20 ms·

Deleting the golang subreddit

• pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
  how about just deleting golang entirely? the CEO of google stole Oracle's development toolchain. you're all idiots.
• centizen 10y ago
  As mentioned by others in the thread, deleting it would just make it possible for someone to take it over the open it again. Setting the community to private not only solves the issue, but it allows them to bring it back in its current state at any time if they wish to in the future.
  • Sphax 10y ago
    What issue does it solve exactly? the users want to keep using it, only Brad and a couple others want to kill it.
    • Aldo_MX 10y ago
      The issue of investing time in a language which prefers to push a political agenda at the expense of alienating their community.
• mrweasel 10y ago
  I get their point, but I also think that a large part of the reason that people are using the Golang subreddit is Google Groups. If the Go team could just abandon Google Groups as the main forum for discussing Go, then just maybe there wouldn't be a need for the subreddit. I know that some people like Google Groups, but there's at least an equally large group that absolutely hate it. Personally I find it to be such an awful platform that I would prefer pretty much anything else, that includes tolerate shitty behaviour from the Reddit CEO.
  • zzzcpan 10y ago
    Second that. Google Groups is a big problem, stops me from reading anything golang related there.
    • thewhitetulip 10y ago
      It is not just about the UI, UI sucks but the feedback they give on google groups is terrible. Reddit community is so amazing that once I was having doubts about AJAX, within ten minutes, I had two answers, one with plain JS AJAX and another with jquery. If I had been asking on google group, which I have done only once when they replied back so horribly that I stopped using it, they'd have directed me to some obscure link on the Internet and asked me to chase it down. Reddit isn't stackoverflow. This is an open source community, if someone has a problem with it, they are welcome to leave, make /r/golang as an unofficial subreddit, which it was, when it started and before the robotic overlords took over the subreddit.
      • gkop 10y ago
        Is it really true that /r/golang is friendlier than go-nuts? If so then Golang should make /r/golang official and wind down go-nuts. Community friendliness is way more important than platform politics, and the unfriendliness on go-nuts might turn some people off to Golang.
        • thewhitetulip 10y ago
          Yes, /r/golang is way more friendlier than go-nuts. I say this by proof. 1. One year ago I started learning Go. It was difficult to understand it, I read a lot of books and stuff. I started working on http://github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks http://github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks, Later, I realised that there isn't a free resource to teach what I learned, so I tried to share my knowledge by creating this, http://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textbook/ http://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textbook.... The first post I made was to /r/golang: I got immensely +ve feedback, suggestions etc. The second post I made was that google group, I was told "The language is called Go and not Golang" and the condensed feedback from the elites was (after someone rallied behind me saying that give real feedback and this is being jerk and blah blah) that "it might be the case that suraj wrote a good book but people won't take it seriously until the language name is corectly used" Who cares about the title of the book? I certainly don't. I have read astaxie's book, codegansta's book, both had golang in their title. Their content was amazing. I loved them, didn't care about the title The links are below As another instance, I wanted help in AJAX one year ago, I asked /r/golang, I got two examples in half hour, one with plain JS another with jquery. Do you really think that if /r/golang was so "toxic" and "scum" as they call it on the go-nuts mailing list (a glaring violation of the CoC shoved down our throats) that there would be a consensus among /r/golang to unequivocally say "if Go authors don't participate in /r/golang then they are welcome to step down?" I do not understand what they want to do, Guido created python, is he the mod of /r/python, does he care what authors name their book? "oh the language is Python with a capital P", no, he does what he does and let's the community handle the community. my exp with /r/golang https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/5dkobc/sample_webapp_with_vue_as_frontend_feedback_please/ https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/5dkobc/sample_webap... https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/56mgxb/learn_how_to_write_webapps_in_go/ https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/56mgxb/learn_how_to... https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/50ih0s/whats_up_with_gomobile/ https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/50ih0s/whats_up_wit... https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4zyjye/network_programming_with_go/ https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4zyjye/network_prog... https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4kbup2/can_webapps_be_totally_stateless/ https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4kbup2/can_webapps_... https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4jxtdg/building_an_api/ https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4jxtdg/building_an_... https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4jaiun/updated_my_todo_list_app_in_go_to_handle_multiple/ https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4jaiun/updated_my_t... https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4ihjk7/added_session_handling_function_in_my_app/ https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4ihjk7/added_sessio... https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/46vb6x/want_to_discuss_handling_authentication_in_go/ https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/46vb6x/want_to_disc... https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/45uqpw/updated_my_todo_list_manager_file_uploads/ https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/45uqpw/updated_my_t... https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/439asd/simple_commandline_go_application_to_notify_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/439asd/simple_comma... https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/3zle8c/i_am_writing_a_book_about_writing_web_apps_with/ https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/3zle8c/i_am_writing... The fact that I do not have a single (+ve) link on go-nuts speaks volumes about which forum is toxic. Just read this thread which I started on go-nuts https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang-nuts/F4LJwyYZcXU/K4HxC6EXEQAJ;context-place=topic/golang-nuts/XoOhzUClDPs https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang-nuts/F4LJwyYZcX... And tell me later which community is helpful.
• yxhuvud 10y ago
  While the behaviour of the Reddit CEO was more than a little bit immature and short-sighted, closing down a functioning community in response seems almost as stupid. If they try to shut it down, then the community at Reddit will create a version of it that is not closed down.
  • justin_vanw 10y ago
    I'm not a /r/golang user, but I think this is a political statement of 'we will not tolerate the abuse of users by people entrusted with their data', which I think is fair. Maybe they should just call for the CEO to leave or something.
    • lucb1e 10y ago
      > I think this is a political statement Yet when people protested against SOPA/PIPA, we took it down for a day. Not indefinitely.
    • pavel_lishin 10y ago
      Except this is the admins making the statement, potentially taking their ball and going home - leaving a lot of people on the court wondering what to do next.
      • justin_vanw 10y ago
        I wonder how dramatic this really is? There must be a hundred forums to discuss go, people aren't so helpless they can't find their way off of reddit.
        • TeMPOraL 10y ago
          Dramatic enough for frequent visitors. Forums are dime a dozen, but a community you get used to and grow to like is unique for you. If HN was to be suddenly shut down, I'd literally be heartbroken.
          • 10y ago
• bryanlarsen 10y ago
  Dupe with more comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13035027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13035027
• dingdingdang 10y ago
  This response seems knee jerk to me - the actions of Reddit's CEO were made public and the backlash was considerable. As long as we're not running on fully distributed communication services the idea of fully impartial site owners remain hypothetical. I mean: the complaint itself had to be posted/linked on a Google service, another company that I guess should be shunned for being embroiled in various unrighteous actions. Not feasible or reasonable in my opinion.
• Tharkun 10y ago
  Their motivation for leaving Reddit is incredibly silly. Especially given that Google Groups -- of all things -- is their preferred alternative.
  • bradfitz 10y ago
    I was the one who proposed deleting /r/golang. Google Groups is not my preferred alternative by any means. Google Groups is a 1990's webmail interface to crappy but federated SMTP. There is very little to like about it, but at least the underlying protocol (SMTP) is federated. It is NOT an alternative to Reddit, which has a nice UI & voting system. It's unfortunate that Reddit is not a reliable platform which can be trusted. If Github were modifying our code for their own amusement we wouldn't trust them for a platform either.
    • baq 10y ago
      can you tell me why you want to punish users of your language - normal people - because politics? how that does make you better than u/spez? i'd argue this is worse.
    • Filligree 10y ago
      You're overreacting. The CEO of reddit edited a few posts, after having been sent masses of hate mail, then backed it out and apologized. You cannot seriously think there's any chance he'd do the same to /r/golang; there's little chance he'll do it again at all.
