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.
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.
Inefficiency in programming?! How where did I hear that before…
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?
Christian also pointed out that Reddit’s own app is equally inefficient, using the same number of API calls as Apollo when browsing the same subreddits.
Actually if I remember correctly the official app was more inefficient
Also the official app uses way more battery
And it doesn’t work properly, and doesn’t have many features the official one has.
I mean it does not even have a modqueue
“More than 7,000 subreddits have gone private or read-only in response to the API pricing terms”
Holy crap!
Can that be right? 93% of subreddits have gone dark?
That’s not 93% of all subreddits; just 93% of those that committed to going dark.
I personally closed 4 subreddits yesterday. Happy to play my part.🤣🤣
I closed my 500k member subreddit yesterday!
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).
Know that it worked! I have seen it on a few subreddits that closed (including yours), which got me to sign up. It is nice here!
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
There are 4 options:
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Public. This is how most subs operate. Everyone can post and comment.
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Restricted. This disallows posts. You can set it to “restrict posts only”, “restrict comments only”, or “restrict both”. Mods and “approved users” can still post as normal. /r/polandball used this to make sure that only good content from known people got submitted.
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Private. This turns off the subreddit entirely - the only people who can see it are mods and the aforementioned approved users, while everyone else just sees the subreddit description. An example of this is /r/centuryclub, which only approves uses with over 100k karma.
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Gold-only. You need to set this at subreddit creation (it can’t be changed later). This restricts the sub to only be visible to people who have Reddit Gold.
Most subs who are “going dark” are setting their stuff to “private” and then changing the subreddit description to say something about the blackout, because that’s all that users can see.
On Old Reddit, you can see the full message. On New Reddit, you see the first 20ish characters. On the official app, you don’t see a message about why a subreddit is private at all.
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No I don’t think you can delete a subreddit. Just setting it to private indefinitely
