Reddit was down for over two hours
reddit.statuspage.io
reddit.statuspage.io
We could implement it with blockchain.
As was Caller ID, Three Way Calling, Busy Number Redial, etc.
It's amazing how much incumbent telcos nickled and dimed little features like this. I think it was a couple bucks a month to have that feature.
I think at one point it was a value-added service, and you had to pay extra on your phone bill to enable it, but once it was enabled you could turn it on or off at will.
When I was a teenager (in the 1990s), our house had three phone lines. One was for voice calls, and it had call waiting turned on permanently. Another was for modems (first BBSes, then dial-up Internet), and had call waiting turned off permanently. A third was paid for by my Dad's employer, he used it for work calls, work faxes, and call up his work's modem bank to send/receive email, I don't know what he did with call waiting settings.
My Dad ordered three phone lines, but only had two pairs running in to the house. So they ran another cable, which I think had 12 pairs in it, but only three were ever connected. My Dad was smiling about how future-proof they made it. Nowadays, only one of those pairs is still active, and I expect within the next 1-2 years that pair will be turned off too. Analog POTS phone system being phased out in favour of VoIP (the Internet comes into the house over coax, not copper pair.)
Edit: Check out the dev instance of Lemmy! https://dev.lemmy.ml/
These platforms do not fracture the Fediverse FYI, you can follow cross-platform & cross-site like normal.
I'm not sure if I should thank you or curse you for making me want to spend a ton of time on yet another side project ;)
There's others too. People are free to fork it and make a new platform. Most of the hard work is already done unless you want to change absolutely everything about it.
That being said, I've always thought that the right way to implement a distributed social network would be not with blockchain, but with IPFS, or something similar to IPFS. Pinning someone else's IPFS hash would be the equivalent to an upvote for that item.
If only everyone who talks about usenet, IRC, and the rest could actually be bothered to update the experience to what modern users demand.
Same reason why Gmail is a bloated mess, because that's what the metrics show is wanted by users.
Doesn't that just mean that users are spending more time on the site because it's so much more of a pain to get what they actually want out of it? Like, you could increase "user engagement" of a shopping mall by turning it into a labyrinth and rearranging the shops every day.
Also, Protip: in case anyone still doesn’t know, go to old.reddit.com for the previous, better interface. Who knows how long it will be kept alive though.
I'm using an extension to automatically redirect to the old one. When the old site is gone, I will probably leave Reddit, the redesign is too unusable for me.
I like HN but I miss the diversity of conversations. /r/synthesizers /r/starwarssleaks etc.
You don't need megabytes upon megabytes of nonsense just to avoid some full page loads. Or take al ook at something like HN where it's light enough that a full page load isn't a problem.
I don’t think most people know how to handle anything but an infinite scrolling page.
I'm sure they lose some users but they've gained far more than they've lost so far.
the A/B test isn't telling you that users like something, only that its taking them longer and they didn't bounce.
I've been on the new design, trying to give it a chance, for over a year trying to give it a chance, and I still have to often switch to old.reddit.com to do some things.
1. The new interface still doesn't have the "other discussions" link to show you discussions of the same link in other subreddits. I think they said something like a year ago that they realized this was important and it was coming soon.
2. The new interface messes up scrolling on Edge on my Surface Pro 4 when viewing a discussion. Actually, for this one you don't have to switch to old.reddit to work around. All you have to do is hit refresh. When you refresh while on a discussion, that switches from the view that shows the discussion in an overlay on top of the thread list, to a more traditional page that just has the discussion. That page doesn't fuck with scrolling. Depending on how much I plan on reading and how long the discussions are, I may or may not get annoyed enough with this to just give up and switch to old.reddit.
(BTW, that discussion as overlay view also fucks up in-page search, because the thread list is still on the page, just hidden from your view--but not the browser's search functions--behind the discussion view, and so the search hits those hidden items).
