Additional edit: Reddit has written an official post stating it was an issue after production code deployment and was reverted
In their mind the issue was not the blocking of users, but that the users have started complaining. I bet they just reverted it so that they can bring it back slowly, after just checking whether it is effective at all
Reddit has so many users now, that they can filter out everyone who is in the very least problematic or not fully profitable, and still sell ads to millions.
The only time they’ll do something that reduces profits is when they’re confident it will mean more profits in the near future (and they can’t figure out a way to have both).
That’s why they were happy to platform mask off neo-nazis, the dangerously stupid and communities dedicated to getting as close to child pornography as possible without technically breaking any laws and why they waited until the last possible moment to pull the plug on them.
That’s when they were in the “growing” phase, they used every tactic in the book, or even slightly off the book, to increase their numbers.
Now they’re in a “distilling” phase, where they can get rid of the unwanted 1% to end up with a 99% pure zombie base whose ad consumption won’t get interrupted by some undesirable critical thinking.
After they enroll enough ad purchasers or “content creators”, they’ll go into a “squeezing” phase, possibly after the IPO, where they will tighten the monetization mechanics in search of a balance between maximizing ad revenue and alienating advertisers… until they overtightened it, and go bust… only for another zombie-targetting platform to take their place.
I mean it literally does. It’s the same reason Twitter hasn’t completely imploded yet, despite Musk doing his best to turn it into a cesspit. People stay on it because it has lots of people and their niche subs, which makes it harder for people to leave and coalesce in new areas and recreate niche subs, which feeds into the cycle
It looks like most of you had difficulty reaching the site for about 5 minutes, but those issues should have subsided.
During that time, you may have been shown an incorrect error message that read:
<span style="color:#323232;">Whoa there, pardner! reddit's awesome and all, but you may have a bit of a problem.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Make sure your User-Agent is not empty, is something unique and descriptive and try again. if you're supplying an alternate User-Agent string, try changing back to default as that can sometimes result in a block.
</span>
To share some additional context on what happened - we pushed a bad code change in our tooling that resulted in a significant amount of users getting blocked without doing anything wrong. So if you happened to see that error message within the last hour, don’t fret! We’ve reverted the code change that caused this error and things should be back to normal very soon if they aren’t already.
It’s not a bug. It’s them running A/B tests to completely block mobile users that aren’t on the app. They’ve been implementing different versions of this for over a year now. They always lie about what it was. Actually they pretty much habitually lie about all of their tests and changes.
I got this bug on desktop, running chrome, with no VPN.
This was, as most things like this are, just a pure dumb fuck-up by some guy putting things on prod without properly testing and staging. No need to put on any more tin foil hats than we already have, the incompetence is plenty reason enough to point and laugh.
If an internet corporation has a history of enshittification, it gets increasingly hard to clock up these kind of things to incompetence. While stupidity can certainly explain some things, it’s usually safe to assume it’s a bit of both
Seriously doubt this is an API issue. The error itself would make it seem like it's a problem with your browser, but unless you have some overzealous privacy extensions installed that are hiding your user agent, it's more likely to be a temporary problem on their side.
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