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Biden-Trump debate breaks parts of Reddit, it seems

33 points by hax0ron3 ↗ HN
The debate megathreads on r/politics, r/moderatepolitics, r/politicaldiscussion, and I'm pretty sure also r/neoliberal and r/conservative stopped working about 30 minutes before the end of the debate.

Currently on all major political subreddits one can see threads that show a count of hundreds of post-debate comments, but no comments are visible if one tries to actually look at them. I don't know if one can access them through the API.

Not sure if this is a code issue or deliberate censorship due to Biden's performance. Occam's razor says a code issue.

33 comments

[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 78.1 ms ] thread
viridian
It isn't just those subreddits, comments are broken all over. New threads currently are showing comments as a part of the topic API, but the actual threads then return 0 comments. I do think the influx of traffic is probably responsible though.

I'd love to know what actually happened in detail behind the scenes.

BadHumans
The idea that this is censorship is laughable. Reddit fails whenever the wind blows too hard. It isn't too much of a stretch to think one of the most anticipated presidential debates collapsed Reddit.
richrichie
Reddit is like Heathrow airport. Half an inch of snow shuts down the runways at Heathrow.
miles
There does not seem to be widespread censorship happening among Biden-friendly news outlets:

Congress' Democrats in "state of shock" over Biden debate performance https://www.axios.com/2024/06/28/house-democrats-biden-debat...

It’s time: The Democrats must replace Joe Biden with California Gov. Gavin Newsom https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/article289600484.html

Ditch Biden. That Debate Performance Was a Disaster. https://newrepublic.com/article/183242/joe-biden-debate-perf...

Democrats consider the unthinkable: It’s time for Biden to go https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/27/biden-democrats-rep...

Who Won the Debate? Biden Stumbles Left Trump on Top https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/27/us/politics/biden-trump-d...

The NYT piece includes these quotes from Biden allies as well:

Kate Bedingfield (Mr. Biden’s former White House communications director):

“It was a really disappointing debate performance from Joe Biden. I don’t think there’s any other way to slice it. His biggest issue was to prove to the American people that he had the energy, the stamina — and he didn’t do that.”

Andrew Yang:

“Look, I debated Joe 7 times in 2020. He’s a different guy in 2024.”

Steve Schmidt (co-founder of the Lincoln Project):

“Joe Biden lost the country tonight, and will not get it back. If Trump is a threat and democracy is on the line, then Biden must step aside. His duty, oath and legacy require an act of humility and selflessness.”

hax0ron3
That is a good point. And yeah, I agree with you. I think the chance of it being censorship is like 1-2%, chance of pure technical failure more like 98%-99%. I should have made that more clear in my OP.

Even if the Reddit admins were inclined to do censorship, it would probably be pretty risky, because of the risk of exposure, to actually do it.

richrichie
This is probably a planned 'coup' to replace him at the convention. DNC candidates have been selected by rich business interests since Obama.
beej71
What did they run him in the first place if they were just going to replace him?
hello_computer
Any large organization can have factions, disagreements, struggles. Most do.
beej71
Ok, but is there any hard evidence that's what's happening here? I could see the party changing their collective mind, but that's not been done kind of plan from what I've seen.
matrix87
I have no idea why these publications are attacking him so viciously, like yeah he stumbled at the beginning but it wasn't that bad

It makes me think that they all collectively decided beforehand to shit on Biden right after the debate, which could play out horribly if he doesn't retire or kick the bucket

rvz
It was crystal clear that what happened in the last few hours showed to the whole world that there was no debate and no contest.

Biden did not take any cognitive tests before the show, and his incompetence was on full display on national television.

There is no mixer that can spin this catastrophe into anything positive for Biden.

He must do the right thing and admit he is not fit for another 4 years and resign after that disaster.

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[dead] jauntywundrkind
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rvz
> The fact checking here shows what absolute insanity & madness was spun forth, with no basis in fact.

We already know politicians lie these days. You can't still be surprised about that. To expect any politician to tell the truth is setting yourself up for great disappointment.

However, one of them did so badly in the debate that their own party is panicking and calling for a replacement and for them to withdraw their nomination all together.

> Biden actually answered the questions. He actually had real things to say & said them.

He "actually" struggled to put a coherent sentence together for anyone to understand his answer to the question.

If he did so well, why are the democrats holding immediate talks to replace him after that disastrous show? Confidence has been already lost and not even the media are attempting to spin any positive light on Biden.

