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!
I was having a little look through the Wikipedia article for Digg, to remind myself how their downfall went about. Found this absolute banger of a quote 😂
Well that kinda aged poorly.
To his credit, Ohanian hasn’t been involved with reddit for a while. He and u/spez sold the company years ago, then spez came back.
Fuck u/spez.
Fuck u/spez
Fuck u/spez.
Simultaneously looking like a 12 year old and crib death warmed over and we’re supposed to be impressed by this chud lol fuck him.
Everything does unfortunatelly… remember Google’s “do no harm” quote?
“Don’t be evil” was their actual quote. The fact that they removed it says a lot about their new direction.
Yeah, probably, forgot the exact quote 🤷.
Digg executives had to get a job /somewhere/
Anyone else notice how friendly, calm, and civil the posts and discussions have been away from Reddit? This place reminds me a lot of the early days.
It was really sad to go to my Reddit profile and see how long I’ve been using it.
To think that for over 13 years, I’ve been using Reddit daily and for MULTIPLE hours a day. It has probably caused untold amounts of impact on my growth as a person. Its like breaking up with a lifelong partner, what a strange feeling.
dude same. 13 years. Reddit has been a huge part of my life for a long time. I even lurked for a year or so before making an account. It feels like a break up in a weird way, but lets remember we’re breaking up because they’ve become a controlling abusive spouse and we deserve better :)
Now we’ve entered a polyamorous relationship (multiple Lemmy instances)
Honestly it’s all pretty confusing to me I’m getting better and better but I think its gonna take a couple weeks.
Honestly? I fucking love it.
Its SO fast (I have my own instance), and instead of subscribing to subreddits and one server, now I subscribe to communities and multiple instances.
The people are responsive.
Only problem is missing niche communities, and discoverability, but that will improve with time hopefully with something like multi-reddits.
See like I dont even know what you just said lol. I don’t know what an instance is or what a server means in this context, and i know what a community is kinda but no idea why they are called something.something//Lemmy.something.biz.kbin haha. and I dont know what multiple instances is.
I’ve got a lot to learn. But hey I managed to reply to this so im getting somewhere.
Okay, here’s how I explained it to my kid.
You’ve got the united states, that’s lemmy.
You’ve got states, which are instances. Servers are the roads inthem ,and the things that keep the roads working.
Communities are cities.
Kbin is Canada. Mastadon is France, where they do things weird, but they’re working on the same basic principles.
The fediverse is the UN.
It ain’t exactly right, but it ain’t exactly wrong :)
This has helped me more than anything else I think lol love it.
haha that gave me a good laugh :)
Think of lemmy as like an email (except everyone can see it). You have an email address “steakfries” and the domain you registered your email on “@lemmy.one” so if I want to email you I have to enter in @steakfries@lemmy.one
I can “email” you from any domain, be it Gmail, yahoo, my own server, etc and you can likewise respond.
Yeah that’s the problem I think, is that the majority of people aren’t familiar with how web technologies work and how all the communication happens.
Basic users can just signup on lemmy.ml, or beehaw.org forever and just treat it like their new Reddit home.
I’m probably only really a week into all this stuff and I feel like I have a solid layman’s grasp of it all. You’ll get there too :)
thanks! its getting easier by the hour. This https://browse.feddit.de/ is a great place to search for communities if you haven’t seen it yet.
I also have my own instance. But it feels so lonely being the only one on a sever haha. That being said, do you know if upvotes and downvotes are also federated? In fact, I’m using jerboa on beehaw and I don’t think I see any upvote / downvote metrics
beehaw disabled downvotes, but other instances haven’t. the sidebar said disabled downvotes encourages more active discussion, and prevents unpopular opinions from being silenced by a flood of downvotes. they want people to engage by saying “i disagree with you, here’s why” instead of passively downvoting and moving on.
you should be able to see you the upvotes on your comments though.
Fairly sure upvotes/downvotes on my comments have been federated into my instance. I can’t see it on Lemmy’s webUI but it appears via the mlem app.
and like why is your name so long. it says @nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev that just seems ridiculous. why not just nii236
Says you:
I’m chatting to you from https://lemmy.jtmn.dev, and you’re chatting to me from https://lemmy.one, on a community on https://beehaw.org.
okay I’ve learned a bit because I’m pretty sure I understand that now. Like I said it’s gonna take a few weeks but I’ll get there. I’m pretty determined to leave reddit and have been for a long time just needed a push. I’m already making my way around my new “frontpage” alright. I do like how fast everything is and how comments and upvotes seem to be live.
