(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...
Exemplary
(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.
Ohhh, you think this is for the same reason as why you couldn't block more than 100 or so subs? That they struggle to serve you a front page if you block all the subreddits that would usually fill...
Ohhh, you think this is for the same reason as why you couldn't block more than 100 or so subs? That they struggle to serve you a front page if you block all the subreddits that would usually fill it?
Which, thinking about it, is there a smart way of doing this that actually does scale? Where you can have an arbitrarily long white / black list of subreddits, and it serves you the top content from them as requested? Or is that one of those things that scales like shit no matter how you spin it?
I personally can’t laugh loud or long enough at the CEO claiming Apollo was poorly optimized and then all it took was a bunch of mods setting their subs private to break the website. No wonder...
I personally can’t laugh loud or long enough at the CEO claiming Apollo was poorly optimized and then all it took was a bunch of mods setting their subs private to break the website. No wonder reddit isn’t profitable. It’s barely tenable at this point.
When you're managing this much data, you need shortcuts, and caching is the ultimate shortcut. At least, it's the ultimate shortcut when you have predictable, typical behavior. There's a reason...
When you're managing this much data, you need shortcuts, and caching is the ultimate shortcut. At least, it's the ultimate shortcut when you have predictable, typical behavior. There's a reason for the old programmer saying:
There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.
that’s fair, but why would it happen at this random time instead of earlier? the subreddits have been private for quite a few hours now. maybe some cron job related to subreddit listings was...
that’s fair, but why would it happen at this random time instead of earlier? the subreddits have been private for quite a few hours now. maybe some cron job related to subreddit listings was activated? i would expect this at around like say 9 am because a lot of people would be trying to access reddit…
People go online at the end of business hours too. Europe ends the work day, this page was posted around 16:45 CET. It probably started around 5 pm EET (4 pm CET) and overlapped with East Coast US...
People go online at the end of business hours too. Europe ends the work day, this page was posted around 16:45 CET. It probably started around 5 pm EET (4 pm CET) and overlapped with East Coast US starting the day.
Honestly, I don't think I'd ever notice it while on desktop (most of my browsing). I only ever go to specific subreddits on web. With RIF, it always opens to the front page so that's about the...
Honestly, I don't think I'd ever notice it while on desktop (most of my browsing). I only ever go to specific subreddits on web. With RIF, it always opens to the front page so that's about the only time I see the front page.
In my own experience I was late to making one of my subreddits private, and I couldn't get into reddit for about an hour to get it done. Strangely navigating through my pms worked though. Now that...
In my own experience I was late to making one of my subreddits private, and I couldn't get into reddit for about an hour to get it done. Strangely navigating through my pms worked though. Now that the site is back up I honestly find it hilarious to see that r/AnarchyChess is on r/all currently when it wasn't being actively moderated for a short period of time.
As a former Reddit backend dev you might have some insight, if you're willing to share, on how 'based in reality' the API pricing really is. I mostly do backend work so it just seemed crazy to me...
As a former Reddit backend dev you might have some insight, if you're willing to share, on how 'based in reality' the API pricing really is. I mostly do backend work so it just seemed crazy to me that third party API access costs "tens of millions of dollars annually" as spez claimed.
You might not be conformable sharing such info in case there are NDAs attached etc, but if you are then you might have a particularly valuable insight into this topic.
It's almost assuredly opportunity costs of serving the user with ads via the website or official Reddit app. I could see it being a realistic number if you assume all third party app users would...
It's almost assuredly opportunity costs of serving the user with ads via the website or official Reddit app.
I could see it being a realistic number if you assume all third party app users would start using the official app, although I don't think that's a very good assumption as you can see...
I definitely think that is still the assumption. Reddit is fairly confident that their competition is not as good as they are at providing the content they provide, and are betting that most users...
I definitely think that is still the assumption. Reddit is fairly confident that their competition is not as good as they are at providing the content they provide, and are betting that most users will be coming back and will be settling for the official app once the outrage dies down.
And I can see why they would. The two top alternatives being Tilde, which is a gated community and definitely feels a lot smaller and lacking in content right now (compared to the vastness of reddit), and Lemmy which is also small and lacking content, but on top of that is painful to navigate and unintuitive.
I'm fairly content here, but I can see a lot of the Lemmy users getting very tired of that system and going back to reddit after not long. The real deciding factor will be if the content comes back to reddit as well, which I doubt. The power users left for good I think.
Moderators are also probably the most addicted Reddit users, it remains to be seen if they can stay away. I think I'll continue to use Reddit on occasion, but only via old.reddit on desktop with...
Moderators are also probably the most addicted Reddit users, it remains to be seen if they can stay away.
I think I'll continue to use Reddit on occasion, but only via old.reddit on desktop with an ad blocker.
Again, as I said on Reddit before the blackout, I point you to Digg. They said the same things during the 4.0 debacle. Reddit is a lot more fleshed out and mature than Digg was, not to mention...
Again, as I said on Reddit before the blackout, I point you to Digg. They said the same things during the 4.0 debacle.
Reddit is a lot more fleshed out and mature than Digg was, not to mention what Reddit was during that time. I think subreddits had only just been introduced when I joined. So as an entity, they likely aren't going anywhere. But this incident will definitely hit their user count. Whether it hits a critical mass of mods jumping ship and letting the subs be taken over by trolls and spam is another question. I think Reddit is going to look a lot different after this, and nothing like the site everyone flocked to when Digg committed suicide.
For sure, reddit isn't going away. Digg survived, reddit will too. But digg is a shadow of its former self, and I assume reddit will be as well now. I'm actually very interested to see how the...
For sure, reddit isn't going away. Digg survived, reddit will too. But digg is a shadow of its former self, and I assume reddit will be as well now.
I'm actually very interested to see how the site continues to evolve now that it probably will have very little resistance against it doing so. Who knows, maybe it will evolve back into a site we all enjoy, just in a different way and for a different reason.
I just went to check Squabbles out, and it seems like it could get some traction but personally I do not like the more "modern" look that emulates Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. That being said,...
I just went to check Squabbles out, and it seems like it could get some traction but personally I do not like the more "modern" look that emulates Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
That being said, I could see myself growing to use it if the communities I follow gain any traction there.
Sorry to revive a dead thread, but in case you’re curious Lemmy.world is at 25K users and still growing. It honestly is feeling pretty good for social content, although admittedly very...
Sorry to revive a dead thread, but in case you’re curious Lemmy.world is at 25K users and still growing. It honestly is feeling pretty good for social content, although admittedly very reddit-focused right now. It’s been fascinating to watch.
Spez confirmed this on a call with the developer of Apollo, which he shared. It's absolutely the opportunity cost. Now if that opportunity cost is legitimately what they're claiming is another...
Spez confirmed this on a call with the developer of Apollo, which he shared.
It's absolutely the opportunity cost.
Now if that opportunity cost is legitimately what they're claiming is another story. But it definitely isn't "just to cover their cloud expenses".
I remember the counting subreddit having so many hundreds of thousands of comments in one thread that it had seriously affected reddits caching and database queries. Just as you said, inefficient...
