Reddit has stopped working for millions of users around the world.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/reddit-down-subreddits-protest-not-working-b2356013.html
The mass outage comes amid a major boycott from thousands of the site’s administrators, who are protessting new changes to the platform.
On 12 June, popular sub-Reddits like r/videos and r/bestof went dark in retaliation to proposed API (Application Programming Interface) charges for third-party app developers.
Among the apps impacted by the new pricing is popular iOS app Apollo, which announced last week that it was unable to afford the new costs and would be shutting down.
Apollo CEO Christian Selig claimed that Reddit would charge up to $20 million per year in order to operate, prompting the mass protest from Reddit communities.
In a Q&A session on Reddit on Friday, the site’s CEO Steve Huffman defended the new pricing.
“Some apps such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync have decided this pricing doesn’t work for their businesses and will close before pricing goes into effect,” said Mr Huffman, who goes by the Reddit username u/spez.
“For the other apps, we will continue talking. We acknowledge that the timeline we gave was tight; we are happy to engage with folks who want to work with us.”
In response to the latest outage, one Reddit user wrote on Twitter: “Spez, YOU broke Reddit.”
Website health monitor DownDetector registered more than 7,000 outage reports for Reddit on Monday.
Some users were greeted with the message: “Something went wrong. Just don’t panic.”
Others received an error warning that stated: “Our CDN [content delivery network] was unable to reach our servers.”
Update: Seems to be resolved for most users
Well first off, I like to write essays too, and I really have been enjoying the fact people here are way more willing to engage in longer posts.
I think you’re into something with how humans empathize (kind of interesting to me my first response when someone tells me about an conflict is to try to reconstruct the other person’s perspective). I think there’s definitely a lot to the way people think less critically the more emotional they get
But to round it all off, smaller communities help, but really it’s a matter of self-reinforcing social structures and the ways that social network mechanisms interact with them.
Outrage is the strongest driver for participation - so posts that incite the most outrage will get far more votes and replies in either direction. The outraged position will be far more likely to vote, while people who don’t feel as strongly are less likely to do so to the same extent. That skews the metrics most algorithms use to rank them, and so they get more visibility.
As this goes on, the group will shift - the outraged people only need to be a fraction of the group to seem like they’re the majority, and people put off by it are more than likely going to leave what looks like a total echo chamber (especially if people get nasty or personal)
The outraged group also starts to feel like their position is actually the average of the group (e.g. the silent majority), and they might shift even further, becoming more extreme - as people’s beliefs are relative to their perception of social norms.
This cycle repeats until it becomes so polarized a moderate opinion is seen as extreme, and might be attacked.
It’s a difficult problem to solve - the only easy metrics are going to be votes, comments, and maybe if people stay or leave after viewing. There’s more complex systems that might work - such as using ai to score additional metrics based on content, or (an idea bouncing around in the back of my head for a while) by profiling the users to try to boost consensus opinions to compete with “outrageous” ones. Obviously, this is way more computationally expensive and requires complex code that few will be in a position to understand (even if it were open source). These strategies could also be used to drive engagement or ad conversation at the expense of mental health (something that seems to be at least explored by some social media companies)
But small groups help in a very simple way -only so much media fits on a page. Even if the top comments are pure outrage porn, the other voices won’t be buried
The other solution is moderation (it’s in the name) - effective moderation of the tone and “rules of engagement” can tamp things down. But people generally don’t like to be censored, and it doesn’t scale - moderators are individuals, and too much to go through or dividing it up between larger groups of mods strips the nuance out of the process
Thanks for your response. I read it right away, but wanted to take time to reply properly.
You raise and expand on a couple really good (and important) points, that I think lead us down to an unfortunate ultimate conclusion. One that federation might survive, but that no monolithic platform possibly can.
It seems the best way to retain a community’s identity, constructiveness, and good faith is to keep is small and human-curated. Perhaps the ONLY way.
Which is understandable, but… also a real shame. It implies enshittification is actually inevitable - not just on the corporate side, but on the consumption side, too. One any collective becomes large enough that it reaches critical mass, their nuances and perspectives diffuse into a monolithic mob.
Things like voting systems, moderation guidelines etc… they’re really only capable of slowing down the inevitable. The system works in its infancy when ideas and populations are dispersed, but as time passes and they slowly collect into fewer and fewer key groups, they homogenise and radicalise, or split into individualised interest groups and echo chambers.
I see analogies for that in humans in general - in money and capital, in subcultures and conspiracies, in religions and spiritualities…
Humans haven’t been developed to live in networked communities this large. We’re not capable of comprehending populations this massive, we’re naturally-inclined to divide and sub-divide people into smaller and smaller categories so that we can label groups as Other according to their simplified descriptions.
In the case of Reddit, it means that like all social media platforms before it, and likely all platforms after… this is just part of its life cycle. It’s dramatic, but it is the nature of any sufficiently-large social platform to grow, lose quality as it gains quantity, reach critical mass… then rupture and slowly drain away its foul contents like a cyst.
Like a cyst, some platforms may drain on their own (MySpace), some never get large enough to and slowly disappear (Bebo), and some are lanced by their owners (Twitter). Some remain a foul abscess, on the precipice (Facebook).
Reddit may have been lanced, but its rot was inevitable, because it seems it is the amassing of people to the point of homogeneity that ultimately erodes the value of a platform. Whether it is lanced or dies a slow death is irrelevant; all is cyclical. We migrate, and migrate, and migrate; again and again we repeat ourselves.
What does that mean for kbin or Lemmy? It depends. If we recreate the monoliths by flocking to the largest instances - which we currently are, in kbin.social and lemmy.ml or beehaw.org - those larger instances will fester one day, too. The largest communities continue to draw yet more and more users, because we want to be around each other.
But there can at least be smaller ones, and we can use those smaller ones to see the largest ones. Smaller federated instances have the opportunity to remain small. A single federated server can fester, too. But the concept of federation itself at least will not. Users can live in their smaller communities, slowly secede from larger ones as they visibly evolve in ways that contrast their own home communities.
In this way, federated social communities may do either of the following: