• Sponholz@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      u/Spez will just put the blame on Christian again (Apollo’s dev).

      But on a little more serious note, I doubt this is on purpose. This would look really bad for the credibility of the platform, there is a LOT of users that just want to keep doomscrolling Reddit and in all honesty don’t give a spez(fuck) about what’s going on with the protests.

      But… if this is on purpose…

      Strange decision to say the least.

      • aaron@lemm.ee
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        This would look really bad for the credibility of the platform

        From what I’ve been following, they haven’t been too concerned about this since at least a few weeks ago

        • andrew@radiation.party
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          1 year ago

          Outright telling active partners that they won’t help them identify inefficient interactions with the first-party API was a great look.

          • aaron@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Yeah - in fairness, they weren’t getting paid to, but there are plenty of examples to pick from.

        • Sponholz@lemmy.world
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          I know and agree with you on that.

          But for the majority of the userbase, one thing is to have some of their favorite subreddits joining a protest, the other is having their whole experience affected.

      • 💡dim@lemmy.world
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        u/Spez will just put the blame on Christian again (Apollo’s dev).

        100%… “malicious code in a 3rd party app led effectively to a DDOS attack on reddit… this is why we must close the API to only allow select approved apps”

    • chekhovsgun@lemmy.world
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      It just makes the blackout look more successful honestly. Pretty dumb of them but they haven’t been making great decisions lately.

      • Scaldart@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I don’t know. My best bet is that it’s a happy coincidence for them. It’s probably just an actual accidental outage, but it can be spun in a few different ways. Given their push for an IPO, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is an excuse for lower traffic numbers. “Hey, look, these guys all went to protest but there was an outage. Nothing correlates the numbers. Now that we’re back up on XYZ date, everything is returning to normal! It was no big deal!”

        If it actually turns out to be something more nefarious, I can’t say I’d be surprised, but I sincerely hope that isn’t the case.

        • sockinacock@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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          Given their push for an IPO, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is an excuse for lower traffic numbers. “Hey, look, these guys all went to protest but there was an outage. Nothing correlates the numbers. Now that we’re back up on XYZ date, everything is returning to normal! It was no big deal!”

          Boy, sure would be nice to live in a world where investors weren’t dumber than flat earthers.

        • Ataraxia@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          I can believe that considering how often they have them. I had subbed to outage emails a while back and days where I don’t get any are rare.

    • Rox@lemmy.world
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      Probably used the lower traffic as an opportunity to perform “maintenance”.

      • bstix@feddit.dk
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        The maintenance in this case is damage control. They spent the time deleting a hell of lot of comments from all over the place.

        They definitely don’t want their investors to know what’s happening.

    • dog@yiffit.net
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      that would be disgusting, but i would not be surprised at this point :/

    • sup
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      Yeah pretty suspicious tbh

    • Ataraxia@sh.itjust.works
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      Oh no! I hope they don’t do this indefinitely! It would totally defeat the purpose of them going dark in the first place… ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

    • sverit@feddit.de
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      Would be the perfect time for critical server updates that require downtime anyway ;)

    • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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      I suspect it’s something related to point in time backups or changes to the api to make it easier to put everything back with new mods.

  • okfuskee@lemmy.world
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    I’ve used rif and old.reddit respectively for so long that I really had no idea how much of a shitshow the ui had turned in too until I checked it out through the official app and new layout style in browser.

    No fucking thank you, take your glitter shit and constant ad pushing and jump off a cliff.

    The first ad that popped was a promoted post for machine gun kelly. I listen to grindcore, crossover, metal, etc… That sealed its fate in my eyes.

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      for years companies have been trying for “targeted ads” but in rare occasions I see ads, they’re terribly off the mark, like you have mentioned

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        Companies have been trying and succeeding with targeted ads*

        There’s a reason a bunch of the biggest tech companies in the world’s main revenue is these ads, they absolutely work unfortunately.

    • 3StacksHS@lemmy.world
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      I actually prefer when the ads are targeted but wrong. It shows me they don’t know me as well as they could. Also if I’m not interested they aren’t distracting

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        I used the official app but I have ADHD, which is basically targeted ad kryptonite. By the time they target something to me, I’ve moved on.

