Reddit has stopped working for millions of users around the world.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/reddit-down-subreddits-protest-not-working-b2356013.html
The mass outage comes amid a major boycott from thousands of the site’s administrators, who are protessting new changes to the platform.
On 12 June, popular sub-Reddits like r/videos and r/bestof went dark in retaliation to proposed API (Application Programming Interface) charges for third-party app developers.
Among the apps impacted by the new pricing is popular iOS app Apollo, which announced last week that it was unable to afford the new costs and would be shutting down.
Apollo CEO Christian Selig claimed that Reddit would charge up to $20 million per year in order to operate, prompting the mass protest from Reddit communities.
In a Q&A session on Reddit on Friday, the site’s CEO Steve Huffman defended the new pricing.
“Some apps such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync have decided this pricing doesn’t work for their businesses and will close before pricing goes into effect,” said Mr Huffman, who goes by the Reddit username u/spez.
“For the other apps, we will continue talking. We acknowledge that the timeline we gave was tight; we are happy to engage with folks who want to work with us.”
In response to the latest outage, one Reddit user wrote on Twitter: “Spez, YOU broke Reddit.”
Website health monitor DownDetector registered more than 7,000 outage reports for Reddit on Monday.
Some users were greeted with the message: “Something went wrong. Just don’t panic.”
Others received an error warning that stated: “Our CDN [content delivery network] was unable to reach our servers.”
Update: Seems to be resolved for most users
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🤣
I wonder if this is intentional on their part?
“We’re offline working to restore access to subreddits that went private for some reason” - Reddit, probably later today
“What we had today wasn’t a complete drop in traffic, engagement, and a resulting significant downturn in the number of served ads, caused by the major boycott we’re in the middle of, guys, that was just a major outage. We still have great expectations for the IPO.”
– spez, probably
How do you short a stock that isn’t public yet? Asking for a friend.
Slowly tweaking his nipples as he says it
Lmfao.
It’s such a shame - I used Reddit for many years and found so many helpful people that helped me with many things - fixing my motorbike, improving my 3D prints or saving my plants. I hope we can establish similar kind of community in the Fediverse.
I guess that’s what we get for trusting too much in a company - decentralised open source software is way to go. Even if somebody in this particular instance will go fucking insane and will decide to raise it to the ground, whatever, the project lives on and you can just go somewhere else.
Same. Projects like Lemmy are pretty slick, I just hope that the perceived barrier to entry due to the decentralized nature of the Fediverse won’t keep people from joining. There needs to be a “critical mass” of users to make a platform successful and engaging. Hopefully that happens to Lemmy due to the Reddit API fiasco.
I think that’s already happened, for mainstream topics anyway.
Now, we’re on the small side of a balance between small and large; as the Fediverse grows, it can support increasingly niche communities but, on the flip side, the less cohesive the userbase (and thus the harder to maintain culture) and the more attractive the platform becomes for spammers, trolls, and other malicious parties.
I think the technological barriers may be a good thing as it forces a minimum level of effort to get started. Just like private trackers are almost universally “safer” than public trackers since it takes some actual effort to get in.
That’s the thing this last week has made me realize: it’s so unjust that the ‘owners’ of Reddit are completely unable to see that the only value they have is what the community provides. Their sense of entitlement, when it is us who are responsible for their $X hundred-million valuation is startling.
No they see it, and I can see how they have to make money to support their operations. Lemmy will have similar problems and we will have to pitch in. Bu that’s fine, let’s talk and let’s figure something out. You don’t just shut the door and command people to pay up.
That’s the point I’m making. I would have been 100% behind justified pricing changes to maintain the site. But like you said, that’s never what that was.
Yeah, I’ll miss r/3dprinting, do we know if there’s a 3d printing community anywhere in the fediverse yet?
Apparently, here: https://lemmy.world/c/3dprinting
So much this! Luckily i got the ins and outs of tuning and fixing a 3d printer. Got my car fixed, helped others fix theirs. Learned how to lose a couple of pounds, got motivated to run, and take care of my plants!
Decentralized systems for the win! Resonates with me soooo much!!!
I totally agree. Just want to point out you mean “raze.” I was confused for a bit.
Makes me wonder if it’s on purpose to hide the blackout…
Sure looks like it. It’s probably better for their image to be down than to have users refreshing and not seeing new content
That or rushing through untested changes to minimise its visibility, leading to site breakage.
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One would think, but as we’ve seen, they aren’t making the best decisions. Could also be they’re taking it down to make changes with moderation? But either way, you are correct, it’s not good right as they’re going public.
Maybe. But also maybe they were looking at internal data showing users leaving en masse to alternatives, and that was really scary compared to the known-quantity of what happens when the site goes down for maintenance.
I wonder if this is coincidental, or if some people are taking it upon themselves to DDoS them or something. I hope it is the former as that would be absolutely hilarious, and can’t be used as further justification for their continuing BS.
Perhaps they didn’t account for some weird recursive issues on the backend. I remember reading about when Twitter took down Trump’s account, they had to ensure that all of the millions of dead links of people’s likes, retweets, quotes, etc. didn’t crash the system.
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A lot of people are also going through and using tools like Reddact and Power Delete Suite to clear out their post and comment history. I cleared mine specifically because I had a bunch of rather obscure tech support posts/comments. Occasionally I would get a message of thanks on years old posts. Sucks to delete it, but Reddit shouldn’t continue to benefit from my posts if they’re going to be greedy assholes like this.
Reddit shouldn’t continue to benefit from my posts if they’re going to be greedy assholes like this.
Sad to say but my guess would be your old content is already feeding synthesized answers via ChatGPT. Just as any art work online is apparently fair game (so far) for midjourney et al.
Oh I have no doubt about that. Noe that they probably have backups of everything so they can sell that too. But I’m just doing what I can going forward.
So. One thing I’ve noticed is that privated subs on mobile return an error (403 forbidden). I can’t help but wonder if they have a crush of mobile users hammering the API over and trying to refresh their favorite sub because they can’t see the message explaining that it’s been privated.
Hahaha what a bunch of incompetent boobs making decisions over there leading Reddit as a company
If that’s what it is, that’s hilarious.
One former Reddit employee elsewhere surmised it was more likely because of how they cache posts in order for the “multireddit” feature. When a bunch of posts suddenly vanished it threw that whole system into disarray.
Can’t have a black out if the site is not online points to temple
Double blackout
I seriously considered this as a possibility. When they are asked about the low traffic today, Spez & Company will just say “oh, that wasn’t those silly blackout folks. That was just a server problem. You know what helps fix server problems? More money! Give us money, please!”
FWIW this might be related to a Cloudfare outage: https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/
The blackout is pretty dang short though, inconsequential I reckon
Not all subreddits are following the 2 day blackout rule. Some have gone private indefinitely and others are going dark until they think matters are being addressed reasonably.
Definitely not enough to make a clear difference. I think what will happen is that the majority returns to Reddit and a few (like myself) will stay here, just out of principle.
Yep this is what I’m worried about too. Although honestly I’m too pissed off at how they’ve butchered the situation at Reddit to ever go back.
Its the same reason people use Windows than other OSes. Better content, better support, bigger community!
I think what will happen is that the majority returns to Reddit and a few (like myself) will stay here, just out of principle.
That’s cool. People with principles are preferred.
Reddit has entered the “Fuck round and find out” portion of their journey.
I just saw this on my regular news sites and laughed.
Just waiting for news out of Wall St saying the IPO has been cancelled. :)
I’m curious about why the most popular subreddits going private would stress out their servers. Wouldn’t that reduce load?
They might be getting DDoSed.
Another possibility is that many of the closed subreddits link to a single thread in Save3rdpartyapps for an explanation. That page was returning gateway timeouts over the last few days. Since it has tens of thousands of comments, the sorting algorithm might be timing out from people visiting that particular page.
Reddit folks came out saying that with so many private subreddits the server struggled to build the front page for people.
I know that even after my small (~26,000 users) went dark I STILL received a spam posting!
So dark means nothing to spam bots unfortunately
It has probably messed with their sever scaling system.
I would guess it’s related to making all the content of the subs private. For large subs that would mean crawling millions of posts/comments.
It doesn’t need to update every individual link or comment, the “private” property is just on the subreddit itself. There is probably an index on the “private” property so filtering on that property is cheap.
Sources:
- https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/models/subreddit.py#L297 (subreddit model)
- https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/models/link.py (post model - privacy is absent)
Well, that certainly looks like it’s implemented in a sane way. I would still assume that somehow it needs to trawl every post. E.g. due to search engine indexing and requesting removal from them or due to tracking/ad related things.
Down detector doesn’t actually “detect” if a site is down right? It just shows how many people are reporting that a site is down. If an unaware user logs on and every subreddit they visit says “this subreddit does not exist,” they might think there’s something wrong with reddit’s servers and report it.
Edit: just read the article, I see that its more than that
Oh no 😱
Anyway.
Lol and, I cannot stress this enough, lmao.
