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!
The NSFW community (lemmyNSFW.com) has exploded due to the blackout.
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Great article thank you for the read.
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It’s nice that you shared this info, but could you try and stay away from money locked websites? A (granted European) student doesn’t have money. Or not enough anyways xD
NoScript (a Firefox extension) seems to have disabled the paywall for me. Might have been origin too, but I doubt it.
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Generally 12ft.io or archive.ph will sort out a paywall, also there are a number of plugins which can unlock them
Or at least post the important text here
New myself, but you seem to be doing it right.
However, the link only shows the first paragraph unless you have an account, at least for Firefox on Android.I googled paywall blockers, and this one is working for me.
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Ffortune.com%2F2023%2F06%2F12%2Freddit-revolt-puts-ceo-steve-huffman-in-a-tough-position%2FWeird, there’s no paywall on my end, using kiwi browser on mobile
NO paywall here, firefox on desktop + NoScript and origin. Probably NoScript blacking the paywall.
Some might say that some Redditors have always been revolting!
Sire, the peasants are revolting
I agree.
Seems like all the traffic had to go somewhere…
Lots of love for the Beehaw and other Lemmy admins this morning. It’s never fun suddenly having to 10x scale. Although it sounds like everybody else on the internet is getting a heavy traffic load today too.
I think the most fun, unintended consequence is that there were some assumptions baked into the Reddit codebase and the large number of Private subreddits has caused massive disruption and outages for them. While others have speculated it might be a tactic to hamper the affects of the protest, it sure seems real plausible to have not anticipated 6K subreddits going private overnight.
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As a former sysadmin and a [still, for the moment] reddit moderator, my bet is that most of the subreddits that switched to private forgot to (or didn’t know to) go into “new reddit” and switch off the thing that allows people to request being added to the now-private subreddit.
A HUGE influx of people pounding on the “let me in, add me to the sub” button, which sends modmail, may have overloaded the whole modmail system, which in turn sometimes goes kaflooey for no apparent reason (my theory is: it gets bored).
Ah, but you see they “improved” modmail recently. It would certainly never go “kaflooey” anymore. It now fails all like “kerpow!” instead… much cooler, you see.
Well, of course, that’s just good engineering.
You see, kerpow!s scale much better than kaflooeys due to cache invalidation problems in the ooey inductors, that’s like first semester knowledge.
I see this as a positive aspect of the protest.
I am also amused that random people are pounding on the door for access, as if they think approved submitters are having a private tea party inside.
Clearly you’re not someone who would have to go back and clear out 259238 modmail messages and make sure that none of them are legit “I have a problem” notes.
None of the subreddits I mod are that huge but just the thought of more than 100 at once makes me wanna cry.
Oh clearly I’m not. I just don’t understand the thinking of people demanding access. It’s like the kind of person who pounds on the door of a closed restaurant because they can see the employees inside.
People are selfish. People subconsciously think the rules apply to other people.
People who demand to come into closed stores and restaurants are not the exception. What’s even crazier is when you turn one away, anyone who has seen the door open even though the person was told no and didn’t get inside suddenly decides that maybe if THEY pound on the door, they’ll magically get access!
Oh man, my partner made a somewhat popular weapon calculator spreadsheet for Elden Ring, and the number of random Google Sheets edit requests they received was… quite a lot. (the instructions were right there for people to make a copy of the sheet to edit themselves! that’s how all of these sheets calculators work!) 🤦
At this point, they should just leave the 259,238 modmail messages for the admins to deal with. Let them sort through all that since this is all their doing.
I’ve had some of those. I’ve been responding with a link to Louis Rossman’s video and “Please consider limiting your own reddit use.”
I’m just speculating of course, too, but could be some kind of sharding e.g. in the DB level. I can imagine the little subreddits draw little traffic hence fewer shards are allocated to them (like how S3 works).
This makes a lot of sense to me (as an Operations Engineer).
I could imagine the architecture team has low watermark triggers to rescale the architecture, kill and restore hosts, or other changes based on expected user load. When that load just… isn’t there, the automated tooling just loops the same actions causing site instability.
I’ve had similar issues before, so it seems like a feasible explanation
I’m not sure if it’s just a load balancing issue. if all of Reddit can only access specific subs, maybe they split their servers that way
but I’m just guessing, because it doesn’t make much sense to go down, when there is less data to process…
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yeah, well, maybe…
usually unexpected situations have unexpected errors. so yeah, you could be right
I’m having flashback to the early Reddit and Twitter days. Those platforms would get a ton of press os buzz on a random day, then they would explode.
The fail whale was iconic back in the day.
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.
I bet their shitty bots intended to inflate comments and content couldn’t be switched off in time for the blackouts, still sending requests and DDoS’ing their own site.
Too much load? Reddit is down.
