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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

#91

Post by seydor »

I think reddit will never be the same after this, not because of the API thing (I dont agree with the blackouts), but because it shows how much they neglected their website. Over the years they have made it impossible to compete with the established subreddits. They have allowed a single uniform mob to take over the site, establish themselves as permanent tyrants and grow their ban lists to enormous scale. Even today with the blackouts, you can't find alternative subs to the closed ones, because new subreddits are hidden in search results and popular lists. Without this competition, how do they expect their subs to improve?

It's as if their mismanagement has come back to bite them. Mods have been allowed to run the show and ruin communities for years and years.

Very few people are using 3rd party apps but now they are causing inconvenience to millions for their own capricious reasons. I knew that the site was ran by a small powertripping group of mods but now that they make it so obvious it has kind of chepened the whole medium in my mind

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#92

Post by superkuh »

graeme wrote: post #47
stillbourne wrote: post #8

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

Finding new moderators would be a incredible challenge. If someone wants to be a moderators badly, that is usually disqualifying. You get an immense amount of power with very little accountability except to the community. Put that in the wrong hands and you can destroy a community incredibly quickly. Or, put power in the hands of a dilettante, and you get overrun with spam and insults very fast.

Nah, there's plenty of people just waiting to take over even the smallest of niche subs. I saw it firsthand back during the 2nd wave of gentrification in spring 2018 when a bunch of commercially uncomfortable subreddits like r/gundeals and their users (like my 2008 reddit account) were banned. The subreddits I moderated like r/radioastronomy were given to other users to moderate within a month or two. Reddit eventually admitted it was wrong about banning r/gundeals and reinstated the sub but my account was never unbanned.

And any sub with serious activity will have power mods submitting applications for take-over so they can commercialize it.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#93

Post by gfv »

sofixa wrote: post #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"?

When operating a complex system like Reddit, you know that something is going to happen during a significant event, but you generally don't know exactly what will break first.

What's worse is that the system evolved as a response to the previous similar event, and what broke now is probably not what had broken in the past.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#94

Post by seydor »

Tao3300 wrote: post #85
seydor wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

tell that to reddit though - they seem to be fine with the current situation and plan to keep the same mods until death do them part

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#95

Post by speedgoose »

throwaway4837 wrote: post #43

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

That's also my first bet. The strike was well covered in many medias.

Looking at the google trends, it was a big spike today compared to the classic daily workload: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&q=%2...

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#96

Post by poyu »

Tao3300 wrote: post #74
subarctic wrote: post #37

It'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

Easy:

``` UPDATE subreddits SET is_private = FALSE WHERE is_private = TRUE AND updated_at BETWEEN 2023-06-11 AND 2023-06-12; ```

Bonus: Run it every hour

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#97

Post by cpncrunch »

EMCymatics wrote: post #71
throwaway4837 wrote: post #43

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.

I operate a certain health condition subreddit. The main subreddit for this condition is highly toxic (which is why I created an alternative a few years ago).

Anyway, it turns out the primary (toxic) subreddit for this condition is taking part in the strike, so a lot of users have come over to my alternative subreddit, and they are glad to have found it because they were getting fed up with the toxicity of the other place.

Unfortunately I'm sure it will be back to normal in a couple of days.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#98

Post by Tao3300 »

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).

> there are enough popular subreddits who didn't go in on the outage

Yeah, this morning I noticed only one sub that I follow was actually private. I was going to mention it here, but I forgot which one it was - and now I can't find the one that was blacked out.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#99

Post by cpncrunch »

pkju62dqmx wrote: post #89
falcolas wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is in no way accurate. It says 7806 subreddits, but there are actually over 3 million subreddits, so the figure is actually only 0.24% rather than 90%. It's wonderful what you can do by just faking statistics!

I also don't see some subreddits listed there that are part of the strike.

Re: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

#100

Post by tester457 »

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?

Here's a guess from a former reddit dev.

> (I used to work as a backend developer at Reddit - I left 6 years ago but I doubt the way things work has changed much)

> I think it's extremely unlikely that this is deliberate. The way that Reddit builds "mixed" subreddit listings (where you see posts from multiple subreddits, like users' front pages) is inefficient and strange, and relies heavily on multiple layers of caches. Having so many subreddits private with their posts inaccessible has never happened before, and is probably causing a bunch of issues with this process

https://tildes.net/~tech/163e/reddit_appears_to_be_down_duri...

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