At this point, he lost the nomination on national television and no media spin can undo that.

AnimalMuppet
> We already know politicians lie these days. You can't still be surprised about that. To expect any politician to tell the truth is setting yourself up for great disappointment.

Politicians lie. Trump lies far more than normal. Yeah, other politicians lie too, but this is not normal.

mandmandam
That argument might have more effect if we hadn't just seen Biden and his officials attempt to gaslight the planet over mass murder and ethnic cleansing.

For just one example of many, Biden claiming to have seen pictures of beheaded babies (!) before sending over bombs that actually beheaded real babies, as seen by millions on their Instagram feeds.

For another, smearing peaceful and decent and good protesters at colleges across the country as pro-terrorism, even as we see Zionist gangs actually being violent at those protests. A truly terrifying thing to say give our laws around that topic.

The latest one was when he tweeted angrily about protests in front ofa synagogue (without even mentioning the rather vital context that they were auctioning occupied land inside).

Lying about fucking a porn star just pales in comparison to that.

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Zren
Not sure if this timestamp is when the topic was locked or when reddit broke. The thread has 56015 comments.

https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1dq5s2f/discussio...

Edit: New comments seem to be slowly appearing.

2024-06-28T02:26:10+00:00 = 22:26 EST (First loaded around 23hXX EST)

2024-06-28T02:35:37+00:00 = 22:35 EST (Loaded at 00h09 EST)

2024-06-28T02:35:41+00:00 = 22:35 EST (Loaded at 00h19 EST)

2024-06-28T02:41:17+00:00 = 22:41 EST (Loaded at 00h19 EST) This might have been when the topic was locked since there's a mod comment at the top now.

However it seems the "all comments" still shows the last few comments in a subreddit (without the context).

https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/

https://old.reddit.com/r/all/comments/

cryptoz
Mods of big subreddits usually break out threads into < 10,000 comments to avoid issues. /r/politics does this all the time. Not a clue why they didn't do it this time.
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hello_computer
after spezgate and maxwellhill, occams razor says reddit is capable of anything
Zren
https://www.redditstatus.com/

> Comment tree processing is delayed

* 21:31 PDT Update - A large spike in traffic caused some scaling issues, which delayed new comment display across the site. All comments posted during this time will be displayed as the servers work through the backlog.

* 21:08 PDT Update - We are continuing to work on addressing the issues causing comments to be delayed.

* 20:26 PDT Identified - We've identified the underlying problems and are working on addressing them.

* 19:17 PDT Investigating - We are aware that newly posted comments are not showing up immediately in comment trees. We are currently investigating this issue.

This makes sense why https://old.reddit.com/r/all/comments/ works but the nested comments in threads don't.

ggregoire
I read this comment on one of the threads on reddit:

> It broke because of /r/politics. When a discussion thread gets meaningfully past 30,000 comments, it starts to lag subsequent submissions to that thread, and then lag the entire site, until there's eventually a full chokeoff. The debate thread ballooned to an insane number of 56k before mods locked it, at which point the comments in there were 25 minutes behind realtime.

> Had the /r/politics mods locked the first thread and started a new one properly, it wouldn't have caused a sitewide issue. But this has been a problem since forever. It just rarely happens because there are rarely scenarios where enough people are commenting on a single specific thread so as to cause the cascade failure.

AnimalMuppet
Hmm. Speculating, but that sounds like there's something O(n^2) in there...
gandutraveler
Why can't reddit automatically create a new thread after x comments.
krapp
IDK but the likelihood of threads getting that big is probably so low that it isn't worth the effort, when it'll all blow over in a few days.
mandmandam
The likelihood of a thread that big being about something quite important is also very high though.
admissionsguy
That's what happens when you (don't) fire 80% of your employees.
gx7
Why does it matter? Beyond a point everyone is repeating what someone else has already said. Scale is highly over rated and over valued.
viridian
I agree with you in this instance, but I think it's contextual. Cheap scale is great. Scaling for black swans is generally inadvisable unless it's a critical event in severity as well.

I work at a university, we need to scale up our messaging very fast specifically for shooting alerts. Given that our N of mass shootings is > 0, doing otherwise is not acceptable.

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hello_computer 

  Oops they flagged it again.
  I think that they're mad.
  "He wasn't that lame!"
  Oh baby, baby

  Oops, you think it's a hug
  server 503 bug
  "They're not that competent!"