I remember the counting subreddit having so many hundreds of thousands of comments in one thread that it had seriously affected reddits caching and database queries.
Just as you said, inefficient and strange. Multiple layers of caches don't work when you are counting to a million. It hadn't happened before. So instead of recognising their flawed architecture and solving the problem, they placed a limit on how many comments a single thread can contain.
What I don't understand is that a few years after you left they went on a mass hiring spree. I simply cannot fathom where that huge staff investment went. Their platform still has these strange oddities like you described, the moderation tools in many ways went backwards. We know that third parties had repeatedly tried to contact them via multiple communication channels and were ignored for months.
Wait, I've just had an apostrophe, sorry an epiphany. After you left, reddits backend was left in shambles. You were the glue holding it together. No wonder they had to hire 700 people just to replace you.
Marketing. They hired people to manage selling advertisements, not code, not features, not admins and developers. Their staff is probably >80% marketing now, hundreds of them. Reddit drove the...
I simply cannot fathom where that huge staff investment went.
Marketing. They hired people to manage selling advertisements, not code, not features, not admins and developers. Their staff is probably >80% marketing now, hundreds of them.
Reddit drove the majority of the 'admins who care' and 'mods who care' about community out back in 2015. It became apparent to everyone after the Pao debacle and Victoria's departure. As the head mod of a default subreddit, all I ever got from admins was canned responses after that - I may as well have been talking to bots. At least when krispy, cupcake, chooter, deimos, raldi, and jedberg were there it was like talking to people who gave a damn about community and wanted to help. Deimos is not the only one of those ex-admins with an account here, either.
Thank you, that was insightful. I wasn't a mod of any big sub, but I had some lovely interactions with cupcake and chooter many years ago. But 700 new employees, that is a massive number. I don't...
Thank you, that was insightful. I wasn't a mod of any big sub, but I had some lovely interactions with cupcake and chooter many years ago.
But 700 new employees, that is a massive number. I don't even see how they could have put them all into marketing, its a huge number of people. Even if 80% of them went into marketing, that a still a sizeable number of people working on the platform. Yet I cannot see where those resources went. I suspect a disgusting amount was wasted on weird crypto NFT pie in the sky dreams.
After a prior wave of blackouts (I think the ones surrounding Victoria being let go?) they implemented 'community health' guidelines, essentially giving them something to fall back on to...
After a prior wave of blackouts (I think the ones surrounding Victoria being let go?) they implemented 'community health' guidelines, essentially giving them something to fall back on to commandeer and reopen subs if needed.
If anything, "closed subs causing site issues" would give them more of a justification to do so.
Considering you've got insights: Could this be another outcropping of this? (users being forcefully resubscribed after whittling down their subscriptions to only blacked-out subs) Here's my...
If you restrict your front page to only private subreddits that you can't view, reddit tries to serve you a page of 20 posts and (presumably) does silly things like looking for a long time in each of these private subreddits for a post that you can see. It climbs down the order of posts from those subs, checking each time whether you can view them, rejecting every single one of them. Reddit's front page assumes that there's gotta be something you they can display you (or there might be a condition that catches the obvious one, an empty subscription list), so it keeps looking and looking and looking. Eventually, the server goes belly up. The admins figure out what's the issue and rolls back every user who unsubscribed down to a basically-empty sub list, back to a list they previously subscribed to. Problem "solved".
Puts tin foil hat on My idea is, it's easier to show the outage to explain low usage on 12th-14th to investors later this year. Saying "yeah our users launched a massive protest that effected 2...
Puts tin foil hat on
My idea is, it's easier to show the outage to explain low usage on 12th-14th to investors later this year. Saying "yeah our users launched a massive protest that effected 2 BILLION (not unique) accounts" is much harder than "yeah we had an outage."
It's no secret that Reddit is planning to become publicly traded. And publicly traded companies do everything in their power to cover-up their fuckups.
I'm not sure that this is a huge tin foil hat theory. If you do maintenance scheduled or otherwise on a day(s) when you expect to see a drastic drop in engagement, you've got a great explanation...
I'm not sure that this is a huge tin foil hat theory. If you do maintenance scheduled or otherwise on a day(s) when you expect to see a drastic drop in engagement, you've got a great explanation for the drop of engagement.
Any smart investor could easily find all the articles that have come out regarding the API changes though. Pretty easy to see through the lie of "scheduled maintenance"
Any smart investor could easily find all the articles that have come out regarding the API changes though. Pretty easy to see through the lie of "scheduled maintenance"
I don't think this could be the case. It would be tough to explain away a two day downtime. Like: why would a live service ever be down that much. And what if the blackouts do continue? A lot of...
I don't think this could be the case. It would be tough to explain away a two day downtime. Like: why would a live service ever be down that much.
And what if the blackouts do continue? A lot of places already hinted at letting them run for a longer period
I don't think they need the site down for two days, just long enough to decide on a game plan. If I was an exec at Reddit and woke up to everyone telling me that the front page is dried up and...
I don't think they need the site down for two days, just long enough to decide on a game plan. If I was an exec at Reddit and woke up to everyone telling me that the front page is dried up and only has posts about how Reddit is killing 3rd party apps, I would want to take a little bit to figure out what to do. Best to hide the protest in the meantime.
You don't have to have two full days of downtime, just enough downtime on both days to be a plausible explanation. Having said that, I take your point.
You don't have to have two full days of downtime, just enough downtime on both days to be a plausible explanation. Having said that, I take your point.
This was my first thought as well. Opening the app earlier this morning, all the top posts for me said "Reddit is killing 3rd party apps." Much better to just bring down the whole site to buy some...
This was my first thought as well. Opening the app earlier this morning, all the top posts for me said "Reddit is killing 3rd party apps." Much better to just bring down the whole site to buy some time. I generally avoid tin foil hats, but this is too suspicious.
They initially started to IPO in 2021.... But then they decided to wait. I fully expect the IPO to open in late July, early August. The API thing is a direct indicator of that, as they are...
They initially started to IPO in 2021.... But then they decided to wait.
I fully expect the IPO to open in late July, early August.
The API thing is a direct indicator of that, as they are reigning in things they don't control, and putting a price tag in it for licensing. The ridiculous pricing is theoretically GOOD for initial stock price.
What Spez is too stupid to understand is, public trust us also a large factor in that initial stock value also. And he's losing a lot of it. It's gonna IPO, and he'll be ousted by January.
I'm not sure that he would be sad about that? So there's the IPO, he gets a golden parachute, and he goes on with his life without having to deal with Redditors anymore? There are worse outcomes...
I'm not sure that he would be sad about that? So there's the IPO, he gets a golden parachute, and he goes on with his life without having to deal with Redditors anymore? There are worse outcomes in life.
Yeah, as long as he's still there when the IPO happens, he's going to cash in. The only question is what happens to the stock price between IPO and the end of the lockup period, when he can sell...
Yeah, as long as he's still there when the IPO happens, he's going to cash in. The only question is what happens to the stock price between IPO and the end of the lockup period, when he can sell his shares.
