Reddit suffers a major outage after thousands of subreddits temporarily shut down - The company blamed the protest for causing issues across its website and mobile apps.

submitted by neolib from (engadget.com)

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]bananahammock 6 insightful - 2 fun6 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

I doubt there will be much of a dent in their 430 million active monthly user base, most of whom may not know much about the purpose of the strike. But this is a very interesting time for Reddit that - ideally - should cost them users and - ideally - get them to think much more about how they've fucked up with the layoffs, other restrictions and incredibly greedy API pricing ("Imgur charges him $166 for 50 million calls compared to Reddit's now-$12,000"). Traffic disruption was likely bot-related, for reasons noted below, where there are much better explanations of why the strike has been necesary:

https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_the_community_about_changes_to_our_api

[–]magnora7 16 insightful - 2 fun16 insightful - 1 fun17 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

Minus the bots and shills, I really wonder how many human beings are active on that website every month. I bet it's 1/10th of their stated number, they're trying to drive up valuations and metrics with bot activity, and reddit has done this from day 1 when they made tons of fake accounts to make reddit look popular, until it actually was. Saidit never did that. So reddit has a long long history of fluffing itself up to make it look like more than it is.

But overall I agree with the strike. I just think that a strike shouldn't have a fixed ending date, or they'll just wait it out and go back to normal. Also this should've happened years ago, there was just never enough of a unifying event until this API fiasco.

[–][deleted]  (1 child)

[deleted]

    [–]magnora7 7 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

    Agreed, although I'm not even sure what a decent compromise would honestly look like in practice. Just a complete walkback of everything they stated in the last few months? Even then, the problem still persists that made them try it in the first place, the motivations and people that caused it are not changed at all. Leaving reddit and planting roots on other forums is the only true way forward, imo. The huge power reddit has over the information flow of the current internet is insane, and that is the actual root problem underneath all the other problems. It's too centralized, and the power is being abused. Instead there needs to be many more forums that are all frequently used. Putting all our eggs in one basket was never a good idea.

    I have to say the current strike method has succeeded in generating quite a bit of conversation though, which is good.