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Reddit CEO admits to altering user comments that were critical of him
- JorgeGT 10y agoAnd without an "edited" mark, which means that any comment of any user can be covertly modified by an admin. Very concerning since Reddit comments have provoked even Congress hearings: http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/296680-house-panel-probes-web-rumor-on-clinton-emails http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/296680-house-pan...
- wvenable 10y agoThe fact is anything digital can be modified this way; it's probably good that it happens and there are public examples so people learn not to trust it.
- ErikAugust 10y agoWould be good to have some distributed model (like Bitcoin, etc.) for message platforms like Reddit?
- arcticfox 10y agoI feel like Telegram will release something like this at some point...at least I'm hoping so!
- Natanael_L 10y agoMatrix.org will probably get there first
- reddytowns 10y agoTake a look at steem.io if you are interested in such a thing. As a disclaimer, I would not recommend investing much money in it.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoYeah. That would be great. I'd go so far as to say that it would be a really Useful network. If you catch my drift.
- rjbwork 10y agoPlease, tell me more about this wonderful futuristic technology.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoWell, you see, there used to be a network coexistant with the internet, backed by UUCP, because Unix didn't have internet support yet (among other reasons). And then there were these guys called Tom and Steve. And they wrote Usenet. And all was well until September fell. And then the usenet gradually faded into obscurity, as users moved towards walled gardens, and away from netnews. Some of these users were weeaboos: This is how the -chans made their way here from Japan.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoAwesome! that totally reads like a future history of post apocalyptic script kiddy explaining the current state of the world. Usenet was created because "networks" were expensive and "fax lines" were cheap. If you did it correctly machine A could call machine B in its local calling zone which could call machine C in its local calling zone and a message could go from A!B!C!user without incurring any long distance charges (aka "free"). Because you would lose your news feed if you pissed people off, spam was low because no admin would tolerate one of their users putting their system at risk of disconnection. When networks because "free" and anyone could talk to anyone, there was no impediment to spam and no way to scale, and much of the infrastructure collapsed on itself. That said, there is absolutely nothing preventing anyone from creating their own peer to peer messaging network. They could re-use the netnews code or write their own with a bit more security built in. The argument to that is "but hey no one will use it." to which you say "Who cares? My friends and I will use it." and since it is free and it is just you and your friends it will be fun and enjoyable. And if you're very unlucky everyone will join you.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- MK999 10y agohttp://twister.net.co/ http://twister.net.co/ is a twitter clone in bitcoin, so not a reddit clone. I've not seen a reddit clone yet.
- moridin007 10y agosteemit.com?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- RubyPinch 10y agothere is already a system in place to have verified comments OpenPGP works for near anything
- Nadya 10y ago-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 But it does get annoying to sign every comment. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- wsBcBAEBCAAQBQJYNp4wCRCuaVAPm2QoyQAAr8sIAHQaE5B+HYdCz6XBrysdHzr4 ykR81zq5TXoMR+/f9UwuSi2I4881H4pEWsN9Fa0/qnpK/asNk+grEaMtB74DOg3p 8Uy3lUvlVglj9QTPZ9Hf90e3HHLOW2OonXitYaf1xPoczIO8NgwwebDDZIVohU4u 4EySOfgbP+VjwGbmtUJFeh0BifGN6b3DtKQrgVziWyumyK3WL9oz1kDAr4s24mCr 227ty9d+7kwtYhaszkM8HwGnstZaNSan1jpVkmsLRMSr4JqNFyNWalN5LU85w2WV zwY0n8mA7tHnrCd+mWcjp845I8gGn7NoFPHXhG2m+yU/f1LDsyXUib5hut+iduQ= =jcN5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
- RubyPinch 10y agoI do think relegating it to ${message} ${message sig metadata} ${message sig} could be done easily enough, and would look okay too. and then allow people to install an extension to verify automatically or the such
- Nadya 10y agoCould you post an actual example? I'm having problems deciphering what that would end up looking like.
- RubyPinch 10y agohttps://i.imgur.com/60ya7x8.png https://i.imgur.com/60ya7x8.png I know its considered wrong to mess around with the structure, but this is reversible, looks neater, n' can be hidden (after verification) by third party tools with a simple "is this PGP-like, if yes, delete element" instead of mucking around, splitting arbitrary html
- TD-Linux 10y agoNo need. Simple digital signatures of comments (and of their parents) would go a long way here.
- dorfsmay 10y agoSo Usenet?
- Natanael_L 10y agoAbsolutely! Here's my sketch for a system like that; https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/01/a-decentralized-hash-chained-discussion-system/ https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/01/a-dec...
- eternalban 10y agoGithub.com can't modify your commit records without modifying top level (observable) artifacts.
- taneq 10y agoAfter all, Confucius say "do not believe everything you read on internet."
- dvt 10y agoIt's more concerning that Congress is that stupid (one can only hope the Courts haven't been making rulings based on untraced emails and anonymous tweets). Social media is a canonical exemplar of hearsay. There's a reason Wikipedia isn't an acceptable source in college-level courses.
- Throwaway23412 10y agoNo, but Wikipedia's sources usually are. I feel like there's a world of difference between a well-sourced encyclopedia entry and a comment on a somewhat anonymous forum.
- dvt 10y agoWikipedia's sources are usually terrible (a blog post), unverifiable (I don't have access to the actual book), or they 404. Sometimes, Wikipedia editors don't understand the source so the Wikipedia article and the source are actually at odds with one another. I've witnessed this a few times when I investigated dubious claims.
- VintageCool 10y agoOne time while studying for a final exam, I did a final review of the Wikipedia article and noticed a quote which was an exact match for a paper that I had just read, and it was followed by [citation needed]. Adding that citation is one of my proudest Wikipedia edits ever.
- mixedCase 10y agoThe reason being Wikipedia is a summary made by a constantly changing group of people out of actual sources with a real name attached to it, which are the ones you're supposed to link. In any case, a permalink to a specific revision that includes a sha256sum of the article is a good way to ensure you're getting a reliable link to information which can not be tampered without failing the checksum.
- 10y ago
- x0x0 10y agoIn which people discover admins can admin a database. Also, ceo of reddit looks like a horrid job.
- noobermin 10y agoLook, I get that being lambasted by your base sucks, but yes, being the boss means you have to keep your cool and not abuse your power, as difficult as that is. The job demands you have a superhuman temperament...and he definitely is human, but that shouldn't excuse his behavior.
- x0x0 10y agoIt would also be perfectly reasonable to bulk ban anyone suggesting the reddit ceo is a pedophile, plus any subreddit that tolerated it. Using reddit does not give you the right to abuse people that way. What he did -- which I can't really tell, because something about pizzagate, and the whole thing is just too dumb to care about -- was probably dumb, but whatever.