Still, from everything I've read, he seems to enjoy being a petty tyrant, so I'm sure he wouldn't want to give that up if he had a choice.
It's not implausible, but if they did that they didn't bank on other publicity. The reddit blackout is trending on twitter, and many other reputable news sources are already reporting on it. Most...
It's not implausible, but if they did that they didn't bank on other publicity. The reddit blackout is trending on twitter, and many other reputable news sources are already reporting on it. Most investors interested in purchasing reddit are likely consuming those same sources, so they would be well aware of what is happening already. Spez likely knows it's too public to cover up at this stage. My bet would be too much engagement, or subs going down caused internal issues.
My gut is it's a bug related to the quantity of private subs. I think some database query or filter is poorly implemented and dealing with so many private subs is tanking the site.
My gut is it's a bug related to the quantity of private subs. I think some database query or filter is poorly implemented and dealing with so many private subs is tanking the site.
(Update: Site appears to be up as of a few minutes ago, originally posted about 42 minutes ago as of this edit) I'm a soon-to-be Reddit refugee (waiting for June 30th/end of 3rd Party apps) and...
(Update: Site appears to be up as of a few minutes ago, originally posted about 42 minutes ago as of this edit)
I'm a soon-to-be Reddit refugee (waiting for June 30th/end of 3rd Party apps) and just checked in to Reddit this AM. Unless it's just me, the website appears to be down. Can't help but speculate this has something to do with the blackout that is supposed to be going down today and tomorrow (or indefinitely depending on the subreddit)...
You might also want to check out DownDetector! It allows users to submit reports, which is aggregated and used to determine whether a given site is down or not based on a threshold. I've found it...
You might also want to check out DownDetector! It allows users to submit reports, which is aggregated and used to determine whether a given site is down or not based on a threshold. I've found it incredibly useful when there are problems with a given service and other "detection" sites just say it's still online. I'm guessing that's because they just verify whether or not the web server responds to ping and returns a 200.
It's down for me as well, and I agree that it's fishy it's down the same day as the blackouts are starting, I have a funny feeling they're going to come out and say "You all are free to protest,...
It's down for me as well, and I agree that it's fishy it's down the same day as the blackouts are starting, I have a funny feeling they're going to come out and say "You all are free to protest, but we were taking the website down for maintenance anyways on those days" (But, you know, more professionally)
Doubt it. Should be more than compensated by the number of viewers not there. I suspect the admins used the presumed lull to roll out a patch and it broke things or something.
Doubt it. Should be more than compensated by the number of viewers not there.
I suspect the admins used the presumed lull to roll out a patch and it broke things or something.
Possibly, but I'd suspect a DDoS honestly. This seems like the sort of thing that would happen - plus, googling "reddit DDoS june 12" brings up people who were in reddit pre-blackout, organising...
Possibly, but I'd suspect a DDoS honestly. This seems like the sort of thing that would happen - plus, googling "reddit DDoS june 12" brings up people who were in reddit pre-blackout, organising doing just that.
This send most likely, but if that's what's happening, it's definitely not going to help the cause. If anything, it will just make reddit look like a victim to people on the outside.
This send most likely, but if that's what's happening, it's definitely not going to help the cause. If anything, it will just make reddit look like a victim to people on the outside.
Ah, sadly it's up right now (or at least it worked for me). And yeah, hello from another soon to be reddit refugee (I question my willpower cause I admit I will miss reddit but they really pissed...
Ah, sadly it's up right now (or at least it worked for me). And yeah, hello from another soon to be reddit refugee (I question my willpower cause I admit I will miss reddit but they really pissed me off with this whole debacle... and I don't want to use Reddit without Apollo).
I didn't realize how bad my Reddit addiction was until I decided I would not be visiting the site at all over the next two days. Started going through withdrawal almost immediately. I'd actually...
I didn't realize how bad my Reddit addiction was until I decided I would not be visiting the site at all over the next two days. Started going through withdrawal almost immediately.
I'd actually forgotten I had a Tildes account, but I'm stoked it still works!
Hopefully this means we are influencing some major changes! The good ending is the API changes are delayed or reconsidered entirely. The bad ending is the admins take more direct control of the...
Hopefully this means we are influencing some major changes! The good ending is the API changes are delayed or reconsidered entirely. The bad ending is the admins take more direct control of the offlined subreddits and force them back open. Changes are brewing either way.
I sadly have no hope for any positive changes. There was already a recent Reddit post where admins admitted to blocking some users from accessing their Reddit account via mobile browser, clearly...
I sadly have no hope for any positive changes. There was already a recent Reddit post where admins admitted to blocking some users from accessing their Reddit account via mobile browser, clearly to force them to use the official app. I wonder how long it'll take before they kill mobile browsing for everyone.
nah, just the mobile reddit.com. TBH, they've been very annoying with it for a while where it just keeps (VERY intruisively) prompting you to download the app. You can get around it by bringing up...
nah, just the mobile reddit.com. TBH, they've been very annoying with it for a while where it just keeps (VERY intruisively) prompting you to download the app.
You can get around it by bringing up the desktop site on mobile (both Chrome and Firefox mobile have that option to force desktop).
Note though that Reddit does still sniff out your mobile browser and slaps a huge banner for their app at the top of the page. Or maybe that's another one of their A/B tests, but it's been there...
Note though that Reddit does still sniff out your mobile browser and slaps a huge banner for their app at the top of the page. Or maybe that's another one of their A/B tests, but it's been there for very many months for me.
Theory: enough subs have gone private that the code is struggling to process enough posts for r/all r/home r/popular et all. Either that or all the pinned "why we're shutting down" posts looked so...
Theory: enough subs have gone private that the code is struggling to process enough posts for r/allr/homer/popular et all.
Either that or all the pinned "why we're shutting down" posts looked so bad they decided to say fuck it and kill the site.
I am going on a 10 day vacation to Aruba on Wednesday so I will look at it when I get back at the end of June. I will start browsing Tildes while I wait for the plane(s) instead of the other site....
I am going on a 10 day vacation to Aruba on Wednesday so I will look at it when I get back at the end of June.
I will start browsing Tildes while I wait for the plane(s) instead of the other site.
The other site was good for mindless scrolling while anxiously awaiting flights.
This site has much a better quality of discussion that I can sink my waiting anxiety into LOL!
A vacation makes it easy! ;) As for me, I was relying too much on Reddit. My new strategy is to diversify on smaller platforms. I can switch between them depending on what I’m looking for. They...
A vacation makes it easy! ;)
As for me, I was relying too much on Reddit. My new strategy is to diversify on smaller platforms. I can switch between them depending on what I’m looking for. They all offer something different. News updates, quality discussion, light-hearted entertainment, etc. It’s so refreshing!
Yep... I'm trying to refrain from using reddit though part of me is going but you only have a month left to use it (I've resolved if I can't use apollo to read reddit I'm gone so end of this month...
Yep... I'm trying to refrain from using reddit though part of me is going but you only have a month left to use it (I've resolved if I can't use apollo to read reddit I'm gone so end of this month it seems).
One suggestion from me who's been going through the same dilemna, I feel like actually posting comments and being thoughtful with my answers has been helping me a lot. I used to lurk really hard...
One suggestion from me who's been going through the same dilemna, I feel like actually posting comments and being thoughtful with my answers has been helping me a lot. I used to lurk really hard on the old site which helped me just mindlessly scroll, but now thinking about comments and writing them out has actually staved off that feeling of needing to doomscroll. It's only been a couple of days though so I could be wrong.
I wish it was just willpower for me. There are so many niche subs I enjoy but browsing them without the clean UI is just not worth it... I literally can't browse it properly. It's like if I went...
I wish it was just willpower for me. There are so many niche subs I enjoy but browsing them without the clean UI is just not worth it... I literally can't browse it properly. It's like if I went to go to the beach on a sunny day but I also had to dress like I'm visiting Canada in the winter.
Holymoly. I thought they might just kill .old for a day or two to get back at us obnoxiously complaining users, but this is very confusing news and very bad for Reddit's PR I assume. Does anyone...
Holymoly. I thought they might just kill .old for a day or two to get back at us obnoxiously complaining users, but this is very confusing news and very bad for Reddit's PR I assume.
Does anyone have any idea whats going on on the mothership?
Same, the day that RES dies is the same day that I leave reddit. I use the tag user feature a ton in some of the smaller sub reddits that I frequent so that I don't engage with people who have a...
Same, the day that RES dies is the same day that I leave reddit. I use the tag user feature a ton in some of the smaller sub reddits that I frequent so that I don't engage with people who have a history of concern trolling or just outright trolling.
I’m not defending him at all, but that AMA where he said the API wasn’t going anywhere was like 6 years ago… (Also, technically it’s still there, just with an exorbitant price tags for developers,...
I’m not defending him at all, but that AMA where he said the API wasn’t going anywhere was like 6 years ago…
(Also, technically it’s still there, just with an exorbitant price tags for developers, so he didn’t outright lie)
The API has not gone anywhere. It's still there, still usable, still being used. They're just charging for it now. But you can't charge for something that doesn't exist, so... the API must still...
the API wasn't going anywhere either
The API has not gone anywhere. It's still there, still usable, still being used.
They're just charging for it now.
But you can't charge for something that doesn't exist, so... the API must still be there.
They are removing sexual NSFW content from the API even if you pay for it. That level of feature disparity is essentially equivalent to pulling the API completely, IMHO.
They are removing sexual NSFW content from the API even if you pay for it. That level of feature disparity is essentially equivalent to pulling the API completely, IMHO.
I'm beginning to realise that that will be my "straw that breaks the camel's back". I don't give a shit about Reddit apps, because I don't use apps to access websites. Anyway, old.reddit.com works...
said in his recent AMA that "old.reddit.com isn't going anywhere".
I'm beginning to realise that that will be my "straw that breaks the camel's back".
I don't give a shit about Reddit apps, because I don't use apps to access websites. Anyway, old.reddit.com works just fine on any device, from desktop computer, through tablet, to phone. I don't need an app when I've got the original Reddit at my fingertips.
But, if they decommission old.reddit.com... that will stop me using Reddit. I've tried using new.reddit.com as a user, and I just can't. It's slow, ugly, and confusing (and packed with ads!). I will concede that the moderator tools in new.reddit.com are very good, but they chose not to build those tools in old.reddit.com, so of course new.reddit.com is better for moderating. However, as a day-to-day user, I can't use new.reddit.com. If they close old.reddit.com, that'll be the end of my redditing.
I seem to remember somewhere, a while back, they assured us that i.reddit.com & www.reddit.com/.compact wouldn't go anywhere - and they got decommissioned a couple of years ago. So, old.reddit.com is also probably going to end up on the chopping block at some stage.
I was in the process of deleting all my comments and afterwards was going to delete my 17 yo account. I wonder if other people had similar ideas and Reddit either got overwhelmed or put the site...
I was in the process of deleting all my comments and afterwards was going to delete my 17 yo account. I wonder if other people had similar ideas and Reddit either got overwhelmed or put the site in maintenance mode to stem the bleeding. Probably not but would be funny if it was.
https://www.twitch.tv/reddark_247 This is a stream keeping track of subreddits that have gone private, and both the stream and the chat are reporting issues with Reddit too. Pick your theory;...
Why not a combination of all theories? This is an unprecedented time...there have never been this many subs going private all at the same time before, nor this many users deleting comments and...
Why not a combination of all theories? This is an unprecedented time...there have never been this many subs going private all at the same time before, nor this many users deleting comments and accounts at the same time. There has to be some internal tension that could result in technical issues purposely. There's more than enough bored script kiddies that will jump on this opportunity. And if the management team was smart, which I'm not convinced they are completely, they'd take this opportunity to perform "routine site maintenance" to explain away the drop in user visits. All are probably occurring right now...
Question: Is it actually unsafe to even go onto the Reddit site with all this chaos? I am fairly computer literate but don't understand something of this magnitude and how it could possibly impact...
Question: Is it actually unsafe to even go onto the Reddit site with all this chaos?
I am fairly computer literate but don't understand something of this magnitude and how it could possibly impact an unsuspecting user.
It's likely safe, you just won't always be able to load the page or use some features like comments may not be saved properly. I doubt any security has be comprised.
It's likely safe, you just won't always be able to load the page or use some features like comments may not be saved properly. I doubt any security has be comprised.
Random questions: I used a script a couple months ago to scrub my reddit account. My user page is completely blank aside from recent comments, but I'm still finding years-old posts and comments...
Random questions: I used a script a couple months ago to scrub my reddit account. My user page is completely blank aside from recent comments, but I'm still finding years-old posts and comments (e.g. in some private mod subs) that weren't deleted. Does anyone know why? Also are there any automated solutions to delete all this activity short of deleting each one I can find manually? I'm planning to go back after the protest on the 15th and delete as much as I can before the end of June when I fully transition away from reddit. I'm really worried/annoyed that I'm gonna have to spend hours and hours truly deleting all my reddit activity.
Question: I am hoping that I can pull some of my more thoughtful commentary from Reddit before I even consider deleting my account. Would this request process work for such an endeavor?
Question: I am hoping that I can pull some of my more thoughtful commentary from Reddit before I even consider deleting my account.
Would this request process work for such an endeavor?
I've heard that as well, but at the risk of coming of as a cynical conspiracist, is there any evidence that they don't retain any version of prior comments?
I've heard that as well, but at the risk of coming of as a cynical conspiracist, is there any evidence that they don't retain any version of prior comments?
I am not deleting my account until I have the opportunity to pull some of my better commentary off the site for saving. That'll be a slog but I know I will regret not trying. I think I have been a...
I am not deleting my account until I have the opportunity to pull some of my better commentary off the site for saving.
That'll be a slog but I know I will regret not trying.
I think I have been a user for nearly ten years although I lurked for a long time before signing up with a username.
When the IMBD site shut down their comments section years ago I tried to save my comments but missed a significant portion of them and wished I had taken more time to gather my messages before it all went poof.