The only thing I can find in the new interface that is actually functionally better than the old interface is the fancy pants editor. Aside from selecting tools/commands not always always working if it has to put them on the "..." pop-up, and it sometimes losing the ability to scroll the text being edited via the mouse, the new editor is a win.
If they would just put the new editor as an option on old Reddit, I think a lot of people would be happy.
Anyways, ideally you would be able to connect to services with whichever client you want. You could use a pretty eye candy client, or then not. With the web, however, it's an impossible feat to implement a standards compliant browser.
> "Anyways, ideally you would be able to connect to services with whichever client you want."
Make it happen. This is my other point. People complain that all these fantastic legacy technologies aren't used but nobody puts in the work to modernize and use them. If it was that simple, where are all the companies doing it?
IRC is objectively terrible. If you ask a question, the only way to get the answer is if you stay logged in until someone answers you. That's like buying a phone that doesn't ring unless you're already holding it up to your ear, or an email client that deletes all your email unless you happen to be looking at your inbox at the moment a new message arrives.
What makes IRC good is that it's a text-only chat with a wide range of highly configurable, blazing fast clients. Not supporting images, quoting or reactions could be considered a feature, since these distract from the actual conversation at hand (consider newbies clogging the conversation with screenshots, or 100 people adding reaction emojis to a message).
Scrollback and voicemail can be useful, but a good chunk of the population does not want either, hence unread backscroll and unconfigured/full voicemail boxes being very common.
The largest Freenode channels I'm on like #node.js and #javascript have about 10 regulars max, myself included. It's pretty much dead for any purpose other than hanging out with a handful of curmudgeons feeding off a corpse out of habit.
Doesn't seem like "a good chunk" to me. IRC lacks the only feature I really care about in a chat network: new people to talk to, users.
I wonder how many HNers who praise IRC only like the idea of it but don't even use it these days, either.
And I haven't even heard HNers bring up usenet outside of downloading free shit so I know that's especially dead wrt this thread as a decentralized Reddit.
So it always makes me chuckle to see "yeah, well, some people like it like that!" which is apparently virtually nobody. Or it's like how my two friends and I loved the failed, abandoned supermall in my hometown because the three of us could longboard down its parking garage.
These two words next to each other really bother me. That something is "terrible" is not objective, whatever that means. All we have are our subjective valuations.
You might have a preference for one over another, or each might be appropriate for different situations. But to claim one is objectively terrible is ridiculous and only makes you look like you haven't taken the time to understand it at its most basic level, or you're too solipsistic to be able to recognize the existence of value in something outside of your own preference.
The UX in slack is not easily replicated in IRC (for example, how does/can global search work in IRC?)
Therefore, it is actually correct to say IRC is objectively worse in those measures. The only measure that IRC beats slack is the open protocol (which, if I'm being honest, not many users care,ala most existing chat services moved to private protocols and haven't lost all their users to IRC or xmpp).
Well it's a good thing Slack and Discord don't work exactly the same way but with a nicer UI and no need for a bouncer to emulate a persistent session.
IRC was all about conversation. You went there to have a conversation, like a party line voice bridge. You even waited around for someone to have a conversation with... oh I miss it...
Boomers demand attention constantly.
Oh and binaries didn't go away, that's a feature and you just don't have to sync alt.bin.* if you want to avoid. I think it's great though for snatching rare/out of print stuff.
(There wasn't anything back in the '90s in the design of email to stop spammers from spamming, either; but enough people cared enough about email that billions were spent to add that spam-proofing. Nobody cared enough about Usenet to invest a similar amount, so it's still as unprotected as it was when Monica Lewinsky was in the news.)
I see you haven't visited Reddit lately ;)
There have been some really good modern Usenet clients. The biggest issue I see is that current browsers don't have built-in support for Usenet any more, and that's not something I can influence in any way.
Look, I loved Usenet back in 1994, it was one of my first great Internet obsessions. But it effectively died in terms of relevance before the turn of the century. The majority simply preferred web forums.
Usenet was always a pain to use, posts would routinely get mangled or dropped entirely, and the multiple user-driven quoting conventions and wonky clients made any long-lived threaded discussion impossible.
