Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
theverge.comI have not read a reddit devblog or anything like that. My guess is they are doing some kind of caching of posts via elasticsearch/redis or something similar. It must depend on the privacy settings of a sub.
So when 1000 subs go private, they potentially had to update hundreds of millions of comments.
Anyone else have a theory?
Posted elsewhere, but yeah that's my theory too (having actually helped built it in the first place). My guess is the caches got blown out because the entire system is built on the idea that most people are looking at the most popular content.
When you close down all the most popular content, you have to dig deep into the long tail for fresh content.
Also, my guess is that the code for building homepages is not optimized for having a lot of skips due to private Reddits, since most people have probably never been subscribed to a private reddit, or if they have it wasn't for very long, or even if for very long, never more than one or two at at time.
Makes sense to me. I remember several lunch conversations at FB about whether or not we even could restart the site with totally cold caches. I’m sure it was possible but it wouldn’t have been clean or pretty.
We did restart reddit with cold caches a few times when I was there. It took hours to recover but eventually caught up if it happened near peak. If we did it during low traffic it wasn't too bad.
But that was 13 years ago, no idea how it would do today. :)
I’m sure Facebook could too (their disaster recovery planning and drills were always top notch) but I’m glad I won’t be oncall if it ever happens :-D
> I remember several lunch conversations at FB about whether or not we even could restart the site with totally cold caches
so you're saying, we just have to knock it out once, and it'll be gone forever? that makes things easier ...
That makes sense to me. It would be one variant of a larger theory of "a subreddit going private is an expensive process that is poorly optimized because it's normally so rare". Another variant would be that clicking the "go private" button might do something like start a huge cascade of queries/calls to mutate the status of individual posts and comments (and possibly hence also trigger the massive cache invalidation you mentioned). Possibly also "going private" infra, whatever it is, is some bespoke snowflake that doesn't autoscale (since it's never needed to and there was always something better to be doing with engineering time, or people just forgot).
One theory I have seen floated but which seems unlikely to me is that this was some kind of internal sabotage. I could maybe buy this if the protest was about a war or human rights issue or something, but I really don't think any IT pros would be willing to risk jail time for this one.
Would a better protest be rapidly switching subreddits from public/private?
A better protest would have been for the moderators to all stop moderating. Turn off their automod filters, allow all posts. Show reddit what happens when their volunteer moderators just stop.
I still think this is coming. After the 48hr strike, how many mods are going to turn their sub back to public, look at their mod inbox filled with confused and angry users, and then see some pending non-response from Reddit post-strike, and wonder why they do this?
The problem with this strategy is that it gives reddit a valid excuse to remove subreddit mods.
Having your sub be unmoderated is against reddit TOS, whereas taking a sub private is not yet against the official TOS.
Process and technicalities like this matter a lot and can effect a platforms actions.
I agree that taking the subs private for 48 hours is a good first step. And I agree that subs staying private indefinitely is a good next step.
But if neither make headway, just going unmoderated is the logical next step. Yeah, reddit could take over moderating the subreddits. They can also do that if they're set private. But they don't want to. They outsourced that to volunteer moderators so they could get free labor. If they want to run their own moderation, and submit their own content, the reddit corporation can have fun with that.
You never want to threaten people with a good time.
From Reddit corporate's perspective, all of their free-labor mods disappearing is _not_ "a good time".
Really shouldn't be anyone's idea of a good time.
every sub would then be nothing but onlyfans ads or similar spam
Too easy to shut down, since there's a finite number of mod enabled accounts.
> to mutate the status of individual posts and comment
AKA why you should normalize your data models.
Meh it's a tradeoff usually. De-normalize for better read performance at the expense of some complexity and worse update performance/semantics.
This is true, but FWIW (it probably wouldn't save you here, too much is changing too fast) something like a SQL materialized view can very often give you both the chocolate and the peanut butter.
I'm skeptical. Most of the outages I've been involved in have been for way dumber reasons than that. Based on my dumb experience, my guess is that the handling for a user trying to access a private subreddit stressed some system that doesn't make sense to even exist.
My theory is that the algorithm that produces the front page relies on the largest subreddits all being public. But if it can't draw on posts from the largest subs, it'll have to dip into a bunch of smaller subs, and the part of the algorithm where it delves deeper and deeper into less popular subreddits is terribly optimized and puts a huge strain on the servers.
Cache invalidation makes sense.
Could also be some kind of fanout query that assumes the top subreddits are open and wastes CPU cycles.
It could even be that lots of queries to generate pages just fetch private posts and comments. The assumption was that users will not be subscribed to lots of subreddits that they have access to so skipping these posts is typically negligible and not worth using a more complex query for. If the fraction of skipped items becomes significant these queries will be doing lots more work. Its pretty believable that some very common query getting 25-50% more expensive will be more server capacity then Reddit has available.
Another possible explanation is that operations on private subreddits are not as optimized as it is expected that they have a small number of subscribers and take up a small amount of total resources. These assumptions would be flipped.
I’ve noticed that my comment history in privatized subreddits are now unavailable, so I wonder if it’s related to that.
the cynic in me says, they're being DDOSd (I mean, they pissed off millions of internet nerds who have their own definition of justice), and instead of admitting it they're using the opportunity to blame the subreddit mods.
then again, not sure why that messaging would be any better for them than admitting to a DDOS...
Blame the user makes sense because they don't want to show how fragile Reddit is while they're trying to attract investors for the IPO.
Here's a guess from a former reddit dev.
> (I used to work as a backend developer at Reddit - I left 6 years ago but I doubt the way things work has changed much)
> I think it's extremely unlikely that this is deliberate. The way that Reddit builds "mixed" subreddit listings (where you see posts from multiple subreddits, like users' front pages) is inefficient and strange, and relies heavily on multiple layers of caches. Having so many subreddits private with their posts inaccessible has never happened before, and is probably causing a bunch of issues with this process
https://tildes.net/~tech/163e/reddit_appears_to_be_down_duri...
Unrelated, but any way to get a tildes invite these days? I asked on Reddit but then shut my sub down and have avoided going back
Exact same boat here.
That was my thinking as well, and assuming they're still cloud-heavy (it's been years since I've checked) this could potentially be an expensive event for them. That opens up a very interesting for of protest/attack that reddit really won't like; "privating" then "un-privating" a subreddit several times a day.
Twitter was like this at one point, flipping over from public to private was one of the most resource intensive things an individual user could do... especially with a long tweet history, because it involves changing every tweet.
My theory is that some middleware applications have policies to scale to zero or one based on traffic patterns, when scaled down due to lack of traffic things start breaking.
The subreddits that are most popular are on high performance servers while the subreddits that are less popular are on lower performance servers?
Well that is how wallstreetbets freezes the subreddit to log all of the potentially actionable comments.
It'd be funny if the engineers at reddit decided now was a good time to upgrade postgres or do some other kind of scheduled maintenance, and just not worry about downtime because the blackout is on anyway.
Unless there is some serious damage control happening from corporate which makes them unable, I think a team of engineers would talk themselves into doing this 99% of the time.
I don't see any damage control... they're still committed to the "Apollo sucks" line:
> Mr. Rathschmidt added that some apps are more efficient and require significantly fewer A.P.I. calls and that “Apollo is notably less efficient than other third-party apps.”
Or rolling out the big blackout override switch
Easy:
``` UPDATE subreddits SET is_private = FALSE WHERE is_private = TRUE AND updated_at BETWEEN 2023-06-11 AND 2023-06-12; ```
Bonus: Run it every hour
I don't think anyone doubts that Reddit could pretty easily unlock those subs, but without mods there to run them it would be a legal nightmare. How long before illegal material was flooding the site beyond the capacity of the admins alone to manage?
I'd also worry that if Reddit moved in that direction, the mods would feel like they didn't have control over their own subs and bail. I don't believe that Reddit can afford that, especially given how many subs and what %age of the user base we're talking about here.
> How long before illegal material was flooding the site beyond the capacity of the admins alone to manage?
I guess that depends on how many people are willing to risk prison just because they're mad at Reddit. Or on what automatic moderation capabilities Reddit has. Not a moderator, so I honestly don't know how much work it does or doesn't take. They probably count on volunteer mods to filter spam and whatnot, but for legal compliance? Highly doubtful.
I think I was unclear, that's my bad. I'm not talking about the average person "protesting" that way, I'm saying that Reddit is already flooded with illegal and ad-unfriendly stuff, the mods are the ones who spend their days picking up that trash. If you open the subs, but the mods are still on strike (and forcibly opening their subs is unlikely to change that) then who's doing the janitorial work?
I'm not a mod, but I have several friends who are, and you wouldn't believe the sheer amount of gross nonsense they have to sift through. Even ignoring the relatively banal death threats, there are always questionable elements trying to sell drugs (both Rx and other), running scams, offering malware, and worse.
Today we learned that r/css hasn’t had any functioning mods in many years, yet it hasn’t been over run, yet.
Yeah... I'm not shocked that a CSS sub with 100k subbed isn't exactly raucous. I suspect that the same can't be said for r/worldnews or the other giants.
Aaaaand suddenly hundreds of private subs are public because they changed anything else :)
Conforms to Reddit Engineering Guideline ;)
Deniability is a powerful tool, and considering their track record this year, this decision wouldn't rank among their worst.
I think reddit will never be the same after this, not because of the API thing (I dont agree with the blackouts), but because it shows how much they neglected their website. Over the years they have made it impossible to compete with the established subreddits. They have allowed a single uniform mob to take over the site, establish themselves as permanent tyrants and grow their ban lists to enormous scale. Even today with the blackouts, you can't find alternative subs to the closed ones, because new subreddits are hidden in search results and popular lists. Without this competition, how do they expect their subs to improve?
It's as if their mismanagement has come back to bite them. Mods have been allowed to run the show and ruin communities for years and years.
Very few people are using 3rd party apps but now they are causing inconvenience to millions for their own capricious reasons. I knew that the site was ran by a small powertripping group of mods but now that they make it so obvious it has kind of chepened the whole medium in my mind
This isn’t a unilateral move by a small group of moderators. Regular users support the blackout in droves. We don’t like Reddit corporate deciding to shut down 3rd party developers.
Reddit is extremely entitled. They as a company create nothing. The users create everything and do all the work of moderation. Spitting in the eye of your all-volunteer staff on which you depend completely for your livelihood is corporate suicide.
Reddit was known for having lots of developers on it in the first place. It should be on some level unsurprising their users throw a fit over third party devs being thrown aside the moment they don’t help reddit’s IPO.
The subreddit experience is bifurcated into (at least) two camps: big/popular/default or small/curated/niche. The tyrannical behaviors are most often found in the former camp where being a moderator is synonymous with “internet power”. The latter is populated by enthusiasts tending to their communities.
I agree that Reddit won’t be the same after this, but there’s just not a ton of remaining value in the big defaults. They’re already plagued with low value, low effort content, low cardinality content. The true damage that’s being done right now is to the small communities which represent(ed) the best of Reddit. Out of the spotlight but deep in quality content for those that care about the topic. The inherent risk of stability is more certain now with Reddit’s new policies. And I suspect now with many subreddits weighing indefinite shutdowns that many users (perhaps more importantly: the best content creators) will scatter to the wind for greener pastures. Those that are left are given crappy apps, lots of ads, and hollow communities eagerly looking for something better.
> The tyrannical behaviors are most often found in the former camp where being a moderator is synonymous with “internet power”.
What's old is new again, I suppose!
Similar happened on IRC back in the day. All the big channel wars and drama were over the big popular channels for internet points. I certainly participated in my fair share.
Then you had the small channels of folks who were just pretty chill chatting about whatever random topic of interest.
Might be nostalgia, but I still think the best balance of this was the phpbb/vbulletin era. The amount of "reference material" lost behind the walled gardens is crazy.
I think the problem as somebody creating content for or moderating one of those small communities is - do you really want your users to be forced to be used a community as abusive as Reddit towards its users? Do you really want to have your labours exploited by Reddit for their profit?
I’m not sure what the alternative is though. Independent websites? Where are dejected Redditors going to go?
Alternatives mega thread: https://0.0g.gg/?58ed6f6429ac61aa#DQse3Hh6Cr4pw6BFRGf7MeWgPY...
I'm currently using kbin. Waiting for Tildes to come out of beta.
The blackout is as much about a small number of users using third party clients for personal tastes as the American civil war was about states rights. The real issue, as can be read in the long PSAs pinned to some of the restricted but public subreddits, is the impact on moderation and accessibility that forbidding third party apps will incur. If moderators can't do their job, Reddit is worthless. Calling them tyrants is... a peculiar way to frame it
The problem for me with the different subreddits and mods is the inconsistency between them. I am shadowbanned from some instantly before a single comment, I can't comment on a subreddit without providing a registered email, in so doing compromising my privacy, (looking at you /r/linux), appeals to mods go unanswered, and the universe help you if a mod disagrees with something you have said. It is a completely frustrating experience to try to opine on topics you find interesting without being herded through the tunnel like cattle to conform.
However, I do agree with the blackouts as it is a coordinated action to a larger problem, not some power obsessed individual subreddit with arbitrary rules also applied arbitrarily.
> A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,”
Calling bullshit on that one. If they had expected stability issues, and knew exactly which subreddits will go private and when, how is it possible they had so much "anticipated issues"?
My guess is that they knew the caches would get blown out and would have to refill with content from non-blacked out subs, and decided to just take the hit and let it ride, knowing it would recover itself soon enough.
I mean, honestly that's probably what I would have done if I were still in charge.
And in this case, use it as an opportunity to learn more about the system. Treat it as an experiment.
They have an outage every two weeks maximum so I also call bullshit on that one, Reddit hasn't exactly been the most stable website before.
I imagine a previously not-stress-tested component that has to do with searches/fetches with private subreddits went kaboom.
Not too much of a stretch, IMO.
A fantastic Schadenfreude generator, regardless.
When operating a complex system like Reddit, you know that something is going to happen during a significant event, but you generally don't know exactly what will break first.
What's worse is that the system evolved as a response to the previous similar event, and what broke now is probably not what had broken in the past.
The world has finite resources... such as man-hours.
Such a critical moment for the future of the company (mass boycott after controversial changes, presumably on the path to IPO; they really don't need any more bad publicity) should be an all hands on deck situation. Again, they've had advanced notice, and knew the full list of subreddits. They should have prepared better.
> should be an all hands on deck situation
[The Mythical Man Month has entered the chat]: Nine mothers, all hands on deck, should be able to gestate a baby in 1 month.
At the risk of adding further low quality content, right here and now, this proposed "Mythical Mom Month" book is an intriguing pitch.
Do you have a more detailed pitch sheet? :)
You're not going to significantly rewrite a caching system in a matter of days, not if you want to fix more problems than you cause.
> and knew exactly which subreddits will go private and when
As someone who is close to a reddit mod, they did not know which subs would go private
I don’t say this snidely, but more than 7,000 subs openly committed to going private in advance of today.
I’m sure someone somewhere at Reddit was surprised by sub X or Y going private, but if they were surprised at half the largest subs that went private, then that would be as sad as it is amusing.
Edit: typo
Could be due to home feeds not having enough cached content as a lot of the first page posts went private and had to be skipped? Would have led to have to go deeper in lists of posts to fill the first page and causing more cache misses and db reads and performance issues.
The way Reddit displays content is basically all caches, as far as I can tell. Every query you do is supposed to directly hit a cache of 1000 objects (like comments or posts). You can’t go past 1000, either through the web interface or through the API.
Kinda frustrating design, IMO, speaking as an end-user.
It was always obvious when you scrolled past the cached content because errors or timeouts would start happening pretty frequently.
Very likely; before the crash, I noticed that the home page failed to load, but individual subreddits continued to load.
What happens if the mods were to coordinate cycling subs from private to public?
They'll get replaced faster than they otherwise would have
This would be chaos. Most of the big subreddits have a combination of bespoke bots and complex automod configs that even the current mods struggle groking. Reddit would lose a ton of quality through poor moderation quickly if you put everything up for grabs.
I think this would be a poor move.
Looking at /r/all today, it seems like there's still enough big front-page subs with mods to at least temporarily reallocate responsibilities. Most of the big subs are controlled by "power mods" already who administrate many subs. I think there would absolutely be a significant longer term loss of quality, but my guess is that in the shorter term Reddit could just give the keys to those subs to the 'power mods' who have remained.
You have to wonder what those mods get out of it, considering they're doing what essentially amounts to a nearly full-time job for free.
There's an unconfirmed but strong possibility that Ghislaine Maxwell was one of the largest power mods on Reddit. https://kirbysommers.substack.com/p/evidence-that-reddit-use...
