Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
Errors
>Something went wrong. Just don't panic.
> Sorry, we couldn't load posts for this page. [RETRY]
>Something went wrong. Just don't panic.
> Sorry, we couldn't load posts for this page. [RETRY]
Hyperbolic I know, but that’s what it feels like.
Interestingly, HN is being really slow for me right now and also gave an error when I first loaded it. Maybe something more global is going on, like network or cdn issues?
I had to reload this page 5 page until I was allowed to post a reply. Something is definitely going on.
HN seems to be groaning under the load too and might go down with Reddit.
A place I once worked had a 404 handler that was extremely expensive, but nobody noticed for a while because 404s are relatively rare. One time a vulnerability scanner took down the site because it was just hitting known vulnerability paths which all 404'd. The code that executed during a 404 was n^2.
Maybe it is a regional thing?
The official Reddit Status Twitter account proves that it happens very, very regularly: https://twitter.com/redditstatus
The official Reddit Status Twitter confirms this is a pretty common occurrence: https://twitter.com/redditstatus
The "elevated error rates" always presents as an "oops, you broke reddit!" landing even on old.reddit. I imagine since it is an "elevated error rate" rather than a total outage that it might be localized to geo or some other kind of shard. I'm on the US West Coast, though, so I can't imagine I'm in a minority.
(Which is confirmed by the number of people responding to GP.)
You'd get timeouts, and I'd never see them - despite being West Coast (Canada) as well. Or at least, that's my best guess so far.
I imagine it probably has some to do with specific geography as well. Cloudflare will proxy back to nearest node and maybe some are better than others.
Edit: I wonder if it’s because all the subreddits I’m on are low or medium traffic. I’ve unsubscribed from the front page and /r/all and tend to only read niche subs.
But yeah clearly others have a different experience with this. I wonder why.
Anecdotally I think it's more and that the threshold for "errors above normal" is probably set pretty high. It feels like their infrastructure isn't very reliable and depending on which backend Cloudflare is routing you to, YMMV.
I always just assume the uptimes absolute dogshit.
Source: I'm finally breaking a 13 year Reddit addiction.
> 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.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/12/23758002/reddit-crashing-...
For example, maybe it causes reads from the database take a lot longer than they normally would, locking up the database or causing the process the crash (again, that’s just pure speculation).
What happens when a user has 99% of their posting in subs that are now hidden, and the API is programmed to produce a fixed 30 comments of history on the overview page? The answer is extremely deep database pulls... you might pull a year of comment history to get 30 comments that aren't hidden. And depending on how they do that, it may actually pull the whole comment history for that timespan, since most of the time posts aren't hidden like this.
I worked at a backend team at work with some very overburdened legacy tables in mongo, and this is the kind of thing we'd think about. Yeah you can use an index, but then you have to maintain the index for every record, and change it every time a sub goes private/public (and we literally were hitting practical limits on how many indexes we could keep, we finally instituted a 1-in-1-out rule). And how often does that happen? Even deleted comments are overall probably a minority such that indexes don't matter, but, this is relational data, you have to know which subreddits are closed before you can filter their results, and mongo sucks at joins. And the mongo instance can become a hotspot, so, just filter it in the application instead for those "rare" instances. Even if they are doing it in mongo, the index/collection they're joining may suddenly be 100x the size, which could blow stuff up anyway.
edit: for me, one overview page is now taking me back one month in comment history. And I comment a lot on subs that are currently closed, so it could easily be throwing away 5-10 comments for every comment it displays.
EDIT: to clarify -- a big stretch to connect editing comments (which was well-known to have happened) with other actions.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
Not true! He did not openly admit to doing this. Instead:
* he did it, and told no one at all
* was caught doing it, after people figured it out
* then, admitted he did it
This is absolutely not the same as "openly admitting it".
He did secretly edit comments.
Still misleading, I agree.
> was a mod of r/jailbait in 2008
not the comment editing
In either case, it’s easily as speculative as the parent comment above, maybe slightly more so, since the parent came from Twitter.
He did not admit to it until evidence was compiled and hit the front page, and let it appear for part of the week to participants and onlookers as if there was massive internal strife.
Steve Huffman has reportedly told employees that Selig threatened Reddit. Selig posted a (perfectly legally recorded and disclosed) call recording showing the alleged “threat” was a misunderstanding over which the Reddit employee on the call apologized immediately.
Huffman serves in an official capacity at the Anti-Defamation League. People are (rightly, I think) critical of his handling partly in light of that.
Fabricating? Or do you have some reason to believe this is true.
The wayback machine doesn't list him as a mod (SFW): https://web.archive.org/web/20100420183707/http://nl.reddit....
PS. Wow, the sidebar makes that sub seem even scummier than I assumed it was.
That said, that meme is propaganda and defamation. Anyone could add anyone as a mod anywhere for a time, and violentacrez added spez "for the lulz" or however people like that think. I'd be beside myself it there's evidence that he was an active moderator working on that sub. Although, given the prevailing winds of the modern left, in a few years he'll probably be trying to claim that he was.
Obviously I can't reference the comment in question right now, but I'll try to remember to circle back and add a reference when(/if?) Reddit comes back up.
Edit: /u/andrewsmith1986's comment can be found at https://old.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/1477psa/all_3_ar...
Consider: spez was the voluntary "mod" of the entire platform as CEO, and he maintained that subreddit.
Excusing him for the unsolicited mod invite is just optics management. It would be like saying lowtax had no responsibility as co-signer for the existence of subforums that his paid or unpaid staff maintained.
This would likely be like the use of underage subjects in nudist art, painted, drawn, or photographed. Such art is generally not considered pornographic and are legally protected, and some even displayed in museums and the like, yet websites will still ban the material to not have any relationship to it and to not have users trying to push the boundary. I'm speaking to the extent that rules are enforced, many websites have issues with enforcing rules in general due to the amount of user generated content being much larger than the amount of moderation available, so there will be something slipping through moderation from time to time.