Request a copy of your data here and you'll receive an archive with a number of csv files that contain your posts, comments, and saved comments/posts. Shreddit also has an option to save your...
I am not deleting my account until I have the opportunity to pull some of my better commentary off the site for saving.
That'll be a slog but I know I will regret not trying.
Request a copy of your data here and you'll receive an archive with a number of csv files that contain your posts, comments, and saved comments/posts.
Shreddit also has an option to save your comments/posts to disk as json files before deleting them, but the fork I use seems to have been removed from github and I think the original is currently broken.
Down for me as well. Not that I care, I wasn't planning on using it. But now the tin-foil hat is on and thinking they are working on reopening certain portions of the site, removing mods, etc to...
Down for me as well. Not that I care, I wasn't planning on using it. But now the tin-foil hat is on and thinking they are working on reopening certain portions of the site, removing mods, etc to keep things going.
Just noticed that myself. Was wondering about the possibility of it being related (somehow) but then I remembered Reddit is always going down and feels held together by duct tape even during...
Just noticed that myself.
Was wondering about the possibility of it being related (somehow) but then I remembered Reddit is always going down and feels held together by duct tape even during 'normal' times.
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if Reddit has some big algorithm change or something else proposed to minimize the effects of the blackout, though knowing their history of development I...
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if Reddit has some big algorithm change or something else proposed to minimize the effects of the blackout, though knowing their history of development I don’t know that they have the expertise to pull off something that sinister that quickly. The timing sure is convenient though.
I do like the theory that so many subs are private that r/all, r/popular, etc. are having trouble finding enough posts.
Seems online from what I can see. Just that there's very little worthwhile content on the front page right now. Edit: RIF app is down, reddit site is up. I assume the API is down.
Seems online from what I can see. Just that there's very little worthwhile content on the front page right now.
Edit: RIF app is down, reddit site is up. I assume the API is down.
It's down on my end, using desktop from my Windows machine (they intentionally broke browser access from mobile devices a while ago, hence specifying). RIF is also down for me. Personally I...
It's down on my end, using desktop from my Windows machine (they intentionally broke browser access from mobile devices a while ago, hence specifying). RIF is also down for me.
it’s apparently a Cloudflare issue. cloudflarestatus.com shows an R2 issue, whatever that means, but as far as I can tell it’s not necessarily a Reddit thing
it’s apparently a Cloudflare issue. cloudflarestatus.com shows an R2 issue, whatever that means, but as far as I can tell it’s not necessarily a Reddit thing
I wonder if they just realized "you know what bunch of users are 'protesting' the site and coming back a few days from now, we should push all the risky experimental stuff now.
I wonder if they just realized "you know what bunch of users are 'protesting' the site and coming back a few days from now, we should push all the risky experimental stuff now.
I wonder if it's because of an Influx of users with Mainstream media reporting on it. In the UK at least several mainstream press have been reporting on it. Or maybe the admins have taken the site...
I wonder if it's because of an Influx of users with Mainstream media reporting on it. In the UK at least several mainstream press have been reporting on it. Or maybe the admins have taken the site down for Maintenance during the blackouts?
Would a DDOS attack as some have suggested really work on a site as big as Reddit? I'm interested in seeing if there is an official statement after the site goes up or if they will continue to be quiet.
(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.
A Reddit spokesperson gave a statement to The Verge saying it was an anticipated issue, confirming your theory.
Ohhh, you think this is for the same reason as why you couldn't block more than 100 or so subs? That they struggle to serve you a front page if you block all the subreddits that would usually fill it?
Which, thinking about it, is there a smart way of doing this that actually does scale? Where you can have an arbitrarily long white / black list of subreddits, and it serves you the top content from them as requested? Or is that one of those things that scales like shit no matter how you spin it?
I personally can’t laugh loud or long enough at the CEO claiming Apollo was poorly optimized and then all it took was a bunch of mods setting their subs private to break the website. No wonder reddit isn’t profitable. It’s barely tenable at this point.
When you're managing this much data, you need shortcuts, and caching is the ultimate shortcut. At least, it's the ultimate shortcut when you have predictable, typical behavior. There's a reason for the old programmer saying:
that’s fair, but why would it happen at this random time instead of earlier? the subreddits have been private for quite a few hours now. maybe some cron job related to subreddit listings was activated? i would expect this at around like say 9 am because a lot of people would be trying to access reddit…
That’s east coast. It’s not even 9am yet in the west coast. I’m sure traffic really picks up starting about now across the whole of the US/Canada.
People go online at the end of business hours too. Europe ends the work day, this page was posted around 16:45 CET. It probably started around 5 pm EET (4 pm CET) and overlapped with East Coast US starting the day.
r/popular was nonfunctional last night once about 1500 or so subs went dark, fwiw.
really? it worked fine for me, i was refreshing it a lot
lol this will sounds like "what would happen if everyone on earth jumped" but really what would happen if everyone on Reddit hit refresh?
That's essentially what a DDOS attack is 😅
Just wait until there's 3rd party apps that web scrape Reddit.
Indeed,
reddit.comis not accessible, butreddit.com/r/<some_sub>is.Honestly, I don't think I'd ever notice it while on desktop (most of my browsing). I only ever go to specific subreddits on web. With RIF, it always opens to the front page so that's about the only time I see the front page.
In my own experience I was late to making one of my subreddits private, and I couldn't get into reddit for about an hour to get it done. Strangely navigating through my pms worked though. Now that the site is back up I honestly find it hilarious to see that r/AnarchyChess is on r/all currently when it wasn't being actively moderated for a short period of time.
As a former Reddit backend dev you might have some insight, if you're willing to share, on how 'based in reality' the API pricing really is. I mostly do backend work so it just seemed crazy to me that third party API access costs "tens of millions of dollars annually" as spez claimed.
You might not be conformable sharing such info in case there are NDAs attached etc, but if you are then you might have a particularly valuable insight into this topic.
It's almost assuredly opportunity costs of serving the user with ads via the website or official Reddit app.
I could see it being a realistic number if you assume all third party app users would start using the official app, although I don't think that's a very good assumption as you can see...
I definitely think that is still the assumption. Reddit is fairly confident that their competition is not as good as they are at providing the content they provide, and are betting that most users will be coming back and will be settling for the official app once the outrage dies down.
And I can see why they would. The two top alternatives being Tilde, which is a gated community and definitely feels a lot smaller and lacking in content right now (compared to the vastness of reddit), and Lemmy which is also small and lacking content, but on top of that is painful to navigate and unintuitive.
I'm fairly content here, but I can see a lot of the Lemmy users getting very tired of that system and going back to reddit after not long. The real deciding factor will be if the content comes back to reddit as well, which I doubt. The power users left for good I think.
Moderators are also probably the most addicted Reddit users, it remains to be seen if they can stay away.
I think I'll continue to use Reddit on occasion, but only via old.reddit on desktop with an ad blocker.
Again, as I said on Reddit before the blackout, I point you to Digg. They said the same things during the 4.0 debacle.