      • czinck 10y ago
        > You're overreacting. While I agree deleting the subreddit is excessive, I think you're downplaying it. Reddit has increasingly censored more and more content that the admins disagreed with (rightly or wrongly). Now they've taken it a step further and started to modify content they disagree with. If this was early on in reddit's history and they made the modifications as a joke then it wouldn't be a big deal, but the CEO modifying posts seen by probably 10s of thousands of people (that subreddit has 300k very active subscribers) is a huge slip down the slippery slope. I mean, think what your reaction would be if I misquoted you at the top, and I'm just a random user quoting you, not an admin actually changing what you said.
• atroyn 10y ago
  This reaction seems a little overwrought, but then again the frequency of this kind of drama generated by reddit really seems to be pathological. What is it about a critical mass of people in one place on the web that causes these kinds of behaviors?
  • Sphax 10y ago
    It's Brad and a couple of others who are to blame here, the golang subreddit didn't do shit to deserve being killed.
• BoorishBears 10y ago
  This is asinine and it going through would seriously harm how mature I assumed the community around Golang was (actually reading through those posts already did, but either way I guess I'm just one person right?). The CEO edited a comment and admitted he edited it, and it was stupid, and he shouldn't have done it. I'm 100% sure there is a way for someone at any given platform they'd choose to replace it with to access a DB of posts and edit it without triggering any sort of edit marker. I'm also sure if that process exists a CEO is someone who could probably make it happen, and in fact in some (most?) places someone lower in the chain of command can probably make it happen. Spez's actions harm himself more than users of the site. By confirming what any technically minded person probably already knew (you can edit raw data backing something like a post), he gave the masses a new source of drama any time something they don't like appears on the site. The sensible amongst us should be above childish drama like this. What is there on /r/Golang that they expect to see edited? If their qualm is political instead of practical then the users themselves should leave Reddit, and not burn down the entire village on their way out.
  • problems 10y ago
    I'm not so sure dismissing this as "childish drama" is smart. Sure, it's technically possible, but technical possibility does not mean it should be used, especially in this sort of way. I don't think it's a bad idea to disassociate yourself from a company who's behaving in a way you don't want to condone.
    • nurettin 10y ago
      It may not be smart, but it definitely is not stupid as you might have insinuated. Individuals deciding to exit because they disagree with company policy (editing content and apologizing) is one thing, forcing others, who don't care about stupid internet drama and conspiracy theories, to do the same is entirely something else. (that something else is borderline despotic)
      • problems 10y ago
        Again "stupid internet drama and conspiracy theories" this is not. An admin abused their power. It's ripe for abuse and they've proven they're willing to abuse it and not mature enough to treat that power respectfully. I have a hard time respecting a company with someone like that as CEO. No conspiracy, no politics, just what happened.
• fortytw2 10y ago
  As I've said before, there are more than enough willing community members to moderate the subreddit in the absence of the Go team. No reason for it to have been brought up like this, instead of a simple "I don't like reddit anymore, so I'm deleting my account and here's why"
• AlexeyBrin 10y ago
  Closing a thriving community just because an admin feels some moral imperative to do it is just short sided. If you don't like Reddit, write a blog post, blow some steam, delete your Reddit account, be as critical as you wish, but don't kill a community just because you can.
  • mibbiting 10y ago
    I feel like some people don't understand the gravity of what he did. He edited someone elses comments. What is the point in being part of a community where the website owners may be editing random comments? It undermines the whole thing. Let me ask a question. If it turned out that Google had started selectively "editing" peoples email coming from Gmail, would you still be fine using Gmail?
    • toomuchtodo 10y ago
      There is no gravity. People are overreacting, that's all. Spez simply did what other sites are able to do but never admit if they do or not. GPG sign everything online if you're concerned about your data changing. Even HN could change your comments if they wanted. What's stopping people? "Trust"?
      • ClassyJacket 10y ago
        So what if other websites "could"? It only matters if they DO. I don't treat everyone like a psychopath because they COULD stab me. I only care if they do.
        • toomuchtodo 10y ago
          You don't know if other sites do it unless they admit it.
    • AlexeyBrin 10y ago
      So the answer to censoring is more censoring, let's nuke an entire community just because I'm on a moral high horse! Also I fully understand what Spez did and I find it not OK. If you don't agree with what an admin did, you could ask for the respective admin/CEO to resign. The answer should not be to delete a community that you don't own on a whim. If Google started modifying my emails, I would stop using Gmail and advise my friends not to use Gmail. But I won't ask for Gmail to be killed/deleted just because I don't like it or I don't agree with it.
• heroprotagonist 10y ago
  So.. here's the thing. I think that spez did everyone a favor by editing those user comments. We know that politicians and corporations game the system already with fake accounts, presumably as a tool for manipulating public opinion. We know from the code that user comments aren't encrypted at all, or their voting tallies. It would require a very small tweak to manipulate things from the server side. Given that, users should _not_ have been placing any trust in the sanctity of the results they see to tell them how the hive actually thinks or even if the linked source is accurate. People need to learn to question the motives of what's presented to them. I'm not saying to automatically distrust everything, just to look past whatever spin is put on an article and look at the primary sources. The fact that someone has the capability and willingness to edit comments was so shocking to some people is a sign that these surprised people needed this kind of a wake-up call. We can speculate, due to the missing warrant canary, that the government has, or has had, at least one user under surveillance from the system. This is very public proof that even the content of comments can be manipulated, which might help some poor schmuck out one day when his 'anonymous' internet comment gets misconstrued and comes back to bite him.
  • rocketpastsix 10y ago
    Not to mention, its pretty widely known that /r/the_donald uses bots to up the votes and push their stuff higher on /r/all. Not that Im thrilled that Spez did what he did, but /r/the_donald has been pushing the line ever since it was created.
    • water42 10y ago
      Do you have any proof of this? I haven't heard this before and they certainly have an active enough community to push things to the r/all quickly.
      • wmil 10y ago
        Early on mods encouraged users to upvote everything to counter brigading. Then they noticed that it got them on /r/all. So now they just randomly post notices of brigading.
• antirez 10y ago
  Always Overreact!!11one. Seriously I expect a bit more by people that for work apply logic everyday.
• Steeeve 10y ago
  > That is so beyond unethical and immature, I no longer want anything to do with that site. I will be deleting my account on Reddit after backing up my content, and I will no longer be a moderator of /r/golang. Responding to immaturity with immaturity is a bad idea altogether. I have never understood Google's choice of "use google groups" for projects, then farming out community relations to third parties like StackOverflow, Reddit, etc. They have enough resources to manage their own support, news dissemination, and discussion mechanisms. There are a number of reasons to not have an official presence on Reddit, but "I'm taking my ball and going home" isn't one of them.
  • thewhitetulip 10y ago
    Why do they use Google groups anymore? The UI sucks, it is heavily moderated. Reddit is like democracy where the elites of the community are treated equally with the others. Even the author's comments can be collapsed. name one place on the internet where this happens, except reddit. A knee jerk reaction, we want the subreddit back! p.s. after the Google Pixel thing, I do hope that they don't shut my google account down because I am saying that google groups sucks by citing some hidden rule or something.
  • forgottenpass 10y ago
    Responding to immaturity with immaturity is a bad idea altogether. Sticking to principles, even when it's uncomfortable and inconvenient to do so is "immature" now?
    • freehunter 10y ago
      It's not the principles, it's the actions being discussed to follow through with those. You know the phrase "I'm taking my ball and going home"? What he wants to do is take someone else's ball, go home, and make sure that no one else is playing with a ball again after he leaves. He's wanting to destroy something the community finds useful, and not only that, wanting to prevent the community from building and using it on their own in the future if they wanted to continue without his involvement. That's the harmful action. It's fine if he says "I won't use reddit anymore". Perfectly fine. But shutting down the subreddit, deleting all of its content, and specifically reserving the name so the community can't continue in his absence is just... well, immature. There are better ways to handle it. This is a pure temper tantrum.
