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Comment by nullityrofl | Hacker News Reader

You can't be using Reddit very often if you think these are a relic from 10+ years ago. I would say I experience a Reddit outage at least weekly. My friends and I have a running joke about how often it's down.

The official Reddit Status Twitter account proves that it happens very, very regularly: https://twitter.com/redditstatus

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To be clear: You mean you have timeouts and failures using Reddit's own "new and improved" web UI and mobile client? Because using RedReader, old.reddit.com, and other third-party apps, I don't actually recall the last time Reddit didn't load for me.

No, I only ever use old.reddit and BaconReader. I've never used the new UI or the official app.

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.)

Little late, but I think I see how we have such different experiences. Assuming other comments are right, and Reddit's pulling pretty much entirely from cache, you probably just scroll longer than I do - long enough to run out of the first ~1000 (cached) posts, and hit uncached items.

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.

Cache is probably a good guess. I don't do infinite scrolls but I do use Reddit mostly for hobby subreddits which aren't as popular and less likely to be in cache.

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.

Well, BaconReader is likely dead at the end of the month with their API changes (along with Apollo, Sync, Reddit Is Fun, etc.)

E.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditEng/comments/11xx5o0/you_brok...

I use reddit daily, am constantly refreshing certain subreddits. Fwiw I use new reddit but I have all fancy settings disabled so it looks and works like old.reddit. I also use the iOS app daily. I’m also on the US West coast fwiw. And no reddit premium or anything like that. I literally never have outages or “You broke reddit” or stuff like that.

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.

Yeah, I'm also US West Coast and I only ever use old.reddit or BaconReader. The Reddit Status Twitter and number of people responding to you confirm this isn't an isolated incident, though.

Your reddit status link is showing outages about twice monthly fwiw.

But yeah clearly others have a different experience with this. I wonder why.

Semi-frequently, I see outages that go unreported on the status page. They used to have error rate and backlog depth graphs on their status page too so it was obvious (in a good, transparent way) when they were having issues even if a human hadn't (yet) updated the status page, but those graphs were removed.

Sure, twice monthly is a lot more than "not for 10+ years"!.

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.

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