#reddit is foundering today.
I'll be interested to find out (if I ever do) why the Reddit Strike appears correlated with general service degradation. My guess is that either trying to access a private subreddit is actually an expensive query and Reddit never realized that because they never had to test that interaction at scale, or tens of thousands of bots that treat Reddit as infrastructure and auto-archive or copy the most popular subreddits are now finding their access cut and their recovery protocol is busted, and Reddit never had to test denying access to so many bots (probably not using the API, probably scraping the page and faking being real users) at scale before.
@TheFerridge This is all pure speculation on my part. Though the bots explanation would be the funniest one because this whole fight started over Reddit changing their API TOS, which is the sort of thing you can sidestep by just not playing ball at all and doctoring up a bot user-agent to look human.
(Older companies either have nothing publicly available without credentials if it’s supposed to be API accessible, or they’ve accepted that the reason you have an API is to incentivize people playing by your rules… Which is to say, the API is a tool for the user, not the company. Reddit seems to have missed the memo in their recent changes).
@mtomczak
I understand, but the mere fact that this seems rather likely is... kinda hilarious