Reddit is a lot more fleshed out and mature than Digg was, not to mention what Reddit was during that time. I think subreddits had only just been introduced when I joined. So as an entity, they likely aren't going anywhere. But this incident will definitely hit their user count. Whether it hits a critical mass of mods jumping ship and letting the subs be taken over by trolls and spam is another question. I think Reddit is going to look a lot different after this, and nothing like the site everyone flocked to when Digg committed suicide.
For sure, reddit isn't going away. Digg survived, reddit will too. But digg is a shadow of its former self, and I assume reddit will be as well now.
I'm actually very interested to see how the site continues to evolve now that it probably will have very little resistance against it doing so. Who knows, maybe it will evolve back into a site we all enjoy, just in a different way and for a different reason.
Squabbles.io also gained thousands of new users. But it's not invite based so the barrier to entry isn't the same as tildes
I just went to check Squabbles out, and it seems like it could get some traction but personally I do not like the more "modern" look that emulates Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
That being said, I could see myself growing to use it if the communities I follow gain any traction there.
Sorry to revive a dead thread, but in case you’re curious Lemmy.world is at 25K users and still growing. It honestly is feeling pretty good for social content, although admittedly very reddit-focused right now. It’s been fascinating to watch.
I joined .world a few days before the blackout, same time I joined Tildes. Last I saw, they got defederated from the other two major instances?
Spez confirmed this on a call with the developer of Apollo, which he shared.
It's absolutely the opportunity cost.
Now if that opportunity cost is legitimately what they're claiming is another story. But it definitely isn't "just to cover their cloud expenses".
It feels like such a predictable result and a naive assumption. It's crazy.
I remember the counting subreddit having so many hundreds of thousands of comments in one thread that it had seriously affected reddits caching and database queries.
Just as you said, inefficient and strange. Multiple layers of caches don't work when you are counting to a million. It hadn't happened before. So instead of recognising their flawed architecture and solving the problem, they placed a limit on how many comments a single thread can contain.
What I don't understand is that a few years after you left they went on a mass hiring spree. I simply cannot fathom where that huge staff investment went. Their platform still has these strange oddities like you described, the moderation tools in many ways went backwards. We know that third parties had repeatedly tried to contact them via multiple communication channels and were ignored for months.
Wait, I've just had an apostrophe, sorry an epiphany. After you left, reddits backend was left in shambles. You were the glue holding it together. No wonder they had to hire 700 people just to replace you.
Marketing. They hired people to manage selling advertisements, not code, not features, not admins and developers. Their staff is probably >80% marketing now, hundreds of them.
Reddit drove the majority of the 'admins who care' and 'mods who care' about community out back in 2015. It became apparent to everyone after the Pao debacle and Victoria's departure. As the head mod of a default subreddit, all I ever got from admins was canned responses after that - I may as well have been talking to bots. At least when krispy, cupcake, chooter, deimos, raldi, and jedberg were there it was like talking to people who gave a damn about community and wanted to help. Deimos is not the only one of those ex-admins with an account here, either.
Thank you, that was insightful. I wasn't a mod of any big sub, but I had some lovely interactions with cupcake and chooter many years ago.
But 700 new employees, that is a massive number. I don't even see how they could have put them all into marketing, its a huge number of people. Even if 80% of them went into marketing, that a still a sizeable number of people working on the platform. Yet I cannot see where those resources went. I suspect a disgusting amount was wasted on weird crypto NFT pie in the sky dreams.
This is actually a very interesting twist. I wonder how long it will take to fix, and if subreddits can use this design flaw as a weapon.
After a prior wave of blackouts (I think the ones surrounding Victoria being let go?) they implemented 'community health' guidelines, essentially giving them something to fall back on to commandeer and reopen subs if needed.
If anything, "closed subs causing site issues" would give them more of a justification to do so.
Considering you've got insights:
Could this be another outcropping of this? (users being forcefully resubscribed after whittling down their subscriptions to only blacked-out subs)
Here's my thinking:
If you restrict your front page to only private subreddits that you can't view, reddit tries to serve you a page of 20 posts and (presumably) does silly things like looking for a long time in each of these private subreddits for a post that you can see. It climbs down the order of posts from those subs, checking each time whether you can view them, rejecting every single one of them. Reddit's front page assumes that there's gotta be something you they can display you (or there might be a condition that catches the obvious one, an empty subscription list), so it keeps looking and looking and looking. Eventually, the server goes belly up. The admins figure out what's the issue and rolls back every user who unsubscribed down to a basically-empty sub list, back to a list they previously subscribed to. Problem "solved".
Deimos lore
That’s super interesting. Thanks for sharing.
Puts tin foil hat on
My idea is, it's easier to show the outage to explain low usage on 12th-14th to investors later this year. Saying "yeah our users launched a massive protest that effected 2 BILLION (not unique) accounts" is much harder than "yeah we had an outage."
It's no secret that Reddit is planning to become publicly traded. And publicly traded companies do everything in their power to cover-up their fuckups.
Takes tin foil hat off
I'm not sure that this is a huge tin foil hat theory. If you do maintenance scheduled or otherwise on a day(s) when you expect to see a drastic drop in engagement, you've got a great explanation for the drop of engagement.
Any smart investor could easily find all the articles that have come out regarding the API changes though. Pretty easy to see through the lie of "scheduled maintenance"
I don't think this could be the case. It would be tough to explain away a two day downtime. Like: why would a live service ever be down that much.
And what if the blackouts do continue? A lot of places already hinted at letting them run for a longer period
I don't think they need the site down for two days, just long enough to decide on a game plan. If I was an exec at Reddit and woke up to everyone telling me that the front page is dried up and only has posts about how Reddit is killing 3rd party apps, I would want to take a little bit to figure out what to do. Best to hide the protest in the meantime.
You don't have to have two full days of downtime, just enough downtime on both days to be a plausible explanation. Having said that, I take your point.
This was my first thought as well. Opening the app earlier this morning, all the top posts for me said "Reddit is killing 3rd party apps." Much better to just bring down the whole site to buy some time. I generally avoid tin foil hats, but this is too suspicious.
They initially started to IPO in 2021.... But then they decided to wait.
I fully expect the IPO to open in late July, early August.
The API thing is a direct indicator of that, as they are reigning in things they don't control, and putting a price tag in it for licensing. The ridiculous pricing is theoretically GOOD for initial stock price.
What Spez is too stupid to understand is, public trust us also a large factor in that initial stock value also. And he's losing a lot of it. It's gonna IPO, and he'll be ousted by January.
I'm not sure that he would be sad about that? So there's the IPO, he gets a golden parachute, and he goes on with his life without having to deal with Redditors anymore? There are worse outcomes in life.
Yeah, as long as he's still there when the IPO happens, he's going to cash in. The only question is what happens to the stock price between IPO and the end of the lockup period, when he can sell his shares.
Still, from everything I've read, he seems to enjoy being a petty tyrant, so I'm sure he wouldn't want to give that up if he had a choice.