Most states in the US could use a photo of a teenager in a bikini as enough 'evidence' to bring charges of Possession of Pornography involving a Juvenile, depending on what the actual photo depicts. Whether the contents of the image could be found to substantiate a conviction for the charge would be a trial/appeals issue. Nudity is not required for an image to be considered CSAM in most US states (or at the federal level), there are also Federal precedents that make cartoon depictions of under-aged characters count as CSAM.
It may actually be a defense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
I think it helps strengthen the argument rhetorically, since people can't as easily use the existence of such "exceptions" as an argument for adding more, or bypass the principle entirely with slogans like "freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach". (Suppressing the "reach" of certain ideas obviously does inhibit their free exchange.)
This approach hasn't been "battle tested" yet though so we'll see how it goes in practice.
Nudity... depends on the purpose but probably not. I agree that's unfortunate if your stance is that there should be no restrictions on porn, but I'm not sure the arguments for why freedom of speech is a good idea really apply to porn in the first place. I think it'd be better to make that argument on its own merits rather than try to conflate the two.
That seems very open to interpretation to me; it seems to me these kind of things express a "feeling" much more than an "idea", and they might also be considered "antisocial" that you mentioned in your previous comment.
I meant "nudity" only in the sense of "nudity", nothing more. e.g. "I want to make a nudist TV cooking programme", or stuff like that. No concrete "ideas" are being exchanged with that as such.
I'm not a free speech absolution by any means, but I have generally favoured the exact opposite: "free expression" instead of "free speech" as that covers so much more. I think we can have an expansive "free expression" which includes many things while also having reasonable limits on that based on e.g. "does this reasonably harm people in a significant way?"
I suppose there may be room for both. "The freedom to exchange ideas" is after all a subset of "freedom of expression" (though not necessarily of "freedom of expression, with a bunch of exceptions").
That some people will try to abuse this seems inescapable no matter what; we'll still be argueing the details 200 or 2,000 years from now because there is no way to capture any of this in clear neat rules. The best we can do is come up with some decent set of ground rules which convey the intent and purpose as best as possible. This is why we have judges to, well, judge, and "reasonably harm people in a significant way" seems like a lot clearer of a guideline for this than a much more vague "ideas".
Flag burning wasn't protected as free speech in the US until 1989. I have a list of stuff that was banned or censored in the past that would be considered unobjectionable by almost everyone today, and I suspect things would have been better if we had "freedom of expression" instead of "freedom of speech" (or "free exchange of ideas", for that matter).
The issue I see developing is that any attempt to carve out what is not desired by some group is going to create standards that will let other groups carve out what wasn't intended in the first place. Look at how encryption is under attack and one common way it is attacked is by claims of how it promotes the spread of CSAM. So government asks for reasonable backdoors that will only ever be used to stop such material, yet tech circles realize that any such backdoor will allow for arbitrary power to block any material.
It also makes it clearer what's going on when people are waving the "free speech" banner over things like harassment and abuse. Allowing abuse not only doesn't increase the free exchange of ideas. It also often directly decreases it because it drives off people who get targeted by racism, sexism, et cetera, ad nauseam.
It just starts from porn and ends in gas chambers. And in the middle is freedom limited to "meaningful" contents and activities. If you looked up and compared state of freedom of speech, CSAM/CP regulation, internet censorship, especially authority intervention, crime rate, and standpoint on democracy-totalitarian axis for various random nations, it should all line up well against each others.
But if you try, please start with something more related to what I actually said, thanks.
It does infuriate me when some people may use "freedom of speech" as their excuse for "You must let me have a place to speak", when that isn't even guaranteed in the first place.
What do you need in order to have a free exchange of ideas? Oh that's right, free speech. Free exchange of ideas is one of the benefits of free speech. But it isn't free speech. Also what about speech to entertain? What about speech to criticize? What about speech to just mindlessly express yourself?
> like spam or antisocial behavior
What counts as antisocial behavior? Rap music? Heavy metal? Is protesting government antisocial behavior? What about criticizing politicians? And more importantly, who decides?
It's amazing how little people know about free speech. It should be mandatory to have a class on civics and of course free speech. People have such a childish and superficial understanding of free speech. And of course these people always tend to be for censorship.
But there's a lot of "speech" that should be and is already prohibited, both legally (CP being an obvious example), or through social standards of conduct (screaming expletives at random passers by is liable to get you kicked out of just about any venue).
In my view, focusing on the goal of freedom of speech (which is to say, the free exchange of ideas) rather than on speech itself communicates much more clearly on why the principle is important and where the line is. It makes it obvious why CP is not legally protected but Nazism is. Both are despicable, but one needs to be protected in order to preserve the free exchange of ideas while the other doesn't.
And again, I'm not saying other forms of expression that don't convey ideas shouldn't be allowed; just that the reasons why they should or shouldn't be allowed are separate from the reasons why the free exchange of ideas is important.
Yes, this wording does narrow my argument somewhat. But I think it largely narrows it in ways that make it easier to defend rhetorically, especially when trying to apply the principle to non-government entities such as the large social media conglomerates that own our modern town square.
Absolutely not. I'd argue that anyone should be free to talk with others about their opinion, but that doesn't mean I agree with that opinion. And letting then speak without shutting them down doesn't mean I agree either, just means I agree that they should be able to speak freely.
What kind of dystopian viewpoint is that? You go around stopping everyone from saying stuff you disagree with?
Sure, when “talking” is done via sound waves or someone else’s medium it’s different
But if you have free-speech parties at your place and people spray paint messages on your house then you are now “hosting”
You decide which words you leave or paint over
A better analogy would be, imagine you rent your house to someone else. You make a rule that tenants may display political messages in their windows, but only for one political party.
That would be illegal. You can prohibit all signs if you want, but specifically choosing what signs someone gets to display violates their first amendment rights and could trigger a fair housing lawsuit. It doesn't matter that you aren't the government and that you own the property.
I _think_ I agree with that. Don't hold me to it, but it feels right.
> but that doesn't mean I agree with that opinion.
Yup, sure, agreed.
> And letting then speak without shutting them down doesn't mean I agree either, just means I agree that they should be able to speak freely.