- mullen 10y ago> Also, ceo of reddit looks like a horrid job. You could not pay me enough to be CEO of that cesspool. People take Reddit way too seriously.
- noir_lord 10y agoSome do, most don't, I just enjoy it for what it is.
- derrickdirge 10y agoWould you rather be spez or moot?
- mullen 10y agoMoot. You know he signed up for that and has continued to make 4chan what it is. Spez is trying to un-4chan reddit and catching a lot of flack for it. I would rather be a person who voluntarily runs a cesspool than be a person forced to run one.
- dhruval 10y agoHe changed a 'F U CEO' (upvoted by 1.6k users) comment to 'F U unpaid reddit moderator', without any indication that the comment was edited. Very juvenile and unprofessional way of dealing with the situation, really erodes trust in the platform (simply deleting the comment would have been a better response). Would maybe expect this from the founder of a young fledgling startup, but the 33 year old CEO of a company like Reddit ought to know better.
- kordless 10y agoIt's well within his power to change a comment. What's not cool is that he changed it to a lie. If he's the CEO, he's paid.
- JorgeGT 10y agoOne thing is to visibly edit a comment like they do in StackExchange. Impersonating a user is a very different thing.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- bigtunacan 10y agoIt's an abuse of power and ethics and is a line that shouldn't be crossed. It is much more honest and within reason to take steps like deleting posts, suspending or even outright banning users.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoWhile an abuse of power, I'm not sure I see the outrage. It's Reddit. It's an Internet forum run by a private corporation. The users in question abusing spez have zero right to their speech on the platform. You have zero recourse if Reddit edits your comments. Nuke /r/the_donald, nuke the users and hellban their IPS of those who sent abusive messages, and let's move on. Bask in the irony when I say, "Drain the swamp"
- 69mlgsniperdad 10y agoI highly doubt secretly editing a comment of another user is one of his account's listed privledges. Not marked edited, I highly doubt its a built-in feature of the website for even administrators. What if a low level employee, who doesn't even have privilege to ban users, had leveraged his technical back-end access to their databases to alter a comment. Act as the person who made the original comment, effectively impersonating them by using their technical access to reddit's data to basically 'hack' that users account. I highly doubt this is 'within his rights' as a founder, as someone here commented...
- defgeneric 10y agoAt the same time though, you'd imagine reddit has some sort of distributed backend so that getting direct access to the datastore and doing something like UPDATE the_donald SET comment = replace('/u/spez', '/u/notspez', comment) WHERE 'fuck /u/spez' in lowercase(comment); would create massive consistency headaches.
- iso-8859-1 10y agoReddit has the infrastructure for censorship, they have had to remove content before.
- samstave 10y agoTrue but thats not what we are talking about
- epicureanideal 10y agoI just went to look at Reddit to learn more about this. Someone there makes the good point that if the mods can edit user comments, they could in theory plant false evidence of crimes. https://i.reddituploads.com/26af29432a2340a98d83052a0ed3efcc?fit=max&h=1536&w=1536&s=ca36923eb18c6045c2cde3447b16c4c4 https://i.reddituploads.com/26af29432a2340a98d83052a0ed3efcc... I didn't understand the significance of this until reading that comment.
- Sacho 10y agoSorry to nitpick, but I'd like to point out that "administrators" and "moderators" are two different groups in Reddit. "Administrators"(which spez is part of) are Reddit staff; Moderators are users who create a subreddit or are enlisted to help manage it; Moderators do not have the power to edit user comments.
- nialv7 10y agoI think I would attach a PGP signature to my reddit posts from now on....
- necessity 10y agoNot surprising at all.
- grzm 10y agoWhy? Would you add some context to your comment?
- Throwaway23412 10y agoNot him/her, but I suspect he/she is referring to: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama_set_to_private_over_mod_firing/csqg24d/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam... https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3cuk3y/what_is_the_story_with_ukn0thing_saying_he_likes https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3cuk3y/what_i...
- grzm 10y agoThanks!
- necessity 10y agoReddit is known for censoring subreddits the admins do not like or when they're involved in some drama, they have a specific algorithm to filter out Trump's subreddit from /r/all[1][2], the default subs are strictly aligned with the admins' political views, and recently the CEO mocked Facebook's knowledge of their users data saying that at Reddit they know not only what one publicly speaks (such as in Facebook), but also their users "darkest secrets" (in an interview about advertising on Reddit). [1] https://voat.co/v/MeanwhileOnReddit/1373659 https://voat.co/v/MeanwhileOnReddit/1373659 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/shittychangelog/comments/59s3ao/reddit_change_rall_algorithm_changes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/shittychangelog/comments/59s3ao/red...
- grzm 10y agoThanks for the expansion. I appreciate it!
- outlinkit 10y agoGlad he admit it, or someone can say they are just doing something to correct misinformation.
- Gargoyle 10y agoWow. And he knew it was stupid when he did it. There's been a lot of talk about having the right temperament for leadership lately, and this is an excellent example of lacking it.
- ghayes 10y agoAnd the thread was otherwise so civil: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5ekdy9/the_admins_are_suffering_from_low_energy_have/ https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5ekdy9/the_admi...
- arama471 10y agoLack of civility does not make these actions ok. /r/The_Donald is not a bar you want to measure yourself against.
- mixedCase 10y agoThis is like sarcastically mocking how "serious" /r/coaxedintoasnafu is. /r/The_Donald's purpose is to be a "24/7 Trump rally". There are other Trump-related subs for serious discussion with supporters.
- jtrip 10y agoCan you point me to such subs? I have only been exposed to the 'joke' subreddit.
- MagnumOpus 10y ago/r/HillaryForPrison? (just kidding, there are none)
- mixedCase 10y ago/r/AskThe_Donald/
- thesagan 10y agoGood thing then; that he mimicked what he might otherwise abhor.
- ww520 10y agoThis is pretty bad. That pretty much destroys the credibility of Reddit's commenting system in a single act. No one can look at the integrity of the comments written by others the same any more.
- noobermin 10y agoWe already know that Reddit was originally filled by sockpuppets, so more deceptive behavior from reddit higher-ups today doesn't surprise me too much...although this isn't really deception, this seems more like admin trolling.
- ww520 10y agoSockpuppet is one thing. Altering a user's comment to frame him/her is another thing. Basically any comment cannot be trusted anymore. It takes years to build trust. It can be destroyed in an instant.
- dabockster 10y ago>That pretty much destroys the credibility of Reddit's commenting system in a single act. Didn't they already do that when Morgan Freeman's AMA was staged? (If not Freeman, then another AMA. Some big celebrity's AMA was staged within the past year.)
