Too much load? Reddit is down.

Not enough load? Believe it or not, also down.

When Reddit forcibly opens everything back up:

knock knock

“Who’s there?”

”Mods. Hired mods.”

“Hired mods?”

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.

Verge: Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout

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.

Ah, "expected", such a wonderful word! They expected for their infrastructure to explode, just according to keikaku...

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.

As an engineer, this sounds most plausible - they had proactive detection and resolution in place against various attacks and system failures, which got triggered due to the massive drop in public subreddits/users/activity, and made everything worse. Honestly, this isn't a scenario their engineers could have easily predicted...

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.

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.

started using jerboa, but as it stands i found browsing in firefox on the mobile interface better

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.)

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!

For me I want a LemReader a Lemmy version of RedReader.

Same. We need better Lemmy apps

Did the same this morning but with Boost. End of an era, really

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

I've done the same. I miss RiF but I have to say, jerboa is nicer than expected. The main thing that gets me is that tapping on a comment hides it, I'm used to just selecting it to upvote lol

Put Jerboa in that spot like I did and use that habit to your advantage!

I put mlem in the spot where Apollo (sob) used to be

Same, but for me it's Apollo! I had to take it off my home screen. I am committed to the 48 hours and beyond, if necessary! And got everyone in my house to join in too! But damn it's a hard habit to break!

Stick around the cute animals are growing by the day! Seriously on Saturday I could only find one community dedicated to animals. Today while browsing I found like EIGHT!

I’ve become partial to animals eating food 🥺 where do I go for this content 😭

Same, I just kept instinctively looking for Boost throughout the day to scroll and then catching myself amd going "godamn it, you made accounts in other places a week ago for this! Just go there!"

I got better at it by the end of the day, by tomorrow hopefully I'll hop here or tildes first instead of mindlessly trying to open reddit first.

The aww subreddit opened a Discord for the cute animal photos, but I had trouble navigating it and decided to just not go there. I'll admit to never using Discord before and for some reason it wasn't coming naturally.

And, yes, I know the username doesn't match with that. Not instinctively understanding a technology made me feel old.

So instead of removing RIF, I removed my entire phone homepage. D'oh.

At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem

I do not disagree with anything you said, and I agree that Reddit (as they want it to be) will come out of this just fine. That being said, Reddit does have a lot of the same major problems Digg had at the time, especially astroturfing and spam content, and I don't expect that to go away. Over the past couple years most of the posts on the front pages are often bot generated and/or posted karma farms, and it's becoming more and more common to see bot brigades in the comments of everything, manipulating the dialogue.

I've commented loads on here that I haven't felt a sense of community on Reddit in years, and it's getting more and more cookie cutter and instagrammy by the day. It's become something I just mindlessly scroll through instead of ever really engaging with, and tons of the posts are really just socially engineered ads. I'm really liking Lemmy, it feels like a fresh start. I miss a lot of the content, but I love that it's more engaging. IDC if it doesn't become the most popular thing, if I can come here and actually engage with people/content rather than just amble through it apathetically, I'm 100% down.

To be fair Voat was commandeered almost immediately or at least within a few days. I remember bouncing back very fast when I found out specifically why so many going there wanted "free speech." I chose to eat corporate shit rather than that malignant anti-social shit at the time. I don't like eating any kind of shit, and it doesn't seem as likely here as it seems like social responsibility is generally being given precedence over allowing fascists to say whatever they want.

I agree. This feels more like the AACS encryption key fiasco to me than it does Digg v4. Brief context for the unaware, in 2007 Digg started taking down posts and accounts that referenced a hex code that could be used to decrypt HD-DVDs and Blu-rays. The userbase was very unhappy about it and spammed the front page with the code, rendering Digg basically useless. Digg relented pretty quickly, and while the site continued to chug along for another couple of years or so, the bad taste left in users' mouths surely triggered a lot of them to start jumping over to Reddit.

I loved TechTV when it was a thing, and had followed many of those personalities to their respective podcast networks and to Digg when that channel imploded; over time I definitely started leaning more towards Reddit though, as one could definitely see the corporate pressure that Digg was starting to cave to. The "darkening" of Reddit today feels a lot closer to that moment than to the big Digg v4 switchover -- the beginning of the end rather than the final nail. Feels very surreal looking back and having been there for all of it.

undefined> I predict that Reddit will survive this

Sure it will survive. And it's certainly not assured that this will be the crack that breaks the dam, but it is one of them. As you described above, Digg didn't fall all at once. Reddit may stay dominant until they disable Old, or until they disable mobile browsers, or this protest may end up doing it. We won't know until long after the fact.

