Reddit protestation is making more noise than I expected! | Article from the CBC

3 years ago by Windows2000Srv to c/canada

Even the CBC is making an article about it! 😅

9488fcea02a9 69 points 3 years ago

Didnt know the apollo dev is from halifax.... Makes me even more angry that reddit CEO tried to make him look like a liar

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frankyboi 19 points 3 years ago

everyone on the internet is secretly Canadian .

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ashley 18 points 3 years ago

I wonder if they’ll make a Lemmy client like how the tweetbot devs made ivory for mastodon

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Arghblarg 21 points 3 years ago

I'm trying Jerboa, on the f-droid app store (Android).

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socialjusticewizard 10 points 3 years ago

Hey me too. It isn't bad, I miss RiF but this has a similar feel. Wish it was easier to see my subscriptions, I suspect I'll get smoother with time

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Vilian 5 points 3 years ago

same, i was using ibfinity i asked the developer how hard could be port it to lemmy, ask the RiF too

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Cryst 2 points 3 years ago

Can you tell me how to see my subscriptions?

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LoamImprovement 1 point 3 years ago

Do you know if there's a way to preload cards so that it's not constantly hanging up while I'm scrolling? Like I get if it's every 20-30 links or so because you can't load everything indefinitely but it's incredibly choppy as-is.

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ashley 6 points 3 years ago

Unfortunately I’m on iOS so I Mlem isn’t too polished right now, so I just have the site installed as a pwa

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wecalledhimmavis 1 point 3 years ago

Mlem won't let me log in to beehaw for some reason

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Grimpen 12 points 3 years ago

I'd love it if the 3rd party developers burned by Reddit started developing for Lemmy/kbin/Mastodon. First, there is lots of opportunity to make Lemmy and the rest of the Fediverse more user friendly without sacrificing the benefits of federation. Second, it's an open source ecosystem. The more developers in the space, the better for everyone.

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shadowolf 1 point 3 years ago

It might require a significant amount of work to transition from the Apollo API to Lemmy. yesterday, I peeked at the Lemmy and Reddit APIs out of curiosity and they aren't exactly similarity. So, there are two potential paths forward for the developer: either build a translation layer to preserve their existing code base, or undertake a complete re-engineering of there code base.

There's also the challenge of identifying functional Lemmy instances, which brings us to a complex issue that was raised on Rust reddit thread about possible using Lemmy https://www.reddit.com/.... Where some concerning information regarding the lemmy dev was brought up.

This Mastodon post (https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379) seems to imply some socio-political implications. Although I can't fully understand the context, it appears to be related to concerns about human rights oppression associated with Lemmy's developers (https://www.reddit.com/...

This issue is apparently severe enough that Fedi.Tips, decided to withdraw there support for Lemmy. The developers have seemingly not addressed these concerns since they were raised.

So ya, Lemmy isn't exactly a squeaky clean project currently

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can 2 points 3 years ago

So lets just not register on the instances they run?

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SterlingVapor 1 point 3 years ago

I'm working on a Lemmy app now, and I will say the documentation is pretty rough - I've had to do a lot of reading through source code. The data types are well defined, but there's no explanation - you kind of just get the name of the route, and if you're lucky a short sentence about it.

I've worked with much worse, but it's an entirely different experience than working with the Reddit API

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longshaden 62 points 3 years ago

publicity is good, but wish they would have taken two exta seconds to explain the nuance of the issue.

It's not just that Reddit will start charging for API calls, but that the price was outrageously high, extortionate even.

Many will read this article, and others like it, and automatically side with Reddit, because "it sounds fair that apps with heavy API usage should contribute to the cost", completely missing the part the Reddit is trying to bankrupt the third part app developers.

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kent_eh 24 points 3 years ago

wish they would have taken two exta seconds to explain the nuance of the issue.

Most users on Reddit don't really understand the nuance, either.

Even though there has been tons of threads in most of the subreddits trying to explain it.

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lostlemon 18 points 3 years ago

I'm annoyed that the imgur pricing didn't make the article, which I thought was the most illuminating comparison. Leading the pricing details with $2.50/person/month sounds very "that's all?" at surface level

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Diego 4 points 3 years ago

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TheMcG 21 points 3 years ago

reddit is $0.24 per 1000 calls Imgur is $0.06 per 1000 calls.

