What happens if the mods were to coordinate cycling subs from private to public?
They'll get replaced faster than they otherwise would have
Reddit hasn't replaced them for 10+ years. Free labour is not easy to find these days
Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
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Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Posted elsewhere, but yeah that's my theory too (having actually helped built it in the first place). My guess is the caches got blown out because the entire system is built on the idea that most people are looking at the most popular content. When you close down all the most popular content, you have to dig deep into the long tail for fresh content. Also, my guess is that the code for building homepages is not optim…
Makes sense to me. I remember several lunch conversations at FB about whether or not we even could restart the site with totally cold caches. I’m sure it was possible but it wouldn’t have been clean or pretty.
> I remember several lunch conversations at FB about whether or not we even could restart the site with totally cold caches
so you're saying, we just have to knock it out once, and it'll be gone forever? that makes things easier ...
Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the admins will care more about the appearance of "business as usual" in the face of an IPO than the opinions of the users who would notice a moderator replacement. In their eyes, this is all nothing more than a tempest in a teapot; a small pothole on the road to public investor dollars.
the API thing was that, it is moved beyond that now, and admin action on that level will make the API issue an after thought... If they do that, forget IPO, there will be no more reddit at all. right now they already missed the IPO point years ago, today for a company to have a successful IPO they need more than good MAU numbers, and this API change was never going to get to the profitability numbers they need for a…
They seem to honestly believe that increasing monetization is an equally existential question for the platform. IPO or no IPO, they can't run off of VC funding forever, and they say they aren't currently profitable.
Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
#64It'd be funny if the engineers at reddit decided now was a good time to upgrade postgres or do some other kind of scheduled maintenance, and just not worry about downtime because the blackout is on anyway.
Deniability is a powerful tool, and considering their track record this year, this decision wouldn't rank among their worst.
Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
#65> 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"?
The world has finite resources... such as man-hours.
Such a critical moment for the future of the company (mass boycott after controversial changes, presumably on the path to IPO; they really don't need any more bad publicity) should be an all hands on deck situation. Again, they've had advanced notice, and knew the full list of subreddits. They should have prepared better.
Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
#66What happens if the mods were to coordinate cycling subs from private to public?
They'll get replaced faster than they otherwise would have
This would be chaos. Most of the big subreddits have a combination of bespoke bots and complex automod configs that even the current mods struggle groking. Reddit would lose a ton of quality through poor moderation quickly if you put everything up for grabs.
I think this would be a poor move.
Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
That makes sense to me. It would be one variant of a larger theory of "a subreddit going private is an expensive process that is poorly optimized because it's normally so rare". Another variant would be that clicking the "go private" button might do something like start a huge cascade of queries/calls to mutate the status of individual posts and comments (and possibly hence also trigger the massive cache invalidation…
Would a better protest be rapidly switching subreddits from public/private?
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.
Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
#68I have not read a reddit devblog or anything like that. My guess is they are doing some kind of caching of posts via elasticsearch/redis or something similar. It must depend on the privacy settings of a sub. So when 1000 subs go private, they potentially had to update hundreds of millions of comments. Anyone else have a theory?
the cynic in me says, they're being DDOSd (I mean, they pissed off millions of internet nerds who have their own definition of justice), and instead of admitting it they're using the opportunity to blame the subreddit mods. then again, not sure why that messaging would be any better for them than admitting to a DDOS...
Blame the user makes sense because they don't want to show how fragile Reddit is while they're trying to attract investors for the IPO.
Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
#69It'd be funny if the engineers at reddit decided now was a good time to upgrade postgres or do some other kind of scheduled maintenance, and just not worry about downtime because the blackout is on anyway.
Unless there is some serious damage control happening from corporate which makes them unable, I think a team of engineers would talk themselves into doing this 99% of the time.
Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
#70It seems that Reddit will go down like Digg did.
More likely that people will simply forget in 3-4 weeks, like literally every other issue that can sort of blow over.