Hey everyone. If you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy!
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Reddit has been going through some issues for many on Monday, with the outage happening the same day as thousands of subreddits going dark to protest the site’s new API pricing terms.
According to Reddit, the blackout is responsible for the problems. “A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge.
Too much load? Reddit is down.
Not enough load? Believe it or not, also down.
Rebelling moderators, we have a special jail for rebelling moderators.
This comment is so good an upvote won’t do justice (without awards, a classic comment such as this now has some merit… it’s a new day boys & girls, a good day)
Give them some gold. Oh wait…
If Beehaw offered awards I would actually buy them, at least the money would be going towards keeping the lights on for a project that isn’t actively trying to screw over users for profit.
I’d love to know what it is about subreddits going private that caused issues.
They’re lying. Fish swim, birds fly, sun shines, Reddit lies.
Probably a drop in usage flagged some internal test
It’s entirely possible that they’ve made some assumptions about what a “normal” level of traffic looks like when writing code for their backend, which has caused some things to break when that has changed.
Not our fault if their code is shit.
How is that an example of bad code?
Honestly, it’s probably not - if I’m actually right this is likely an issue that Reddit’s engineers never predicted would happen so never planned for it. I was being hyperbolic.
It’s not reactive. A proper reactive system can handle fluctuations in usage patterns more robustly.
Maybe, but this was a huge increase in usage. Reddit never expected to deal with anywhere near thousands of subs going private simultaneously.
I’m having a hard time believing the claim that Reddit’s code isn’t reactive.
Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a gigantic, mess of nested if-else statements.
Tildes’ dev Deimos used to work for Reddit and had this guess https://tildes.net/~tech/163e/reddit_appears_to_be_down_during_blackout_day_1#comment-87v1.
“It’s merely coincidence. But starting Wednesday, our servers will be more robust and you can browse the site using our official app.” - Spez, while sniffing a decanter of human shit
God we need indefinite blackouts.
The servers run on the tears of bitter whiny CEOs.
Maybe some overload caused by a process having to dig deeper to find best/top posts?
apparently that’s exactly the case.
That is an interesting aspect no engineer could have foreseen!
You’d be surprised how much critical infrastructure was implemented through trial and error and has just been left like that for years…
Anything less than 99% of infrastructure working that way would be surprising. Everything is held together with scotch tape and scotch whisky.
I like this idea. I imagine that with the top subs being dark the automated top posts that get scrounged up may be too terrifying for the front page and they hit the panic button while they scramble to curate through the absolute worst filth they’ve ever seen.
Want Free API? Straight to down status.
Want cheaper API? Also straight to down status
Not enough people on Reddit because of protests? Also straight to down status
thank you, this comment made my day
Lol, this made me chuckle out loud. Good job Sausage man!
Whatever causes the website to have trouble, I’m all for it, right now.
I already wondered if I got lightning-banned for sending too many API requests in a short time, when I used a script to auto-edit all my comments and text-posts.
I bet their shitty bots intended to inflate comments and content couldn’t be switched off in time for the blackouts, still sending requests and DDoS’ing their own site.
A significant number. Fantastic. I’m not sure I believe the stability issues, I’m just a a tin foil hat kind of guy though. I guess it’s possible.
Reddit didn’t design their systems around needing to deal with a huge number of subs going private all at the same time. It’s not surprising that it caused a short outage.
A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue.
My hypothesis is that it’s probably because so much of Reddit posting is automated by their own bot network now that they DDOS’d themselves trying to auto-post to subs that are suddenly locked. Like they didn’t even bother tracking which subs would be blacking out and like…write exceptions to their post schedule.
Ah, “expected”, such a wonderful word! They expected for their infrastructure to explode, just according to keikaku…
Bold of you to assume they had a keikaku to begin with
When Reddit forcibly opens everything back up:
knock knock
“Who’s there?”
”Mods. Hired mods.”
“Hired mods?”
“Wait, you all are getting paid?”
Reddit has an annual “moderator summit”, a rah! rah! yay for moderators! event for moderators, mostly of large or super large subreddits.
At last year’s summit, Spez gave his ‘keynote’ talk where among other things he claimed that they were researching ways to pay moderators for their work, by giving them a cut of … something. It was all sort of wonky and nebulous and likely just something he thought of that morning in the shower.
Is that what the subreddit coins or subredidt points idea was about?
I don’t think so. I think that’s a whole other mess.
If the volunteer mods hold their ground and force Reddit corporate to oust them, Reddit would need to step in to fill the void.
They’ll find some people.
The reality is, not having (good enough) mods will take a while to really hurt the bottom line. Subs will slowly deteriorate.
But I’m 100% sure, within a few weeks you can establish a new order of more servile mods.
People on Reddit complain about the mods enough as it is. (And I include myself in that. I’ve had some less than stellar mod encounters in the past.) However, if Reddit were to force out existing mods and replace them with mods willing to toe the company line (and possibly ban people for mentioning the blackout, complaining about Reddit, or mentioning alternatives), it would just result in more user dissatisfaction.
Reddit won’t go out overnight. There are too many people who post there. However, this could turn into a snowball effect. Rebelling mods are replaced by bootlickers. Dissent is crushed in order to make it seem like everything is hunky dory before the IPO. Power users flee to alternatives like Lemmy. Slowly, normal users hear that some of their favorite content is on this new service and sign up. Reddit usage drops little by little until it’s limping around as a shell of its former self.
There is something very cathartic about deleting 11 years worth of posts and comments…
Trace it to the root of the problem, if the subreddits going dark took the servers down, then what made all the subreddits go dark 🤔
It was really sad to go to my Reddit profile and see how long I’ve been using it.
To think that for over 13 years, I’ve been using Reddit daily and for MULTIPLE hours a day. It has probably caused untold amounts of impact on my growth as a person. Its like breaking up with a lifelong partner, what a strange feeling.
Anyone else notice how friendly, calm, and civil the posts and discussions have been away from Reddit? This place reminds me a lot of the early days.
If 200,000 people would rather figure out how to make all their individual forum softwares work together in synchrony than put up with your bloody app, Reddit, maybe you have a pretty shitty app?
Dunno. I never installed it coz I never install any apps if I can help it, and I know how to use a web browser. But if a quarter of a million people would rather subject themselves to the complexities of distributed information networks and the politics of inter-instance blocking than use your bloody app, Reddit, maybe you have a pretty shitty app?
It’s like the kids today don’t know what a web address is with their obsession with apps. They seem to prefer to download an executable than read a text document. If even them, a million zoomer kids who are normally obsessed with apps, if even they would rather entertain the idea of a communications commons not owned and controlled by oligarchs than use your app, then maybe you should have just used yer IPO money to buy Apollo?
Dunno. I’ve never installed either. Sounds sketchy. I distrust apps.
How is it possible, that with 90% of subbreddits set to private, the number of posts and comments created on reddit do not decrease according to https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/? (EDIT: I might have based this percent on misinterpreted information, see EDIT at end of comment. But I leave the following paragraphs unchanged for history and food for thought.)
Activity only decreased by 20-30% if I’m being generous looking at the graph. How is this possible, is the graph accurate? How can 10% of subreddits be so active, like nothing happened? That would meanthe remaining 70-80% of activity is happening in 10% of the subreddits which are still open! Which is craaazy.
I have a theory - maybe we are underestimated the amount of bots on the site and they operating like nothing happened in the open subreddits? If this would be the case (and I’m gonna enter speculation and conspiracy territory here), but what if certain parties have quotas to fulfill for advertisers or propaganda machines, so they have to post (using bots or other means)?
I struggle to find the cause of this anomaly, of course you wouldn’t see 1:1 decrease in subbreddits going dark and activity, because people are subscibed to plethora of subbreddits. But I thought that it’ll be at least 50-60% decrease in post activity. Worst case scenario is that these are real users creating real posts and comments, because that would make this protest moot - It would just show reddit management that the community doesn’t matter, general public who come to the site will still interact with the remaining slop, advertisers rejoice.
EDIT: I based the 90% number on this site’s statistic: https://reddark.untone.uk/. My understanding was that these subreddits makes up for most of all subs on reddit. Turns out, as @brightside@compuverse.uk mentioned in this comment, these are only subreddits that participate in the blackout. Based on the README.md of this reddark fork, it pulls the list of participating subreddits from the threads on r/ModCoord.
However I still feel the impact of the blackout a little lackluster. If this is the case, this statistic could be explained by another phenomenon: that the distribution of reddit activity by subreddits have an incredibly long tail. Meaning, that a significant portion of comments and posts are created in a very large quantity of small subs, which does not participate in the protest.
I have typed the letter “o” for “old.reddit” about six or seven times today out of habit. Thanks to the Beehaw team for providing a space which is better than a simple substitute in many ways. I am simply incapable of operating any of the newer reddit interfaces, so once “old.” is history that will be it for me totally.
I opened Apollo once and got a special splash screen. I moved Apollo off the front page of my phone display.
Save and import:
{ "createdBy": "Redirector v3.5.3", "createdAt": "2023-06-01T00:00:00.011Z", "redirects": [ { "description": "Reddit to Beehaw", "exampleUrl": "https://reddit.com", "exampleResult": "https://beehaw.org", "error": null, "includePattern": "^(https?://)([a-z0-9-]*\\.)?reddit.com(.*)", "excludePattern": "", "patternDesc": "Reddit to Beehaw", "redirectUrl": "https://beehaw.org", "patternType": "R", "processMatches": "noProcessing", "disabled": false, "grouped": false, "appliesTo": [ "main_frame" ] } ] }Is there a way for the extension to replace only the domain? for example, https://lemmy.ml/c/memes will become https://sopuli.xyz/c/memes ?
I’m totally not going through withdrawal.
Uh huh.
Deleted my account and took Apollo off my phone. My hands feel… itchy.
I deleted RiF in the line for the bagel shop this morning. I feel exactly the same way.
I’m doing the same on 6/30. I had to move Apollo off my front page to stop me from reflexively opening it every ten minutes.
Seems like all the traffic had to go somewhere…
Lots of love for the Beehaw and other Lemmy admins this morning. It’s never fun suddenly having to 10x scale. Although it sounds like everybody else on the internet is getting a heavy traffic load today too.
I think the most fun, unintended consequence is that there were some assumptions baked into the Reddit codebase and the large number of Private subreddits has caused massive disruption and outages for them. While others have speculated it might be a tactic to hamper the affects of the protest, it sure seems real plausible to have not anticipated 6K subreddits going private overnight.
I’m having flashback to the early Reddit and Twitter days. Those platforms would get a ton of press os buzz on a random day, then they would explode.
The fail whale was iconic back in the day.
As an engineer, this sounds most plausible - they had proactive detection and resolution in place against various attacks and system failures, which got triggered due to the massive drop in public subreddits/users/activity, and made everything worse. Honestly, this isn’t a scenario their engineers could have easily predicted…
As a former sysadmin and a [still, for the moment] reddit moderator, my bet is that most of the subreddits that switched to private forgot to (or didn’t know to) go into “new reddit” and switch off the thing that allows people to request being added to the now-private subreddit.
A HUGE influx of people pounding on the “let me in, add me to the sub” button, which sends modmail, may have overloaded the whole modmail system, which in turn sometimes goes kaflooey for no apparent reason (my theory is: it gets bored).
I see this as a positive aspect of the protest.
I am also amused that random people are pounding on the door for access, as if they think approved submitters are having a private tea party inside.
I’ve had some of those. I’ve been responding with a link to Louis Rossman’s video and “Please consider limiting your own reddit use.”
Clearly you’re not someone who would have to go back and clear out 259238 modmail messages and make sure that none of them are legit “I have a problem” notes.
None of the subreddits I mod are that huge but just the thought of more than 100 at once makes me wanna cry.
At this point, they should just leave the 259,238 modmail messages for the admins to deal with. Let them sort through all that since this is all their doing.
Oh clearly I’m not. I just don’t understand the thinking of people demanding access. It’s like the kind of person who pounds on the door of a closed restaurant because they can see the employees inside.
People are selfish. People subconsciously think the rules apply to other people.
People who demand to come into closed stores and restaurants are not the exception. What’s even crazier is when you turn one away, anyone who has seen the door open even though the person was told no and didn’t get inside suddenly decides that maybe if THEY pound on the door, they’ll magically get access!
