Reddit went 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 was 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. The company said the outage was fully resolved at 1:28PM ET.
Well… if it isn’t the consequences of /Spez’s actions…
This is hilarious.
They already were killing the experience by tanking the algorithm, and there was straight up no path to me ever using the mobile site or their horrendous app, but their full on meltdown in response to the backlash is next level.
Looking at this from a leadership perspective when communicating to investors, it’s a lot easier to explain the low user engagement over the next couple days as a blip due to a service outage blocking access rather than due to an intentional protest against using the site.
Not suggesting this is deliberate, but I do imagine this is actually a best case scenario to them in some ways.
Exactly. If people want this protest to be taken seriously, they shouldn’t have pre-emptively announced it would only be 48 hours long. 48 hours is nothing to worry about when you know it’s coming. Like you said, they’ll just blame the lack of engagement on server issues.
I love the format of kbin, with some TLC i can see it taking off. I like it better than Lemmy’s layout. As to people returning after 48 hours, doesn’t that depend on Reddit caving in? I don’t see that happening, so why would anyone return if Reddit’s terms are egregious? They going to cough up the money to Reddit to use their API? People just going to cave in and use their shit app, enduring the ads and personal data farming? This should be interesting.
“More than 7,000 subreddits have gone private or read-only in response to the API pricing terms”
Holy crap!
Can that be right? 93% of subreddits have gone dark?
And 7% of subreddits are scabs?!
If you click through to some of the ones that indicate still public you can see they have gone into read-only mode rather than completely private.
That’s not 93% of all subreddits; just 93% of those that committed to going dark.
Damn that sucks. So long as we start getting stronger and stronger activity over here in the fedverse, I’m staying here.
The fediverse exploded after Twitter became a dumpster fire. This is another huge migration, so the numbers are going up quite a bit again. I’m excited to see what we build with such a large number of new people!
I personally closed 4 subreddits yesterday. Happy to play my part.🤣🤣
I closed my 500k member subreddit yesterday!
It feels sad, but it needs to happen. We’ve moved here to Kbin - @Disneyland - and I linked it in the “we’re going private” message.
Hopefully we get people to come over. We have half the original mod team and I’m still trying to convince the other half to join up before Kbin closes registration (I’m not sure if you can mod across instances).
Know that it worked! I have seen it on a few subreddits that closed (including yours), which got me to sign up. It is nice here!
To add a bit more context, this comment is from a former Reddit dev, who is now the creator and developer of Tildes, one of the Reddit alternatives that’s been gaining traction in the last week:
(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.
Inefficiency in programming?! How where did I hear that before…
My initial response was “probably everywhere, duh”. But then I remembered that Reddit tried to throw Apollo under the bus, claiming that their API usage was only high because of inefficient code.
As I recall, Apollo (Christian S.) responded by open-sourcing their backend. Maybe Reddit should do the same?
Christian also pointed out that Reddit’s own app is equally inefficient, using the same number of API calls as Apollo when browsing the same subreddits.
Actually if I remember correctly the official app was more inefficient
Also the official app uses way more battery
Anyone happen to have invites? I’m trying to get my foot in a number of different sites
Same. At this point, I’m open to using almost any reddit-like site that isn’t reddit. With this many disgruntled former users, there’s bound to at least one major alternative that blows up, just a matter of finding (and seeding) it.
