Reddit blaming website crashing on subreddits going private

w2tpmf@kbin.social to Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 5 points – Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout
theverge.com

Reddit went through some issues for many on Monday, with the outage happening the same day as thousands of subreddits going dark to protest the site’s new API pricing terms.

According to Reddit, the blackout was responsible for the problems. “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. The company said the outage was fully resolved at 1:28PM ET.

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To add a bit more context, this comment is from a former Reddit dev, who is now the creator and developer of Tildes, one of the Reddit alternatives that's been gaining traction in the last week:

(I used to work as a backend developer at Reddit - I left 6 years ago but I doubt the way things work has changed much)

I think it's extremely unlikely that this is deliberate. The way that Reddit builds "mixed" subreddit listings (where you see posts from multiple subreddits, like users' front pages) is inefficient and strange, and relies heavily on multiple layers of caches. Having so many subreddits private with their posts inaccessible has never happened before, and is probably causing a bunch of issues with this process.

Inefficiency in programming?! How where did I hear that before...

My initial response was "probably everywhere, duh". But then I remembered that Reddit tried to throw Apollo under the bus, claiming that their API usage was only high because of inefficient code.

As I recall, Apollo (Christian S.) responded by open-sourcing their backend. Maybe Reddit should do the same?

Christian also pointed out that Reddit's own app is equally inefficient, using the same number of API calls as Apollo when browsing the same subreddits.