Reddit hasn't replaced them for 10+ years. Free labour is not easy to find these days
I think you'd be surprised. Nature abhors a vacuum and there will be many users waiting in the wings for the tiny internet power of that prestigious mod hat.
tell that to reddit though - they seem to be fine with the current situation and plan to keep the same mods until death do them part
Probably rolling outages
Cfaa charges.
What's the theory?
18 U.S.C. §§ 1030(a)(5)(B)
> intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, recklessly causes damage;
I would think it's reasonably easy to establish mens rea when someone switches their sub from public to private and back every few hours, even if manually done because what else would they want to do but take down Reddit? Not to mention the punishes much harshly "conspiring" to commit such a crime. Careful there.
IANAL, of course.
They're mods. They're authorized. Taking their subs private -temporarily, intermittently, permanently- is within the scope of the authority delegated to them by Reddit. A prosecution on the basis of CFAA would be ridiculous -- though, of course, that wouldn't mean it couldn't happen.
IANAL either, but my reading of that is the "and" in there is important. That is, you'd have to be "intentionally accessing a protected computer without authorization" and recklessly cause damage.
Reddit mods are not accessing a protected computer without authorization.
How long before they admins swoop in and change ownership of the blacked out subreddits?
Finding new moderators would be a incredible challenge. If someone wants to be a moderators badly, that is usually disqualifying.
You get an immense amount of power with very little accountability except to the community. Put that in the wrong hands and you can destroy a community incredibly quickly.
Or, put power in the hands of a dilettante, and you get overrun with spam and insults very fast.
Nah, there's plenty of people just waiting to take over even the smallest of niche subs. I saw it firsthand back during the 2nd wave of gentrification in spring 2018 when a bunch of commercially uncomfortable subreddits like r/gundeals and their users (like my 2008 reddit account) were banned. The subreddits I moderated like r/radioastronomy were given to other users to moderate within a month or two. Reddit eventually admitted it was wrong about banning r/gundeals and reinstated the sub but my account was never unbanned.
And any sub with serious activity will have power mods submitting applications for take-over so they can commercialize it.
I checked into the history:
1. A reddit request was made in 2018 when you were banned. This was manually approved by the admins: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/8m8cdm/reque...
2. The new mod heavily restricted posts, seemingly for three years. They declined to reply to messages for nine months, until a new Reddit request happened on Jan 3 2021. A comment in that thread said "there hasn't been a new post in ages!", confirming your replacement had locked the place down: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/kpf083/reque...
3. Sometime between Jan 3 and Jan 19th, the request was approved. Likely closer to the 19th, the day the new mod posted: https://www.reddit.com/r/radioastronomy/comments/l0j6qj/new_...
Sub seems alright now, but after a three year long false start with an inactive mod who locked the place down.
Further, it took up to 16 days to handle the request. For a very small sub. And I've seen reddit requests take much longer.
Now reddit would have to, at a stroke, replace at least 8,000 of their most active subs, all at once, and make sure they don't appoint people who are insane, or draconian, or power hungry, or in it for their own profit, etc.
I don't see this working. You may have some knowledge of /r/radioastronomy in those periods which contradicts what I wrote, but the public record suggests the transition wouldn't bode well for mass replacing every single moderator at once.
92% of reddit is down right now.
I'm pretty sure that Reddit doesn't have enough paid employees to undertake that sort of vetting at the scale required, even if they wanted to. I think they're probably just hoping and praying that this all blows over, that most mods are more addicted to their communities than anything else.
It's a very cynical move, but you've laid out in exquisite detail why it's their ONLY move, other than walking back their policy. While the company as a whole would benefit from that walkback, I think Mr. Huffman himself would probably lose his job.
Yeah they really put themselves in a bind.
A reddit admin just posted this:
> We also want to reiterate that we respect your decisions to do what’s best for your community, and will do what we can to ensure you're safe while doing so. However, we do expect that these decisions have been made through consensus, and not via unilateral action. We ask that you strive to ensure that your moderator team is aligned on community decision-making – regardless of what decisions are being made. If you believe that your community or another community is being subject to decisions made by a sole moderator without buy-in from the broader mod team, you can let us know via the Moderator Code of Conduct form above.
They’re hoping to have some lower level mods who disagree with going private turn to the admins. I doubt it would work but might reopen a few subreddits.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/147ysr6/moderat...
