Hey! This post is not specifically related to the lemmy.world instance. From now on, posts such as these will be removed, in order for the community to stay on topic. However, as this is a highly upvoted post, I’ll just lock it for now.
Chances Reddit did this on purpose to hide the content blackout?
Reddit hides partial blackout by going full blackout lmao
Sounds silly, but I’m guessing they don’t want the dip in usage on some reports they have to show to stakeholders, and can instead write it off as server issues.
That doesn’t sound silly at all.
I meant the comment I replied to sounded silly, I was more explaining why it wasn’t silly after all.
Galaxy brain
3D chess
Reddit SysAdmin can protest too, no?
Reddit SysAdmin can protest too, no?
Not legally by sabotaging the infrastructure they are supposed to run, I expect.
But accidents happen, of course…
u/Spez will just put the blame on Christian again (Apollo’s dev).
But on a little more serious note, I doubt this is on purpose. This would look really bad for the credibility of the platform, there is a LOT of users that just want to keep doomscrolling Reddit and in all honesty don’t give a spez(fuck) about what’s going on with the protests.
But… if this is on purpose…
Strange decision to say the least.
This would look really bad for the credibility of the platform
From what I’ve been following, they haven’t been too concerned about this since at least a few weeks ago
Outright telling active partners that they won’t help them identify inefficient interactions with the first-party API was a great look.
Yeah - in fairness, they weren’t getting paid to, but there are plenty of examples to pick from.
I know and agree with you on that.
But for the majority of the userbase, one thing is to have some of their favorite subreddits joining a protest, the other is having their whole experience affected.
Agree - couldn’t resist the snark
u/Spez will just put the blame on Christian again (Apollo’s dev).
100%… “malicious code in a 3rd party app led effectively to a DDOS attack on reddit… this is why we must close the API to only allow select approved apps”
It just makes the blackout look more successful honestly. Pretty dumb of them but they haven’t been making great decisions lately.
I don’t know. My best bet is that it’s a happy coincidence for them. It’s probably just an actual accidental outage, but it can be spun in a few different ways. Given their push for an IPO, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is an excuse for lower traffic numbers. “Hey, look, these guys all went to protest but there was an outage. Nothing correlates the numbers. Now that we’re back up on XYZ date, everything is returning to normal! It was no big deal!”
If it actually turns out to be something more nefarious, I can’t say I’d be surprised, but I sincerely hope that isn’t the case.
Given their push for an IPO, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is an excuse for lower traffic numbers. “Hey, look, these guys all went to protest but there was an outage. Nothing correlates the numbers. Now that we’re back up on XYZ date, everything is returning to normal! It was no big deal!”
Boy, sure would be nice to live in a world where investors weren’t dumber than flat earthers.
there may be some unfortunate overlap in those populations, you don’t have to be smart to make money
you don’t have to be smart
to makebe born into money
I can believe that considering how often they have them. I had subbed to outage emails a while back and days where I don’t get any are rare.
Anyone feel like Spez is shooting out the lights on his way out?
Probably used the lower traffic as an opportunity to perform “maintenance”.
The maintenance in this case is damage control. They spent the time deleting a hell of lot of comments from all over the place.
They definitely don’t want their investors to know what’s happening.
My money is on a DDoS attack. DDoS attacks are 100% going to happen after what Spez pulled.
That’s what I thought first because their infrastructure seems to be shit.
My wife and I were talking about this 2 days ago. She was betting money that we’d see DDoS attacks early Monday.
Is it bad I’d like to see some more
that would be disgusting, but i would not be surprised at this point :/
Even more reason the blackout needs to last more than 48 hrs.
Yeah pretty suspicious tbh
Well a 5xx response wont get delisted from Google as fast as a 403, so there’s that possibility.
If you hit a private sub you still get a 200 😉
Figures, not checking today… 😉
I’m 99% sure those are automated, so it really doesn’t say anything.
Looks like it’s just access to the platform, not the platform itself. Could be a CDN issue or they could be implementing how reddit is accessed. I’m guessing the former.
I would guess the latter. They’re trying to roll out the new pricing tier at the start of next month, so pushing a change about 2 weeks ahead of that seems reasonable.
But I guess we’ll see. I doesn’t impact me anymore. ;)
Right? Back up now for those who care.
Doubt it
https://www.redditstatus.com/history
The other messages are not the same and an automated response would be posted faster.
Interesting, hopefully that’s the case instead of something more… stupid from Reddit. I sincerely hope this is just the community protesting in some way.
Doubt it
https://www.redditstatus.com/history
The other messages are not the same and an automated response would be posted faster.
Oh no! I hope they don’t do this indefinitely! It would totally defeat the purpose of them going dark in the first place… ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Probably better than average.