Oh man, my partner made a somewhat popular weapon calculator spreadsheet for Elden Ring, and the number of random Google Sheets edit requests they received was… quite a lot. (the instructions were right there for people to make a copy of the sheet to edit themselves! that’s how all of these sheets calculators work!) 🤦
I’m just speculating of course, too, but could be some kind of sharding e.g. in the DB level. I can imagine the little subreddits draw little traffic hence fewer shards are allocated to them (like how S3 works).
Ah, but you see they “improved” modmail recently. It would certainly never go “kaflooey” anymore. It now fails all like “kerpow!” instead… much cooler, you see.
Well, of course, that’s just good engineering.
You see, kerpow!s scale much better than kaflooeys due to cache invalidation problems in the ooey inductors, that’s like first semester knowledge.
This makes a lot of sense to me (as an Operations Engineer).
I could imagine the architecture team has low watermark triggers to rescale the architecture, kill and restore hosts, or other changes based on expected user load. When that load just… isn’t there, the automated tooling just loops the same actions causing site instability.
I’ve had similar issues before, so it seems like a feasible explanation
I’m not sure if it’s just a load balancing issue. if all of Reddit can only access specific subs, maybe they split their servers that way
but I’m just guessing, because it doesn’t make much sense to go down, when there is less data to process…
in a way it does, when you’re building massive scale systems. Say you are the mitigation team and want to protect yourself against a malicious hacker/employee that starts shutting down web servers or removes posting permissions from the DB for everyone. You’re going to monitor the frequency of posts and if it drop too fast, you know something’s bad happening. You’re going to take automated measures against it - maybe freeze access to the DB completely, maybe switch to a (much less tested) backup region/system, etc… so you can see how things can snowball from there to strange scenarios…
yeah, well, maybe…
usually unexpected situations have unexpected errors. so yeah, you could be right
I’ve been posting this to subs that haven’t blacked out:
Reddit wants to begin selling API data access to large AI companies at a really high margin so those AI companies can train their data on the content we generate and contribute to reddit, and reddit can make a shit ton of money on that.
This data API is also how third party apps and mod tools access reddit. Rather than charging apps a lower tier and AI companies a large one, reddit has instead decided to charge everyone for that data access.
As a result, not only are third party reddit apps going away because they’d have to charge huge fees to their users, but so are a lot of the tools that reddit’s unpaid volunteer moderators use to moderate subs, which means moderation quality is going to drastically drop soon.
In addition, the official reddit app is terrible for accessibility, and does not work with things like screen readers that blind or partially-sighted people use. These issues have been reported to reddit since alienblue became the official reddit app, reddit does not care to put money into fixing them. third party apps do this. people who rely on these apps to be able to even use reddit are basically getting kicked off reddit for being disabled.
All so reddit can cash in on all the content the communities of reddit produce, without compensating the content creators nor paying the unpaid volunteer moderators whose lives they just made way more difficult.
Is Beehaw accepting donations for server costs? I can only imagine that the hosting bill is going to be preeeeeetty steep this month…
yes. you can donate here
Thank you! I’ll donate when I get paid this week.
Ooh wonderful, thanks for sharing!
We sure are, I think it should be in the sidebar but if it’s not, https://opencollective.com/beehaw
A one-time donation will help now, and with all the new users it seems like Beehaw needs some support now. A smaller but recurring monthly contribution would also help now and would add to a regular pool of funds which can allow Beehaw to be able to plan how to accommodate the larger community on a permanent basis. I think the community is worth having to wait through some of the strain right now, but I would like to contribute to infrastructure upgrades and maintenance so I have decided to make a recurring contribution.
This is a fantastic idea, thank you.
yeah we hung with the flood of topics about this for a bit but it’s not super tenable (or desirable) on our end for every second post on our front page to be about reddit, lol
Hell, I’ll let this be my first comment; it’s on a different instance than my account to boot! I’m running into some issues with some of the newer instances not being federated; some of the subreddits I was hoping to replace here are unavailable as a result. Still, I’m happy enough to be a part of something new and different.
Childish smirk of the day…
https://reddark.untone.uk/ shows that r/SexInFrontOfOthers is public.