The problem with all anti-censorship platforms is that they become hate platforms by default, because only people who get deplatformed have an incentive to move there, and it’s mostly hateful loudmouths who get deplatformed.
Personally, I prefer having these disgusting people out in the open. When they do something horrendous, the paper trail can be long and damning - making it much easier to convict them. These people are usually proud of their deviancy and advertise it without shame.
The notion that if we just ban all the sick people they will just go away and never do anything evil is ludicrous. The evil is already in their hearts, hiding it won't heal it.
My fellow trans and gay friends have lived in Seattle without issue for decades, but now Nazis are coming here from rural Washington to attempt to murder us. This is a huge change from the past, and SPD's hate crime statistics are up significantly due to this.
I have never once seen on The_Donald, even before their quarantine, any highly voted posts or comments advocating violence. The moderators regularly release transparency reports that show exactly all the things that they remove and their have been plenty of instances of people creating alts to post inflammatory things to get them in trouble. The vast majority of users condemn violence of any kind other than lawful self-defense.
I also see plenty of openly LGBT people on there, and they are just as welcome in the forum as anyone else.
It is twitter’s model, and it puts an incredible burden on the most targeted or vulnerable users.
Or to get back to reddit, the model works for people who stay focused on a very limited set of subs; I think that would be close to your idea of personally tailored censoring, but it goes too far in the other direction IMO, unexpected information becomes very hard to reach people.
It is twitter’s model, and it puts an incredible burden on the most targeted or vulnerable users.
Or to get back to reddit, the model works for people who stay focused on a very limited set of subs (default filters are horrible); I think that would be close to your idea of personally tailored censoring, but it goes too far in the other direction IMO, unexpected information becomes very hard to reach people.
There are no way to downvote people or provide a score that can be used (even in a very optional way) by people who want to filter out the noise.
> the paper trail can be long and damning - making it much easier to convict them
This usually comes out after they've carried out the mass shooting.
Popper's Paradox made reality. I still remember Voat blowing up because their lawyers started making them remove comments inciting violence.
The key is there shouldn't be a globally consistent front page. Sorting should be done on an individual basis. Upvotes boost signal signal to peers and downvotes squelch. By propagating content scores transitively through the network proportionally to trust scores, users can moderate their own feeds by voting and managing their friend list.
Users have a peer list, containing a list of server/users on it. Each peer has a user-managed 'trust weighting'. Each user has a list of "good content" (ideally hash identified for content addressability), with each item having a score based on that user's votes and votes from peers, weighted by that users trust in that peer.
Periodically, your server contacts all of your peers, and asks them for their good content list. The scores from peers are multiplied by your own trust weight for that peer, and you build a personal "good content" list that merges the lists from each of your peers together (and drops insufficient scores).
You are presented with a score-descending-sorted page of content. Whenever you upvote something, it increases your score weight for that content as well as the trust weight for each peer who sent you the recommendation, and vice versa for downvotes. Votes are transmitted to peers as a crypto signature of the content hash, but when retransmitted to peer-of-peer, they only see the intermediary's aggregated and trust weighted merged scores.
The specifics of the algorithms on how you calculate and adjust weights can be configurable by each individual user, the protocol only cares that peers are able to produce some kind of score list.
Dividing content into topics is a bit trickier, could just label content with tags. I think it may be preferable for each user to have multiple topic focused 'personalities' that are basically distinct user accounts with unique peer lists and votes. In that way, I could follow Dave-gardening without having to follow Dave-sports.
For this example I'm using 1 user per server for simplicity, though not required. All users could be on same server, which is probably best for MVP to avoid implementing p2p networking stuff until validated.
Bob scores content A as 0.8, B as 0.2
Dave scored content A as 0.4, B as 0.9
Alice downloads both lists.
Alice score content A as avg(0.8 * 0.5, 0.4 * 0.1) = 0.22
Alice scores content B as avg(0.2 * 0.5, 0.9 * 0.1) = 0.095
Content A gets sorted higher than B.
