone else. He's a liability to the company now, but the board isn't acting.

Here's a site which tracks how many subs have been made private. It's actually crazy that it's up to 93% of them now: https://reddark.untone.uk/

The site is decieving, it's 93% of the ones that committed to going dark. It's not 93% of all subreddits.

If you search for r/news for example, it's nowhere on that page.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#593

Post by Ajedi32 »

arp242 wrote: post #569
Ajedi32 wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think flag burning and provocative art are unquestionably intended to convey "ideas". In fact, they fit into that category far more cleanly than they do into "speech" in my opinion. Nudity... depends on the purpose but probably not. I agree that's unfortunate if your stance is that there should be no restrictions on porn, but I'm not sure the arguments for why freedom of speech is a good idea really apply to porn i…

> I think flag burning and provocative art are unquestionably intended to convey "ideas". That seems very open to interpretation to me; it seems to me these kind of things express a "feeling" much more than an "idea", and they might also be considered "antisocial" that you mentioned in your previous comment. I meant "nudity" only in the sense of "nudity", nothing more. e.g. "I want to make a nudist TV cooking program…

Yeah, I suppose there is some ambiguity there. Though I'd argue a standard like "does this harm people?" would even more open to interpretation and prone to abuse. Just about any idea can be framed as "harmful" to some person or group given a sufficient level of motivated reasoning (in fact, almost all modern cases of mass censorship seem to try to justify themselves that way). I much prefer a clear principle with few or no exceptions.

I suppose there may be room for both. "The freedom to exchange ideas" is after all a subset of "freedom of expression" (though not necessarily of "freedom of expression, with a bunch of exceptions").

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#594

Post by paulmd »

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.

Yup, this seems super plausible. Even things like the frontpage feed and user comment history probably work on the assumption that most of the data they're pulling is probably visible (which leads to the "just filter it in the backend" approach), but also every external link or bookmark into a now-private sub will trigger the same kind of check.

This is likely shifting load in very unpredictable ways... I'm sure a sibling comment is right that it's probably less load overall in general, but it'll be going down codepaths that aren't normally being exercised by >95% of requests and aren't working on the assumption that virtually all content is being hidden.

There's probably some microservice instances that are currently melting themselves into a puddle until they can deploy additional instances, additional DB shards, or roll out patches to fix dumb shit that wasn't dumb until the usage assumptions were suddenly inverted. Meanwhile there's tons of other instances that are probably sitting idle.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#595

Post by strato-cumulus »

AnonCoward42 wrote: post #573
djcannabiz wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind explaining what #Stolzmonat means or what is behind it? I see that it is german for pride month. Is it meant to be ironic or something like that?

[flagged]

I'd be all up for an initiative that attempts to burst the liberal bubble which seems to reject the possibility that people have other things to do than follow the latest inclusivity trends online, but come on. You know well what this is about. Had to scroll like 3 posts down to find out that this panders to reactionary clowns[0].

If this were a protest I would expect polemic discourse, yet the "official account" is just throwing shit around and screaming with excitement when someone "gets offended"[1].

[0] https://twitter.com/BjoernHoecke/status/1664190277282611200 [1] https://twitter.com/stolzmonat

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#596

Post by Sebb767 »

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.

They'd just replace their unpaid workers by paid ones and annoy the userbase even more in the process. Doesn't sound like a great plan.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#597

Post by FractalParadigm »

CodeCompost wrote: post #550
award_ wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, this is definitely just speculation, but I think this is it. Code/queries that worked fine at small load for private subs just doesn't work at scale when tons of subs are private.

Isn't the source code of Reddit on GitHub? At least it used to be...

They stopped updating/supporting the code about 6 months before the big redesign (last push Oct '17, redesign launched Apr '18). Call me a bit of a conspiracy-theorist, but they just happened to raise $200 million on their Series C less than 3 months prior to abandoning their commitment to open-source.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#598

Post by ben7799 »

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. Probably 50% of the subs I subscribed to are gone, and some of the others have deleted all the content and locked posting to the sub.

Others look like they got the hostile takeover and a new mod.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#599

Post by zeruch »

ecommerceguy wrote: post #586

How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake Accounts https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t... Reddit has always seemed to have gotten a pass when it comes to being a cesspool of fake accounts, what we would call bots today. I'm really hoping it fails, it's leadership team has always been amongst the worst of the tech companies.

I think you're being a bit overblown. If it was just bots, it would have fizzled out sooner; the bot account trash has waxed and waned over time, but I suspect the big reason it worked is that for years it allowed any subcommunity to emerge naturally rather than trying to predicatively shape it.

And there are many worse examples of leadership in tech than Reddit. If anything until recently most of its C-suite historically (post founders) has been uninteresting enough to care. No one on the scale of a Gates, Neuman, Ellison, etc.

The recent turdstorm however, does signal a likely lamentable shift downward.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#600

Post by AnonCoward42 »

strato-cumulus wrote: post #595
AnonCoward42 wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'd be all up for an initiative that attempts to burst the liberal bubble which seems to reject the possibility that people have other things to do than follow the latest inclusivity trends online, but come on. You know well what this is about. Had to scroll like 3 posts down to find out that this panders to reactionary clowns[0]. If this were a protest I would expect polemic discourse, yet the "official account" is…

[flagged]
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