Would be the perfect time for critical server updates that require downtime anyway ;)
I suspect it’s something related to point in time backups or changes to the api to make it easier to put everything back with new mods.
that’s just every other tuesday, not like reddit is known for immense stability
“Ok guys, if we take the site down they can’t have a blackout: It’s brilliant!”
-Spez probably
We did it, reddit!
…wait, fuck. Lemmy!
Thanks for your good punctuation.
we are reddit in some ways
We’re more reddit than reddit
Reddit 2.0
In all the ways that matter, the users and quality content are its heart. Take that away and it’s more like UnDeadit.
Lemmy for president!!
Who the fuck is Lemmy?
They’re likely changing the mod structure during the blackout. A lot of low-paid, repurposed bangladeshi click-farm mods coming in.
Reddit? Paying mods? As if.
They’ve gone 15 years not paying mods for their work. They’re not about to start now, especially if they’re concerned about costs.
Replacing them all with automod
u/Spez-autoGPT joined to the thread.
Hopefully they culled his comments from before roughly 2014 or they’re gonna have a whole new problem on their hands.
Not paying mods gave them an out to not be a publisher.
If your company is the one doing the moderation, then you become responsible for what is on your website, and that means spez would have to get rid of the Nazis :(.
That would not surprise me in the least.
Id bet their brand new API has a few horrible bugs or the system charging accounts is too slow for the real world.
lmao!
Check. and. mate.
Google en peasant
I wonder if anarchychess has a community yet?
Big brain move
I’ve used rif and old.reddit respectively for so long that I really had no idea how much of a shitshow the ui had turned in too until I checked it out through the official app and new layout style in browser.
No fucking thank you, take your glitter shit and constant ad pushing and jump off a cliff.
The first ad that popped was a promoted post for machine gun kelly. I listen to grindcore, crossover, metal, etc… That sealed its fate in my eyes.
for years companies have been trying for “targeted ads” but in rare occasions I see ads, they’re terribly off the mark, like you have mentioned
Companies have been trying and succeeding with targeted ads*
There’s a reason a bunch of the biggest tech companies in the world’s main revenue is these ads, they absolutely work unfortunately.
You’d be surprised to hear, how many users are still clueless and don’t use an ad blocker.
More than half of the surfers don’t use an ad blocker: https://earthweb.com/how-many-people-use-ad-blockers/
Honestly that’s one of the things I’m stoked on about this, the fat gets trimmed. Leave all the clueless people with the loudest, uneducated opinions to sink on the redditanic.
I actually prefer when the ads are targeted but wrong. It shows me they don’t know me as well as they could. Also if I’m not interested they aren’t distracting
I used the official app but I have ADHD, which is basically targeted ad kryptonite. By the time they target something to me, I’ve moved on.
Same here. I’ve been using old.reddit with RES and apollo for so long that I forgot reddit even had ads until I tried the official app.
Same, RiF + old. FTW TBH, really liking Lemmy ❤️
Yeah. I don’t mind ads if I’m getting content for free, but at least know your audience. I feel like especially the hegetsus spam was wildly misplaced on Reddit.
There was some kind of cookie consent popup on old.reddit.com and it said “go to the new reddit to set preferences” or something like that and i clicked it without reading properly and got sent to new reddit.
What a shit website… I will never use new reddit. Get fucked spez
I don’t even think most of their ads gets interacted often. The small amount of people who are using the official reddit app probably have gotten used to it now so will just wait this blackout out.
I think more people use the official app than you might think. I initially thought everyone was in unanimous outrage, but many just don’t care. I don’t understand how some people know about ad-free third party apps and still use the official one.
I used official app only because I had no idea the other apps existed until this month, lol
Everyone I know that uses reddit doesn’t use the official app
Convenience. For the average user it’s just download from the play store and scroll. I agree that lot of people use the official app but they’re used to the ads from other social media apps too probably.
I mean… I downloaded a third party app from the play store. Isn’t that how you got yours too??
I mean yes, you can get third party apps on the Play Store (I got mine off F-Droid but that’s besides the point), but for most people, if they want to install “Reddit” on their phone, they’re gonna search for “Reddit,” and then when the first thing that pops up is the official app, they’ll install that, and never think twice about it.
Well my proposal for lemmy is to have jerboa apply a post signature. Like “posted using Jerboa”
So that people would start askin and be curious and then become aware that there are other apps to view the site
I can easily see that becoming rather tiresome. Instead, if anything were to be done, what about a custom “flair” of some kind? Maybe a little golden lemming by the “link” buttons that rest above the post?
To be honest, though, I’m not sure if it needs it. I like the idea of promoting the app, though!
I used both the official and boost. One for just scrolling on and one to read short stories on.
