4 ms·

Reddit Experiencing Elevated Error Rates

51 points by rlyshw 8y ago

Retroity 8y ago
This outage lasted quite long. I hope we get a postmortem from Reddit as to why the site went down.
- rlyshw 8y ago
  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
jumpman500 8y ago
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.
- overcast 8y ago
  I cut the cord to Reddit a bit over a year ago. I promise, the feeling of missing something subsides quickly.
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  It's especially amusing that they call the "ad blocker" a "software blocker" on their fail screen -- even though you can clearly see from the adblocker logs that the only software being blocked is ads. You're right, though. This might finally be enough to break me free of that particular Skinner box.
- cheeze 8y ago
  The redesign is terrible. Saddens me.
- Razengan 8y ago
  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+comments https://www.google.com/search?q=Reddit+admin+editing+comment... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/7l2ank/rip_good_old_apollo_icon/ https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/7l2ank/rip_good_... [2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/reddit-ceo-tells-user-we-are-not-the-thought-police-then-suspends-that-user/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/reddi...
  - leereeves 8y ago
    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.
    - smittywerben 8y ago
      Fine I'll delete my poor attempt at humor. To respond seriously, I don't see the point in competing against Reddit for Redditors. What are you trying to achieve?
    - Razengan 8y ago
      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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Also experiencing high censorship rates since last election
  - amaccuish 8y ago
    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
FLUX-YOU 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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.
smittywerben 8y ago
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 8y ago
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.

51 points by rlyshw 8y ago

Retroity 8y ago

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

rlyshw 8y ago
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

jumpman500 8y ago

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.

overcast 8y ago
I cut the cord to Reddit a bit over a year ago. I promise, the feeling of missing something subsides quickly.
jjoonathan 8y ago
It's especially amusing that they call the "ad blocker" a "software blocker" on their fail screen -- even though you can clearly see from the adblocker logs that the only software being blocked is ads. You're right, though. This might finally be enough to break me free of that particular Skinner box.
cheeze 8y ago
The redesign is terrible. Saddens me.
Razengan 8y ago
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+comments https://www.google.com/search?q=Reddit+admin+editing+comment... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/7l2ank/rip_good_old_apollo_icon/ https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/7l2ank/rip_good_... [2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/reddit-ceo-tells-user-we-are-not-the-thought-police-then-suspends-that-user/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/reddi...
- leereeves 8y ago
  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.
  - smittywerben 8y ago
    Fine I'll delete my poor attempt at humor. To respond seriously, I don't see the point in competing against Reddit for Redditors. What are you trying to achieve?
  - Razengan 8y ago
    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 8y ago

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 8y ago
Also experiencing high censorship rates since last election
- amaccuish 8y ago
  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

FLUX-YOU 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.

smittywerben 8y ago

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 8y ago

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.