What does that really accomplish? Reddit mods are often bad enough as is, imagine what Reddit scab mods would be like.
It would also be a huge invitation for the displaced the rest to make life unbearable for those new mods and the handful of admins overseeing them. Reddit as a community would make for one hell of an intellectual DDOS.
> What does that really accomplish?
To borrow from another comment buried below: I think the company cares more about the appearance of "business as usual" in the face of an IPO than the opinions of the users.
In their eyes, this is all nothing more than a tempest in a teapot; a small pothole on the road to public investor dollars.
I can sort of understand the mentality, but right now Reddit looks like a terrible IPO prospect. It isn't profitable, it's poorly managed, lacks transparency, depends on volunteers to function on a daily basis, and when they make a move to make themselves profitable their user base rebels in a fairly public and humiliating way.
All of this in the post-Fed rate hike world where money isn't free. Besides I feel it's important to remember that Reddit has been talking about an IPO for many years, and I doubt it's going to happen now.
> depends on volunteers to function on a daily basis
it depends on volunteers to function at all. Posters and commenters are volunteer too, which is something reddit oft seems to forget.
I seem to remember someone saying something about how a small number of users mod the vast majority of Reddit in terms of the number of users within the subreddits they control. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a black market for mod status. Might not be such a bad thing if the establishment was totally uprooted.
I suspect that still results in a huge amount of moderation work to do … Reddit’s advantage is that people do that for Reddit for free.
> a small number of users mod the vast majority of Reddit
I think it's more like there are a small number of users who are mods on a huge number of subs, but there are other mods that focus more directly on the actual moderation of those subs.
The main reason why reddit works as a platform is because its mods and subreddit regulars do a lot of unpaid work. Where is reddit going to find enough people to work for free on such short notice?
They don't have to be good mods. There's precedent for a handful of mods to moderate a huge swath of subreddits.
Not without third-party tools, there isn’t. Lol
> Where is reddit going to find enough people to work for free on such short notice?
Enter: an army of scab accounts ending in _GPT.
That's more expensive than free mods.
Oh, that's easy, if they are looking for scabs to mod a million+ sub, I volunteer myself immediately. I've got a lot of great ideas that I'm really eager to try out.
The only thing that I'll be able to guarantee is that you'll really not like me as a mod.
I personally believe they will wait to see which ones remain shuttered. 48 hours is not very long to wait to maintain your free civilian labor.
After that, they'll definitely reclaim the shuttered subreddits with new moderators.
Reddit is odd.... while most communities hate the mods, they hate admins far more. Admins taken over a subreddit would kill it in the eyes of the users.
I think the admins will care more about the appearance of "business as usual" in the face of an IPO than the opinions of the users who would notice a moderator replacement.
In their eyes, this is all nothing more than a tempest in a teapot; a small pothole on the road to public investor dollars.
the API thing was that, it is moved beyond that now, and admin action on that level will make the API issue an after thought...
If they do that, forget IPO, there will be no more reddit at all.
right now they already missed the IPO point years ago, today for a company to have a successful IPO they need more than good MAU numbers, and this API change was never going to get to the profitability numbers they need for a good IPO
Their IPO dreams were fucked long before today
The internet forgets too quickly. And so long as Reddit can present a "everything's awesome" front, their IPO will likely take off.
Having /r/Pics down permanently because of a protest would be a problem, but a poorly moderated /r/Pics would not. The quality would just go down, and Reddit would get a good justification for locking it down.
"No, /r/Pics wasn't shut down because of the protest, it was shut down because there were too many law-breaking posts. And you know how tough we have to be on those kinds of posts."
At least, that's my take on how most investors would look at it. Investors love companies who focus on profitability, regardless of their long term perspective.
There seems to be a disconnect to what I am saying...
You seem to believe a low quality /r/pics would bring in traffic, even more weirdly you seem to believe the admins shutting down /r/pics because of illegal content, is better for profitability then it being shut down because of a protest, not sure how that works....