I keep having to force myself to use Lemmy instead. I literally just caught myself on Reddit. Ugh
I solved that problem by deleting the app I used for Reddit. I mean, it’s going to stop working in about two weeks anyway, so might as well delete it now.
yeah i deleted Sync :( and just replaced the app with the Jerboa app for Lemmy. Now i open my phone and automatically click Lemmy and its working pretty well for me.
I made my reddit app not have access to data over wifi or the cell network, so when I open it, it opens and forever is “loading” until I realize my mistake.
I’ve had the best day. Most I’ve accomplished in a while IRL. And of corse exploring around this place.
only 12 years for me, but almost a decade of premium ends now
13 year club here too. It sure seems like a lot of us long timers have been the first to move. I guess there’s a certain sense of ‘I’ve seen where this goes’ from experience with other sites in the past.
Also part of the 10+ year club (long time lurker). You’re right about that “familiar sense”, but for myself it comes with a forgotten sense of optimism.
Reddit’s been on the decline for years before the Vitoria incident or The Great Purge… but as long as I had my niche communities, baconreader, and old.reddit.com - I could “get by”… as Reddit became more and more aggressive in selling “me as the product”.
The federated and open source nature of Lemmy will solve the issue of “corporate presence”, but it will require us to “roll up our sleeves” - which I find refreshing.
No bots or astroturfing here yet though (or ChatGPT posts), so who knows, maybe Lemmy will spiral faster than expected
It’s really strange how civil and relaxed the discussions have been. Makes me wonder how much of Reddit is either children or bots stirring the pot constantly
I suspect the answer is that there’s probably a depressing number of authentic human adults who just are like that, and it creates a feedback loop/spiral where people are pushed into being more aggressive/vitriolic as a defense mechanism.
The real problem, I think, is the ease with which those individuals can hop between communities/be directed toward communities particularly sensitive to their brand of bile on social media sites. I know there’s a lot of talk out there about making on-boarding to Fediverse stuff easier, but realistically, being able to layer several barriers along the way (e.g. finding an instance to join, finding an instance to harass without getting either yourself banned or your entire instance defederated) will go a long way toward limiting the influx of bad actors.
Security through obscurity!
Though be careful, too obscure and you’ll get the most horrible people hanging around. I discovered this while Bitmessage community…
I wouldn’t necessarily call it “security through obscurity” so much as just the nature of a web that isn’t all in a few big baskets.
Besides, it’s a knife that cuts both ways: the barriers to fluid movement means the worst people are kinda just stuck festering in a handful of places and everyone eventually learns where they are. Like, the big basket-style web has been a boon for fascists and their ilk in large part because there’s lower barriers to entry and its possible to build a funnel from normal/mainstream boards to the more radicalized ones through intermediary communities.
But, when everyone knows, for instance, that something like Voat or Stormfront is where all the vitriolic racists are, there’s kinda an upper limit to how easily they can lure people in since eventually they’ve gotta drag you there or else you’ll probably slip away from the indoctrination, and that often means tipping their hands just a bit too soon to get past the “wait a moment, these guys are terrible people” filters.
Same here. been on reddit for around 12 years, of nearly constant daily use. it’s a weird feeling.
There are dozens of us!
I’m getting my 13yr badge in November. Idk. I don’t think I’m deleting my account. I couldn’t even muster up the willpower to delete my Twitter account that I’ve had since 2009, that I’ve barely used for the last several years.
So to delete my reddit account, that I use everyday – except at least today and tomorrow; probably first time in several years, maybe even a decade – feels wrong.
My goal, however, is to reduce my activity on reddit over time. Give up my remaining mod positions. Start unsubscribing from subreddits little by little. Maybe just use it for researching work related thing. So far, Beehaw/Lemmy and Tildes and Mastodon have been holding my attention pretty well. We’ll see.
I can relate. I’m a sentimental digital hoarder, I guess. But I’ve beaten my impulses to get on reddit today at least!
This is how I feel, too. I’m leaving my posts and comments up; ironically, I used to habitually purge my profile every year or so because I was worried about IRL people finding me through my activity, but now, I’d prefer to just leave it. Even if I stop being active on Reddit, it’s currently one of the best ways to find answers to niche problems; I’d like to keep my stuff accessible for anyone looking for extremely specific answers. I’ve been fairly private on Reddit, though, so it feels less sentimental and more practical. (Twitter, on the other hand… I never use it, but everything on it is way too sentimental to nuke.)
