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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

#81

Post by phpisthebest »

falcolas wrote: post #60
phpisthebest wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The internet forgets too quickly. And so long as Reddit can present a "everything's awesome" front, their IPO will likely take off. Having /r/Pics down permanently because of a protest would be a problem, but a poorly moderated /r/Pics would not. The quality would just go down, and Reddit would get a good justification for locking it down. "No, /r/Pics wasn't shut down because of the protest, it was shut down because…

There seems to be a disconnect to what I am saying...

You seem to believe a low quality /r/pics would bring in traffic, even more weirdly you seem to believe the admins shutting down /r/pics because of illegal content, is better for profitability then it being shut down because of a protest, not sure how that works....

Traffic, and users drive profitablity, High Quality User Generated content drives that traffic and attracts users

If reddit loses high quality user generated content, there is no traffic, and thus there is nothing to sell to be profitable, no ads, not API, nothing

it would not matter if /r/pics was shutdown in protest, or shutdown because of poor moderation, it is still shut down, and thus no profits from it.

investors love companies that are profitable, especially right now when the cost of capital is very high. "focusing on profitability" is not the same as delivering profitability. Investors right now want results, not power points about how they project the results being

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#82

Post by micromacrofoot »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #2

I 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?

Twitter was like this at one point, flipping over from public to private was one of the most resource intensive things an individual user could do... especially with a long tweet history, because it involves changing every tweet.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#83

Post by ElevenLathe »

commandlinefan wrote: post #80
ElevenLathe wrote: post #14

Earlier 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…

> to mutate the status of individual posts and comment AKA why you should normalize your data models.

Meh it's a tradeoff usually. De-normalize for better read performance at the expense of some complexity and worse update performance/semantics.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#84

Post by EA-3167 »

falcolas wrote: post #51
EA-3167 wrote: 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.

> What does that really accomplish? To borrow from another comment buried below: I think the company cares more about the appearance of "business as usual" in the face of an IPO than the opinions of the users. In their eyes, this is all nothing more than a tempest in a teapot; a small pothole on the road to public investor dollars.

I can sort of understand the mentality, but right now Reddit looks like a terrible IPO prospect. It isn't profitable, it's poorly managed, lacks transparency, depends on volunteers to function on a daily basis, and when they make a move to make themselves profitable their user base rebels in a fairly public and humiliating way.

All of this in the post-Fed rate hike world where money isn't free. Besides I feel it's important to remember that Reddit has been talking about an IPO for many years, and I doubt it's going to happen now.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#85

Post by Tao3300 »

seydor wrote: post #61
anoonmoose wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think you'd be surprised. Nature abhors a vacuum and there will be many users waiting in the wings for the tiny internet power of that prestigious mod hat.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#86

Post by eropple »

ElevenLathe wrote: post #83
commandlinefan wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to mutate the status of individual posts and comment AKA why you should normalize your data models.

Meh it's a tradeoff usually. De-normalize for better read performance at the expense of some complexity and worse update performance/semantics.

This is true, but FWIW (it probably wouldn't save you here, too much is changing too fast) something like a SQL materialized view can very often give you both the chocolate and the peanut butter.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#87

Post by graypegg »

joecot wrote: post #67
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I still think this is coming. After the 48hr strike, how many mods are going to turn their sub back to public, look at their mod inbox filled with confused and angry users, and then see some pending non-response from Reddit post-strike, and wonder why they do this?

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#89

Post by pkju62dqmx »

falcolas wrote: post #45
throwaway4837 wrote: post #43

My unpopular theory is that the Reddit blackout increased Reddit usage, having the opposite of the intended effect.

It would certainly change usage patterns. And there are enough popular subreddits who didn't go in on the outage, so there's content to be had. The adage "there's no such thing as bad press" could definitely apply, given how broadly covered this is (I mean, hell, I saw it show up on NPR).

Currently over 90% of subs are private or restricted.

https://reddark.untone.uk

Re-hosts of that site have the figure even higher.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#90

Post by pessimizer »

joecot wrote: post #67
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You never want to threaten people with a good time.
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