You dont need a consistent front page for everyone, but communities of like people should get similar front pages based on what is "best" and best shouldn't be defined as universally popular, but instead popular with some subset of experts.
Because users are 'liable' for content they rebroadcast (if you repeatedly propogate downvoted content, your trust score will fall), there is a strong incentive to "moderate" the content you promote. This allows not only the OP to gain karma/trust from a post, but also adjacent peers can earn trust by reliably upcoming content that is later upvoted downstream. Hopefully this would encourage "tastemaker" users who don't create new stuff, but carefully curate what they rebroadcast. Trusting the right users allows you to rebroadcast their trusted content automatically, if you chose to configure your trust algo that way.
There is a huge benefit to everybody in a community seeing the same page. Whether its hckrnews, drudge report, front page of wsj, if everybody sees the same page, there is a social water cooler effect of "hey did you see" "yeah."
I just think with the "infinitely customized to you" we are trapping people in a constant cycle of always consuming more of the same, while also fragmenting our sense of community and identity. We get stuck in the filter bubbles we choose. These two articles combined together make me feel trapped.
https://www.vox.com/2014/5/20/5730762/buzzfeeds-founder-used...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7...
https://notabug.io/ (beware of content: anonymous decentralized reddit!)
@go1dfish runs NAB and all the code is at https://github.com/notabugio/notabug .
It is built with my P2P graph protocol ( https://github.com/amark/gun ), + he has some custom implementations of it.
Mining would have no monetary incentivization, so the people left controlling the network are the ones who are incentivized to push a message on your new distributed reddit.
Like with all things that have a vacuum of power, it will be filled by someone - most likely not who you really want to fill it either.
Here is a bit about the technical architecture: https://link.medium.com/yjevZ7y15Z.
Used to be a heavy Usenet user back in the day.
Sending every peer a copy can be wasteful and slow. It only there'd be a cluster of servers to make these media available via http...
Been on Hacker News a few times too:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19161171
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18373504
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370208
It's the need to make money that makes things go awry, so Aether doesn't need to make money. No servers mean costs are fairly negligible, except my own time spent.
Free name suggestion: Distreddit
We had recovery by removing that zone from our Auto Scaling Groups, but I haven't been able to find many others affected online (other than Reddit).
Did anyone else experience something like this?
edit: Our errors started at 13:35 Pacific Time.
For example https://www.reddit.com/r/menwritingwomen/new/ shows a post from just now (verified the timestamp).
IMO, their javascript UX is awful... impossible to see all the comments in a thread! what sort of nonsense is that?
old.reddit.com ftw
If you can get the page to load: https://old.reddit.com/r/pan/comments/d5paue/a_midweek_treat...
https://web.archive.org/web/20190918200317/https://twitter.c...
Its still showing up on reddit.
https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/6l17g/though_bla...
Maybe social media should be turned off on Tuesdays and Thursdays, as suggested in Ready Player One.
It's interesting to see how it fails. Clearly some users can still post. I'm sure there are things that still work (maybe the phone apps .. got me), but also very clearly, there's a sharp dip in new posts.
Now the newer version is always trying to kick me into either Chrome or the App. I don't want the f'ing App. And the mobile experience is supppper slow. Its literally just a text webpage it should load near instantly, if they didnt have to redesign the whole thing in some new web framework.
Imagine if Facebook or Twitter had to go down regularly for “maintenance”. Heads would roll.
Just because lots of people use something doesn't make them willing to pay for it, and it doesn't make a platform inherently monetizable.
Reddit is just as much of a profit driven company as Facebook or Twitter, I’m not sure why you’d think otherwise.
Because, among other things, they don't show annoying ad formats and don't demand real names and phone numbers from their users.
I dont know if they started selling this data directly. Last I spoke to ad people there, they had plans to build out their own tracking and analytics infrastructure, to improve things like geo-targeted ads, as their capabilities were lacking signficiantly.