• detaro 10y ago
  Wow, the amount of people just going "yeah, delete it and make sure it doesn't come back" is staggering. Really bad image how some people seem to think the community and it's resources should be "officially owned". Want to make a personal statement? Leave the platform, demand the subreddit being marked as unofficial (AFAIK it did start out as a random sub by a random person and only later added people from the Go team as moderators). Don't decide for your users that yes, you don't want to meet there anymore, so we torched it for you.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• zapu 10y ago
  There is a thread on golang subreddit about this. Users are not happy. https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/5eqs64/proposal_to_delete_rgolang/ https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/5eqs64/proposal_to_... From what I understand, the golang team does not want any association with the subredit or reddit as a whole. But I don't understand how /u/spez actions have triggered this. It looks like the proposal of /r/golang deletion is either a political statement, or go team wanted to get rid of it before and were just looking for an excuse. Everything at expense of /r/golang (and therefore the go language itself) users.
  • Klathmon 10y ago
    They have been vocal in the past about disliking the subreddit, I think this is just their opportunity. Edit: disregard this. I remember reading some things a while ago and haven't looked into it, and I shouldn't have jumped in without doing some due diligence.
    • bradfitz 10y ago
      They? I've never seen the other moderators or myself disliking Reddit before. This is my opinion alone.
      • Klathmon 10y ago
        To be completely honest it was a while ago and I don't remember who or what was said at this point. I edited my original comment, I shouldn't have said anything without actually knowing what I was talking about.
• wofo 10y ago
  Note that the discussion on the golang subreddit [1] has a very different tone. One comment that particularly drew my attention is: > So people that rarely use this subreddit want to get rid of it? Okay. It seems like the Google Groups people are not the same as the r/golang people. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/5eqs64/proposal_to_delete_rgolang/ https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/5eqs64/proposal_to_...
• adrenalinelol 10y ago
  Why is the initial reaction to delete the sub instead of find a new owner?
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• wtbob 10y ago
  > The sensible amongst us should be above childish drama like this. Are there many sensible among us? Remember, this is an industry in which a CTO would fire an employee for using proper English[0]. It's an industry where a CEO called for employees who voted for a candidate he opposed to resign. We passed the point of insensibility a long time ago. [0] Bryan Cantrill stated in 2013 that Joyent will fire any employee who uses English pronouns correctly: https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun
  • chasing 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization
  • Thrillington 10y ago
    You argue that gendered pronouns are proper English? Sure, but non-gendered pronouns are also proper English. Given both options why do you feel insistence of gendered pronouns is a positive thing?
  • goblin89 10y ago
    Non-native English speaker here. I’m defaulting to “they” or “one” unless it’s someone whose gender is known and is one of the two widely recognized today. Does that actually fall under incorrect usage of English pronouns?
    • nommm-nommm 10y ago
      No, it's correct English and has a long history of use and appears in famous writings. >The singular they had emerged by the 14th century and is common in everyday spoken English, but its use has been the target of criticism since the late 19th century. Its use in formal English has increased with the trend toward gender-inclusive language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
      • goblin89 10y ago
• buro9 10y ago
  This is about trust. If a space where a community gathers isn't trusted, core members of that community are going to want to leave. Trust is delicate. Trust is giving someone the power to do harm you or to misuse what you have given them, in the belief that they will not do those things. The trust has been shattered, and probably only the core members currently realise this. Those are the users for whom "this is our voice, this is what we've said" is important. It is really sad that the trust has been broken, but there you have it. If key people in any community believe that their words (which are their reputation) can (will) be edited, misrepresented... then there really is a problem. The worst-case logical conclusions are legal liability, the best case is stress and friction caused by confusions and mis-truths. I run forums, I know this is about trust, I've seen it played out. When I designed the forum software for the sites I run I made the database an append-on-write system to store historical revisions of every comment. I can't display those (if a user edited something to remove something that had legal/personal implications then they should not be public) but I do store them and provide no moderator any access to edit them. Trust is really important. This isn't, as others suggest, petty.