Not enough load? Believe it or not, also down.
Want Free API? Straight to down status.
Want cheaper API? Also straight to down status
Not enough people on Reddit because of protests? Also straight to down status
Rebelling moderators, we have a special jail for rebelling moderators.
Lol, this made me chuckle out loud. Good job Sausage man!
thank you, this comment made my day
I’d love to know what it is about subreddits going private that caused issues.
It’s entirely possible that they’ve made some assumptions about what a “normal” level of traffic looks like when writing code for their backend, which has caused some things to break when that has changed.
Not our fault if their code is shit.
How is that an example of bad code?
Honestly, it’s probably not - if I’m actually right this is likely an issue that Reddit’s engineers never predicted would happen so never planned for it. I was being hyperbolic.
It’s not reactive. A proper reactive system can handle fluctuations in usage patterns more robustly.
I’m having a hard time believing the claim that Reddit’s code isn’t reactive.
Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a gigantic mess of nested if-else statements.
Maybe, but this was a huge increase in usage. Reddit never expected to deal with anywhere near thousands of subs going private simultaneously.
Tildes’ dev Deimos used to work for Reddit and had this guess https://tildes.net/~tech/163e/reddit_appears_to_be_down_during_blackout_day_1#comment-87v1.
The servers run on the tears of bitter whiny CEOs.
“It’s merely coincidence. But starting Wednesday, our servers will be more robust and you can browse the site using our official app.” - Spez, while sniffing a decanter of human shit
God we need indefinite blackouts.
They’re lying. Fish swim, birds fly, sun shines, Reddit lies.
Maybe some overload caused by a process having to dig deeper to find best/top posts?
apparently that’s exactly the case.
That is an interesting aspect no engineer could have foreseen!
You’d be surprised how much critical infrastructure was implemented through trial and error and has just been left like that for years…
Anything less than 99% of infrastructure working that way would be surprising. Everything is held together with scotch tape and scotch whisky.
I like this idea. I imagine that with the top subs being dark the automated top posts that get scrounged up may be too terrifying for the front page and they hit the panic button while they scramble to curate through the absolute worst filth they’ve ever seen.
Probably a drop in usage flagged some internal test
This comment is so good an upvote won’t do justice (without awards, a classic comment such as this now has some merit… it’s a new day boys & girls, a good day)
If Beehaw offered awards I would actually buy them, at least the money would be going towards keeping the lights on for a project that isn’t actively trying to screw over users for profit.
Give them some gold. Oh wait…
When Reddit forcibly opens everything back up:
knock knock
“Who’s there?”
”Mods. Hired mods.”
“Hired mods?”
“Wait, you all are getting paid?”
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.
Is that what the subreddit coins or subredidt points idea was about?
I don’t think so. I think that’s a whole other mess.
If the volunteer mods hold their ground and force Reddit corporate to oust them, Reddit would need to step in to fill the void.
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.
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.
Ah, “expected”, such a wonderful word! They expected for their infrastructure to explode, just according to keikaku…
Bold of you to assume they had a keikaku to begin with
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is Beehaw accepting donations for server costs? I can only imagine that the hosting bill is going to be preeeeeetty steep this month…
yes. you can donate here
Ooh wonderful, thanks for sharing!
Thank you! I’ll donate when I get paid this week.
We sure are, I think it should be in the sidebar but if it’s not, https://opencollective.com/beehaw
A one-time donation will help now, and with all the new users it seems like Beehaw needs some support now. A smaller but recurring monthly contribution would also help now and would add to a regular pool of funds which can allow Beehaw to be able to plan how to accommodate the larger community on a permanent basis. I think the community is worth having to wait through some of the strain right now, but I would like to contribute to infrastructure upgrades and maintenance so I have decided to make a recurring contribution.
Replaced RIF with Jerboa on my home screen; I can’t say I won’t miss it though, wish there was a “Lemmy is fun” already
In one of the subreddits, someone mentioned an effort to make a “Reddit API->Lemmy API bridge.” Basically, you’d load this code and point your Reddit API calls to Lemmy instead. Then this bridge would translate your Reddit code to Lemmy. This could allow for apps like RIF, Boost, Apollo, etc to quickly turn their Reddit apps into Lemmy apps.
I hope this pans out. Jerboa isn’t bad, but having many third party apps to choose from would be great. (As a Boost user, I’d love to load Boost and browse Lemmy instead of Reddit.)
For me I want a LemReader a Lemmy version of RedReader.
I was using joey. Joey for lemmy sounds pretty weird.
The RedReader developer (QuantumBadger) said they’d like to make it a more general reader app and include support for RSS and Lemmy. It would take a while to to it though. They would have to abstract a lot of the Reddit specific code.
I hope they do it, it’s a really nice app.
Did the same this morning but with Boost. End of an era, really
Didn’t know we had an app. The RiF developer is working on an app for Tildes, which bums me out, RiF was my weapon of choice.
I’ve only convinced one real life friend to become interested in reddit, I asked her if she’d heard about all the drama there, and found out she’d been using the official app all this time…she was super shocked when I told her the stories about peoples’ phones heating up using that thing.
I’m still trying out Tildes now and then, but the lack of an app pretty much kills the experience for me at the moment. I feel like the Lemmy system is overall the superior option, but Tildes is still an interesting alternative from what I’ve seen so I’m excited to see what it looks like with an app.
I read that people were really impressed with how dedicated the RiF developer is working on their app - bugs or features were reported and bam! Fixed asap. I mean to join up at Tildes when they have another bidding round, it is interesting in its own way - same with Squabbles.
Any chance you could give me an invite?
I was going to join tildes until I saw a slew of posts talking about how they got permabanned for saying stuff like “I like tildes more than lemmy”. Lol… what?
Same. We need better Lemmy apps
Jeroba is great and open source (and free)! Rather than “better Lemmy apps” why not just improve the one that already exists?
I don’t like the layout personally. I agree that we should improve existing apps but we also should create more options.
Reddit (and Boost, the app I used before) offered several different layout styles that you could pick from (e.g. cards, list). Are those the types of layouts you’re referring to? Those could be added, I expect, and the more the merrier
Or do you mean more specific layout details like where the voting buttons are?
Jerboa has “Card”, “Small Card”, and “List” modes under “Look and Feel” -> “Post View”
Jerboa is a pretty nice app overall already. I use an iPhone as my main device, and Mlem is very incomplete at this stage (but it’s quite new). I loaded up Jerboa on a Pixel, though l, and was very impressed. Jerboa is far more polished…shame it’s Android only
If folks are on iOS, you can beta test the app “Mlem” by following the instructions here:
https://testflight.apple.com/join/xQfmkJhc
I like it!
I just downloaded it. I’m not sure how to log in though. I entered beehaw.org for the home page then Skyteck for username and added my password. Then it says could not connect to beehaw.org.
Try the full URL:
https://beehaw.org/That worked for me. Logging in was as easy as logging in here on browser.
Logging in is a major pain in the ass. It took me like 12 minutes to figure it out and if I got logged out, I’m not sure I remember how it worked.
Terrible UX. But better than nothing.
started using jerboa, but as it stands i found browsing in firefox on the mobile interface better
Agreed. Jerboa has a ways to go to catch up with the mobile web interface.
And they both have a long way to go to catch up to the likes of RIF.
I guess I have the minority opinion here - I reallykme Jerboa. It’s not Apollo or Sync but it’s lightweight, all about the text, has bookmark, comment, up and down votes front and center, and gets out of the way.
I’ve also been over on kbin.social and the mobile interface there is really lacking so maybe Jerboa just looks especially good to me jn contrast!
The lack of a mobile app is what’s keeping me from trying kbin.social right now.
I have typed the letter “o” for “old.reddit” about six or seven times today out of habit. Thanks to the Beehaw team for providing a space which is better than a simple substitute in many ways. I am simply incapable of operating any of the newer reddit interfaces, so once “old.” is history that will be it for me totally.
I’m totally not going through withdrawal.
Uh huh.
Deleted my account and took Apollo off my phone. My hands feel… itchy.
I’m doing the same on 6/30. I had to move Apollo off my front page to stop me from reflexively opening it every ten minutes.
I deleted RiF in the line for the bagel shop this morning. I feel exactly the same way.
Save and import:
{ "createdBy": "Redirector v3.5.3", "createdAt": "2023-06-01T00:00:00.011Z", "redirects": [ { "description": "Reddit to Beehaw", "exampleUrl": "https://reddit.com", "exampleResult": "https://beehaw.org", "error": null, "includePattern": "^(https?://)([a-z0-9-]*\\.)?reddit.com(.*)", "excludePattern": "", "patternDesc": "Reddit to Beehaw", "redirectUrl": "https://beehaw.org", "patternType": "R", "processMatches": "noProcessing", "disabled": false, "grouped": false, "appliesTo": [ "main_frame" ] } ] }Is there a way for the extension to replace only the domain? for example, https://lemmy.ml/c/memes will become https://sopuli.xyz/c/memes ?
I opened Apollo once and got a special splash screen. I moved Apollo off the front page of my phone display.
I’ve been curious as to what the end user experience on reddit might look like today and tomorrow. The blackout tracker seems to show fairly typical activity though. https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/ That perplexes me.
Maybe people are still checking reddit like usual, but many posts are hours old in the private subreddits that they may subscribe to? I know a percentage of subreddits didn’t go dark, but those wouldn’t be big enough to cause engagement to stay at the usual levels. Anyone hazard a guess as to what’s up?
Oh…thank you guys for keeping up with all the chaos from us new folks slamming your servers!
Reddit still pulls things to r/all, even if what’s there is some abandoned sub. It’s why some subs went restricted instead of private, so they can make posts about the protest and the issue behind it that will still be surfaced.
A lot of newer users don’t bother going past r/all, so there’s going to be some activity constantly since not everyone knows what’s going on.
Hell, I made three posts about it all on r/edc, and I’m still getting people asking why they can’t post. I’m not moderating during the two day blackout at all, but I get the notifications.
Which is fine. The protest has never been about getting people to stop using reddit. It’s about the moderators standing up and making the point that it’s the users and mods that made reddit worth anything to begin with. And it was. Reddit side? The admins that handled day to day activity helped a ton when they could, but reddit beyond that was just servers and software. Without content, that’s useless.
It looks like the activity is flattening now. I guess the stale content is starting to have an effect.
First of all, thanks for moderating r/edc as that is one of my favorite subs. 2nd question - are there plans for setting up an equivalent over here? I have seen a lot of new “magazines” on K-bin the last few days, but it would be great to get sanctioned, equivalent subs over here and then more Reddit regulars could simply “move on over”. Maybe that is happening, and I just don’t know how to fine it? Some instances, like Beehaw, are restrictive in creating new communities, not sure what the process is for doing that in those locations.
I know I’ve instinctively opened Sync a couple times already. I assume a lot of people who use reddit are lurkers as well, who don’t really pay any attention to the quality of the homepage and will just browse like nothing changed.
I am really going to miss Sync most of all from this whole debacle. LJ has commented that he’s toying with the idea of porting it over to Lemmy but I would be surprised if he’s able to do it all that smoothly. Still, I can dream.
LJ is the GOAT for sure, I remember loading the redditsync test beta when I had the original HTC with a trackball (it’s lived in the same spot on every device ever since then to this day). I hope he does focus on Lemmy - I’d pay for his efforts all over again. Still, despite the minor inconveniences I’m finding adopting this new set of servers and building out my personalized feeds I’m finding the Jerboa app a similar enough reading experience that it’s not jarring.
The most recent update for Jerboa definitely made it look less awful, and it works alright. I miss the customization of Sync for sure, though. I went back and looked and it looks like I purchased the ad removal back in 2014, so I’ve been using it for close to 10 years now.
This is a fantastic idea, thank you.
yeah we hung with the flood of topics about this for a bit but it’s not super tenable (or desirable) on our end for every second post on our front page to be about reddit, lol
Would love to see a list of large subreddits that aren’t participating and the statements (if any) they put out explaining why.
Dunno if it counts as large, but r/Ukraine is understandably staying open and made a statement in support of the blackout
There is an education based sub I was an active member of. Last I checked they have not gone dark or made an announcement. But people might depend on it for school and exams. So I’m OK with them not going out. They also are not huge.
The sysadmin sub isn’t participateing because it is a major resource for patch Tuesday
The mod team has a strong “keep the trains running” mentality.
The mod team is high on their own farts. Was told point blank when I started in the field “Don’t rely on r/sysadmin for anything. You’ll get worse than wrong information there.”
Comes with the job I suppose.
/r/Games basically said they wouldn’t close up because it’s Summer games news week so why hurt the people coming to the subreddit? But also some kind of “we stand with the blackouts so we’ll make some very light changes in protest”.
I’ve generally liked and preferred Games to other choices on Reddit, but it showed they just didn’t care. Went ahead and unsubscribed because of that weak response.
I can kinda, sorta understand their reasoning and I think Summer Games Fest is very awkward timing for them to blackout.
If they don’t participate in further protests (and I see more blackouts happening), that’s when we know they’re full of shit.
Yeah, I didn’t understand that either. Its not like video games are some sort of resource that lives may depend on, like r/ukraine which is more understandable. Oh God we wouldn’t want to miss a Nintendo Direct or something, would we? 🙄
r/Australia made a half-arsed “we support the movement, but we’re not going dark” post which was met with much ridicule from the community as “pissweak” and “a very Australian response, like our climate change policy”.
This definitely feels like the D&D OGL fiasco. That got some big news. It felt like Reddit was the primary platform for organizing that boycott. It’s a shame that Reddit didn’t learn any lessons from WOTC.
hey folks, new megathread is thataway since this one has like 500 comments already and news is quickly cycling out of date. we’ll lock this one down shortly. thanks!
- Week 1
I like your optimism!
I removed my reddit app of choice (Sync), and left the spot on my home screen empty. I probably tapped that spot instinctively 20 plus times today. It’s just muscle memory for what to pull up when I have some time to kill. The Fediverse seems like an estimated, but there is a shocking lack of cute animals here