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Rumblestiltskin 47 points 3 years ago

Too bad there was no mention of decentralised alternates like Lemmy or kbin.

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adespoton 47 points 3 years ago

As discussed elsewhere, that might not be such a bad thing. Ramping up slowly will work much better than all of Reddit suddenly showing up at lemmy.ml and expecting it to be a fully polished* Reddit.

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spintowin 11 points 3 years ago

Agreed. This will take awhile, but once it gets going I think it'll slowly take over.

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ashley 7 points 3 years ago

I remember the exodus to mastodon being a bit of a shitshow with nobody knowing how it worked, the whole network slowing to a crawl, and then a lot of them leaving a couple weeks later. It did boost the amount of users, just in a bad way.

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Grimpen 7 points 3 years ago

Some of us stuck around. I'd say Mastodon is good enough and big enough. Lemmy is definitely more rough around the edges. If some of the spurned app developers end up in the Fediverse somewhere, it should help a great deal.

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Chrisosaur 3 points 3 years ago

Thing with that though, is there was a series of events over several months that kept pushing people to mastodon. I can’t see Reddit progressively fucking up harder the way Musk did.

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niisyth 4 points 3 years ago

Wonder if the last statement will age like wine or milk. I guess, time will tell.

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frozengriever 1 point 3 years ago

The Digg to Reddit migration was also a trickle at first. Reddit hasn't had their "Digg 4.0" moment yet.

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Bonehead 3 points 3 years ago

No, that comes up on July 1st. But they did have their Fark "You'll get over it" moment. That will accelerate the migration.

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SmugBedBug 12 points 3 years ago

They likely didn't go very deep in their research. Like others mentioned they didn't go into the details of the extremely high prices of the API access price.

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LlamaSutra 3 points 3 years ago

We should be the change

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Borgzilla 3 points 3 years ago

Noticed this too. They didn't mention Lemmy :(

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Zamboniman 36 points 3 years ago

Not a bad article. A bit light on details and the effects and consequences of Reddit's changes. However, many articles I've seen from other mainstream news organizations were slanted towards the corporate bias and made it sound like the concerns were no big deal.

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socialjusticewizard 20 points 3 years ago

I agree on both counts. I thought the CBC article was one of the best, it covers both sides and leans more towards how this might matter for people who don't even use Reddit.

Particular bonus points for the commentary by Cory Doctorow.

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chonglibloodsport 9 points 3 years ago

CBC often does this with Business reporting. In their story about the InstantPot bankruptcy they neglected to mention that the reason the company was $500 million in debt is because they were acquired by a private equity firm who then took out a $500 million loan in the company's name and used it to pay themselves a huge dividend, earning about $150 million in instant profit.

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Bagou01 35 points 3 years ago

How come Reddit's hosting costs are so high? It's a content aggregator so mostly directs to other sites. While for original content, it used to rely on Imgur for hosting images, does it not anymore? And text content shouldn't use that much resources or maybe I'm wrong?

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TheDestroyerOfHats 30 points 3 years ago

It really realllly shouldn't be they host comment sections for links to other more technically impressive websites.

Like we are talking about a cost they willing absorbed for like 10 years running without noteworthy complaint. Yet now as of like this month the cost is suddenly so onerous that everyone has to start paying an extortionate rate at the end of this month.

Good faith business arrangements are not typically changed with one months notice. And they is no plan for accessibility or mod tools or the backlash. They didn't even have time to couch the CEO on how to handle the questions in the AMA.

Idk I don't really buy it.

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CanadianNomad 1 point 3 years ago

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Rentlar 25 points 3 years ago

They wanted to be the next Tiktok/Youtube Shorts/Instagram Reels and added expensive video hosting. Yay for ad impressions and mainstream adoption of mindless scrollers, but a good chance the costs drove up well beyond the influx of ad revenue/premium.

That and Reddit admins have to scrounge every penny to look pretty for their IPO.

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CanadianCorhen 23 points 3 years ago

and avatars, NFT support, chat groups, and.. and.. and..

Endless growth, without a use case.

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Delete 17 points 3 years ago

What? You don't want stupid features that aren't really necessary and that most users wouldn't care if they were removed?

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someguy3 10 points 3 years ago

[gif reaction]

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wvenable 23 points 3 years ago

I don't believe their hosting costs are that high. But they did go from about 700 employees to somewhere around 2000 employees. I suspect a lot of their overhead is headcount.