- qq66 10y agoThat's different because it's an end-user action, not an internal action. I always know that the person who is saying that they're a Navy SEAL may not be or that it might be Morgan Freeman's or President Obama's PR person answering the questions. It's a lot different when the site admins use their root privileges to put words in people's mouths. Imagine if someone edited your comment or my comment to include a bunch of racist or hateful comments.
- theWatcher37 10y agoThe more of the pizza gate subreddit were circulating an image showing mod "Reddit" unbanning accounts they had banned for posting dox. Their claim is the admins were unbanning users posting PII as pretext for nuking the sub
- intopieces 10y agoUsernames on Reddit do not require even an email address. For that reason, I find it hard to muster up even a modicum of concern for the sanctity of 'authorship' and 'attribution' for individual users. For all I know, every comment on Reddit but my own are generated by a very clever computer. That congress sees fit to investigate Reddit comments and news websites find credibility in re-posting them are separate issues that absolutely deserve discussion. But the editing of "Fuck [username]" posts...
- marcoperaza 10y agoMany people post on Reddit under their real identity. Now it is madness to do so, as a malicious Reddit employee can frame you as having said anything.
- intopieces 10y agoThis has always been the case. It has always been madness to post on user forums under your real identity. In the 'viral era' -- the age of mobile broadband, the age where any post you make or photo you send can get the attention of millions and ruin your career before your plane lands [0] -- it's pure madness to expose yourself like this. [0]http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tw...
- sundvor 10y agoReading that is both sad and scary at the same time. White Christmas (of Black Mirror) certainly doesn't look so science fiction anymore.
- mejari 10y agoAnd any user can claim to not have said something, citing this as evidence.
- joshmanders 10y agoI find it odd that people who build websites for a living didn't understand that... Like.. They control the data... They have complete access to the database.. Do you NOT think they could edit comments without updating the edited at timestamp?
- tsneed290 10y agoCould this hurt Reddit's credibility? Seems like it's kind of a big deal.
- barsonme 10y agoI'd think so. Now we _know_ admins can and have edited comments without people knowing. Makes you wonder if they've done it in the past.
- return0 10y agoOn the other hand, i can claim that the admin edited my comments whenever i 'm wrong.
- vowelless 10y agoExactly. Reddit has now completely lost credibility.
- MagnumOpus 10y agoReddit never had credibility to lose. Reddit is a link aggregator with comments, not NPR.
- wanda 10y agoWhat credibility? Even on 4chan, which has next to zero credibility AND no voting/reputation system intended for 'self-policing' (so it is not likely to ever become credible), some users express their dissatisfaction with low quality or spammy posts by suggesting the perpetrator go to, or return to, Reddit. This is also a common occurrence here — should a HN user make a useless post, particularly when invoking a meme or trolling, that user is often reminded that HN is not Reddit. This is not a proof of Reddit's lack of credibility, just an interesting/amusing anecdote. Reddit is not an oft-cited source of news. By and large, it is a marketplace for link sharing coupled with a comment system and a currency of reputation. In other words, a forum focused on reacting to content elsewhere around the web but with some original content here and there. Where there is credible content, it is often from somewhere else like a news vendor. Everything else, including all comments on any thread, must be subjected to scrutiny and distrust as with any other forum. For starters, any comment can be a deliberately hyperbolic or entirely false/nonsensical assertion — rhetoric or sophistry — and thus no comment should be trusted on the grounds that it being correct may be coincidental if the intention was not to be correct, but rather to incite a reaction from others (trolling). Then there is of course the possibility (indeed inevitability) that posts will be edited silently by those with sufficient permissions in the forum system, or access to the database if the system does not have silent edits built in. I say 'inevitable' because, given enough time, those with access to administrative power or the database itself will find a reason to silently edit something, by someone, somewhere. No forum should be treated as credible. Even if your study is about how forum users behave, you cannot trust those you study to be behaving normally as their intentions are always questionable. We don't have Asimov's psycho-history yet. I do not think forums have ever been credible sources of information, and I have participated in discussions on forums for fifteen years now. HN has more credibility than others, but that has been earned by clever people who visit this community for the sake of discussing intellectual topics — not the founding ideal of Reddit. If the US has had congress hearings on the basis of Reddit posts, as was stated in a comment above, that is testament only to the ignorance of the US congress. Edit: if you mean viability when you say credibility, i.e. in terms of generating revenue/getting investment, that depends on the rationality of its current/future investors. Assuming rational behaviour, this probably won't make any difference. The users will still come and if anything Reddit users should feel better precisely because the CEO fessed up to silent edits. It means that the issue can be addressed, perhaps with PGP signatures as suggested by others here; the ability to make silent edits by administrators could be removed; and the code powering Reddit could be open-sourced to prove that (apologies if it already is open-source, I am ignorant of the state of Reddit's back-end).
- philfrasty 10y ago„...getting called a pedophile constantly...“ Why?
- ww520 10y agoFrom what I have seen. It seems Reddit has shut down a subreddit whose people are in the midst of investigating pedophile rings.
- arama471 10y agoSo /r/pizzagate was a subreddit convinced they'd found evidence of a pedophile ring in the government and more specifically implicating Hilary Clinton. They were recently shut down because they kept publishing people's information (which is against reddit ToS _even if said info is publicly available_). This prompted them to assume reddit admins were part of said ring. I assume /u/spez has been receiving accusations since.
- threeseed 10y agoBased on zero evidence they believed that Podesta and Clinton were molesting children in the bathrooms of a NY Pizzeria. They then proceeding to post the owners information and make death threats against him and his staff. Absolutely despicable behaviour. And completely criminal.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoI was surprised. This was wrong of me. Reddit (the company) is a wretched hive of scum an villany, where this sort of stuff seems almost regular. Perhaps it wasn't always so: I don't know. But I can't think of any other forum that would put up with this. If an owner or mod did this on the *chans, the chan in question would be abandoned within the week. As for HN, dang does as he sees fit, as do the admins: they'll split your thread, redact your post (and if they doesn't, the software will if it gets flagged enough, IIRC), and (or so I heard) even shadowban you of you're bad enough. However, they're mostly right, and not corrupt. And they wouldn't pull crap like this. Blocking a comment that talks about how HN is just a massive circlejerk is one thing: actually altering it to say something else is quite another. I suppose it might be common on forums run by egotistical gits, but come on, you're heading a company running a large forum/news aggregator. You can do better than an egomaniac with a website.
- codezero 10y agoI was once on a forum where you could pay some of your karma to change someone else's signature. It was pretty good fun.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoThat's very different from changing the actual message text. That lends itself to "disregard that, I suck cocks." Editing content leads to, well, you saw.
- VintageCool 10y agoThe rest of reddit will accept this because everyone hates /r/the_donald anyway. That subreddit is an abuse of the system already.
- Gargoyle 10y agoIn what way is it an abuse of the system?