There is a world of difference between "not actively preventing someone from speaking" and "setting up a system whereby someone's speech is enabled and broadcast". Casting this to the real-world - if someone's yelling their opinions on a street corner, and I simply walk by without stopping them, then no, that's not an endorsement. But if I notice them yelling, and walk up and hand them a microphone - or (more closely mirroring social media setups) I install a public-access microphone, and stand there observing who uses it without trying to control it - then yes, through inaction I have endorsed what they choose to do with it.
> What kind of dystopian viewpoint is that? You go around stopping everyone from saying stuff you disagree with?
In areas I control and am responsible for, yes. If a guest in my home started spewing (what I consider to be) unacceptable speech, then (depending on my history with and pre-existing respect for them), I'd either take them aside and ask them to reconsider their choices, or jump straight to asking them to leave.
You can be a proponent of free speech and not allow people to stand on your porch yelling heinous things, but that's not what Reddit was doing. They knowingly profited from that speech.
That's an excewptionally broad definition and would sound pretty scary with no context.
That's an exceptionally broad definition and would sound pretty scary with no context.
That's nonsense. The Sears debacle showed that reddits leadership team was fine with deleting posts if it was going to cost them money to not delete them.
That 'political commitment to free speech' sure disappeared quickly when r/jailbait and u/violetacrez hit the main stream media.
spez was fine with hosting a community of child predators because it was one of the most popular subs. It was the top recommended result when you searched for reddit on google.
You can support free speech without actively providing a community for predators
reddit used to be owned by Conde Nast. Sears got upset about a post and complained to Conde Nast, who then told spez to take it down. If you have a political commitment to 'free speech' that folds if you might have to face some consequences for defending it, you don't have that strong of a commitment in my opinion. Certainly not strong enough to justify hosting a community of child predators
https://www.techdirt.com/2009/08/21/reddit-sears-grills-that...
They end up conforming or losing money. There’s no one reason for this. You try to run a website visible to the world, you’re gonna be subject to a world full of reasons.
Surely this is a meme by now? Any CEO that has ever said this about a website they control is just pandering to the crowd. Musk's Twitter has complied with more government takedown requests than the previous regime had.
If anyone would say it and mean it, it was probably this guy. He was quite the activist before he committed suicide.
It is though. 230 be damned. These were not small or hidden communities. They were frequently on the front page. Generally, and especially in this case silence is violence. The optics of that sub and the frequenters thereof are terrible. Do you want to try and justify their inaction further or concede this point? It should have never been allowed in the first place. Spez/Reddit at al should continue to be shamed for their long-standing tacit approval of these communities. Earning respectability requires public contrition for bad decisions that affect the public and non participants. As is typical, the communities were only shuttered when the victims cries grew loud enough to affect their brand image. Cf fph, wpd, fappening, t_d, Boston bomber fiasco, all the racist subs, and countless other controversies that spez/Reddit fumbled. Reddit deserves to close. The management team is evidently not competent or mature enough for the task and has repeatedly proven that their inability to learn from their mistakes and failure to become the proactive stewards needed will result in preventable harm to people who do not even use the platform.
Heh. So what did they moderate? things besides jailbait? How free!
I get that it might be different in the heads of the people who have worked very hard to create those platforms. I'm just not seeing any different in its effects on the world or on the targets of the racial harassment.
The difference is intent. Intent matters. Intent is the difference between murder and manslaughter, or between a conspiracy and mere speech.
big win? whomever votes to silence the guy gets to judge.
Also, it seems wild to me that you think a small company means you somehow have less ability to supervise your employees. What's your plan if you hire a racist who wasn't dumb enough to post openly? Just let him go to it?
Now where I'm from (Germany), not just "hate speech" is against the law, but it's also unlawful to insult another person. It's complicated, but for the latter it's mostly sufficient that they feel insulted by what you said to them personally.
Now while I don't go around insulting people in person or on the Internet, I personally think - for instance - that it should be allowed to call a person an asshole, if they behave like an asshole. Yet, if I did that here, or even online to another German person, they could go to the police and press charges. If the public prosecutor is sufficiently bored, this very low barrier could also be used to dox me in an otherwise reasonably anonymous setting, since the resulting lawsuit could result in my data getting subpoenaed from, say, Twitter and my ISP. This has happened to other people here in the past.
Now while I'm neither in favor of either hate speech nor randomly and viciously insulting people online, I consider the law in Germany as outlined unreasonable in an online setting. I think freedom of speech is more important fundamentally than another person's right to not feel hurt, or for some powers that be to silence or punish me because I said something inconvenient that they merely claim to meet some of the criteria for speech that is restricted here.
Mind you, this is the case all the while freedom of speech is enshrined in the German constitution as well. But I think it is a pretty good example of why I think freedom of speech should not be curtailed just in the name of another person's feelings about said speech. Even if a person, as you do, doesn't see a direct and tangible benefit in allowing that kind of speech, I would argue that a larger fraction of people are against disallowing it, because of the indirect consequences and where that line of lawmaking leads.
Another thing to consider is this: Say you're modestly happy with the current government wherever you live, and you'd be happy for them to have an "easy" way to curtail freedom of speech. Would you also be happy for the opposing political side to do the same thing? What if some extremists came to power?
This kind of reasoning is why free speech absolutists are so staunchly defending freedom of speech, even if it may be inconvenient or insulting to themselves or others.
You're also shading over exactly who gets free speech. If digital Klansman get to freely harass black people, many of those black people will not participate in public spaces, silencing them. Indeed, that sort of ethnic cleansing is often the goal of racial abuse. See, e.g., Loewen's "Sundown Towns". So whatever "free speech absolutists" think they're up to, in practice the result is often a diminishing of the free exchange of ideas that the Founding Fathers were clearly pursuing.
There is probably a line. But you don't know where it is and neither do I. You and I might agree that X is to one side of that line, but if we ban that behavior, then we have initiated a process that we might call line-discovery -- the search for the line that X was to one side of -- and line-discovery is highly prone to outcomes that result in bans on content from the other side of that line. So we don't want to engage in line-discovery, even though there are obvious examples of things to one or the other side of the line.