    • cookiecollision@lemmy.world
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      Same here. I’ve been using old.reddit with RES and apollo for so long that I forgot reddit even had ads until I tried the official app.

    • GaryPonderosa@lemmy.world
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      Yeah. I don’t mind ads if I’m getting content for free, but at least know your audience. I feel like especially the hegetsus spam was wildly misplaced on Reddit.

    • 9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works
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      There was some kind of cookie consent popup on old.reddit.com and it said “go to the new reddit to set preferences” or something like that and i clicked it without reading properly and got sent to new reddit.

      What a shit website… I will never use new reddit. Get fucked spez

    • ratboy@lemm.ee
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      Not related at all, but hear me out…lemmy needs a grind/extreme music community

    • static@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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      I don’t even think most of their ads gets interacted often. The small amount of people who are using the official reddit app probably have gotten used to it now so will just wait this blackout out.

      • Devon@lemmy.world
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        I think more people use the official app than you might think. I initially thought everyone was in unanimous outrage, but many just don’t care. I don’t understand how some people know about ad-free third party apps and still use the official one.

        • WalrusByte@lemmy.world
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          I used official app only because I had no idea the other apps existed until this month, lol

        • static@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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          Convenience. For the average user it’s just download from the play store and scroll. I agree that lot of people use the official app but they’re used to the ads from other social media apps too probably.

          • taj@lemmy.world
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            I mean… I downloaded a third party app from the play store. Isn’t that how you got yours too??

            • Carly™@lemmy.world
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              I mean yes, you can get third party apps on the Play Store (I got mine off F-Droid but that’s besides the point), but for most people, if they want to install “Reddit” on their phone, they’re gonna search for “Reddit,” and then when the first thing that pops up is the official app, they’ll install that, and never think twice about it.

              • Liempong_pagong@beehaw.org
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                Well my proposal for lemmy is to have jerboa apply a post signature. Like “posted using Jerboa”

                So that people would start askin and be curious and then become aware that there are other apps to view the site

                • Scaldart@lemmy.world
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                  I can easily see that becoming rather tiresome. Instead, if anything were to be done, what about a custom “flair” of some kind? Maybe a little golden lemming by the “link” buttons that rest above the post?

                  To be honest, though, I’m not sure if it needs it. I like the idea of promoting the app, though!

        • Bodybroker@lemmy.world
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          Because I was already using it since it first came out, and honestly the ads weren’t/aren’t even that big of a deal. I don’t even notice them 90% of the time.

      • capital@lemmy.world
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        Using the official app for a given site/service is usually a good heuristic. Just not in this case, IMO.

        • oskiboi@feddit.de
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          Or we just let all those saying die with reddit, that’s a thought

          • Andreas@feddit.dk
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            The Fediverse is too new and decentralized to have its own sayings, so all we have is the memories of our old home. Besides, these sayings remind us of a better era of Reddit where it was just a bunch of techie weirdos asking each other “when does the narwhal bacon” and trying to bait newbies to click on /r/spacedicks. I still remember my first days on Reddit, when I was grounded from the family computer and stole my dad’s laptop to browse. Someone linked /r/spacedicks and convinced me that it was the NASA memes subreddit. I clicked on it and was waiting for the page to load on the terribly slow wifi when my dad stormed into the room, furious that his laptop was missing, and proceeded to beat the shit out of me with a set of jumper cables. It hurts so much to see the site I grew up with be destroyed by corporate greed like that, but life goes on.

            • oskiboi@feddit.de
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              Gee dude those jumper cables really got me, well played. Yeah, you’re right. I didn’t want to be a downer, if it brings you guys joy then by all means. You know what, my reddit account it 12 years old, I know about r/spacedicks, but I’ve never been nor do I know what content is posted over there. I feel like that’s an achievement by itself.

              It hurts so much to see the site I grew up with be destroyed by corporate greed like that, but life goes on.

              I’m with you homie, but I’m cautiously optimistic that we’re gonna build something cool here.

              • Andreas@feddit.dk
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                I prefer rogersimon10’s gimmick to shittymorph’s, the hell in a cell copypasta got boring because it was just added to the end of random comments. On the other hand, the stories in rogersimon10’s comments were all relevant to the jumper cables so it was more fun to read.

