11 ms·

This 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

by ww520 10y ago

This 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 ago
We 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 ago
  Sockpuppet 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 ago
  That'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 ago
    The 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
551199 10y ago
Also Clinton campaigns Correct the Record[0] took over Reddit during election. Most likely with reddits co-operation. To suppress the voices of Bernie supporters and later Trump supporters. [0]http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/21/hillary-pac-spends-1-million-to-correct-commenters-on-reddit-and-facebook.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/21/hillary-pac... [1]CTR Spent: 8MIL https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997 https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997
- kharms 10y ago
  Oh please, it's not like the Trump campaign wasn't doing the same. If anything, they did it better because they had the support of SV's rich and powerful. >http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusive-interview-how-jared-kushner-won-trump-the-white-house/#5855d82c2f50 http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusi...
eridius 10y ago
Did anybody seriously think that reddit admins didn't have the power to do this all along? They can go edit the database directly if they want.
- rfrank 10y ago
  Potential vs. proof. That is a large distinction.
- marcoperaza 10y ago
  People have the power to do a lot of things. You have the power to quite easily lie, cheat, and steal in this world. When you run a website, like when you run a business, you have to convince your customers/users to trust you not to do those things.
- cargo8 10y ago
  Technically, sure. But, usually a company of this size/scale puts in place restrictions so that accessing privileged abilities like this is extremely difficult and requires authorizations / clearances / permissions from users, etc. Generally big / public tech company employees are not even allowed to LOOK at PII or the data of a specific user name etc. You run all tests on staging / fake populated DBs only, etc.
  - eridius 10y ago
    Reddit's not that large, and the admin in question is the CEO.
    - adamrezich 10y ago
      Reddit is one of the largest and most influential community websites on the Internet (#25-29ish).
      - grzm 10y ago
        One of the largest, sure. How are you measuring "most influential"?
empath75 10y ago
I don't know if I'll be able to believe anything any more. At least I can still trust the news on my Facebook feed.
quink 10y ago
>That pretty much destroys the credibility of Reddit's commenting system in a single act. The admins kickstarted reddit by impersonating different users, they even had a field to enter the username which which to post/comment. Fake it 'til you make it. Nothing inherently wrong with it. I'm not going to stop visiting reddit over this. Hell, if it erodes trust by /r/the_donald who'll move over to something like voat, fair enough. I have no illusions that content is safe from subversion, whether it be in-place or not, and I've myself applied some CSS during April Fools on a major subreddit that modified comments as a lark. It was wrong of /u/spez, sure. But the guy's pissed off, he should be with the amount of upvoting bots on that reddit and no real solution. He fessed up almost immediately and it's not like they're going to go at it in scale - especially since it's so very easily provable with archive.is. It was a juvenile messing around with a group that breeds on persecution complex. I consider this a joke. Not bad in taste, not the height of comedy. But no curtain with the wizard behind it has been pulled open here in my view, it's fine. ... I think there needs to be some control over the veracity, some intrusion into the bubbles with which we inherit the web. If it takes a reddit admin to cattle prod around the fucking bat-shit insane /r/pizzagate idiocy into outrage and feeding their persecution complex sarcastically and ironically then I may actually be for it.
- yuhong 10y ago
  It did not include comments AFAIK.
wfo 10y ago
Does it? Really? An admin played a prank on a bunch of insane, out of control conspiracy minded screaming blubbering trolls calling him a pedophile with a dumb silly find/replace rule. God forbid, next forums will start replacing words like 'shit' and 'fuck' with symbols to try and hide the truth of what we /really/ mean from the world. Who cares? Why is this a big deal? I am so unbelievably unimpressed with the seriousness of this, I feel like there is such an enormous effort to pretend this is "serious business" and "the integrity of reddit" (?) is somehow being compromised. We all knew this could be done. On any forum. Reddit is a silly place. Reddit is a place for people to shitpost memes and puns with throwaway accounts. The Donald is a subreddit that revels in trolling and messing with people, spewing toxic garbage nonstop. They riled up the main admin of reddit so much he did something childish -- a pretty impressive trolling effort. That's the end of this story as far as I can tell.
- camperman 10y ago
  > insane, out of control conspiracy minded screaming blubbering trolls This attitude is WHY YOU LOST THE ELECTION. > Who cares? Why is this a big deal? I am so unbelievably unimpressed with the seriousness of this, It is deadly serious. /r/pizzagate was just shut down for posting personal information. No proof was given. Reddit has users like Bill Gates who post regularly, it has interviewed the POTUS and countless movie stars. Just as a pedophile scandal threatens to engulf both Twitter and very senior members of the Democratic Party, the founder of reddit reveals that he fucks around with people's posts. What's to prevent him going into a user's history and falsifying it? We've had the head of the FBI in front of Congress talking about a Reddit comment for crying out loud, because it was about national security. His actions were extraordinarily poor judgement for an organisation that describes itself as a bastion of free speech.
  - vehementi 10y ago
    > Just as a pedophile scandal threatens to engulf both Twitter and very senior members of the Democratic Party Ah.
    - 10y ago

by ww520 10y ago

This 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 ago

We 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 ago
Sockpuppet 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 ago
That'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 ago
  The 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

551199 10y ago

Also Clinton campaigns Correct the Record[0] took over Reddit during election. Most likely with reddits co-operation. To suppress the voices of Bernie supporters and later Trump supporters. [0]http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/21/hillary-pac-spends-1-million-to-correct-commenters-on-reddit-and-facebook.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/21/hillary-pac... [1]CTR Spent: 8MIL https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997 https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997

kharms 10y ago
Oh please, it's not like the Trump campaign wasn't doing the same. If anything, they did it better because they had the support of SV's rich and powerful. >http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusive-interview-how-jared-kushner-won-trump-the-white-house/#5855d82c2f50 http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusi...

eridius 10y ago

Did anybody seriously think that reddit admins didn't have the power to do this all along? They can go edit the database directly if they want.

rfrank 10y ago
Potential vs. proof. That is a large distinction.
marcoperaza 10y ago
People have the power to do a lot of things. You have the power to quite easily lie, cheat, and steal in this world. When you run a website, like when you run a business, you have to convince your customers/users to trust you not to do those things.
cargo8 10y ago
Technically, sure. But, usually a company of this size/scale puts in place restrictions so that accessing privileged abilities like this is extremely difficult and requires authorizations / clearances / permissions from users, etc. Generally big / public tech company employees are not even allowed to LOOK at PII or the data of a specific user name etc. You run all tests on staging / fake populated DBs only, etc.
- eridius 10y ago
  Reddit's not that large, and the admin in question is the CEO.
  - adamrezich 10y ago
    Reddit is one of the largest and most influential community websites on the Internet (#25-29ish).
    - grzm 10y ago
      One of the largest, sure. How are you measuring "most influential"?

empath75 10y ago

I don't know if I'll be able to believe anything any more. At least I can still trust the news on my Facebook feed.

quink 10y ago

>That pretty much destroys the credibility of Reddit's commenting system in a single act. The admins kickstarted reddit by impersonating different users, they even had a field to enter the username which which to post/comment. Fake it 'til you make it. Nothing inherently wrong with it. I'm not going to stop visiting reddit over this. Hell, if it erodes trust by /r/the_donald who'll move over to something like voat, fair enough. I have no illusions that content is safe from subversion, whether it be in-place or not, and I've myself applied some CSS during April Fools on a major subreddit that modified comments as a lark. It was wrong of /u/spez, sure. But the guy's pissed off, he should be with the amount of upvoting bots on that reddit and no real solution. He fessed up almost immediately and it's not like they're going to go at it in scale - especially since it's so very easily provable with archive.is. It was a juvenile messing around with a group that breeds on persecution complex. I consider this a joke. Not bad in taste, not the height of comedy. But no curtain with the wizard behind it has been pulled open here in my view, it's fine. ... I think there needs to be some control over the veracity, some intrusion into the bubbles with which we inherit the web. If it takes a reddit admin to cattle prod around the fucking bat-shit insane /r/pizzagate idiocy into outrage and feeding their persecution complex sarcastically and ironically then I may actually be for it.

yuhong 10y ago
It did not include comments AFAIK.

wfo 10y ago

Does it? Really? An admin played a prank on a bunch of insane, out of control conspiracy minded screaming blubbering trolls calling him a pedophile with a dumb silly find/replace rule. God forbid, next forums will start replacing words like 'shit' and 'fuck' with symbols to try and hide the truth of what we /really/ mean from the world. Who cares? Why is this a big deal? I am so unbelievably unimpressed with the seriousness of this, I feel like there is such an enormous effort to pretend this is "serious business" and "the integrity of reddit" (?) is somehow being compromised. We all knew this could be done. On any forum. Reddit is a silly place. Reddit is a place for people to shitpost memes and puns with throwaway accounts. The Donald is a subreddit that revels in trolling and messing with people, spewing toxic garbage nonstop. They riled up the main admin of reddit so much he did something childish -- a pretty impressive trolling effort. That's the end of this story as far as I can tell.

camperman 10y ago
> insane, out of control conspiracy minded screaming blubbering trolls This attitude is WHY YOU LOST THE ELECTION. > Who cares? Why is this a big deal? I am so unbelievably unimpressed with the seriousness of this, It is deadly serious. /r/pizzagate was just shut down for posting personal information. No proof was given. Reddit has users like Bill Gates who post regularly, it has interviewed the POTUS and countless movie stars. Just as a pedophile scandal threatens to engulf both Twitter and very senior members of the Democratic Party, the founder of reddit reveals that he fucks around with people's posts. What's to prevent him going into a user's history and falsifying it? We've had the head of the FBI in front of Congress talking about a Reddit comment for crying out loud, because it was about national security. His actions were extraordinarily poor judgement for an organisation that describes itself as a bastion of free speech.
- vehementi 10y ago
  > Just as a pedophile scandal threatens to engulf both Twitter and very senior members of the Democratic Party Ah.
  - 10y ago