It's not implausible, but if they did that they didn't bank on other publicity. The reddit blackout is trending on twitter, and many other reputable news sources are already reporting on it. Most investors interested in purchasing reddit are likely consuming those same sources, so they would be well aware of what is happening already. Spez likely knows it's too public to cover up at this stage. My bet would be too much engagement, or subs going down caused internal issues.
My gut is it's a bug related to the quantity of private subs. I think some database query or filter is poorly implemented and dealing with so many private subs is tanking the site.
Well, it's one of the things that's tanking the site.
(Update: Site appears to be up as of a few minutes ago, originally posted about 42 minutes ago as of this edit)
I'm a soon-to-be Reddit refugee (waiting for June 30th/end of 3rd Party apps) and just checked in to Reddit this AM. Unless it's just me, the website appears to be down. Can't help but speculate this has something to do with the blackout that is supposed to be going down today and tomorrow (or indefinitely depending on the subreddit)...
You might also want to check out DownDetector! It allows users to submit reports, which is aggregated and used to determine whether a given site is down or not based on a threshold. I've found it incredibly useful when there are problems with a given service and other "detection" sites just say it's still online. I'm guessing that's because they just verify whether or not the web server responds to ping and returns a 200.
Super helpful, thank you!!
It's down for me as well, and I agree that it's fishy it's down the same day as the blackouts are starting, I have a funny feeling they're going to come out and say "You all are free to protest, but we were taking the website down for maintenance anyways on those days" (But, you know, more professionally)
There’s a lot of press about it so probably an influx of viewers going on Reddit for the novelty.
Doubt it. Should be more than compensated by the number of viewers not there.
I suspect the admins used the presumed lull to roll out a patch and it broke things or something.
Possibly, but I'd suspect a DDoS honestly. This seems like the sort of thing that would happen - plus, googling "reddit DDoS june 12" brings up people who were in reddit pre-blackout, organising doing just that.
This send most likely, but if that's what's happening, it's definitely not going to help the cause. If anything, it will just make reddit look like a victim to people on the outside.
I keep getting loading errors on RIF when I scroll past the first page. I keep checking for protest posts to upvote :/
Ah, sadly it's up right now (or at least it worked for me). And yeah, hello from another soon to be reddit refugee (I question my willpower cause I admit I will miss reddit but they really pissed me off with this whole debacle... and I don't want to use Reddit without Apollo).
I have been resisting all day and it brings to light how damn addicted I am to Reddit.
I didn't realize how bad my Reddit addiction was until I decided I would not be visiting the site at all over the next two days. Started going through withdrawal almost immediately.
I'd actually forgotten I had a Tildes account, but I'm stoked it still works!
Down for me as well. I entirely forgot about the blackout and hopped on to reply to a comment and it's down.
Um, no. You did.
that screen has always infuriated me with its user-blamingness. it’s really bad UX
am I getting Spez's notifications or something?
Hopefully this means we are influencing some major changes! The good ending is the API changes are delayed or reconsidered entirely. The bad ending is the admins take more direct control of the offlined subreddits and force them back open. Changes are brewing either way.
I sadly have no hope for any positive changes. There was already a recent Reddit post where admins admitted to blocking some users from accessing their Reddit account via mobile browser, clearly to force them to use the official app. I wonder how long it'll take before they kill mobile browsing for everyone.
Someone posted the Reddit link to Lemmy.
(Hope I'm allowed to post links in comments)
I think it's just mobile browsers. I can see them getting rid of old.reddit at some point though.
nah, just the mobile reddit.com. TBH, they've been very annoying with it for a while where it just keeps (VERY intruisively) prompting you to download the app.
You can get around it by bringing up the desktop site on mobile (both Chrome and Firefox mobile have that option to force desktop).
Note though that Reddit does still sniff out your mobile browser and slaps a huge banner for their app at the top of the page. Or maybe that's another one of their A/B tests, but it's been there for very many months for me.
Just on mobile browsers, without considering that some mobile devices aren't compatible with their app (either due to age or OS or anything else)
https://i.imgur.com/fN1XU4R.png
bahaha I saved all of them
Theory: enough subs have gone private that the code is struggling to process enough posts for r/all r/home r/popular et all.
Either that or all the pinned "why we're shutting down" posts looked so bad they decided to say fuck it and kill the site.
There might also be lots of people deleting their accounts and comments with mass deleting scripts.
I've been playing with Redact.dev on and off through the day. It was working fine a few hours ago but has been returning various errors recently.
Um, are you "the" phedre? From long, long ago? Who ran the best AMA's of all time?
On the reddit status tweet about this someone responded with
Which gave me a good chuckle.
I've personally banned Reddit for a week. I'll check it (maybe) next Monday.
Hey Reddit! Feel free to post your appeal here. :>
I am going on a 10 day vacation to Aruba on Wednesday so I will look at it when I get back at the end of June.
I will start browsing Tildes while I wait for the plane(s) instead of the other site.
The other site was good for mindless scrolling while anxiously awaiting flights.
This site has much a better quality of discussion that I can sink my waiting anxiety into LOL!
A vacation makes it easy! ;)
As for me, I was relying too much on Reddit. My new strategy is to diversify on smaller platforms. I can switch between them depending on what I’m looking for. They all offer something different. News updates, quality discussion, light-hearted entertainment, etc. It’s so refreshing!
Today will be a good test for me to see if I actually have the willpower to drop Reddit.
Yep... I'm trying to refrain from using reddit though part of me is going but you only have a month left to use it (I've resolved if I can't use apollo to read reddit I'm gone so end of this month it seems).
One suggestion from me who's been going through the same dilemna, I feel like actually posting comments and being thoughtful with my answers has been helping me a lot. I used to lurk really hard on the old site which helped me just mindlessly scroll, but now thinking about comments and writing them out has actually staved off that feeling of needing to doomscroll. It's only been a couple of days though so I could be wrong.
I wish it was just willpower for me. There are so many niche subs I enjoy but browsing them without the clean UI is just not worth it... I literally can't browse it properly. It's like if I went to go to the beach on a sunny day but I also had to dress like I'm visiting Canada in the winter.
Holymoly. I thought they might just kill .old for a day or two to get back at us obnoxiously complaining users, but this is very confusing news and very bad for Reddit's PR I assume.
Does anyone have any idea whats going on on the mothership?
I'm a desktop user with RES. If they kill .old then it's "Captain! Iceberg ahead!" for me.
Same, the day that RES dies is the same day that I leave reddit. I use the tag user feature a ton in some of the smaller sub reddits that I frequent so that I don't engage with people who have a history of concern trolling or just outright trolling.
Same but with RiF. Sooooo..... here I am.
Yep, same here! Over 12 years on reddit down the drain. This site is looking quite nice though.
It's very much reminding me of older sites where quality was prized far more over quantity.
I'm already pissed off about losing Apollo on my phone - if they also kill old.reddit on my PC then I will be well and truly done.
He also said in a previous AMA that the API wasn't going anywhere either. Spez doesn't have any integrity.
I’m not defending him at all, but that AMA where he said the API wasn’t going anywhere was like 6 years ago…
(Also, technically it’s still there, just with an exorbitant price tags for developers, so he didn’t outright lie)
The API has not gone anywhere. It's still there, still usable, still being used.