Yeah, I’ve learned so much from people on that place.
How is it possible, that with 90% of subbreddits set to private, the number of posts and comments created on reddit do not decrease according to https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/? (EDIT: I might have based this percent on misinterpreted information, see EDIT at end of comment. But I leave the following paragraphs unchanged for history and food for thought.)
Activity only decreased by 20-30% if I’m being generous looking at the graph. How is this possible, is the graph accurate? How can 10% of subreddits be so active, like nothing happened? That would meanthe remaining 70-80% of activity is happening in 10% of the subreddits which are still open! Which is craaazy.
I have a theory - maybe we are underestimated the amount of bots on the site and they operating like nothing happened in the open subreddits? If this would be the case (and I’m gonna enter speculation and conspiracy territory here), but what if certain parties have quotas to fulfill for advertisers or propaganda machines, so they have to post (using bots or other means)?
I struggle to find the cause of this anomaly, of course you wouldn’t see 1:1 decrease in subbreddits going dark and activity, because people are subscibed to plethora of subbreddits. But I thought that it’ll be at least 50-60% decrease in post activity. Worst case scenario is that these are real users creating real posts and comments, because that would make this protest moot - It would just show reddit management that the community doesn’t matter, general public who come to the site will still interact with the remaining slop, advertisers rejoice.
EDIT: I based the 90% number on this site’s statistic: https://reddark.untone.uk/. My understanding was that these subreddits makes up for most of all subs on reddit. Turns out, as @brightside@compuverse.uk mentioned in this comment, these are only subreddits that participate in the blackout. Based on the README.md of this reddark fork, it pulls the list of participating subreddits from the threads on r/ModCoord.
However I still feel the impact of the blackout a little lackluster. If this is the case, this statistic could be explained by another phenomenon: that the distribution of reddit activity by subreddits have an incredibly long tail. Meaning, that a significant portion of comments and posts are created in a very large quantity of small subs, which does not participate in the protest.
But as @immolator@lemmy.world mentioned in this comment, it’s not only the long tail effect, but there are huge subreddits which does not participate as well, including the largest one /r/AskReddit. Really makes you think about how the blackout is going against the odds.
I’ve been so happy with the tone and discussions here. I am hopeful that as we continue to grow we will see lots of people from Reddit, but that we will all check the reddit culture at the door. It feels really nice here.
Well, the Denver Nuggets finally won their first ever NBA championship while the NBA subreddit was closed. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the sub reopens since - from what I understand - the decision to close that sub was not very popular with the users.
Was proud of the /r/nba mods for closing. Unlike the /r/games mods who wouldn’t even close it when the community wanted them to.
Honestly the subreddits for the 4 major sports as well as MMA are like the only reason I use reddit. If we can just find a solid alternative for those I’d be happy. The discord server, at least for r/NBA is pretty toxic.
Did you find your communities in Lemmy yet?
Yeah but some of the specific ones (like for 49ers) took me to a browser version of the website and I got stuck trying to login/create an account. Didn’t see the option to subscribe. Feels like a mess!
Copy paste the community@instance thing into the search bar on your home instance, then click on the result. You can subscribe there
Too bad r/DenverNuggets stayed public and created an r/nba refugee game thread
There is something very cathartic about deleting 11 years worth of posts and comments…
Going to download my data tomorrow and delete my own 11 years worth.
Sad day, but also very cathartic.
What are you using to download it?
If you use Power Delete Suite there is the option to download your comments before editing (or just download). However it’s not great if you’ve got years of comments. If you click the download button it caps out at about 65k. But if you inspect the button the full export is available in the href so you can copy that into notepad. However the formatting is not great (CSV unfriendly characters are escaped), so it’s a bit of a clean up.
There is the alternative of requesting all your data from Reddit itself. A preview I saw from someone else shows a more extensive dataset than you get from PDS. I’m still waiting on my data request (it’s only been a day and it can take up 30 days).
Thanks, Power Delete Suite was exactly the type of thing I’ve been trying to find for the past few days.
I want my contributions out of Reddit’s hands, but still leave a protest up. PDS allows me to edit all comments and self posts to “[this user data has been purged]”.
Is there a difference between the various types of data requests? There are 3 options based on different laws, but do they give different information?
Honestly I was genuinely so sick of reddit that I didn’t even bother deleting.