You may think you can ban the obvious things without ultimately engaging in line-discovery, but, the argument goes, you are mistaken. You will ultimately find yourself doing line-discovery.
You start out with obvious-sounding prohibitions on racism and hate speech, but eventually you're arguing about, say, whether it's racist to report on polling showing that violent protests are unpopular. [0]
And that's because banning any speech always leads to line-discovery.
So it comes down to a question of which scenario is worse:
A. You ban obviously bad stuff while accepting some risk of banning things that aren't actually over the line.
B. You privilege all content to avoid that outcome.
Some people are outraged by this framing and think it's obvious that you would want to risk banning some behavior to the right side of the line if it means eliminating the most obnoxious speech. But, basically, that is not obvious to everyone, no matter how many times they are reminded that there is some really bad stuff out there. [1]
[0] https://reason.com/2020/08/27/protests-violence-david-shor-k...
[1] Interestingly, this is really not so different from the argument about evidentiary standards for punishing criminal behavior, except in that case the politics are flipped. There conservatives would rather risk punishing some innocent people if it means the absolute worst actors are guaranteed harsh punishment, but liberals think it's worth risking some amount of literal rape and murder in order to prevent punishing the innocent. So I think, actually, both sides are entirely capable of seeing this from the other side; they just don't want to.
Let's grant that the harms of the kind of speech you're worried about are exactly the same in either case. [0] Platforming "racist harassment" because of a political commitment to free speech implies that other forms of controversial speech will get the same treatment, preventing the kind of line-discovery I described in my previous comment.
"Platforming racist harassment because you just kinda like racist harassment" leads to who knows what. All we know about that person is that they like racist harassment. Maybe other stuff gets banned. Maybe not. Either way, it's unlikely to be in service of avoiding harmful second-order effects.
So that's an enormous difference between the two motivations. In the first case the position is in defense of an ethic of open dialogue and an attempt to prevent second-order effects that are harmful to that dialogue.
In the second case -- who knows.
It seems to me that the first motivation is much more likely to prevent the kinds of second-order effects I'm worried about and that distinguishes it from the second one.
The notion that reddit ever was a bastion of free speech is absurd. They didn't "light touch" on upskirt, revenge, and kiddy porn because of "philosophical and political commitment to free speech", they did it because they didn't want to accept any more responsibility for content than they absolutely had to, and that's because it is not financially viable to moderate large communities using paid labor. That is why you see so many social media companies pushing against rules for online content; not because they're champions of free speech.
If it were about "a commitment to free speech", they wouldn't allow completely unaccountable and anonymous members to delete content, silently mute users, and ban users....including employing automatic tools that would ban people preemptively based on subreddits they posted in, or automated tools for powermods to ban someone across all the subreddits they moderated.
If you pissed off a powermod, your account could end up getting banned from nearly all the major, common subreddits - not just from theirs, but they'd communicate in private channels to other powermods that they wanted someone to be banned elsewhere.
Oh, and they were happy to moderate, severely, anyone who revealed any personal details about a reddit user. Which conveniently helps protect people doing stuff like upskirting and posting revenge porn.
"philosophical and political commitment to free speech", my ass.
I'm not naive, user content is hard to moderate. But is it hard to say "any subreddits with these keywords go on a list for review"?
https://old.reddit.com/r/TrophyWiki/comments/mohrlg/reddit_t...
There is some whitewash in the comments there: "[violentacrez] received the trophy because all the work he did to moderate the site..." as if he got the award for keeping things clean, but consider that he contributed the vast majority of those subreddits' content himself by cruising social media for salacious pictures of minors to share while he was in his 40's, and the award is named "Pimp Daddy."
Remember when Phrack was added to the LOC ... and was over 7 years old already (http://phrack.org/issues/42/1.html)?
More seriously, you really start to feel "ancient" when your body goes from "new year, pretty much the same as old year" ... to ... "new year, who removed vital organs and bodily fluids while I slept last night?! The bastards!!!"
Of course, it is a classic trope nevertheless ... and I did start to feel ancient even 15+ years ago ... but once you start noticing real changes, then you REALLY get that feel (and you know more is coming, lol): https://youtu.be/MqBNSMbEzI0
>Back in the day, you used to be able to add anyone as a moderator and it auto accepted.
>People would make shitty subs and add people, take a screenshot, shut down the sun or make private, then use that screenshot to start a witch hunt. Violentacrez could have added you as a mod of the sub and you'd be in the same situation.
>TL:DR I used to mod a sub with Barack Obama and Snoop Dogg.
E.g. many Google searches lead into private communities now. Word is spreading.
If they see a "this sub is private because reddit is dumb and also evil" they may come back later, they may not.
As for the forced reopening, beside the conspiracy this is something that could happen. It's a private company, moderator on strike are a loss of business, they would be 100% in their right to remove all the "traitors" (I'm not saying this would be a smart move, simply that if they really plan to go down this self destructive path it's the best time to do this and prove potential investor they still have control).
Less if you add "competent" to the qualifications list :)
Legally, of course. Morally, it is completely unacceptable. This isn't "oh they're jerks"; this is "the system is broken".
A meatspace analogy:
You host a weekly gathering at a restaurant. You decide to temporarily boycott the restaurant to protest some behavior of theirs -- your actions are a loss of business, _so the restaurant decides to host your weekly gathering without you_.
We'd never accept that in the real world, but for some reason we do online -- we fall back to the legal argument that It's A Private Business (which is true) and completely ignore that Reddit doesn't own the community, that the community doesn't _belong_ to Reddit. They own the platform (the restaurant); they don't own the community.
however, they have stated that may do this if the protest extends beyond the 48h mark.
IMHO sharding traffic by subreddit doesn't pass the smell-test, though. Different subreddits have very different traffic patterns, so the system would likely end up with hotspots continuously popping up, and it'd probably be toilsome to constantly babysit hot shards and rebalance. (Consider some of the more academic subreddits vs. some of the more meme-driven subreddits — and then consider what happens when e.g. a particular subreddit takes off, or goes cold.)
Sharding on a dimension that has a more random/uniform distribution is usually the way to go. Off the top of my head (still speculating wildly and basically doing a 5-minute version of the system-design question just for fun), I'd be curious to shard by a hash of the post ID, or something like that. The trick is always to have a hashing algorithm that's stable when it's time to grow the number of shards (otherwise you're kicking off a whole re-balancing every time), and of course I'm too lazy to sort that out in this comment. I vaguely remember the Instagram team had a really cool sharding approach that they blogged about in this vein. (This would've been pre-acquisition, so ancient history by Silicon Valley standards.)
As for subreddit metadata (public, private, whatever), I'd really expect all of that to be in a global cache at this point. It's read-often/write-rarely data, and close-to-realtime cache-invalidation when it does change is a straightforward and solved problem.
The founding Reddit team was non-technical (Even Spez. I've been to UVA; it's not an engineering school; and spez had never done any real engineering before coming onto Reddit). They ran a skeleton crew of some 10ish people for a long time (none from any exceptional backgrounds. One of them was from Sun & Oracle, after their prime).
Same group that started with a node front-end, python back-end monolith, with a document-oriented database structure (i.e., they had two un-normalized tables in Postgres to hold everything). Later they switched to Cassandra and kept that monstrosity -- partly, because back then no one knew anything about databases except sysadmins.
Back then they were running a cache for listing retrieval. Every "reddit" (subreddit and the various pages, like front-page, hot, top, controversial, etc.) listing is kept in a memcache. Inside, you have your "top-level" listing information (title, link, comments, id, etc.). The asinine thing is that cache invalidation has always been a problem. They originally handled it using RabbitMQ queues: votes come in, they're processed, and then the cache is updated. Those things always got backed up, because no one thought about batching updates on a timer (or how to use lock-free) (and no one knew how to do vertical scaling, and when they tried, it made things even harder to reason about). You know what genius plan they had next to solve this? Make more queues. Fix throughput issues by making more queues, instead of fixing the root cause of the back-pressure. Later, they did "shard"/partition things more cleanly (and tried lock-free) -- but they never did any real research into fixing the aforementioned problem (how to handle millions of simple "events" a day... which is laughable thinking back to it now).
That's just for listings. The comment trees are another big bad piece. Again, stored un-normalized -- but this time actually batched (not properly, but it is a step up). One great thing about un-normalized databases and trees, is that there are no constraints on vertices. So a common issue was that you could back-up your queue (again) for computing the comment trees (because they would never get processed properly) (and you could slow the entire site to a crawl because your message broker was wasting its time on erroneous messages).
Later, they had the bright idea to move from a data center to AWS -- break everything up into microservices. Autoscaling there has always been bungled.
There was no strong tech talent, and no strong engineering culture -- ever.
-------
My 2 cents: it's the listing caches. The architecture around it was never designed to handle checking so many "isHidden" subreddits (despite that they're still getting updates to their internal listings) -- and it's coming undone.
I've been parts of 2 different engineering teams that wrote crap that I would cuss out but were super succesfuly, and most recently I joined a team that was super anal about every little detail. I think business success only gets hindered on the extremes now. If you're somewhere in the middle, it's fine. I'd rather have a buggy product that people use than a perfect codebase that only exists on github.
I could easily be wrong though, I haven't done web development for years.
You can’t treat the scaling as a binary feature, that it does or doesn’t
You start getting a lot more DB queries than usual, bypassing cache, the DB's remote, it's clustered or whatever, now you've got a ton more internal network traffic and open sockets, latency goes up, resources start to get exhausted...
Speculation, but having major subs private change the load profile which may result in the outage. Reddit certainly wasn't optimized for this.
If you search for r/news for example, it's nowhere on that page.
This is likely shifting load in very unpredictable ways... I'm sure a sibling comment is right that it's probably less load overall in general, but it'll be going down codepaths that aren't normally being exercised by >95% of requests and aren't working on the assumption that virtually all content is being hidden.
There's probably some microservice instances that are currently melting themselves into a puddle until they can deploy additional instances, additional DB shards, or roll out patches to fix dumb shit that wasn't dumb until the usage assumptions were suddenly inverted. Meanwhile there's tons of other instances that are probably sitting idle.
Reddit goes wrong often so I expect this outage could have any number of causes.
That's not necessarily true. Perhaps the status of subreddits is cached (because there's no reason to hit the DB 100 times/second to check if r/funny is private or public). But for a given request to a private sub, it would need to check each user.
> 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.
https://tildes.net/~tech/163e/reddit_appears_to_be_down_duri...
My first thought this morning was "if I was reddit, I would re-open all closed subreddits and instate my own moderators"... I'm kind of surprised they didn't. I'd have to imagine that if they wanted to, the attempt wouldn't fail - this seems like it could be done almost trivially.
Others look like they got the hostile takeover and a new mod.
Most of the site is rebelling, but I took the time to visit, intending to give them impressions, just to see how they are holding up. And of course they aren't really holding up as we can see.
But their handling is unbelievably tone deaf - I was greeted by the message that I broke Reddit. They gave me the grade of 'F'. I refreshed the page and they showed me a cartoon corpse.
I get that it's a tongue-in-cheek leftover from happier times, but considering the circumstances it sure came off as hostility aimed at the few people willing to give them a chance on this dark day.
I mean, I was really just rubbernecking... so maybe i deserved it for my schadenfreude, but still. It is casual hostility directed at the source of their user generated content. It's not in good taste. But I suspect it would never occur to the entitled mindset of their leadership.
A message as simple as "Sorry, reddit is receiving too much traffic right now and can't handle your request. Try loading this page later.", 99% of people will understand.
But there's that 1% of people that aren't just non-savvy, they're willfully non-savvy to the point where words stop having meaning to them just because they're referring to something related to a computer. The type where if you ask them something as simple as "Is the computer turned on?", they say they don't know. Meanwhile, the screen is showing their desktop.
"WTF AM I GOING TO JAIL?"
She also used to cheat at jigsaw puzzles by gnawing at the pieces so they would fit.
The tongue in cheek communication and cute illustrations on error pages started with web 2.0 and is now so prevalent that a regular system error message is a refreshing experience.
I long for the intellectual honestly and emotional sturdiness of “Error 123 in Handler XYZ. You should never see this.”
So they actually made the intentional decision to change it back to the much more accusatory "you broke it", I'm not sure exactly when that occurred but I suspect it was roughly the time spez took over.
Could be getting older indeed, but his one, and "guru meditation error", almost make me act like younger me again feeling a sudden urge to smash my monitor into pieces
I was thinking that because today is the first day of the protests, which have garnered a lot of attention by media and individuals, that traffic might actually spike because everyone is checking in to see how it's going.
> On March 14th, Apollo made nearly 1 billion requests against our API in a single day, triggered in part by our system outage. After the outage, Apollo started making 53% fewer calls per day. If the app can operate with half the daily request volume, can it operate with fewer?
That's a backend server making a request that doesn't count against its rate limit as soon as it can again.
The push notification backend is described as making a request every 6 seconds for each user. If it isn't backing off correctly and delaying a requeueing of the next job, that can drastically increase the request rate.
If a multitude of bots are written immediately retry upon receiving an error without backing off, and are now stuck in loops of flooding the servers with requests, could the number of requests become a greater factor than the simplicity of the responses?
They used to have a really good blog post about their caching infra which for some reason was deleted. Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210205121832/https://redditblo...
Somehow knowing even for a brief moment no one is there and I’m not missing out on anything makes me feel… more alive and excited to interact with the world. sounds bizarre I know… but I wish more social media shut down now.
(Sure, this idea is taken from Ready Player One, but that doesn't mean it's a bad idea!)
Here, it's a much better idea.
For me, today is not only the day when the most of reddit is down but also web search experience is significantly degraded.
I wouldn't mind some fresh blood even for this purpose.
Once something gets big enough, it becomes impossible to moderate and eventually it will fall out of fashion and lose its original intent. Look at Etsy and Amazon.
I'm finding people are rearely loyal customers to a brand long-term. Rather, they want whatever platform gets them what they want. People jump from sites like Aliexpress to Wish to Shein to whichever webiste has the most latest and marketing team.
Especially when I search for vehicle/mechanic advice the old school forums just can't be beat for their value, even though many are ghost ships with no active users anymore.
On desktop though, it's an entirely different experience. I'm always redirected to the old layout, so I don't have the stupid anti-user shenanigans.
as for the modals, just visit the reddit thread by prepending `old.` to the url. like `old.reddit.com` and then you can see everything without all that annoying stuff. also sign up for a reddit account but based on your comment doesn't sound like you'd be open to that.
I remember reading Joel Spolsky's blog when he promoted Reddit. I jumped over for look and stayed. Threads and discussion were heavily tech focused. The format was a nice departure from slashdot, and there was a lack of digital "turf" wars. (Subreddits came along years later.)
16(?) years on - Reddit has metastisized into something different. I still enjoy parts of it, but it's definitely not the same beast it was in the beginning.
I usually browse Reddit with my morning coffee, this has been a pleasant alternative
The tech+(with some business) focused nature of the feed keeps folks off too.
No memes here.
HN instantly brought me "old" internet nostalgia. Geeks just talking about things in a mostly open minded way. Lack of memes, politics and "boring" design will be all positives for some.
It's thinly veiled behind more passive aggressively written prose than reddit, but it's here. No images, I'll grant, but as someone mistaken for conservative by liberals and liberal by conservatives I can assure you it's very much political.
It's also not exclusively negative and cynical, of course, and there are some great insights to be found here. I think you're being unfair with 90%. Maybe more like 70%?
Is there any social media that isn't largely cynical and negative?
I also notice how my mindset changes when I don't visit, which really just makes me think I should stop engaging in 90% of online discourse and discussion.
Maybe no? I only know of two (not including subreddits): HN and Slashdot. And of the two, Slashdot is far, far, more negative, with the weird addition of American style republican political views. Which, as a European reader, makes it feel like a very right wing place.
Are there any other forums I'm not aware of?
They fucked up and now I'll spend more time on here and /., is my guess. Unless there are other strong dork communities I should be looking into.
Edit: Ask HN thread showed up on my last question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36293789
h..t..t..p..colon..slash..slash..slashdot..dot..org
When you see "Hacker News Hug" on here (recently due to Cloudflare's issues) or Reddit's "Hug of Death", the original was "Slashdotted", when tech people hosted personal sites on their _own_ home DSL (even Dial-up via Dynamic DNS!) connections. These asynchronous connections had terrible upload speed by design.
If their webpage hit the front news of Slashdot, their upload bandwidth very quickly ran out due to the torrent of traffic!
Sadly, I didn't win the tournament.
Username checks out.
Perhaps someone on HN has a more reliable source than my brain?
I probably got the telephone part mixed up but was right about being confusing to read aloud.
Can’t get a better source that /. itself!
With ~, ~/. could mean your home directory if your shell recognises ~ as $HOME.
Don’t think /. aka slashdot has any intrinsic meaning in Linux.
As opposed to today, where connects have terrible uploads speed because ISPs don't want you to host servers.
I've heard of people getting gigabit down, but only 16 mbps up.
Which essentially means you have X bandwidth to distribute between upstream and downstream. And it's far more profitable to sell X 40/10 Mbit connections vs selling a bunch of 25/25 Mbit ones, where most people there won't be using upload all that much.
DOCSIS 4.0 supports 10Gb/s down and 6Gb/s up using that same coaxial cable that's been in your house for decades.
I've started looking at that and arstechnica for my tech news replacements.
They also regularly open the invite threads here: https://old.reddit.com/r/tildes/
Also people who have been there for a while (not me) can invite their friends.
If reddit bungles this whole thing, the loss of /r/asknyc will be truly tragic. Such a great way to crowdsource local recommendations without the extra veneer of tourist feedback on top.
I'll miss my local and hobby subreddits. I hope I find something to replace them.
Reddit is on borrowed time, protest or not. No sense in getting attached to any particular site. The competition is just a few keystrokes away.
It's as if Reddit had been taking the pressure off the rest of the internet all this time, and now that there's a blackout people actually starts working and visiting other websites
Twitter doesn't seem affected though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1476fkn/reddit_bl...
