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Yup, this seems super plausible. Even things like the frontpage feed and user comment history probably work on the assumption that most of the data they're pulling is probably visible (which leads to the "just filter it in the backend" approach), but also every external link or bookmark into a now-private sub will trigger the same kind of check.

This is likely shifting load in very unpredictable ways... I'm sure a sibling comment is right that it's probably less load overall in general, but it'll be going down codepaths that aren't normally being exercised by >95% of requests and aren't working on the assumption that virtually all content is being hidden.

There's probably some microservice instances that are currently melting themselves into a puddle until they can deploy additional instances, additional DB shards, or roll out patches to fix dumb shit that wasn't dumb until the usage assumptions were suddenly inverted. Meanwhile there's tons of other instances that are probably sitting idle.




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