
Reddit Experiencing Elevated Error Rates - rlyshw
https://reddit.statuspage.io/incidents/3rfmfn4vxxrr
======
jumpman500
Reddit has been so much slower since the update. Breaks all the time if you
have ad blocker. I'm almost thankful for it though. I've been wanting to kill
my reddit addiction for a while and this clunky redesign has made me only use
mobile clients.

~~~
Razengan
Reddit's nagging has been very user-hostile for a while now, especially on
mobile.

Dark patterns like the big red button saying "CONTINUE" that opens the App
Store, instead of letting you continue on the website.

The "redesign" is a buggy waste of screen space which loads noticeably slower
and also, I think, prevents subreddits from having rich sidebars or custom
themes, hindering the original promise of serving unique sub-communities.

I always use "old.reddit.com" to force the "classic" site but it still keeps
jumping back to the redesign in some places like certain user profiles.

This frontend assault combined with the deplorable meatspace behavior like the
Reddit admin(s) secretly editing user comments [0], threatening better apps
for "stealing" their icon [1], among other scumminess [2], I think it's nigh
approaching its Digg Moment.

[0]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=Reddit+admin+editing+comment...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Reddit+admin+editing+comments)

[1]
[https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/7l2ank/rip_good_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/7l2ank/rip_good_old_apollo_icon/)

[2] [https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2018/07/reddi...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2018/07/reddit-ceo-tells-user-we-are-not-the-thought-police-then-
suspends-that-user/)

~~~
leereeves
Where could reddit's userbase go? The only other site like it that anyone has
heard of is Voat, and reddit's userbase would never go there.

~~~
Razengan
A true successor is the only element missing to fulfill the prophecy. The
requirements of shooting themselves in the feet and alienating a portion of
their userbase have already been met.

HN is already a much better place for certain topics, for example, but we need
a more general platform.

------
deadalus
Hey there! Sorry for the trouble. We're experiencing some elevated error rates
at the moment that our infra team is working on at the moment.

\- /u/sodypop (Reddit Admin)

[https://redd.it/98yi74](https://redd.it/98yi74)

~~~
auser24
Also experiencing high censorship rates since last election

~~~
amaccuish
Try voat.co or gab.ai, there's some really lovely misunderstood people over
there who have been poor victims of Reddit's "censorship" /s

------
Retroity
This outage lasted quite long. I hope we get a postmortem from Reddit as to
why the site went down.

~~~
rlyshw
It seems to be back up now. There was an outage a few days ago as well.
[https://reddit.statuspage.io/incidents/ysbr3dq5rgh4](https://reddit.statuspage.io/incidents/ysbr3dq5rgh4)

There was no follow up from that Aug 15th outage, at-least as far as I can see
via their social-media accounts.
[https://twitter.com/redditstatus](https://twitter.com/redditstatus)

------
FLUX-YOU
I don't mean to rag on reddit specifically, but it seems like another example
of traffic light statuses being useless. Github had similar examples. I don't
get why anyone uses them.

~~~
rlyshw
Maybe I don't necessarily understand what you mean by "traffic light statuses"
but I feel like the red=down; yellow=issues; green=all-good; indicators are
pretty effective at quickly and concisely communicating the status of a
service to the general public.

I don't see that as useless? Unless you are talking about such a system for
the internal infra team. I doubt that they are looking at this public-facing
"traffic light status" page, however.

~~~
FLUX-YOU
Traffic light model means using red/yellow/green.

The problem I see with a lot of sites is that there is plainly a problem, but
the status is still green. I was checking reddit's status page and Aug 20th
was green throughout the entire downtime and still is. The amount of times
I've seen it be inaccurate makes me think it is not a good model.

I would much rather have a graph of requests served and other metrics (which
reddit has). You can very clearly see a dive on the graphs and know something
is wrong.

This is what I'm referring to:
[https://i.imgur.com/UAtFnfI.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/UAtFnfI.jpg)

~~~
regecks
Inaccurate status pages are fatiguing. Why are they not automated? It's such a
drag to have to use Twitter and IRC to bully their CSRs into actually
acknowledging problems.

The cynic in me says that these companies want to get away with not making any
public statement about having an outage unless they absolutely have to. That's
certainly the way it was when I worked in web hosting, the bosses would take
every opportunity to avoid reporting incidents if nobody complained.

We've all seen the infamous AWS "all agreen" status page while an entire
region is melting. Stripe have been slow on acknowledging their API being
broken and then later deleted their eventual Tweets admitting a problem. I've
sat in the Linode IRC channel with staff members acknowledging outages for the
better part of an hour without Twitter or the status sites updated.

What's going on? Your engineers shouldn't have the status site and remediation
competing for their time and attention. Either hook the status site up to
Prometheus/Pingdom and deal with the occasional false positive, or sort your
customer communication out.

Infuriating as a user and customer. Makes me really appreciate companies like
OVH which have comprehensive public smokeping metrics in every region from
many ASes.

~~~
forgottenpass
There's this short paper called "How Complex Systems Fail" [1] and one of the
points is that "Complex systems run in degraded mode." Basically it means that
everything is always partially on-fire at any give time.

But keeping a "everything's OK" flag flying is a big part of a marketing
image. I hate this too, but I get why they do it. A status page that shows
things are constantly 1-10% broken doesn't inspire confidence.

For example the AWS "all green" event you mention, misleading public-facing
information is the bread and butter of the seemingly never-ending line of
people that want to browbeat me about switching to $cloud_service_x. I'm not
saying AWS isn't great, nor making a point specifically about AWS, but how do
you convince people that they're a better cost:value ratio than having a good
ops team that keeps our internal-facing services redundant across the
basements of the three buildings closest to me? By pretending like the fires
don't happen and hiding the ops cost behind ridiculous hourly hardware rates.

[1]
[http://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/random/How%20Complex%20Sys...](http://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/random/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fail.pdf)

------
smittywerben
My mom browses Reddit now. Luckily I made her use adblock.

The CEO actively instigates political campaigns and stirs up drama on Reddit
just like every news site does. I hate politics; I don't work for free.

Besides, I learn more from one comment here than thousands on Reddit. Most of
it is memes and meta-jokes, there's little information anymore. It's the
antithesis of efficiency, times change.

------
Fjolsvith
Still having outages. Also sucks that when it gives you the fail page, it
blames you, instead of them taking ownership for their lousy site.

