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.
I closed my 500k member subreddit yesterday!
It feels sad, but it needs to happen. We’ve moved here to Kbin - @Disneyland - and I linked it in the “we’re going private” message.
Hopefully we get people to come over. We have half the original mod team and I’m still trying to convince the other half to join up before Kbin closes registration (I’m not sure if you can mod across instances).
Is closing different than setting to private? I had seen some comments suggesting that some mods should delete their subs altogether. Just curious if there are some options that are more nuclear than others
There are 4 options:
-
Public. This is how most subs operate. Everyone can post and comment.
-
Restricted. This disallows posts. You can set it to “restrict posts only”, “restrict comments only”, or “restrict both”. Mods and “approved users” can still post as normal. /r/polandball used this to make sure that only good content from known people got submitted.
-
Private. This turns off the subreddit entirely - the only people who can see it are mods and the aforementioned approved users, while everyone else just sees the subreddit description. An example of this is /r/centuryclub, which only approves uses with over 100k karma.
-
Gold-only. You need to set this at subreddit creation (it can’t be changed later). This restricts the sub to only be visible to people who have Reddit Gold.
Most subs who are “going dark” are setting their stuff to “private” and then changing the subreddit description to say something about the blackout, because that’s all that users can see.
On Old Reddit, you can see the full message. On New Reddit, you see the first 20ish characters. On the official app, you don’t see a message about why a subreddit is private at all.
