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Comment by brianwillis | Hacker News Reader

Assuming for a minute that Amazon deserves as much blame as ketralnis is heaping on here, why would the Reddit guys be so reluctant to point this out? Professionalism? Kindheartedness? Even professionalism and mutual respect have limits.

The community loves both the site and the admins, but there are limits to the patience of users, and those limits are being tested by these outages. I would think the Reddit guys would be happy to have a scapegoat to direct the community's rage towards.

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Blaming a third party lacks class. The Reddit guys made the decision to rely heavily on EBS, and it came back to bite them. They show a lot of character by taking responsibility for an outage they had very little control over.

Also, its not a great idea to badmouth someone who is currently providing you with a service and actively working on improving it for you (according to the blog post.)

Then again, according to the comments Amazon is mostly actively promising to work on improving it, and has been for a year with little to show for it.

The good news is that it seems they have some leverage on Amazon now.

"Hi Mr. CIO of Amazon. You realize we had a 6 hour outage on one of the largest sites in the US because of you. We don't want to badmouth your service but we can. Care to pay more attention now?"

Reddit's no longer a cashstrapped startup with limited resources and options. It's ultimately their choice to stick with Amazon. If Amazon has been giving them the run around for more than a whole year, maybe it would've been a smart decision to move to something else.

Happily, the Reddit team is better than the Reddit hivemind with regards to the appropriateness of channeling nerdrage.

I think in general a small group of professionals is going to be a little bit more focused and less knee-jerk-prone than a gigantic mass of similarly-minded people.

Because the whole site is hosted on Amazon, and it would be non-trivial to move from it. They also may or may not be receiving special pricing due to their size?

You shouldn't bite the hand that... hosts you.

And it is pretty unprofessional. Ketralnis thinks he's defending his buddies but he isn't really helping the situation.

Well, at this point, perhaps it needed to be said.

Reddit isn't vital to anyone's well being, but it is a service that hundreds of thousands (?) use pretty regularly, so it certainly isn't trivial either.

How is he hurting the situation by calling out a service for what it really is?

I'm not sure that he really cares if he's helping the situation or not, seeing as he's no longer employed there.

I know first-hand that when a team is working on things, and it's very publicly going wrong, and it's due to things that are out of your control, it's beyond frustrating to have everyone think that it IS your fault due to the public stance.

I'm guessing that the Reddit team that is dealing with this is more than a bit pissed that they can't be more public with what the real reasons are.

Personally, I could care less about the "professionalism" or political BS, I'd rather know the real reasons for the problems so that I could be better informed and not run into the same issues.

I'd rather see more candor and less PR.

On the other hand: "Blaming a third party lacks class. The Reddit guys made the decision to rely heavily on EBS, and it came back to bite them. They show a lot of character by taking responsibility for an outage they had very little control over." What do you think is the best solution to that one?

Actually, as a former employee, he is in a pretty good position to criticise while keeping that criticism at arms-length from Reddit. Not a bad tactic.

A poor craftsman blames his tools.

Indeed. You should always have a second and third hammer any time you swing, with an automatic failover to complete the job in case the first hammer explodes on contact or spontaneously ceases to exist.

Unless of course you happen to be something akin to a cash-strapped startup, when you don't have those kind of luxuries.

I'm pretty sure he was being sarcastic. Even if he wasn't, that's how I took it, just because it was funnier that way.

I was :) I just hear the "a poor craftsman blames his tools" line often, but I'd bet you'd hear Michelangelo singing a different tune if his chisel hammer broke off at the handle and landed on his toe.

More like a poor craftsman selects the wrong tools for the job.

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