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Comment by hanspragt | Hacker News Reader

The worst one to me is:

"You broke Reddit!"

Like it is my fault the site has gone down.

I helped build that. You basically get that error when you get past all the exception handling in the code. There is one layer after that where you just see in plain text "Something went wrong", which is truly the bottom of the stack.

When we added it 16 years ago, people thought it was cute and funny. In fact, people loved it so much we sold t-shirts that said "I broke reddit" with one of the injured Snoos, and they sold out super quickly. This was probably due to the fact that the majority of users were engineers, many of whom also ran user facing sites, so they could empathize.

Maybe these days it makes less sense since the user base is so broad. But I'm not involved anymore and honestly it's sort of part of the brand now.

Oh I agree, this totally would be on point for Reddit at the time. However, not only did the user-base change, Reddit did as well; Between the ads, awards, and NFTs... errr... avatars, I feel that Reddit is now a lot better off financially than it was back then (I could be totally off-base here) and so the expectation is that it should now no longer be in a situation where my specific visit to the site took down the one MySQL box in the storage closet.

I hate cutesy messages, but this one never bothered me.

Reddit is a fun site, and can have a fun error message.

This annoys me also (and the "you broke reddit" happens at least weekly).

What makes it worse are the disturbing images of their mascot that accompany the error:

https://i.imgur.com/StfeP5j.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/wUbjgDT.png

Out of curiosity, in what ways do you find those images disturbing?

But that is not completely incorrect, because sometimes the excess of users can an big part of the cause why the request failed, and you are an user, so...

Still not the user's fault. The user is trying to use the site; they didn't do anything wrong. The ones who broke reddit, in the sense of having failed to do their job in a way that resulted in breakage, is the backend reddit staff who didn't make a robust product or failed to scale properly.

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