          • jerkface
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            This is basically a wake. Allow us to reminisce.

  • fubo@lemmy.world
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    Some possibilities:

    • Some fool thinks it’s a good idea to DDoS Reddit today to make a point.
    • Some Reddit admin thinks it’s a good idea to take it offline deliberately to make a point.
    • The general public are hugging it to death out of curiosity about the protest.
    • Unrelated outage. Outages happen, sometimes even on the same day as other things.
    • neal@lemmy.world
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      Or they took it offline to “hide” all the blacked out subreddits. Some had images about the third party apps as their only post, which was on the front page. By going offline it makes it seem like more of a technical issue rather than a protest.

    • nodsocket@lemmy.world
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      It’s a false flag operation so reddit admins can claim they were attacked and take legal action against the protesters.

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      I’d guess that with so many top subs going dark, the mixing algorithm needs to dig deeper and it’s not tuned for that. These algorithms are hard to get right at Reddit’s scale.

      As an example to populate the frontpage or /r/all it might would need to scan all posts from the private subs before even getting a sizeable amount of candidate posts from the public ones to rank. Then the public subs won’t be in cache nor will caching help as much on those long tail subreddits. Not being in cache means more hits to the DB and that’s going to affect nearly all requests to Reddit.

    • ericjmorey@lemmy.world
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      It could be that their infrastructure is set up to optimize showing data on the typically most popular subreddits.

  • redimk@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    The Verge article:

    “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.

    So… According to Reddit the blackout is the culprit, I guess?

    So either it’s just an outage and they’re faulting the blackout, or the blackout is actually the culprit. Either way I hope this works. However, I’m still not going back to Reddit even if they fix and reverse everything.

    • Darnov@lemmy.world
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      Do not attribute to malice what can easily be explained by idiocy. It is entirely plausible that their algorithm couldn’t handle the most popular subreddits going dark all at once. They likely hard-relegated so many other subs that would appear on r/popular or r/all to lower priority and thus when the higher priority subs disappeared, it couldn’t change priorities and cause the crash.

    • PrometheusG@lemmy.one
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      I wonder if it’s bots or something trying to access the now dark subreddits. Essentially causing a DDOS.

      • God@sh.itjust.works
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        well if i made a bot, hmm, yeah that could cause it lol. Like if i tell it “go in every 30 minutes & steal the top 20 posts”, and it’s down, i’d just say “retry till u get it, idc if u DoS that shit” and well if many ppl do it, it’s a free DDoS courtesy of robotland

          • God@sh.itjust.works
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            if that’s what’s happening, i feel a sense of fellowship for those ppl who don’t give a shit and will ddos a website just to try and steal some memes, truly conoisseurs of 🅱️est 🅱️ractices 😎

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      When a major sub goes private, that’s an awful lot of posts and comments that they have to hide from the rest of the internet. I’m not surprised there’s some excess load on their systems with lots of them doing it at once.

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      That’s going to be the excuse, huh

      “We have a duty to keep the site running”

      • God@sh.itjust.works
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        and when their plot is discovered

        “some sacrifices must be made, we killed it so we could keep it alive!”

  • Eddie Hitler@lemmy.world
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    I hope the major subs stay dark. The only thing keeping reddit afloat is moderators. Without tools the mods would need full time paid positions which is never going to happen. I’d like to see them all burn. Its become a shit show of adds and bots now anyway. Good riddance. I wish someone would incorporate freenets web of trust system to some type of decentralized app like this.

    • fing3r@lemmy.world
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      Could they not replace the mods? In the end, don’t they own the subreddits? Who owns the intellectual property?

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            Under EU GDPL they would have to erase everything upon request if they don’t want to get fined into oblivion.

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            Good to know. If it comes to that I will. Anyone who spends any amount of time adding to a community though is like killing your own creation. I did this for us.

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          Quality would absolutely drop. Even if whoever replaced the mods was just as enthusiastic, losing that much institutional knowledge/inertia would be devastating for a while.

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          They’d also need to find a ridiculous amount of people (~28,000 mods according to Reddark?). Or have fewer people be insanely overworked, either way you’re right; quality will drop.

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    Maybe they just ran out of money and their hosting provider shut them down? Reddit was so desperate with these API fees