Traffic, and users drive profitablity, High Quality User Generated content drives that traffic and attracts users
If reddit loses high quality user generated content, there is no traffic, and thus there is nothing to sell to be profitable, no ads, not API, nothing
it would not matter if /r/pics was shutdown in protest, or shutdown because of poor moderation, it is still shut down, and thus no profits from it.
investors love companies that are profitable, especially right now when the cost of capital is very high. "focusing on profitability" is not the same as delivering profitability. Investors right now want results, not power points about how they project the results being
They seem to honestly believe that increasing monetization is an equally existential question for the platform. IPO or no IPO, they can't run off of VC funding forever, and they say they aren't currently profitable.
Because spez 10x their headcount
That would seem to setup a situation where Reddit has to fill a gap of a huge amount of moderation work that they previously didn’t have to do / people did that for them for free.
A long time IMO, because that would just escalate the situation. At this point they are going to wait and see in the hopes that the majority of people lose interest after a few protests. Then they can just push through the changes.
If they take over these subs, you just radicalise the users, and you now have to find new moderators for these subs. In a worst case scenario, users actually start migrating to another platform.
I see Reddit themselves confirmed that the blackout caused the outage, but just to be clear Reddit is a very unstable website and outages are commonplace. It's clear their engineering team is not exactly top notch (or have been poorly resourced).
I'd love to see an API only version of Reddit where people build the clients on top of it but are forced to serve ads from the global provider, from which they get a generous cut.
They should disclose what happens in their system when a subreddit goes private, and how it scales with subreddit size. Otherwise, I call BS.
It seems that Reddit will go down like Digg did.
Unfortunately, I've been hearing this for like a decade and it doesn't seem to ever happen.
Digg.com’s implosion was so dramatic because Reddit was there to immediately start serving the same users just about the same thing. There are obviously plenty of other things Reddit users can do with their time, but there isn’t a monolith solution waiting in the wings to very closely replace Reddit with almost the exact same thing. Its destruction will be much more prolonged.
Exactly the same comments have been made about Twitter, and Twitter is still here.
More likely that people will simply forget in 3-4 weeks, like literally every other issue that can sort of blow over.
I thought it was a cloudflare outage.
Pretty sure Reddit uses Fastly as a CDN.
My unpopular theory is that the Reddit blackout increased Reddit usage, having the opposite of the intended effect.
It would certainly change usage patterns. And there are enough popular subreddits who didn't go in on the outage, so there's content to be had.
The adage "there's no such thing as bad press" could definitely apply, given how broadly covered this is (I mean, hell, I saw it show up on NPR).
Currently over 90% of subs are private or restricted.
Re-hosts of that site have the figure even higher.
That is in no way accurate. It says 7806 subreddits, but there are actually over 3 million subreddits, so the figure is actually only 0.24% rather than 90%. It's wonderful what you can do by just faking statistics!
I also don't see some subreddits listed there that are part of the strike.
Like reading a list of war dead. Always remember where you were and what you were doing on that fateful day when r/amateurcumsluts went dark, and the heroic sacrifices made on that hill.
That's my point. It's so highly covered that it might actually bring more people to Reddit today than the number of people who fled. Imagine all of the people who don't use Reddit who saw this press, and visited Reddit because of it. That number may possibly outweigh the number of users who decided not to use Reddit because of the "strike" today.
> there are enough popular subreddits who didn't go in on the outage
Yeah, this morning I noticed only one sub that I follow was actually private. I was going to mention it here, but I forgot which one it was - and now I can't find the one that was blacked out.
That's also my first bet. The strike was well covered in many medias.
Looking at the google trends, it was a big spike today compared to the classic daily workload: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&q=%2...
The US trends are very telling... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%201-d&geo=...
It coincides exactly with when Down Detector shows the Reddit report spike... https://downdetector.com/status/reddit/
I'm gonna go ahead and say my theory is probably right.
This is more indicative of people just searching about reddit, possibly to figure out why the site they normally use is having issues.
It is nice to see all of the toxic subreddits delete themseles.
I operate a certain health condition subreddit. The main subreddit for this condition is highly toxic (which is why I created an alternative a few years ago).
Anyway, it turns out the primary (toxic) subreddit for this condition is taking part in the strike, so a lot of users have come over to my alternative subreddit, and they are glad to have found it because they were getting fed up with the toxicity of the other place.
Unfortunately I'm sure it will be back to normal in a couple of days.
Mind if I drop by? I'm browsing random to find better subreddits.
It's only really of interest to people with that health condition.