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sigh 21 points 3 years ago

instead of giving the site a working search feature after 15 years, they doubled down on year end wrap ups, vertical videos, chat, and other nonsense

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1bluepixel 2 points 3 years ago

Which makes spez' claim that their top priority now is delivering new moderation tools so damn hilarious.

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coffeetest 11 points 3 years ago

This doesn't get mentioned enough. They drastically increased their workforce during covid. That is a massive new expense and what exactly do they have to show for it? Has Reddit improved in that time? I don't see that it has. Now suddenly this bizarre API move. None of it adds up to good leadership to me.

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SterlingVapor 1 point 3 years ago

They also could have taken loans to reinvest in growth. From buying alien blue, to their api, to backend changes to add new ad offerings and whatever else they sell to companies... They're all major efforts, and probably include marketing campaigns

If they took loans to grow... Well if you grow explosively it's a huge win, but if you don't you're weighted down moving forward. And investors are going to love it, since they don't care about breaking even, they care about that one investment that's going to go 100x or more

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saigot 16 points 3 years ago

it used to rely on Imgur for hosting images, does it not anymore?

People still use imgur, but reddit hosts a fair amount of content directly now. It's video player is notoriously bad. Imgur has slowly turned into a socia media in it's own right and is slowly starting to move off reddit (deleting images uploaded by non-account holders for instance).

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someguy3 7 points 3 years ago

I was thinking Imgur could have pivoted and become like Reddit.

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JshKlsn 4 points 3 years ago

[deleted]

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someguy3 3 points 3 years ago

Doesn't mean they can't pivot.

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kent_eh 6 points 3 years ago

How come Reddit’s hosting costs are so high?

Presumably the volume of traffic their servers need to handle?

One database call is pretty lightweight, but millions a second add up to some serious processing. Which, presumably, needs a lot of servers.

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zephyreks 17 points 3 years ago

Stackoverflow and Hackernews have very low hosting costs. Reddit is serving text, which is incredibly cheap.

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kent_eh 3 points 3 years ago

Stackoverflow and Hackernews have very low hosting costs.

Sure, but are they handling the volume of traffic that Reddit does (or did until yesterday)?

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psilves1 7 points 3 years ago

Stackoverflow, probably not. Stack Exchange, possibly

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kebabs 4 points 3 years ago

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can 3 points 3 years ago

Possibly because imgur was building its own social network around the media people were uploading for posting reddit? You'd see a pic on reddit but if you clicked beyond the xownde doer view you'd see comments from imgur itself.

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ipkpjersi 5 points 3 years ago

They still have to host users, feeds, and comments which can add up very quickly. Also, they do host some images as well like when people upload to them.

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gmmxle 8 points 3 years ago

Worth noting that for the 11 years, Reddit didn't host any images.

It's hard to say why Reddit thought it was necessary to host their own images.

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wafers 1 point 3 years ago

A lot of older image content has rotted because it's no longer hosted by the third party.

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lka1988 1 point 3 years ago

coughPhotobucketcough

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ipkpjersi 26 points 3 years ago

One of my older family members even mentioned that they heard about a Reddit blackout, so it definitely is being talked about.

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juusukun 7 points 3 years ago

My local sub did a "brown out" and they even messed that up lol

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poyakski 5 points 3 years ago

Are you Filipino?

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Otakeb 2 points 3 years ago

Hey that's racist! /s

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HappenFrank 2 points 3 years ago

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ShadowAether 22 points 3 years ago

Listed as the 3rd most popular article rn too

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GrindingGears 21 points 3 years ago

Arrrrrr Canada! God bless the CBC, and Hockey Night in Canada (the real version, not that jack off Rogers version)

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SmugBedBug 3 points 3 years ago

amen!

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juusukun 20 points 3 years ago

And yet I read something about them taking over one of the popular subs (adviceanimals or something) and removing all the mods and making it public again...

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democracy1984 24 points 3 years ago

What happened was the top mod, who had been inactive for a while, came online and overrode the other mod's decision to stay open. This caused a moderator dispute, which caused the admins to step in, and they decided to remove the top mod and reopen the sub.

https://lemmy.intai.tech/comment/31833

(And if Reddit was maliciously forcing subs open, why would they choose r/AdviceAnimals?)

