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!

  • jboyens@beehaw.org
    40·
    2 years ago

    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.

      • mizmoose@beehaw.org
        14·
        2 years ago

        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).

        • setsneedtofeed@beehaw.org
          11·
          2 years ago

          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.

          • mizmoose@beehaw.org
            4·
            2 years ago

            Clearly you’re not someone who would have to go back and clear out 259238 modmail messages and make sure that none of them are legit “I have a problem” notes.

            None of the subreddits I mod are that huge but just the thought of more than 100 at once makes me wanna cry.

            • Gork@beehaw.org
              2·
              2 years ago

              At this point, they should just leave the 259,238 modmail messages for the admins to deal with. Let them sort through all that since this is all their doing.

            • setsneedtofeed@beehaw.org
              1·
              2 years ago

              Oh clearly I’m not. I just don’t understand the thinking of people demanding access. It’s like the kind of person who pounds on the door of a closed restaurant because they can see the employees inside.

              • surrendertogravity@beehaw.org
                2·
                2 years ago

                Oh man, my partner made a somewhat popular weapon calculator spreadsheet for Elden Ring, and the number of random Google Sheets edit requests they received was… quite a lot. (the instructions were right there for people to make a copy of the sheet to edit themselves! that’s how all of these sheets calculators work!) 🤦

        • chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org
          3·
          2 years ago

          Ah, but you see they “improved” modmail recently. It would certainly never go “kaflooey” anymore. It now fails all like “kerpow!” instead… much cooler, you see.

          • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
            1·
            2 years ago

            Well, of course, that’s just good engineering.

            You see, kerpow!s scale much better than kaflooeys due to cache invalidation problems in the ooey inductors, that’s like first semester knowledge.

        • darius@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 years ago

          I’m just speculating of course, too, but could be some kind of sharding e.g. in the DB level. I can imagine the little subreddits draw little traffic hence fewer shards are allocated to them (like how S3 works).

      • Neotecha (She/her)@beehaw.org
        2·
        2 years ago

        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

      • naeap@sopuli.xyz
        2·
        2 years ago

        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…

    • Ghostalmedia@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.