Er, you will be able to read more at that link whenever reddit comes back online :-/
> 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.
Maybe you should think a bit harder about the difference between "this thing that is actively happening could be the cause" and "aliens could be the cause"?
a) it was the incredibly rare event affecting most of the popular content on the page, which the host themselves state it was
b) it was something completely unrelated
I know which one I'd put money on!
EDIT: Reddit themselves confirmed that the outage was related to subs going private.
> “A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” said Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/12/reddit-goes-down-just-as-a...
> 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. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/8/23754780/reddit-api-update...
Nothing on redditstatus.com (yet?): https://www.redditstatus.com/
UPD Currently on redditstatus.com:
>Reddit Failing to Load
>Identified - We're aware of problems loading content and are working to resolve the issues as quickly as possible. Jun 12, 2023 - 07:58 PDT
First, deciding what to put on them is PM hell. Is it customer-facing? Developer-facing? Both?
Then, for each item, how do you test so you can be really sure? Half the time tests will produce either false negatives or false positives. If your test writes data (like, say, posting a comment), is it a meaningful test of it's to a test or demo topic? But if it's to real topics, the test itself becomes user impacting.
Or you can use traffic stats to estimate whether things are going well, but then your traffic stats are question. Something may report zero traffic when things are great, or normal traffic when things are broken.
Then you have the classic "the tests are failing because the testing infra is broken, but production users are fine."
There just isn't a good answer to most of the problems status pages face. So, yeah, they suck, but I think there may be a Godel argument here that it is not possible for them to be timely, meaningful, and accurate.
They have a pretty good idea if something internal is broken, but it's very hard to know that everything is fixed.
That said, I agree that manually updated pages are generally more useful and accurate than automated ones. It's just an extra tax on the incident team.
When I say "stopped showing up", I mean I could see my comments on my user page but they wouldn't show up on the thread (even for me), and I would get replies to older comments I made in my inbox but they wouldn't show up in the thread either. (Yes, only an hour or so before this happened I made a post that got a bunch of engagement, and I was actively responding to people who replied to me.)
I knew the mods weren't removing my comments because your removed comments still show up in the thread for you while you're logged in, and the mods weren't removing the comments of the people replying to me either because they would've disappeared from my inbox if that was the case. Ergo, outage.
And then it happened again like two weeks later.
>Jun 12, 2023 - 08:47 PDT
>"A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue," Reddit told Engadget in a statement.
https://www.engadget.com/reddit-suffers-a-major-outage-after...
I can probably replace the video game related ones with some RSS feeds for some popular gaming news sites. No big deal there.
I replaced r/financialindependence with bogleheads and r/guitar with thegearpage.
I'll definitely miss some of the random subs, but whatever. Reddit has been a time sink for me for awhile this is a great excuse to move on.
It's difficult to know if it is a coordinated attack or an unexpected side effect of the protest.
HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests Connection: keep-alive Content-Type: application/json Access-Control-Expose-Headers: retry-after, x-sentry-rate-limits, x-sentry-error Vary: Origin Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2023 14:49:00 GMT Content-Length: 45 Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://www.reddit.com retry-after: 14 x-sentry-rate-limits: 14:default;error;security;attachment:organization:error_usage_exceeded
DDOS activity from pissed off stakeholders related to the protest
System ops using their access to further blackout action
A botched administrative action to reopen subs
> No, you see, it was not a protest, it was simply a small outage, nothing to worry about.
Joking aside, I have a few bots monitoring content and I saw ~10% drops in comment activity before the outage (vs. the baseline from last week).
Now almost all of them are. It's going from O(1) to basically O(n^2) worst case. For millions of users.
I wonder why Reddit is down?
fetching a list of default/subscribed subs and comparing it against the whole list of private subs every time someone loads your homepage sounds like a pretty bad design. why wouldn't something as fundamental as a private/public flag be stored in the main db entry for the subreddit?
either way, this doesn't seem like a probable root cause. checking a list of default subs against the list of private subs would be expensive under any circumstances. having all the default subs added to the private list wouldn't really change the already terrible performance by much. there just aren't that many default subs to begin with.
If that is the case, then generating the home page for a user is going to be hitting a lot of posts from private subs which have to be skipped over until enough accessible posts are reached to fill the page. And in the case of the official app, infinite scrolling is going to lead to constant pressure to generate the list of posts.
Office have 120 down reports per period. Reddit has 40,000.
More people panic from missing memes, than missing excel-sheets.
My guess is it's caused by (but indirectly) the Reddit Strike. Here's the thing: because Reddit doesn't require you to be logged in to see posts in most subreddits (especially the most popular ones), having those subs go private has caused a bunch of poorly-maintained automated infrastructure to hit its barely-tested retry/fallback code. How many repeater / archiver bots for subreddits are out there? Who knows. So now a bunch of bespoke, heterogeneous bots are saying "Oh, I got a nonstandard response from that page... Probably a transient issue, I'll try again in 30 seconds with no backoff. And of course, I'm faking my thumbprint to just look like a regular Chrome instance so I don't trip the bog-standard bot detection that'd stop me from doing what my creator wants me to do."
So I bet Reddit admins woke up today to a firestorm of continuously-failed-retried queries and they're having to figure out how to separate wheat from chaff in realtime.
A related, but different, potential explanation: Reddit never had to test at scale the performance of bouncing users from private subreddits and it turns out that query is itself expensive for some reason that didn't come up in small-scale testing, so now Reddit's own infrastructure is setting itself aflame as the world is waking up, pinging the most popular subreddits, and triggering a near-query-of-death every time they do it.
Both these quotes apply uncomfortably well to Silicon Valley global tech companies and their owners:
> "…what civilisation is, is 6 billion people, trying to make themselves happy by standing on each-others shoulders and kicking each others teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation. And yet, you can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have; the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific knowhow, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us; the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary and we do not fight back against the dehumanising values that are handed down as control icons. This is something … I mean, I don’t really want to get off on this tare because it’s a lecture in its self but … culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions; churches, companies, tax-collection schemes and what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture, yet we glorify the creative potential of the individual, the rights of the individual, we understand the felt presence of experience is what is most important. But the culture is a perversion; *it fetishises objects, it creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding* in the form of squirrely religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanise themselves by behaving like machines; *processors of memes* passed down from Madison Avenue and Hollywood.”