Not exactly a sustainable plan if you value using their service, and they’ve already got early investors pushing them to monetize.
If Reddit died tomorrow, we'd all shrug and find somewhere else to talk, just like the countless forums we used before Reddit that are no longer with us. Such is the danger for any social media: if all you provide is a commodity platform, you're only ever as valuable as the community you can build and whatever that community is willing to contribute, and ultimately you have very little control over those things.
Here's an old answer of mine comparing reddit's $7M to Instagram's $700M in 2014: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-reddits-advertising-revenues-o...
And the new ui is trash.
What makes you think that the issue Reddit faced today would be fixed by rolling deploys?
Without knowing anything about this particular issue, at a basic level I'd think any non-trivial site should have a system of rolling out changes to a small percentage of servers and have automated monitoring that fires alerts if it notices any disruptions in functionality. If nothing goes wrong then gradually roll out to 100%. If something does then stop the rollout and go back to the last stable version. Then engineers can look at what went wrong.
Autonomy to get things right when it's the right call is sort of a rarity and a real luxury in my experience. I've built a ton of things I knew could have been built better if the rest of the company saw the value in doing so.
When given the option to do your job as asked or quit because you don't have your way, I'd rather just do my job and wait for opportunities to improve things if they present themselves.
And yes, this is happening in 2019.
heck blizzard has authentication services outages too
Facebook is Alexa #5 in the US and has ~40,000 employees. Reddit is #6 and has ~500 employees. Twitter is #17 and has ~4,000 employees. (Numbers taken from quick Google searches)
They have some super talented engineers that work miracles with band aids and bubble gum.
Edit: Yes I understand not all employees work on everything. I was trying to give a sense of scale. Reddit is a tiny company with a massive website and no way to make money. If you have ideas - they are hiring.
Other big players like Facebook, Twitter, etc, are literally inventing pivotal parts of the modern web technical stack. What has come out of reddit?
Someone's never done a data migration while serving 1M+ qps!
I feel like I would try to strangle the old app (putting proxies in front and redirecting endpoints as they're rewritten) rather than swapping it out wholesale.
At that point I don't know if it really counts as a migration as much as just development.
Any thoughts on that approach? Is that what you have done, or was it a more holistic swap over?
They did. They even tossed out Common Lisp and bought in Python because they thought it would fix their problems. It didn't.
The problems they're dealing with 14 years later as one of the top sites on the internet aren't even slightly comparable.
Python is a good scripting language, But if you are developing backend applications for this scale you probably need some serious JVM language. Or even Golang works fine.
Not to mention the quality is often sub-par. For example, many hate their mobile app with a passion and search field could as well just not exist when I tried.
Imagine redesigning Reddit with simple HTML, CSS and only the most necessary sprinkles of JavaScript. In my opinion it's clearly a document-based website that doesn't need to pretend being a one-page-app.
Wikipedia is very static in comparison.
The statistics I can find for Reddit put it at 160 submissions per second[0]. And that's not counting comments or votes. And each vote changes the ordering of submissions and comments.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8aek7d/red...
Or 'hide', in every sub I'm active in I hide each new thread after I've decided I am not interested or after I've looked at it so I can quickly scan new stuff.
Then add automoderator removing things for manual approval, approval of threads etc. Gilding, messages, chat etc.
.. Didn't fact check the numbers though.
The revenue piece is an interesting one because i was an early adopter and remember the revenue struggle. Gold/silver doesn't cut it because it relies on generosity.
FB/Twitter are an ads business. Is that really not too lucrative of a field for reddit?
I've been seeing a significant rise in the usage of gold/silver/platinum lately, used heavily for banter on r/soccer (and for rewarding quality content as well.)
Same, but it's because they changed the way gold works. If you have a subscription, for stuff like removing ads and what not, you get coins every month which then allows me to give out several silvers every month or let them pile up to give out a week of gold here and there. I doubt there has been a significant rise in people paying and is likely largely the new coin system.