Even as a reddit addict I didn't know anything about spez and all he past creepiness until the discussions about the mobile apps shutting down. It was the impetus to send me to the Fediverse. My reddit addiction is broken (yeah!) and I wasn't even a mobile app user.

Honestly, if people though spam was getting bad on Reddit before...

I wouldn't "count our chickens before they hatch" here. If they lose the 3rd party app users to us Reddit will still be there, but we'll be a more viable alternative, and I bet mods and content creators are much more likely to make the switch.

Otherwise, excellent analysis, good work. I wasn't around for the Digg exodus so I wouldn't know this stuff.

By the way, what do you think makes discoverability hard? I've heard that before but I obviously had no problems.

There's already been noise on the ModCood subreddit about "What if this fails? What next?"

I don't think protests like this alone are going to cut it. If they haven't figured this out already, they need to realize that this doesn't cut their ad revenue enough to make a difference. A coordinated campaign against Reddit advertisers would be a big blow. The disability issues alone should make advertisers pause.

OTOH, I do like Lemmy.

"At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem, "

lmao. Sounds familiar. I think you're right that Reddit is going to survive, but I think this is a hard enough blow that it's going to change the personality of the site. For one, the IPO dreams seem DOA currently, with the handling of this, the fairly toxic nature of some areas on the site, and drying up of VC in tech all seem to be bad news for any optimism for Reddit as a company. I imagine that this treatment is going to lead to migration of some communities, maybe smaller ones, leaving only the karma-farming, bot-ridden, main subs to be "the front page of the internet" anymore.

I hope that Lemmy serves as an acceptable shelter if not home for users looking for the next good web aggregator/messageboard, despite its shortcomings and the growing pains.

It’s so frustrating. I deleted Apollo and don’t see myself downloading the garbage reddit app, so I really hope a new website can come out on top. I wish one of this community driven platforms followed suit of Wikipedia and allowed donations to pay for site costs but didn’t try to become profitable. These kind of community-run (aka free labor) pillars on the internet are bigger than just a dumb tech company

I'm totally not going through withdrawal.

Uh huh.

There's an app for that

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"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

I opened Apollo once and got a special splash screen. I moved Apollo off the front page of my phone display.

Praise porn-Jesus, horny be his name.

NSFW always seems to push technology forward, be it video streaming, or VR, or now federated link aggreagators.

Niche communities reign for now! I'll wait to create an alt account until the influx dies down, but this is, uh ... handy to know.

Are we blocked from seeing NSFW communities on Beehaw? (Not an issue, I would create an alt for that anyway. Just curious)

Yeah this is the main reason I won't be giving up reddit 100% once the 3rd party apps go down. I definitely won't be doom scrolling on my phone like I used to, but I 100% will still use reddit on my desktop as a research tool. There's just nothing else like it for the amount of quality niche information atm.

Ask chatgpt what Reddit things about something something. It has probably scraped everything on Reddit anyway.

I've had multiple times when I launched Boost (my third party app of choice - at least until it's forced to shut down) out of force of habit.

Thankfully, I planned for this eventuality. I installed a "focus" app and set it to block Boost and the Reddit app for 2 days. (I've since also moved the apps away from their usual spot on my phone to prevent launches.)

Ooooh man, I was searching up something earlier today and out of reflex I clicked a Reddit result. Felt icky once I realized where I ended up and went Back fast 😅.

It'll be interesting to see if/how we'll come to adapt to a more decentralized getup in time. I wonder how we might quickly search through all the public federated platforms at once? It's gon' get old fast to type [x] site:beehaw.org OR site:lemmy.world OR [ad nauseum]. I think it'd be cool if decentralized platforms got popular enough that search engines would add something like site:!social.lemmy.

What's interesting is that a bunch of subreddits have disappeared from my multis in Apollo, perhaps because they were dark for over a day? Not sure.

Just woke up and first thing I do was open Apollo (lol) and this is what I noticed.

Apollo shutting down completely is going to disrupt my life like crazy!

As the other commenter said, this is also why I won't give up reddit 100%

? why are you pinging me

I actually like the Reddit app (which apparently makes me the only one), but I'm not for Reddit fucking everyone over.

I actually paid for Apollo and I have no regrets doings so. I've never been paid for any of my programming work. In fact, it's all been done under the auspice of a student loan that I didn't even get a degree from, so I paid for my own programming work. The fact that Reddit is trying to extort these indie developers disgusts me to the highest degree.

I paid for the Apollo app when I used iOS, and I do not regret it in the slightest, because I've never been paid for any of the programming I've ever done. In fact, it's all been done under the auspice of a student loan that I never earned a degree from. I'm happy to see someone get paid for their programming work and the fact that a multi-billion dollar company is trying to extort these programmers disgusts me to the highest level.

The mobile web interface sucks diarrhea geysers, so yeah, those of us who use our phones more than our, ahem, desktop terminals prefer an app that's actually optimized for mobile.

Reddit, maybe you have a pretty shitty app?

Oh, they know. They just don't care.

I did the same, 12+ years. I was an Alien Blue user till they bought it and spezzed it up, then I found Apollo and never looked back. I debated waiting, but at this point I just can't support that platform anymore, even if they do try to backtrack.

I nuked all my posts and comments as well.

What's the benefit of deleting ones account(s) vs just letting it become an unused relic? Wouldn't making them dedicate that fraction of their service space to dead accounts/comments/etc be more of a burden than removing it all for them?

My moose senses also tingled. What great senses we have eh?

I'm only commenting to tell you I read your exposition blather. So take that MOOSE

Makes sense, posts can be (and are) automated via repost bots. Commente and genuine interaction is impossible to fake.

Since the source graph gets wonky immediately before the crop, there's not really enough here to compare against from the before-times (last week).

But what is here looks like a very large problem on the comment front, with each peak being lower than the last and and the latter two nadirs following the same pattern. The presumed "small number of power users" were having a noticeable impact more than 48 hours earlier. (and, hey ... good on them for using 0 as the axis)

This is cool where did you find it? Or did you generate it?

yes. you can donate here

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.

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.

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.

Dunno if it counts as large, but r/Ukraine is understandably staying open and made a statement in support of the blackout

/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.

The sysadmin sub isn't participateing because it is a major resource for patch Tuesday

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".

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.

Disturbingly, there is really no way to know who actually owns a private company like Reddit. Once it goes public, then the owners will be the shareholders (and in reality, the owners are the major shareholders who have a controlling stake).

The only clue to the current ownership is whatever management wishes to disclose. Spez wrote a blog post in 2021 indicating that they issued $250M in "series E funding" to existing and new investors.

If there are any finance bros around here, they may be able to dig up some sort of disclosures from bond auctions to try and see who bought it.

The only confirmed investor I know about is Tencent. They invested in 2019. Its possible they were also some of the "existing investors" Spez referred to in 2021.

Bottom line: nobody knows who owns Reddit. But apparently the owners think this guy Spez is a good fit to run their company, somehow.

I think the Fediverse is an illustration that innovation can thrive without profit motive. Maybe just copying services, picking up the pieces, and moving there is the only reasonable protest anyone can do on the Internet.

In essence, to make one's own website, with blackjack, and hookers.

I don't know how you'll get a capitalist prepper to surrender his golden goose.

That's excellent. Who is David Revoy?

Top quality, right there.

If the AMA taught us anything, it's that spez doesn't actually use reddit. Let alone understand it.

Spez is playing both sides so he comes out on top!

Rebellion

Mr. Rathschmidt added that some apps are more efficient and require significantly fewer A.P.I. calls and that “Apollo is notably less efficient than other third-party apps.”

“The vast majority of A.P.I. users will not have to pay for access; not all third-party apps usage requires paid access,” he wrote, adding that access is “is free for moderator tools and bots.”

That is some shoddy reporting there. Selig is cited earlier in the piece, so to let that quote stand unchallenged either means an editor didn't see it or ... well, I'd rather not get more confirmation from the Times on that front.

Well Spez hasn't sent the Pinkertons after the Apollo dev yet so at least that's something. I think these c-suite executives are so insulated from the real world due to rising income inequality that it doesn't even occur to them that people might get mad when they ruin something people care about. And if there are ever consequences to their actions it is confusing because they largely lead consequence-free lives.