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juusukun 15 points 3 years ago

If the CEO got caught editing comments and posts, how do I know he didn't just pretend to be a defunct mod lol

Probably because it's one of their front page subs? My guess at least. Maybe the CEOs favorite 🤣

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SturgiesYrFase 4 points 3 years ago

r/adviceanimals doesn't have pictures of underage girls, so u/spez obviously has no interest in it.

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Midnight_Ice 19 points 3 years ago

The mods knew this was a risk going in. If anything, it just shows that reddit doesn't care about its users. They're ostracizing a large portion of their mods. If there is no one to moderate their site, they're going to realize why they needed their users very quickly.

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pleasemakesense 2 points 3 years ago

Think it would have been a more effective protest if mods got together (think it was 24k from all the blackout subs?) and said they would remove themselves as moderators if reddit didn't budge. Reddit would in no way function if that amount of mods stopped moderating

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Otakeb 3 points 3 years ago

Yeah there would be gore or CP everywhere very quickly ESPECIALLY if the users valued the increase in chaos. People would probably be actively posting full length Disney movies and "questionable" porn to stir shit up.

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spleenfiesta 16 points 3 years ago

I'm glad, hopefully it's more pressure on reddit to change their tune, we will see though

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Rumblestiltskin 19 points 3 years ago

I hope they keep making bad decisions and more people move to decentralised platforms.

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DarkDarkHouse 19 points 3 years ago

If there’s one thing Reddit’s known for, it’s checks notes listening to community views and responding with policy improvements

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adespoton 5 points 3 years ago

You had me right up to “improvements”….

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spleenfiesta 8 points 3 years ago

They are definitely " improving " the default reddit app with their planned advert updates

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AyyLMAO 16 points 3 years ago

Different perspectives, I estimate reddit have realised that they can do literally whatever they want - And most users don't care. Compare the engagement in the community regarding this matter by number of reddit users.

And for those who do care INTENSELY, most of those users will be back in two to three days!

At this point it seems akin to the sort of psychological dependence I've seen in abusive

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Afrazzle 12 points 3 years ago

After using reddit daily for 10 years I will only consider going back if RiF will continue to work. I moved on from wow after years there, moved on from Facebook, moved on from Twitter, and moved on from Instagram. I don't see why reddit would be any different.

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Poco 9 points 3 years ago

We shall see once the apps stop working. I keep instinctively running RIF of my phone and there is content, even if some subreddits are down. Once RIF goes dark I won't have that instant click and who knows when I'll be back. If I have to browse to a site, then it doesn't have to be Reddit.

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heyheyitsbrent 3 points 3 years ago

I took the app off my homescreen, just to try to wean myself off of it, instead of having to go cold turkey at the end of the month. Lemmy is my crutch now, but I kinda hope I don't get as addicted anyway.

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AyyLMAO 3 points 3 years ago

Abusive relationships. Sorry for cut post, this Jerboa android it just jumps around is literally the worst app for editing text I've ever used.

In fairness the app is fine, it's just a bug with the text input that's absolutely maddening. The Webapp directly from the instances are great.

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Grimpen 4 points 3 years ago

If only there were some 3rd party app developers looking for a new project…

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can 13 points 3 years ago

not the first reddit blackout they've covered

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1993_toyota_camry 10 points 3 years ago

The blackout also was also the cause behind a general Reddit outage this morning, during which all content on the site was inaccessible — a Reddit spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that "a significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues."

Any guesses on why switching things private might cause predictable issues? Wouldn't that be easier than loading the content? Plus it would discourage further browsing.

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darkfoe 17 points 3 years ago

I'm guessing a lot of them all at once requires all the various CDN caches to be refreshed, so higher load on the database(s)

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GreyEyedGhost 6 points 3 years ago

I saw someone speculate elsewhere that it could be that some high-profile subreddits were hard-coded for the front page, and them going private could have crashed the system. That would be a bad implementation, but is a reasonable explanation for why everything stopped working.

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darkfoe 8 points 3 years ago

That too! All boils down to the unexpected. Reddit back in the day was always crashing too, only really remember it being stable the past few years

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n_emoo 1 point 3 years ago

Im surprised that the big ticket subreddits, of which there are only a handful, are yet publicly moderated. Tbh I do forsee them changing ownership of these 20 odd subreddits and getting to a point where your average joe cant tell a blackout is occuring. Whether they can maintain the standards is up for debate however.

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