Hey everyone. If you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy!

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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    1 year ago

    Reddit has been going through some issues for many on Monday, with the outage happening the same day as thousands of subreddits going dark to protest the site’s new API pricing terms.

    According to Reddit, the blackout is responsible for the problems. “A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge.

    • setsneedtofeed@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      When Reddit forcibly opens everything back up:

      knock knock

      “Who’s there?”

      ”Mods. Hired mods.”

      “Hired mods?”

        • setsneedtofeed@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          If the volunteer mods hold their ground and force Reddit corporate to oust them, Reddit would need to step in to fill the void.

          • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            They’ll find some people.

            The reality is, not having (good enough) mods will take a while to really hurt the bottom line. Subs will slowly deteriorate.

            But I’m 100% sure, within a few weeks you can establish a new order of more servile mods.

            • TechyDad@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              People on Reddit complain about the mods enough as it is. (And I include myself in that. I’ve had some less than stellar mod encounters in the past.) However, if Reddit were to force out existing mods and replace them with mods willing to toe the company line (and possibly ban people for mentioning the blackout, complaining about Reddit, or mentioning alternatives), it would just result in more user dissatisfaction.

              Reddit won’t go out overnight. There are too many people who post there. However, this could turn into a snowball effect. Rebelling mods are replaced by bootlickers. Dissent is crushed in order to make it seem like everything is hunky dory before the IPO. Power users flee to alternatives like Lemmy. Slowly, normal users hear that some of their favorite content is on this new service and sign up. Reddit usage drops little by little until it’s limping around as a shell of its former self.

              • EponymousBosh@beehaw.org
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                1 year ago

                Yeah, I think a slow collapse is a more likely scenario. But the main thing is, it’s still an inevitable collapse. The only question is how much blood can Spez et al wring out of this stone in the meantime.

        • mizmoose@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Reddit has an annual “moderator summit”, a rah! rah! yay for moderators! event for moderators, mostly of large or super large subreddits.

          At last year’s summit, Spez gave his ‘keynote’ talk where among other things he claimed that they were researching ways to pay moderators for their work, by giving them a cut of … something. It was all sort of wonky and nebulous and likely just something he thought of that morning in the shower.

    • Crotaro@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Whatever causes the website to have trouble, I’m all for it, right now.

      I already wondered if I got lightning-banned for sending too many API requests in a short time, when I used a script to auto-edit all my comments and text-posts.

    • chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      Ah, “expected”, such a wonderful word! They expected for their infrastructure to explode, just according to keikaku

    • Luvs2Spuj@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      A significant number. Fantastic. I’m not sure I believe the stability issues, I’m just a a tin foil hat kind of guy though. I guess it’s possible.

      • democracy1984@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Reddit didn’t design their systems around needing to deal with a huge number of subs going private all at the same time. It’s not surprising that it caused a short outage.

    • LemmyAtem@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue.

      My hypothesis is that it’s probably because so much of Reddit posting is automated by their own bot network now that they DDOS’d themselves trying to auto-post to subs that are suddenly locked. Like they didn’t even bother tracking which subs would be blacking out and like…write exceptions to their post schedule.