- 10y ago
- yarrel 10y agoPlugin to add crypto signatures to comments and validate them? :-)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- wcchandler 10y agoI could see a small hackfest team of ~5-10 people getting this done over the holiday weekend... maybe that was spez's intentions all along.
- brynjolf 10y agoIn the past reddit mods and administration threatened to do someone who had a system like that running, especially for direct messages
- marcoperaza 10y agoCould you elaborate on this?
- return0 10y agowas he drunk or in urgent need of a break? OTOH , good of him to take the responsibility immediately. OTOH, maybe he even wanted to send a message to those who rely too much in reddit's freedom.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoNo, he was tired and emotional. https://youtube.com/watch?v=z49LjJj3VTI https://youtube.com/watch?v=z49LjJj3VTI
- sundvor 10y agoBrilliant. I had no idea, got to love the British culture.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoYes. And Tom Scott is amazing. Who else would have built The Physical Emoji Keyboard?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- noir_lord 10y agoParts of it at least and I say that as a Brit, if you like our comedy check out Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.
- sundvor 10y agoI grew up on those shows. :) Might be worth a rewatch.
- neotek 10y agoAs a newt.
- avs733 10y agoprobably because Steve (I'm sorry but in this context /u/Spez just seems inappropriate...) had spent weeks being called a pedophile. Hes a person and he snapped. Bad judgement? yes, obviously. But really hes a person...and this is a group of assholes being assholes and I will generally grant people some empathy for having a limit and maybe not having the most rational reaction.
- pavanky 10y agoWhile I strongly disagree with what he did, the level of fake news and conspiracy theories hitting the front page has been toxic and out of control this year. Everyone has been accusing of Facebook and twitter for spreading fake news while reddit has also been absolute shit at it.
- oolongCat 10y agoAtleast on reddit someone reading the comments on there (usually the top) will be able to figureout that the story is fake.
- Cyph0n 10y agoNot on /r/The_Donald.
- rhizome 10y agoInformation can be a weapon, and all available avenues are going to be used to establish that fact.
- dglass 10y agoExactly who gets to decide if news if fake? There's a lot of theories going around because there's quite a lot of circumstantial evidence. Just because there's no proof does not automatically make it a conspiracy theory.
- tptacek 10y agoSo what you're saying is maybe Hillary Clinton did have an FBI agent murdered, and maybe Putin and the Dalai Lama really did meet up to talk about how Clinton and Obama started ISIS, a few days after the Pope endorsed Trump.
- dglass 10y agoI'm not saying any of those things. I'm also not rushing to dismiss them as fake either though.
- kennysmoothx 10y agoPolitics and the ethics of what spez did aside, /r/The_Donald seems to be one the most nightmarish communities one can think of, and it's a huge. Very toxic.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoI can put the politics aside. But the ethics? No. The_Donald might be awful, in your opinion. But what spez did isn't just awful. It's the canonical example of bad behavior on the internet from a mod.
- kennysmoothx 10y agoI agree, and there are many comments threads on this post describing the magnitude and the consequences of what he did. I just wanted to point out the growing problem that is the The_Donald and similar communities, where they relentless harass others.
- dqv 10y agoYou say that like this is some new phenomenon. SRS has been around for as long as I can remember. It's probably one of the most vile harassment engines because it disguises itself as a wholesome cause.
- chillacy 10y agoHorseshoe theory: The_Donald is basically alt-right SRS, with their own culture and lingo, brigading, heavy circlejerking (internal moderation), even aesthetic. All caps in-your-face aesthetic.
- smrtinsert 10y agothankfully its a free market. those angry at spez can tske their business elsewhere.
- 10y ago
- seanalltogether 10y agoThe tension that The_Donald and many alt-right subreddits place on reddit in general seems to be reaching a boiling point. I get the feeling the admins are just waiting for a credible reason to present itself that lets them cleanly wipe out all of them.
- return0 10y agothe donald is well moderated, esp. from doxxing and other personal stuff. they are of course very lively and get to the nerves of leftists, but that's about it. it's actually quite entertaining if you can leave behind enmities (and don't take it too seriously).
- pavanky 10y ago"lively" would be a very very generous representation of what that sub is.
- SquareWheel 10y agoConsidering the thread thread above, I certainly wouldn't call it "well moderated". The all caps and inciting users come off as extremely childish and unprofessional. I don't know what Steve was thinking, but 10 seconds in that thread makes me start to understand.
- marxbroseph 10y ago/r/The_Donald is a place where a mix of trolls, fascists, and white nationalists get riled up, and work to start a horrifying new chapter in history. Fascists and white nationalists defend it by claiming it's just clownish fun. (which, unamusingly, is EXACTLY the same explanation given by the supporters of fascism in Italy, and Russia, and Germany). Trolls really are having fun, they just don't give a fuck. It's propaganda. It's gross. All of the donald's loser readers and writers have the right to share their bad ideas; but they have no particular right to say it on Reddit.
- golergka 10y agoHaving had talked to actual russian nationalists and fascists, it's complete bull. Their views are based on search for sincerety and almost religious revelations, it's a completely opposite mindset of internet trolls.
- idbehold 10y agoWhy didn't he simply delete them? Editing their comments seems so odd.
- noobermin 10y agoClearly to troll them.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- soup10 10y agoReddit has large radical left and radical right communities that are constantly fighting and overwhelm the site with political drama and propaganda. If they don't do something about it they are going to lose the users that come there to look at cats.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- scott_karana 10y agoSounds like real life. :/
- return0 10y agoand what is reddit without drama?
- noir_lord 10y agoHacker news with a lot more users and cats?
- return0 10y agoand boobs and penises
- dabockster 10y ago>what is reddit without drama? A Digg reskin* with a huge library of adult content. *By Digg reskin, I am referring to Digg right before everyone left. I mean, there is a high possibility that any sort of "Reddit v3" would cause people to leave.
- Natsu 10y agoVoat already exists, but it can't handle the load.
- ng12 10y ago
- jelder 10y agoGas lighting is some pretty advanced abuse. I wonder how often this has occurred before now.
- geuis 10y agoPlease stop using this "alt-right" terminology. All its doing is trying to put a neutral label on a group of vile people. People that are blatantly racist, misogynist, and just anti-American. These are the same kinds of monsters that started the "National Socialist German Workers' Party" in the 1930's. They used the same rhetoric and played on desperate people's fears and prejudices. My grandparents didn't fight on two fronts to see this bullshit taking over the United States.
- return0 10y agothe nazi party started in 1920
- c23gooey 10y agothis sort of snarky comment is exactly what turns me off HN. what exactly is the point of your comment. do you think you are providing any sort of service to the readers of this thread. does the fact that the OP was incorrect in a minor part of his comment invalidate the rest of it? does your comment make you feel superior in anyway? in the future, when posting a retort please ellucidate.
- grzm 10y agoIt might just be a correction, nothing more. I've done the same in the past in the interest of improving the original comment. Perhaps it could have been made clearer (e.g., "note:", s/1930s/1920/). I'm not sure you can read too much into it.
- arkadiyt 10y agoThis post is decaying off of the front page of HN very quickly (every few refreshes it drops a position or more), despite have more upvotes and being posted more recently. Reddit is a YC company as well. Is this post being artificially pushed down?
- scott_karana 10y agoIt's well known that HN has anti-flamewar algorithms. Too many comments vs votes (or user flagging too, presumably) causes its rank to drop.
- Figs 10y agoI've been here fairly regularly for 8 years and didn't know about it, so I'm not sure I agree that it's "well known". It definitely isn't in the FAQ's section about how stories are ranked: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html -- which, in my opinion, would be an excellent place to describe it. I'm glad dang answered though since I've been wondering for quite a while why some stories seemed to sink much faster than others.
- noobermin 10y agoAs with most "well-known" things, it is well-known by people who know.
- dang 10y agoPutting it in the FAQ is a good idea, and if anyone who doesn't see it there in a week or two would email hn@ycombinator.com to bug me about it, I'd be thankful. Except wait, are you saying anyone reads the FAQ? An idea that came up recently which we're mulling over is showing 'vouch' links (or something analogous) on stories that are being penalized this way, so users can indicate that they think a discussion is really substantive.
- Figs 10y agoSure, I'll check in a week or so and remind you if needed. > Except wait, are you saying anyone reads the FAQ? Fair point :) The 'vouch' idea is interesting, but I'm not sure if you really need another click mechanism to accomplish it -- if people above a certain karma threshold are voting it up, it's a topic that people integrated into the community do think is worth being seen, regardless of the quality of the discussion currently in the thread. That said, it might be worth trying -- having a visible indicator might result in a different reaction; it's possible that the majority of such stories would get vouched, which could be a useful signal in tuning your algorithm.
- sweetsweetpie 10y agoPeople seem to be treating their comments with some kind of sanctity. These changes are most copy-and-replace for humorous effect (message boards in the past have done it). Surely it is obvious that the Reddit staff has the ability to edit or delete comments. Users might think this is a breach of trust, but I really cant make that jump. The important thing is that the_donald followers need a controversy to latch onto and will do so.
- vnchr 10y agoSurely if Jack Dorsey edited someone's tweet or Eric Schmidt edited a Gmail user's email, that would be cause for great concern. Which user or users it happened to is irrelevant to the breach of trust it represents to all users of the platform.
- rspeer 10y agoOn the other hand, didn't moot auto-edit people's 4chan comments all the time? I'm told this is where the current meaning of "weeaboo" came from, because moot was sick of the word "wapanese". Although this is an odd thread to use Urban Dictionary as an authoritative source, that's what I've got: [1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Weeaboo&defid=1427331 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Weeaboo&defid...
- lerpa 10y agoIt can happen and if you treat your email with that level of seriousness it is a possibility to have in mind that it could have happened. The problem here is people taking an entertainment site so seriously, oh they are blatantly fucking up and btw have been in the past other shady things, so stop using it.
- Mao_Zedang 10y agoReddit has been on the road to becoming digg for some time now, the only thing propping them up is the lack of a decent alternative.
- arca_vorago 10y agoI seriously considered trying to use elixir to start a new site with similar intentions to hn/slashdot/reddit, but then I did a precursory search of all the legal implications and it seems nightmarish to run a high-volume user commenting site these days. I've settled on a side project of just editorials that dissect the rhetoric and logical strengths of current stories in aggregate. I think the next version of reddit is going to have to be on a blockchain or something decentralized and verifiable. That being said, I really have to give props to the HN team for how well they do their job technically and politically compared to most internet forum sites.
- jquip 10y agoHi, I'd be very interested to be a part of that... PM if you need more hands
- raldi 10y agoPeople have been saying reddit is turning into Digg since the very first comment thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/17913/reddit_now_supports_comments/c228/?limit=1 https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/17913/reddit_no...
- Mao_Zedang 10y agoI think when people say "digg" they mean failure not actually the website digg. And alienating your user base because of your feelings is definitely down the path to failure it definable doesn't endear success.
- crayon765 10y agohttps://voat.co https://voat.co is one such alternative.
- perseusprime11 10y agoShit some people do to stay relevant. That's all I have to say.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- CalChris 10y agoThis reminds me of Jimmy Wales editing his bio: https://www.wired.com/2005/12/wikipedia-founder-edits-own-bio/ https://www.wired.com/2005/12/wikipedia-founder-edits-own-bi...
- jabgrabdthrow 10y agoHow pathetic
- sidcool 10y agoI am /r/outoftheloop. What happened?
- ENOTTY 10y agoThis is quite concerning. I do wonder if blockchain could fix the problem of stealth edits by privileged users.
- rspeer 10y agoIt would fix the problem by making commenting require insane amounts of computation, thus making it require transaction fees, thus making nobody comment, thus making there be no comments to edit, right?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- moron4hire 10y agoThere is a reason I'm on HN and not on Reddit. Please don't spill your petty in-fighting over to other sites.
- adamconroy 10y agoshouldn't he be saying i fucked up?
- rfrank 10y agoWhy was the title changed from "Reddit CEO" to "I"? Seems very asinine.
- dang 10y agoWhen a story is written in the first person it's common for the title to say "I". Sometimes we put those in quotation marks but then we'd have nested quotes in this one. As for why changed, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027515 and the replies.
- rfrank 10y agoI think that logic is stupid and don't think your comments re: moderation of YC companies on HN are honest.
- CarpetBench 10y agoI think you're doing a great job. Moderating threads and submissions that are basically guaranteed to be shitshows (like this one) is an incredibly thankless job. Thanks for keeping it together, and thanks for keeping this from going off the rails.
- rfrank 10y agoThe fact you think that patronizing crap about the first person is real moderation is pretty telling.
- winteriscoming 10y agoAm on mobile and that link keeps giving a "something went wrong page" on reddit
- sergiotapia 10y agoReddit can no longer be sourced by any media outlet because of this. How can any comment be valid on Reddit anymore? Reddit's credibility is gone forever. No going back.
- rawrmaan 10y agoDon't worry, media outlets generally don't care about vailidity.
- Yhippa 10y agoI still have no idea what /r/pizzagate is all about.
- MicroBerto 10y agoThe more you research, the more horrifying it is. I'd not recommend looking into it if you don't want to go down a rabbit hole, be thoroughly creeped out, and have your day completely ruined.
- nness 10y agohttp://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/fact-check-this-pizzeria-is-not-a-child-trafficking-site.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/fact-check-this...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- epmaybe 10y agohttp://www.snopes.com/pizzagate-conspiracy/ http://www.snopes.com/pizzagate-conspiracy/
- koolba 10y agoHow did he make the changes to the comments? Is it via an audited admin function available to Reddit staff or by directly modifying the backend data store? I ask because I want to figure out if anyone else that works at Reddit was aware of this. It's one thing to have the top of the house do something this betrayingly asinine, but I'd consider it much worse if other staff at Reddit were aware of this.
- thekevan 10y agoIn a slightly twisted way, his mistake is a good thing for the rest of us. With this happening right along side as the "fake news on Facebook" stories that are happening, it shows how so much of what we read on the internet could have been altered or plain old fabricated and should be taken with a grain of salt.
- tw04 10y agoI will once again point out the irony of r/The_Donald members constantly complaining about SJWs being up in arms over their racist, sexist, homophobic rants. Yet the second something like this drops, it's the end of the world. Reddit as a whole is going to crumble because the CEO got sick of their childish antics.
- gamechangr 10y agoThat's two totally different concepts. It's one thing to "complaining about",,, generalizations. It's entirely different for a CEO to abuse his power and censor those he disagrees with on a social media site. He should be let go for this! He is literally putting words in peoples mouths!! It calls into question the credibility of the whole site.
- giarc 10y agoAnd yet Donald Trump is blocking his press core [0], calling for an end to SNL because they made fun of him [1], telling CNN execs that they are all liars [2], revoking credentials of the Washington Post [3] among many others [4]. Sure, the reddit CEO doing it is bad... the president elect though... 0. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-elections/journalists-president-elect-donald-trump-press-freedom-blocked-media-a7410806.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election... 1. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/787612552654155776 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/78761255265415577... 2. http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/22/13714052/donald-trump-nyt-media-fight-network http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/22/13714052/d... 3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/trump-revokes-post-press-credentials-calling-the-paper-dishonest-and-phony/2016/06/13/f9a61a72-31aa-11e6-95c0-2a6873031302_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/trump-revokes... 4. http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/14/media/donald-trump-media-blacklist/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/14/media/donald-trump-media-bla...
- gamechangr 10y agoYeah - but imagine that Paul Graham w HN for example disagreed with your position. Let's say that instead of allowing you to express this last comment - he used his admin privileges and made your comment PRO trump. Do you see the difference? Having a strong opposing - even annoying - demanding - opinion is not the same as impersonating others and censoring their words. HUGE HUGE DIFFERENCE Does that make sense?
- notaplumber 10y ago/r/The_Donald is such an Internet cesspool.
- georgemcbay 10y agoThe Internet is such an Internet cesspool these days. You won't believe what happens next!
- rednerrus 10y agoThis is the perfect ploy to get conspiracy nuts to leave Reddit. I'm sure spez is tired of dealing with the pizzagate cats and he thought this was the best way to drive them off without creating a bigger shitstorm by telling them all to get fucked.
- orthoganol 10y agoI don't understand HN rank algorithms. With 300+ points in 3 hours I would expect this to be at the very top, not sliding off the front page.
- grzm 10y agoSee this thread for some details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027367 Short (incomplete) answer: it tripped the flame war detector and has likely been flagged by a number of users.
- ivix 10y agoThis is genius really. This act will cause /r/The_Donald to leave reddit, saying they don't trust them anymore. Those opposed to their antics will forgive /u/spez and stay. The result is that reddit expels it's undesirable members without anything so controversial as banning them.
- RikNieu 10y ago> The result is that reddit expels it's undesirable members without anything so controversial as banning them. Except for the part where the CEO personally edited user's posts to say things they didn't say? Yes. Genius. Not controversial at all...
- giarc 10y agoI doubt it was planned. I wouldn't be surprised to see spez step down tomorrow.
- gamechangr 10y ago"Those opposed to their antics WILL FORGIVE /u/spez" That's wishful thinking if you ask me. I'm "opposed to their antics" but I'm 10X more opposed to CEO's censoring people and literally putting words in their mouth! I feel sorry for those that would forgive that, if in fact many people on a social media site would think that's "no biggy"
- draw_down 10y agoI get why this is bad but the lack of perspective is kind of astonishing. I mean these insane idiots will not give up this stupid idea of some pedophile conspiracy they think they've uncovered. And they don't care whose name they shit on. But edit their internet posts and they scream bloody murder. They can lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and this is what will get talked about. I'm very pessimistic about the future.
- city41 10y agoWhat would it take to show the current internet generation that what they really want is usenet? It's impossible to alter a usenet post after it's been sent out. It's decentralized, uncensored, has no economic interests of a company to consider, and no worry of going away when the company calls it quits. It's everything your average redditor wants.
- wilde 10y agoBecause spam-filtering and moderation are useful forms of censorship that keep communities alive. In the US, I need to at least be able to remove child pornography (and other illegal content) so that the FBI doesn't come after me.
- strathmeyer 10y agoYou white nationalists are hilarious.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- sctb 10y agoIn your last two comments you've managed to introduce “white nationalists” and “climate change deniers” out of Everest-thin air. This is an abuse of the site and we have to ban accounts that post like this. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027894 and marked it off-topic.
- throwaway420 10y agoSo within 24 hours of Reddit deleting /r/pizzagate for allegedly doxxing people (which was incorrect by the way, the mods were visibly running an extremely tight ship with regards to personally identifying information as per site policy) it is revealed that Reddit posts have zero integrity and can be silently altered. Very interesting. If that alleged /r/pizzagate doxxing even happened, how do we know that genuine Reddit users were the ones actually doxxing people? Who is to say that comments weren't altered because the admins were pressured to find an excuse to get rid of that board? And what pizza place owner has this kind of pull to be in the GQ top 50 most powerful washington people? Also how does a random pizza place owner get a "boo hoo, please feel so sorry for me" puff piece in the New York Times that straw manned many of the arguments or ignored some of the weirdest circumstantial evidence. The evidence is admittedly circumstantial at the moment, nobody is saying to march them in front of a firing squad without a reasonable and fair investigation and trial, but there's something to this when powerful people are trying to brush under the rug. If you have a brain and are capable of thinking for yourself, you'll see that there's more to Pizzagate than meets the eye. Read about it with an open mind: I initially thought it was a joke too, but this attempt at censorship only raises more questions. /u/spez's admission further raises interesting legal questions for reddit. What happens with /u/stonetear's and other legal cases now? How do any legal cases involving content on Reddit work now that the integrity of posts are nonexistent? Any defendant's lawyer will have a field day arguing that somebody who did something illegal here didn't do it. And what becomes of Reddit itself? Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunizes providers of interactive computer services against liability arising from content created by third parties. Well, what happens when who is the content creator is possibly ambiguous? Do Reddit Shareholder's approve of this policy?
- ryanlol 10y ago>/u/spez's admission further raises interesting legal questions for reddit. What happens with /u/stonetear's and other legal case now? How do any legal cases involving content on Reddit work now that the integrity of posts are nonexistent? Any defendant's lawyer will have a field day arguing that somebody who did something illegal here didn't do it. Complete nonsense, this argument will hold up just as badly as it would've held up before.
- 10y ago
- dbg31415 10y agoOk, so Reddit has been filled with some pretty "deplorable" characters as of late... and to censor them and edit comments... holy fuck, these are not the people you want to do that to. Especially given that they will self-destruct if you just leave them alone. Fueling the fire like this... honestly that's some horrific judgement on the part of u/Spez. Probably time for a new CEO. But... then again... Reddit's best days are behind it. Doesn't really matter who is at the helm. * Reddit is still in turmoil | Hacker News || https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12140603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12140603
- healthnutter 10y agoFWIW, I have had a number of incidents with sketchy "content" on reddit over the years. This incident with content modification is in alignment with my experiences.
- elevensies 10y agoThe CEO of Reddit is officially a cursed position, on par with the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts. In other circumstances this might have gotten laughed off, but The Donald has really developed a bunker mentality IMO after having mods doxxed, the algorithm changed to end their front page dominance, lots of other subs being anti-Trump, and the general tenor of the campaign against Trump. I hope Spez can take a nice relaxing weekend holiday and let someone else deal with this shit-hurricane.
- aaron695 10y ago> The CEO of Reddit is officially a cursed position Not sure it's a curse when you list all the things being done to the sub-reddit? They get attacked, so they fought back? To be expected, no?
- elevensies 10y agoI'm saying its a curse because: - Yishan Wongs various missteps and eventual bizzare (looking) departure - Ellen Pao had haters on the site from day 1, Hitler memes etcetera. And then when they fired u/Chooter all hell broke loose and some subs were shut down by their own mods. The integrity of AMA was permanently ruined by this IMO. Anyway, Pao was hated by the idiots immediately, but hated universally after this. - Spez started strong but this is going to affect his credibility, and seems to me to be part of the same downward spiral that happens to the CEOs when they get caught up in some bullshit happening on the site.
- mememachine 10y agoThe real trouble is that its CEOs are all far far far too involved in the going ons of the communities.
- psyc 10y agoNo kidding. They create a platform, and then continually panic like "Oh no! People are using the platform! What do we do? How do we stop people using the platform while making it seem like we want people to use the platform? People are using the site! Something must be done!"
- nippples 10y agoThis guy is the CEO of a company whose discussion boards constantly work as a platform for mass spreading of unfounded accusations and rumors of people being 'racist', 'misoginists', 'rape apologists', 'pedos', 'nazis', 'white supremacists' and so on and so forth, and he uses DB Admin god powers to give it a special fix when it comes to his own name? Dude, step down, it's time to go home.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- throwaway999998 10y agoI can't be the only one that finds this pretty funny, right? Forget about whatever dumb imagined political angle of it. If you go on someone's website and spam "fuck [admin's name]" and call them a pedophile based on ridiculous accusations, it's probably only just because of misplaced mercy that you're not banned for harassment right off the bat. These aren't paying users, and they don't have personal data locked up in their accounts that they may lose access to. Whatever forum they're posting to owes them nothing and they do worse than spit on that. That a wordfilter gets applied to some posts of some users that were basically asking for a ban is pretty funny. I've helped run a popular forum before. We added silly global wordfilters at times, and on a couple occasions when seriously-rule-breaking users repeatedly evaded bans, we applied customized wordfilters to them to help drive them off. (Dropping all of the vowels that weren't at the start or end of a word from their posts to make it look like lazy teenager txtspeak was a favorite.) It worked and people found it hilarious.
- std_throwaway 10y agoReddit used to be a place where intelligent users had a quality discussion. It used to happen. At least in my imagination. What I see now is a machine which produces memes (still going strong there) and propaganda (growing stronger) but the discussion is on a much lower intellectual level.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- empath75 10y agoWas this before or after 'Jailbait' was the most popular search term that brought people to the site? Or that it became the premiere destination for recruiting and organizing racists?
- samstave 10y agoCalling BS for the following reason: I agree with what you posted that memes and propaganda are still going/growing strong... there is still a TON TON TON of discourse that is important and intellectual. S:N ratio and all that.... Noise may be growing like mad (Shills/corps/whatever-other-noise-producers/etc).... but Signal is growing as well. The thing is that NvS ratio has to increase in order to keep status quo.... That doesnt mean that certain stories are not true but that perhaps they are pushed aside with noise to keep certain things seemingly implausible...
- std_throwaway 10y agoIn my eyes reddit quality, especially the frontpage, is declining year over year and it's not really getting better. It might be my age but I'm less and less interested in the content which gets all the upvotes. Also, the bigger subreddits seem to show this decline where quality discussion doesn't happen anymore. Is there actually a long-term analysis about how reddit content and discussion changed over the years?
- gormo2 10y agoMade this comment in the other (flagged) thread. Here goes: I agree it was not nefarious, but it was a decision that shows unbelievably poor judgement, especially for a CEO. I'd be surprised if he keeps his position. He's undermined his fundamental role as the leader of one of the biggest social media sites by violating the trust that users put into the site's administration. The context as I understand it involves some ravenous hordes of conspiracy-theory redditors promulgating fake news stories and doxxing innocent people. However, by changing the text of these users comments, whatever their actions, and by admitting to it, Steve has opened the floodgates. Now there is no question -- in the minds of these users -- that the site is truly "against them" and willing to not only censor them but to rewrite history as they see it. They can no longer trust anything they read on the site. But what is worse is the effect and message this sends to normal users. How can, for instance, any person safely participate in an AMA now? When the real possibility exists to have their words changed out from under them, and no way to prove they aren't in fact the author? And from that, why would anyone post anything potentially personally identifiable, if (in their mind) some disgruntled admin could modify what they said to include false yet humiliating or criminal things (e.g., throw in racial epithets, link to porn, admit adultery / drug use) that might eventually link back to them. And how far does this go? Can admins send PMs under the name of other users? What else? To me at least, the scary thing is that Reddit posts that only obliquely reference personal information have already been used as the basis for surveillance and legal action [1]... And taking one final step back, from a business side this drama goes beyond just being unprofessional. Reddit posts are now often linked to from news articles. How can the media trust the source they link to? If the content of posts are 'up for grabs' to be edited by admins in the minds of users and the media (even if they aren't in reality), then one of Reddit's functions that is growing in importance -- that is, news-making -- may be stymied. Harming trust is extremely dangerous for social platforms. And when it is the CEO themselves doing the harm, it could very well border on being suicidal for the site. [1] https://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/58hae4/what_is_a_piece_of_reddit_history_every_redditor/d90lago/ https://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/58hae4/what_is_a_...
- Lily52Lily 10y agoIf you don't trust auditd
- Lily52Lily 10y agoNo
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- maverick_iceman 10y agoCombine it with Milo's getting banned by Twitter, Doordash's CEO asking for Trump supporters to resign - a not very pretty picture of Silicon Valley emerges.
- ec109685 10y agoDoordash didn't ask Trump supporters to resign. Please cite your assertions.
- vowelless 10y agoGrub hub not door dash. And it was not trump supporters, but people who supported his racist views.
- aaron695 10y agoPlease, don't go all, technically the literal reading is blah. We all knew what was really being said 'Please quit if you support Trump, you are not welcome here'. This is what many Trump supporters say, we technically aren't X.
- tomp 10y agoCan you explain how Trump's views are "racist"? AFAIK, he criticised criminal illegal Mexican immigrants, not even a whole nationality, let alone a whole race!
- maverick_iceman 10y agoStalin would be proud of this guy. (They practice the same brand of politics after all.)
- Fej 10y agoAm I the only one who isn't really concerned with this? spez was engaging in a bit of the Internet pastime... trolling. It wasn't some conspiracy to control information on reddit, he was just having fun. Dastardly fun, yes, but fairly innocent, all things considered.
- zedadex 10y ago> the only thing he secretly altered was the target of the insults Basically irrelevant. One hell of a veil to pierce. This isn't even the first time reddit's indicated they're kind of... flexible, let's say, with how they handle certain kinds of data; but it always seemed like they stopped just short of crossing lines. Unmarked edits to user comments was absolutely not something I'd've expected to come of that, so I can't say I'm not surprised; still, this seems like it's just the next stage of something that's always seemed to exist (or not exist, I suppose) for them.
- zone411 10y agoWhat made this situation more interesting is that Washington Post cited comments from that edited thread in their article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11/23/fearing-yet-another-witch-hunt-reddit-bans-pizzagate/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11.... That's not a good look for Conde Nast - should the proper media cites now have a disclaimer that the user "apparently" wrote such and such post? I would guess that this exposure is also the reason he edited this thread in particular.
- wruza 10y agoI didn't get all the drama even after reading top HN comments. Am I completely lost?
- xupybd 10y agoWow people are freaking out. In a couple of months everyone will forget. He got stressed and did something unprofessional. But at the end of the day it's just reddit. The world will not end. Anyone know if there is a way to shout him a beer. Sounds like that man needs a cold one and some quiet time.
- z3t4 10y agoThere are a lot of politics going on on communities like these. And there are a lot of trolling, people attempting and sometimes successfully summon mobs, sometimes for amusement, sometimes with an agenda. Do not underestimate stupid people in large groups!
- makecheck 10y agoThis type of breach of trust could be used to help educate people on what digital security really means, and to demand real security in all parts of their digital lives. It is also good to demand multiple layers of security. Reddit is "https", and did that help here? No, in the sense that it only ensured the unaltered delivery of what Reddit was sending. It did nothing to preserve the integrity of comments that were originally written. This was not a “secure” web site for this case, yet many people would assume so due to the one layer of security that was present and prominently displayed in the browser! Now extend this to any given web site, and data that is far more important than a stupid comment. Real security is not trivial, and figuring out a good way to manage trusted parties is especially hard.
- koliber 10y agoHow do we know his apology is real? Maybe he posted "I did not do this. Get off my back people. I don't know what is going on here." Later, another admin may have gone in and changed Spez's comment to read "Yep. I messed with the ...". (I'm being facetious)
- ktamiola 10y agoHaha! Long live "freedom" of speech!
- randomname2 10y agoLeaks from the reddit admin slack channel show the motivations behind this: http://archive.is/ZmULb http://archive.is/ZmULb Apparently a long history of harrassment from the subreddit in question finally made /u/spez retaliate. The leaks further show the admin team is planning to deal with the subreddit in a more definitive way.
- heisenbit 10y agoAs one who moderated a smaller forum for a while in the past: 1) Direct access to the database at times is needed particularly for bulk edits. In our forum we had certain bans and not all were immediately enforced by the posting software. Some were done in bulk operations down at the database level. 2) Manual semi bulk edits at time were done in places where scripts simple were too much work to get right. 3) Manual direct individual edits also at times happened but they are incredibly dangerous as they can erode the confidence in the site. From what I saw at multiple forum the temptation is very high at the top to rationalize such edits and it tends to work against them badly. 4) Edits at database level often leave little to no trace. That is one reason that makes them so dangerous. At production level very few should have access to the DB for accountability reasons. 5) Nobody really likes DB level edits but they are needed and done. The forum software and support scripts do not cover all situations. Getting 100% rid of them is unrealistic. For audit reasons logging original posts in a tamper proof place may be wise but is rarely done. 6) Clearly someone has abused privileges here, I'm fairly sure such edits are not condoned by any internal guidelines. There must be consequences. 7) Personal consequences. This is about ethics, behavior and trust. These things are not all b&w. Was he hiding the behavior? Is there insight? Are there mitigating circumstances? Also is he the right guy for the job considering the job description requires flame retardant skin? The board needs to look into this carefully and quickly. 8) Organizational consequences. How can they make sure this does not happen again? Do they have all the right controls in place? Are they are properly separating the roles. Should they get audited? The threat for an organization to suffer from catastrophic cyber events increased incredibly. It used be be groups of people revolting on boards. These days certain sites reach out to sizable fractions of the US electorate and whip up attacks (recent: Kelly's book on Amazon or CNN's app in the app store). Very solid organizational and technical controls are needed for a place that so easily gets into the cross-hairs of a mob.
- brilliantcode 10y agoI'm seeing reddit's user base as less and less valuable. There is so much active disinformation with purchased reddit accounts (because aged accounts attract less suspicions) that's ripe with vote manipulation. By actively triggering reddit's vote manipulation trigger on somebody's comment, you effectively have a way to censor and control information and how it's portrayed. Reddit CEO directly altering user's comments that criticize him seems to signal that the platform is incapable or unwilling to address the poor value proposition of a purely anonymous based social networks that serves as stage for anyone with the monetary and networking resource to manipulating the casually browsing redditor and their opinion .
- kfo1187 10y agoThis election (seen from outside as a storm in a glass of water) undermined America's best appeal as the only place with the first amendment. Please remain free.
- imode 10y agoawesome work spez, you're now liable for everything your users do on your site due to your actions. have fun dealing with the outcome of this. I don't envy you, but this was your decision.
- LordFrith 10y agoI would be pretty annoyed if a good chunk of the paranoid pizzagate believing Internet spent all day calling me a pedophile.