Because I was already using it since it first came out, and honestly the ads weren’t/aren’t even that big of a deal. I don’t even notice them 90% of the time.
Using the official app for a given site/service is usually a good heuristic. Just not in this case, IMO.
Not related at all, but hear me out…lemmy needs a grind/extreme music community
Same. “new” reddit makes me want to barf. So does the official app.
It’s my fault apparently
Always hated that image on the error page. Blaming the user when they are the ones that fucked up. Server errors are never the users fault
I mean… Almost never. It’s possible it is actually your fault… Just, very, very unlikely :D
I think it’s pretty funny and I’m sure it’s just a joke. It’s hardly actually blaming users, imo.
Good job my fellow migrating redditor!
Thanks for doing that, o7
we did it reddit
AND MY AXE!!!
To shreds you say?
Or we just let all those saying die with reddit, that’s a thought
Prof. Hubert Farnsworth ist still quotable outside of Reddit.
Futurama is just too good to give up.
The Fediverse is too new and decentralized to have its own sayings, so all we have is the memories of our old home. Besides, these sayings remind us of a better era of Reddit where it was just a bunch of techie weirdos asking each other “when does the narwhal bacon” and trying to bait newbies to click on /r/spacedicks. I still remember my first days on Reddit, when I was grounded from the family computer and stole my dad’s laptop to browse. Someone linked /r/spacedicks and convinced me that it was the NASA memes subreddit. I clicked on it and was waiting for the page to load on the terribly slow wifi when my dad stormed into the room, furious that his laptop was missing, and proceeded to beat the shit out of me with a set of jumper cables. It hurts so much to see the site I grew up with be destroyed by corporate greed like that, but life goes on.
Gee dude those jumper cables really got me, well played. Yeah, you’re right. I didn’t want to be a downer, if it brings you guys joy then by all means. You know what, my reddit account it 12 years old, I know about r/spacedicks, but I’ve never been nor do I know what content is posted over there. I feel like that’s an achievement by itself.
It hurts so much to see the site I grew up with be destroyed by corporate greed like that, but life goes on.
I’m with you homie, but I’m cautiously optimistic that we’re gonna build something cool here.
I was so worried that your story was going to go shittymorph
I prefer rogersimon10’s gimmick to shittymorph’s, the hell in a cell copypasta got boring because it was just added to the end of random comments. On the other hand, the stories in rogersimon10’s comments were all relevant to the jumper cables so it was more fun to read.
This is basically a wake. Allow us to reminisce.
Are their servers rent-controlled?
deddit
Reddit is ded. Not big surprise.
Death of Reddit, long live the federation!
We lemminged it!
Ah, so that’s the demonym for Lemmy users.
Some possibilities:
- Some fool thinks it’s a good idea to DDoS Reddit today to make a point.
- Some Reddit admin thinks it’s a good idea to take it offline deliberately to make a point.
- The general public are hugging it to death out of curiosity about the protest.
- Unrelated outage. Outages happen, sometimes even on the same day as other things.
Using Occam’s Razor, I’d bet on the last option.
You’d be right. https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/
Reddit uses AWS, not cloudflare.
Cloudflare is a reverse proxy service, many services are hosted through Cloudflare on other hosting providers such as AWS, Azure, GCP, DO, etc.
Reddit appears to use Fastly, but I could be wrong there. They used to use Cloudflare in combination with the rest of their infra
Agreed, they use fastly.
Or the third.
Or they took it offline to “hide” all the blacked out subreddits. Some had images about the third party apps as their only post, which was on the front page. By going offline it makes it seem like more of a technical issue rather than a protest.
It’s a false flag operation so reddit admins can claim they were attacked and take legal action against the protesters.
r/conspiracy licking their lips right now.
Slow down there Alex Jones…
Spez seems like the type of scumbag to do just that. Occam’s Razor still applies, of course, but I don’t think that’s crazy out of character for him.
@nodsocket It’s a special de-blackoutisation operation through their own blackout.
I’d guess that with so many top subs going dark, the mixing algorithm needs to dig deeper and it’s not tuned for that. These algorithms are hard to get right at Reddit’s scale.
As an example to populate the frontpage or /r/all it might would need to scan all posts from the private subs before even getting a sizeable amount of candidate posts from the public ones to rank. Then the public subs won’t be in cache nor will caching help as much on those long tail subreddits. Not being in cache means more hits to the DB and that’s going to affect nearly all requests to Reddit.
It could be that their infrastructure is set up to optimize showing data on the typically most popular subreddits.
Reddit free tier usage reached
drink a verification can of {product placement} to continue
Reddit really trying to copy lemmy now
“A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge.
So… According to Reddit the blackout is the culprit, I guess?
So either it’s just an outage and they’re faulting the blackout, or the blackout is actually the culprit. Either way I hope this works. However, I’m still not going back to Reddit even if they fix and reverse everything.
Do not attribute to malice what can easily be explained by idiocy. It is entirely plausible that their algorithm couldn’t handle the most popular subreddits going dark all at once. They likely hard-relegated so many other subs that would appear on r/popular or r/all to lower priority and thus when the higher priority subs disappeared, it couldn’t change priorities and cause the crash.
This is absolutely the most likely scenario.
And it’s also fucking hilarious.😂😂
I wonder if it’s bots or something trying to access the now dark subreddits. Essentially causing a DDOS.
well if i made a bot, hmm, yeah that could cause it lol. Like if i tell it “go in every 30 minutes & steal the top 20 posts”, and it’s down, i’d just say “retry till u get it, idc if u DoS that shit” and well if many ppl do it, it’s a free DDoS courtesy of robotland
I bet thats whats happening.
if that’s what’s happening, i feel a sense of fellowship for those ppl who don’t give a shit and will ddos a website just to try and steal some memes, truly conoisseurs of 🅱️est 🅱️ractices 😎
When a major sub goes private, that’s an awful lot of posts and comments that they have to hide from the rest of the internet. I’m not surprised there’s some excess load on their systems with lots of them doing it at once.
That’s going to be the excuse, huh
“We have a duty to keep the site running”
and when their plot is discovered
“some sacrifices must be made, we killed it so we could keep it alive!”
I hope the major subs stay dark. The only thing keeping reddit afloat is moderators. Without tools the mods would need full time paid positions which is never going to happen. I’d like to see them all burn. Its become a shit show of adds and bots now anyway. Good riddance. I wish someone would incorporate freenets web of trust system to some type of decentralized app like this.
Could they not replace the mods? In the end, don’t they own the subreddits? Who owns the intellectual property?
In a lot of ways we do. If I choose to delete my profile, there goes a ton of posts from one sub.
You have to manually delete your content, they don’t delete themselves. Or use a script
Under EU GDPL they would have to erase everything upon request if they don’t want to get fined into oblivion.
Good to know. If it comes to that I will. Anyone who spends any amount of time adding to a community though is like killing your own creation. I did this for us.
But they already sucked their sweet datasauce out of it when you posted it
They’d have to find people as enthusiastic. Quality would likely drop.
Quality would absolutely drop. Even if whoever replaced the mods was just as enthusiastic, losing that much institutional knowledge/inertia would be devastating for a while.
They’d also need to find a ridiculous amount of people (~28,000 mods according to Reddark?). Or have fewer people be insanely overworked, either way you’re right; quality will drop.
I used Redact earlier for an old account, worked great
THE SYSTEM… IS DOWN THE SYSTEM… IS DOWN
Aggressive techno noises
Strong Bad at his finest
The Telltale series is leaving Steam soon. I don’t think there’s a delist date, but their license is expiring soon. I bought and gifted three copies already.
deleted by creator
Oh wow - presumably they won’t be sold anywhere else either?
The Cheat is grounded!
one of the few ringtones i still keep on my phone
I think it’s ridiculous that it’s actually the sub blackout that killed Reddit today. How can this happen?
See TheVerge: “Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout”
Reddit has long survived with the help of pornography makers. Reddit does not face a quick death.
Sorry, rewriting it, buttons are a bit wonky tonight.
They’re removing NSFW content from the API, and someone yesterday posted about a new lemmy server dedicate to NSFW, if they can take it away from reddit, it will die for sure, tho it’s probably what they want, investors apparently don’t like that kind of content.
Does my post appear deleted to you? It appears deleted to me and I don’t know why, I probably messed with the wrong buttons :(
It is showing deleted to me
No, but it has a marker that shows it has been edited
Yeah I was trying to edit it to correct typos, oh well, I’ll try to pay more attention next time.
I heard you can un-delete it by clicking on the delete icon again
Makers and consumers. At one point an Admin, I think it was Alexis or Yashan, said straight up like 50% of reddit is porn. That was years ago though, and I’m sure they’ve done what they could to mitigate that.
porn doesn’t sit well with advertisers, so of course they would
🎼 The Internet is for porn 🎶
Maybe they just ran out of money and their hosting provider shut them down? Reddit was so desperate with these API fees
And “unprofitable” too.
Nothing more hilarious than /u/spez saying the company is unprofitable right before IPOing
Right? Who wouldn’t want to get on that rocketship to the Moon when it finally hits the stock market!
Truly, couldn’t have been better if it had been written into something like Silicone Valley. Just too perfect.
“Silicone Valley”? Are we talking about breast implants?
It’s not like they were aware that Google/Amazon gives them insights on how to spend less on hosting costs