The thing that is killing reddit for me is its endless suggestion of communities that I may want to read. I use reddit to get away from having stuff shoved into my face. I want to explore and find things that are relevant to me or things that are unique and challenging, not have random nonsense shown to me as a way of increasing some silly engagement metric.
that right there is the biggest reason I never swapped to the new reddit redesign. Looks and aesthetics are one thing, but constantly having fake notifications about “you may like this post” or “you may like this community” shoved into my feed with the same notification icon as an actual reply to a post kept getting on my nerves.
Yes that’s it. It feels sort of manipulative.
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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.
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
I’d love to know what it is about subreddits going private that caused issues.
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.
“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.
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.
Probably a drop in usage flagged some internal test
They’re lying. Fish swim, birds fly, sun shines, Reddit lies.
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…
thank you, this comment made my day
Lol, this made me chuckle out loud. Good job Sausage man!
Rebelling moderators, we have a special jail for rebelling moderators.
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.
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.
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. 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.
Childish smirk of the day…
https://reddark.untone.uk/ shows that r/SexInFrontOfOthers is public.
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I just joined kbin and have no idea what i’m doing lol. ended up making this account on fedia and another on kbin.social since they can’t seem to see the same posts. not sure what to do long term…
Reddit kinda feels like a sinking ship right now. I wonder how many subreddits will go public again?
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.
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…
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).
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.
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…
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 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.
If 200,000 people would rather figure out how to make all their individual forum softwares work together in synchrony than put up with your bloody app, Reddit, maybe you have a pretty shitty app?
Dunno. I never installed it coz I never install any apps if I can help it, and I know how to use a web browser. But if a quarter of a million people would rather subject themselves to the complexities of distributed information networks and the politics of inter-instance blocking than use your bloody app, Reddit, maybe you have a pretty shitty app?
It’s like the kids today don’t know what a web address is with their obsession with apps. They seem to prefer to download an executable than read a text document. If even them, a million zoomer kids who are normally obsessed with apps, if even they would rather entertain the idea of a communications commons not owned and controlled by oligarchs than use your app, then maybe you should have just used yer IPO money to buy Apollo?
Dunno. I’ve never installed either. Sounds sketchy. I distrust apps.
? why are you pinging me
Hey man, seem like a cool dude. Who wouldn’t want to ping you? Keep being awesome my dude
Okay you specifically have carte blanche to ping me to tell me how awesome I am. But please try to keep it to less than maybe 30 pings a month
@Gaywallet Replying in your mega-thread. KBin here is tagging you when I do that and I didn’t delete it.
Haven’t used Lemmy much, perhaps that behaviour is different?
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.
This made my day, as a person in your situation i can relate this…
I actually like the Reddit app (which apparently makes me the only one), but I’m not for Reddit fucking everyone over.
I think you may actually be the only one. whoa. I’ve never downloaded it so I wouldn’t know. But doesn’t it have ads? Because I hate ads so much and would never use an app that pushed them. Fuck ads honestly, I actually put in a good amount effort to make sure I see exactly 0 minutes of ads per day.
Yeah, my wife uses the official app and she complains about the ads. Constantly, certain subreddit posts show up in her feed as an ad.
I tried the official app and didn’t like it. It was too bloaty, comment chains felt annoying, navigation was annoying, lack of features was annoying.
I initially used Reddit Is Fun, then moved to Sync for some reason. Then moved to Boost after the Sync dev went MIA last year.
Each one of those was leagues above the official app.
If you’re on Android and tech-handy you can remove the ads from the official app with Revanced Patcher.
Thats funny my wife had the official app for a while and deleted it when I showed her Sync, I didn’t even realize she wasn’t using Sync to browse reddit i just assumed she did and never asked. I used Sync for years and years. Alien Blue I think before that. I assumed reddits app probably looked something like they’re new browser site and I hated that thing. I only ever used old.reddit with RES. Now I’ll never go back there again if I don’t have a good reason too.
I used it for a good long while but what inevitably pushed me away were the absurd loading times and the ads. Things just took forever to load. Like, multiple minutes to watch a video, even more to load a subreddit. And there were ads every 5 posts.
@TheButtonJustSpins It’s like letting oligarchs monopolize the means of communication is a bad idea or something!? Who knew.
Have you even tried the alternatives? This might just be a “not knowing any better” situation
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.
@CeruleanRuin their website says right there on the nag popup. This website is deliberately user hostile, to drive you all onto the app where you can be efficiently transported towards the rotating knives.
I mostly just didn’t look at Reddit much to avoid the trap.
Reddit, maybe you have a pretty shitty app?
Oh, they know. They just don’t care.
The rust subreddit is apparently considering moving to Lemmy:
