On the same day thousands of subreddits went private.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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).
Is closing different than setting to private? I had seen some comments suggesting that some mods should delete their subs altogether. Just curious if there are some options that are more nuclear than others