[Gazoo101]

I agree in general with most of his position.

One statement that fell outside of my agreement was him balking at how people leaving Reddit could cause it to crash. Fewer people should mean less load :O

That position reminds of me of the Simpsons episode where Homer runs for mayor. At a debate, Homer's opponent shows up late because someone cut his car's break lines, and Homer goes - "Well then you should have been here early!"

Any sufficiently large irregular site activity will cause issues. The people who are 'leaving' aren't being inactive. They're either disabling accounts, or disabling sub-reddits, all of which causes activity on the servers. It's absolutely to be expected that outages occur.

[369548684892826]

For example, to make some numbers up, if only the top 10 posts in each subreddit are cached, in normal circumstances the Popular page can be constructed from cache. If the number of open subreddits reduces by 95% then suddenly a request for Popular might be hitting the database a lot more.

Whatever happened is going to be more complicated than that, but I can believe people leaving, and subreddits going dark, could cause a crash.

[Nathan2055]

Pretty much a week after starting any web development job, you discover that 95% of making a site fast is simply reducing the number of times it has to call the database.

Typically, this means caching everything as much as you possibly can.

This is the same reason why Wikipedia can’t just roll out a cookie-based “revert to old look” option for logged out users. It would require caching every page twice since you’d need a file prepared for both skins. The reason they can have skins for logged in users is because they already bypass the cache for logged in users (to allow for individual user scripts and stylesheets to be run, among other things). Even then, things like article text and category lists are still stored in various database caches, hence why there’s a “Purge cache” option available to logged in users.

[hnick]

I can't remember the last time I deleted an account. I only do it for legal reasons. I would probably just visit Reddit less and less, until one day it's for the last time, and I never go back - not even to delete it, because it's just not occupying my thoughts anymore.

Maybe if I wanted to send a message by deleting? But I think most people would just trail off and move on.

[mcmoor]

I'm actually not that comfortable with the idea of deleting my account. Deleting part of my history especially if i don't really have a convenient way to archive (and see) it isn't something I like. I even still have my Facebook account!

[hnick]

Yeah - it's like getting rid of old photos I know I'll never look at. Just can't.

And the more helpful comments might help someone one day.

[JustBreath]

A theory I read that makes sense is their code/services for handling private/closed subreddit post fetching wasn't very well optimized and so when a record number of subreddits went dark suddenly that portion of their service was overloaded.

That or some other black swan shift in user behavior makes the most sense why it would paradoxically crash during a boycott.

[taskforcegemini]

did he mean crash in a technical sense, or crash as in implode: people are leaving because people are leaving, a situation of mass behaviour that nobody can really control

[JustBreath]

He meant it literally, Reddit had quite a bit of downtime/issues when the boycott started.