A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue.
How in the world does setting a bunch of subs to private crash the website?
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Someone on Tilde posted that they used to work for Reddit and the way they have the front page set up to pull your subscribed subreddits and the ones that you might like to read from is spaghetti code and very brittle.
I mean, it's worked until now lol. Probably should have fixed it, but I can understand why the higher ups wouldn't want to.
Reddit has had extremely spotty reliability forever. It got better in recent years, but still came down every few weeks, or would just randomly say "you broke reddit!". Circa 2015 every evening it would just randomly return 50x errors a good chunk of the time because it was always overloaded.
Backend reliability mustn't be very high up their priority list. Well, neither is UX (old OR new reddit), and let's not pretend that they've been masterminds when it comes to ad placement either, so the real question is what do the higher ups want, and why can't they achieve it?
the real question is what do the higher ups want, and why can’t they achieve it?
They want money, and they've tried nothing and are all out of ideas.
Honestly even this year it hasn't been super reliable, even before any of this. Stability has never really been a top priority for them.
High-scale software is complex, sometimes there are edge cases where weird unexpected stuff happens. This isn’t a situation they would normally run into.
It absolutely is something they would normally run into. I work on maintaining a massive application; think 60+ teams of 6, each extremely specialized and minimal overlap. Almost 75% of my job is predicting issues and avoiding them. Peer testing draws on this a ton as well. They just continue to plainly show that they don't care. Time and time again, year after year, they continue to have the exact same issues and do fuck all about it.
Why would they normally run into 6000+ subs going private? I'm sure they tested that their code can generally handle some (usually smaller) subs going private, but the number and size of the subs going dark isn't a normal scenario and I doubt anyone would have assumed such a successful and coordinated protest involving some of the biggest subs would even be possible a few months ago.
It's the user/moderator fault. If they would just keep working without pay there wouldn't be any problem. /s
honestly I figured it'd be the result of all those people running deletion scripts on their accounts
This is probably it. Also ArchiveTeam is archiving Reddit as a high priority target so lots of bots scraping it
God bless archive.org. We'd be so screwed without their efforts.
It's not crashing. It's just more than 7-80% of the requests getting request error because most of the subreddits went private. It sure does looks like crash to a completely uninformed users but it's not a crash as we think.
Maybe their caching doesn't work for private subreddits
they havent worked in a world where the site is not constantly slammed in years. they built the thing to be pre-loaded i bet.
Just one thing, must be indefinitely not 48h, otherwise nothing will change. A year have 365 days, 48h it's a weekend, if subreddits come back after 48h it's nothing happened.
I think that stating it as 48 hours was smart. Because if subreddits start saying it's indefinite, then they have time to start replacing mods and shutting the protest down. Whereas here, 48 hours will pass. They lose a lot of money in just 2 days. And if nothing changes, you'll likely see decreased quality and/or continued protest.
I think it left room at the table for reddit to cooperate. It's a common bargaining thing.
I agree with you and I fear that is exactly what will happen.
thats kinda hilarious
How much spaghetti is your code if most of the communities switching to private fucks up your website?
goto 10
I saw a lot of people saying they used bots to rewrite their entire post history to things like "fuck /u/spez"
I'm thinking that amount of comment editing might be quite the spike on the servers.
I did that, but not "fuck u/spez" because that might get the comment deleted altogether making the edit meaningless. Instead I edited to say the comments been deleted in protest against the API changes.
If enough of us do it, entire comment chains will be illegible lol
I fully committed. My 10+ year account is now deleted.
I didn’t delete my account but I did use redact to change the titles and comment to reflect I left because of the api changes.
I tried redact, but it wouldn't load. Just froze at "loading".
Blew up my 11 year account. Lemmy got memes and the porn showed up as expected. No reason to go back.
Porn, porn never changes
Wheres the porn hiding?
lemmynsfw.com
LET'S EFFIN GOOO
Don't worry. It'll pop up to you in no time 😂
H-How does one find the porn…
That was honestly hilarious, they deserve those problems and more.
Let it burn to fucking ash!
Our collective swan song of fuck /u/spez, from Hell's heart I stab at thee.
KHAAAAN!!
Good riddance!
I suppose the protest may have played a role in the site going down but I thought the outage was mostly due to the cloudflare issues from earlier in the day.
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