They're just charging for it now.
But you can't charge for something that doesn't exist, so... the API must still be there.
They are removing sexual NSFW content from the API even if you pay for it. That level of feature disparity is essentially equivalent to pulling the API completely, IMHO.
I'm beginning to realise that that will be my "straw that breaks the camel's back".
I don't give a shit about Reddit apps, because I don't use apps to access websites. Anyway, old.reddit.com works just fine on any device, from desktop computer, through tablet, to phone. I don't need an app when I've got the original Reddit at my fingertips.
But, if they decommission old.reddit.com... that will stop me using Reddit. I've tried using new.reddit.com as a user, and I just can't. It's slow, ugly, and confusing (and packed with ads!). I will concede that the moderator tools in new.reddit.com are very good, but they chose not to build those tools in old.reddit.com, so of course new.reddit.com is better for moderating. However, as a day-to-day user, I can't use new.reddit.com. If they close old.reddit.com, that'll be the end of my redditing.
I seem to remember somewhere, a while back, they assured us that i.reddit.com & www.reddit.com/.compact wouldn't go anywhere - and they got decommissioned a couple of years ago. So, old.reddit.com is also probably going to end up on the chopping block at some stage.
And then I'll be gone.
I was in the process of deleting all my comments and afterwards was going to delete my 17 yo account. I wonder if other people had similar ideas and Reddit either got overwhelmed or put the site in maintenance mode to stem the bleeding. Probably not but would be funny if it was.
https://www.twitch.tv/reddark_247
This is a stream keeping track of subreddits that have gone private, and both the stream and the chat are reporting issues with Reddit too.
Pick your theory; deliberate shutdown by Reddit, meme DDoS by bored skiddies, malicious inside job, or a completely coincidental technical issue?
Why not a combination of all theories? This is an unprecedented time...there have never been this many subs going private all at the same time before, nor this many users deleting comments and accounts at the same time. There has to be some internal tension that could result in technical issues purposely. There's more than enough bored script kiddies that will jump on this opportunity. And if the management team was smart, which I'm not convinced they are completely, they'd take this opportunity to perform "routine site maintenance" to explain away the drop in user visits. All are probably occurring right now...
Question: Is it actually unsafe to even go onto the Reddit site with all this chaos?
I am fairly computer literate but don't understand something of this magnitude and how it could possibly impact an unsuspecting user.
It's likely safe, you just won't always be able to load the page or use some features like comments may not be saved properly. I doubt any security has be comprised.
I love how Hacker News is down at the same time due to overflow from people not able to waste time on r/programming.
down for me currently...
Definitely an interesting development, but I'm not sure if a direct link to reddit on our frontpage is helpful for the protest :)
It is while it is broken..lol
Down for me in the apps and via browser. Status page says everything is cool: https://www.redditstatus.com/
So, not sure.
It now reports a major outage
Random questions: I used a script a couple months ago to scrub my reddit account. My user page is completely blank aside from recent comments, but I'm still finding years-old posts and comments (e.g. in some private mod subs) that weren't deleted. Does anyone know why? Also are there any automated solutions to delete all this activity short of deleting each one I can find manually? I'm planning to go back after the protest on the 15th and delete as much as I can before the end of June when I fully transition away from reddit. I'm really worried/annoyed that I'm gonna have to spend hours and hours truly deleting all my reddit activity.
Question: I am hoping that I can pull some of my more thoughtful commentary from Reddit before I even consider deleting my account.
Would this request process work for such an endeavor?
That is correct. Choose "GDPR" and you get everything to do with your account.
Article here shows what you can expect to get.
I may be wrong, but this is likely due to Reddit archives.
Can you truly delete a comment? Yes it appears deleted to viewers, but is it permanently deleted from the servers?
I've heard that as well, but at the risk of coming of as a cynical conspiracist, is there any evidence that they don't retain any version of prior comments?
Nice. Time to go make some popcorn.
Old reddit loads, looks like Reddit's aware of this:
https://www.redditstatus.com/
We did it Reddit, we killed them! :p
Not just you. Sure does seem coincidental. I just want to delete my accounts.
I am not deleting my account until I have the opportunity to pull some of my better commentary off the site for saving.
That'll be a slog but I know I will regret not trying.
I think I have been a user for nearly ten years although I lurked for a long time before signing up with a username.
When the IMBD site shut down their comments section years ago I tried to save my comments but missed a significant portion of them and wished I had taken more time to gather my messages before it all went poof.
Request a copy of your data here and you'll receive an archive with a number of csv files that contain your posts, comments, and saved comments/posts.
Shreddit also has an option to save your comments/posts to disk as json files before deleting them, but the fork I use seems to have been removed from github and I think the original is currently broken.
Appreciate the information! I had no idea about any of this!
I put a lot of work into some of my comments through the years.
Down for me as well. Not that I care, I wasn't planning on using it. But now the tin-foil hat is on and thinking they are working on reopening certain portions of the site, removing mods, etc to keep things going.
Just noticed that myself.
Was wondering about the possibility of it being related (somehow) but then I remembered Reddit is always going down and feels held together by duct tape even during 'normal' times.
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if Reddit has some big algorithm change or something else proposed to minimize the effects of the blackout, though knowing their history of development I don’t know that they have the expertise to pull off something that sinister that quickly. The timing sure is convenient though.
I do like the theory that so many subs are private that r/all, r/popular, etc. are having trouble finding enough posts.
What an interesting day that’s for sure!
Down for me on the site currently
Down for me too. This is most curious, I'm sure not a coincidence. Maybe they're doing a mass reactivation of all subreddits that went dark?
It seems like old.Reddit.com loads for me but not the standard reddit.com
Not for me. It says
You broke RedditI can access the site, but my third-party app (Boost) returns a 403 and simply won't load anything, which I find interesting.
Seems online from what I can see. Just that there's very little worthwhile content on the front page right now.
Edit: RIF app is down, reddit site is up. I assume the API is down.
It's down on my end, using desktop from my Windows machine (they intentionally broke browser access from mobile devices a while ago, hence specifying). RIF is also down for me.
Personally I suspect a DDoS.
Indeed, I didn't make a post until trying regular old reddit.com from my PC (checked the native mobile app too).
Everything is down for me
it’s apparently a Cloudflare issue. cloudflarestatus.com shows an R2 issue, whatever that means, but as far as I can tell it’s not necessarily a Reddit thing
I wonder if they just realized "you know what bunch of users are 'protesting' the site and coming back a few days from now, we should push all the risky experimental stuff now.
Seems to be back up.
Same, still private for me
Some stuff loads, some doesn’t. If you keep refreshing it eventually loads. Just went in to check how borked it was. Apollo app.
I wonder if it's because of an Influx of users with Mainstream media reporting on it. In the UK at least several mainstream press have been reporting on it. Or maybe the admins have taken the site down for Maintenance during the blackouts?
Would a DDOS attack as some have suggested really work on a site as big as Reddit? I'm interested in seeing if there is an official statement after the site goes up or if they will continue to be quiet.