My unpopular theory is that the Reddit blackout increased Reddit usage, having the opposite of the intended effect.
It is nice to see all of the toxic subreddits delete themseles.
Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
71–80 of 148 posts
Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
#72> 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
Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> should be an all hands on deck situation
[The Mythical Man Month has entered the chat]: Nine mothers, all hands on deck, should be able to gestate a baby in 1 month.
Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
#74It'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.
Or rolling out the big blackout override switch
Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
#75It seems that Reddit will go down like Digg did.
Unfortunately, I've been hearing this for like a decade and it doesn't seem to ever happen.
Digg.com’s implosion was so dramatic because Reddit was there to immediately start serving the same users just about the same thing. There are obviously plenty of other things Reddit users can do with their time, but there isn’t a monolith solution waiting in the wings to very closely replace Reddit with almost the exact same thing. Its destruction will be much more prolonged.
Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
#76I see Reddit themselves confirmed that the blackout caused the outage, but just to be clear Reddit is a very unstable website and outages are commonplace. It's clear their engineering team is not exactly top notch (or have been poorly resourced).
Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
#77Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
They don't have to be good mods. There's precedent for a handful of mods to moderate a huge swath of subreddits.
Not without third-party tools, there isn’t. Lol
Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> Where is reddit going to find enough people to work for free on such short notice? Enter: an army of scab accounts ending in _GPT.
That's more expensive than free mods.
Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
#80I 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?
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…
> to mutate the status of individual posts and comment
AKA why you should normalize your data models.