Separately:
> "Don’t get the idea that it’s this liberal rap about how everybody has a piece of the action. You know, the Jews know something, the Buddhists know something, the Huichol know something. Nonsense! Rubbish! Nobody knows anything. These are different kinds of shell games that have been worked out by priestly castes of people to keep things under control. Institutions seek to maximize control, control, control! That’s what they’re into. Did you think they were in the business of enlightening you? Saving your soul? Forget it! Control is what this is all about. And to the degree that we commit ourselves to ideology, we are poisoned. Any ideology—Marxism, Catholicism, objectivism, you name it. Rubbish. All rubbish."
- Terence McKenna
Certainly hitting the site harder today by trying to crawl 8 years and 70,000 karma worth of comments in preparation for deleting the account than by browsing my usual subreddits.
If anyone else is interested in leaving Reddit I made a browser extension you can use to batch delete your Reddit posts and comments: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-reddit...
Let me know how it works for you if you try it! Still fixing bugs.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/12/reddit-goes-down-just-as-a...
I hope we stop talking about Reddit because the only people who seem to ever give a shit about that website and talk about in other places have these other attributes that make it dreadful to read their whinging.
It's difficult to know if this is a coordinated attack or a side effect of the ongoing protest.
HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests Connection: keep-alive Content-Type: application/json Access-Control-Expose-Headers: retry-after, x-sentry-rate-limits, x-sentry-error Vary: Origin Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2023 14:49:00 GMT Content-Length: 45 Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://www.reddit.com retry-after: 14 x-sentry-rate-limits: 14:default;error;security;attachment:organization:error_usage_exceeded
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...
Reddit has always seemed to have gotten a pass when it comes to being a cesspool of fake accounts, what we would call bots today. I'm really hoping it fails, it's leadership team has always been amongst the worst of the tech companies.
And there are many worse examples of leadership in tech than Reddit. If anything until recently most of its C-suite historically (post founders) has been uninteresting enough to care. No one on the scale of a Gates, Neuman, Ellison, etc.
The recent turdstorm however, does signal a likely lamentable shift downward.
Certainly unethical then and I don't think much has changed as far as ethics goes, now.
But how many many non-cached requests does it take to overwhelm the servers? Obviously scraping my comments page for years-old data is going to hit the backend hard and isn't going to have a traffic pattern at all like the front page of my subscriptions, but I'd assume that they had far more capacity available than would be required to handle that. The number of people currently running a Greasemonkey or Python script against the archive is higher than it's ever been, but it has to be a miniscule, infinitesimal fraction of their normal traffic - right?
𝐅rom my perspective, this is the beginning of the end for Reddit.
𝐔ser hostile interface decisions were just the beginning.
𝐂oncerns of the user base and moderators are now actively being ignored.
𝐊ey admin features used by moderators are going away and with no replacement.
𝐑eddit, like Digg, is now prioritizing profit over community.
𝐄xcessive monetization will continue to dilute userbase goodwill.
𝐃espite what their management says, the advertisers are all they care about.
𝐃estroying any good with with remaining 3rd party devs.
𝐈t's been a long, slow decline.
𝐓he end can't come quickly enough for me.https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/142l1i0/archiv...
https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/142l1i0/archiv...
Not for me.
I would consider it highly improbable that this has not happened before - e.g. r politics
If it’s certain users, they can’t simply cache the private page.
With everyone checking, this would add a lot of overhead. With apps like reddark, and other bots running this would create a lot of load.
There’s also an archive team project running so that’s a LOT of nodes hitting the site.
It's as slow as the Apple news day
to me, this situation highlights how much power mods have over a subreddit. while i recognize their role in maintaining communities without pay, the community exists because of all users that contribute to it. it didn't seem like the communities had much say in the subreddits going offline, which is very concerning.
Took a bit for my profile page to show only the two comments left on unclosed subreddits.
Might be that kind of thing.
based on the images from downdetector, a major IX/BGP-peering site went down.
Thats why you see the upstream up-tick in outage/delay reporting before the site outages.
Som IX went down.
Geographically limited CDN/backbone issue?
100% okay with the other protests but you don't DDoS websites
Not to mention it's illegal in many countries.
Either "You broke reddit" or "Our CDN failed to reach our servers."
You would think that a company trying to have an IPO sometime in the near future would have a better control over basic shit breaking. There's nothing complex about their software and it's been breaking in the same way for years now.
If the collapse of sites like reddit and twitter are what is needed for a return to smaller user-operated and user-owned sites to flourish, then so be it. I won't miss the memes.
This viewpoint is confusing to me. Conceptually, it's no different than email, and we all get by just fine on it
Or investor relations?
Or YCs input tosses, mayhaps? Does PG stay in touch?
block out quick on egress from any to <reddit>
Twitch: https://m.twitch.tv/reddark_247
1. The page loads but no content is shown on either the home page or my profile page.
2. It says I'm not logged in.
3. It has a list of recent subs I've looked at.
I have no idea what their architecture looks like, but I would guess it's statically served javascript that gets all of its data from some web API, and that API is down.
There is lots of stuff from AskReddit and some tech subreddits I'm subscribed to. Gone is all the junk from /r/pics and memes etc.
If my experience is common, this "48 hour blackout" won't have the intended effect.
I’m in it for specialty subs which are all shut down. Hobby and niche interest subs which are the real life blood of the site IMO.
Most people don't care at all about this blackout and are just checking the homepage anyway, which will always pull content no matter what.
Reddit always has issues at this time (NA wakes up, EU gets off of work), nothing unusual.
Anyway for those of us that do login and follow specific topics, I can speak for my own experience, which is that every single subreddit I read was shutdown this morning other than r/worldnews and r/diablo4.
Nobody cares about the 400 subscriber subreddit from some small town in Idaho with 3 people online at any given moment.