  • Tinyyy 10y ago
    Look, you can ramble all about your 'trust'. But the fact is that the community on Reddit still trust Reddit. They're not asking to shut down the subreddit. It's the moderators in power, who use google groups instead of Reddit, who want to shut the subreddit down.
    • cnnsucks 10y ago
      Ironically you're both in agreement without knowing it. Yes, trust is important and yes, the 'community on Reddit' still trust Reddit. The bulk of Reddit users don't mind that spez had a momentary lapse of judgement and corrupted some r/The_Donald stuff. They find it amusing; left to them r/The_Donald would have been nuked long ago on the way to making Reddit into the sort of safe space echo chamber they want. The fact that spez had a little fun with it just affirms that he's on the right side of that mentality and secures his trust among these people. They're not proud that one of theirs has been caught so embarrassingly, but he's on their side so it's easy to forgive.
• nols 10y ago
  Even if they effectively delete /r/golang or close it while retaining control so others can't use it, the users will just create another one. I doubt it will have a large impact on the future of golang on Reddit, it will just get rid of years of discussion and make it slightly more difficult to use. You don't want to use Reddit? Cool, don't. There are still millions who do want to use it and some might use that to find information on golang.
• transfire 10y ago
  I fear the collective idiocy of the United States populace is reaching dangerous levels.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• tcrews 10y ago
  Weren't they (Golang core team) only recently considering removing golang from StackOverflow like they own the thing? It seems like a pattern of trying to enforce the unenforceable.
• pavel_lishin 10y ago
  > It's a wretched hive of scum and villainy. The Go subreddit was the only thing similar to human and it is downright painful most of the time. How lucky that their group happens to be the good one!
  • zpallin 10y ago
    It's this line of thinking that makes me question their logic in suggesting this action.
  • JamesMcMinn 10y ago
    The person who made this comment in the mailing list appears to have been made a moderator of subreddit 9 days ago...
• thewhitetulip 10y ago
  As I have stated elsewhere, the Go community is split into two factions, elites (Googlers) and others. Reddit is the only place where others and elites are treated the same, post for feedback on the google group, which has sucky UI and is terrible to use, and you get small comments because they are busy and the feedback isn't at all helpful. Contrast that with Reddit, as someone had pointed to me on HN, I posted a question about AJAX and Go, I got two answers, one in vanilla JS and one in JQuery. Had I asked that in the google groups, I'd likely have not been able to post because it would have been "too simple" or I'd have been shooed away to some obscure stack overflow link. The community wants the subreddit, you can leave if you want. Just because one person screwed up doesn't mean that someone who rarely uses reddit wants to delete the subreddit WITHOUT asking the community. This is against the point of open source. Isn't Go open source?
• noja 10y ago
  Surely it should be for Google to suggest and the community to decide?
• jack9 10y ago
  Comments on any given internet forum are of no specific importance or authority, which is part of the lesson. This "question" is a non-event. Sheesh.
• kazinator 10y ago
  The CEO edited comments critical of him. Did that happen in the golang subreddit? If so, those comments should in fact be deleted entirely. Criticizing the CEO of Reddit is not topical in a golang subreddit; it is off-topic trolling.
  • wvenable 10y ago
    I think even saying the comments were critical gives them too much credit. He edited comments that were harassment to, childishly, redirect them to other people. But this is small potatoes really. Reddit has multiple faces; if you're in your technology subreddit you exist in another world from all the literally crazy drama and harassment that goes on. Running reddit is not likely to be a pleasant experience anymore.
• bradfitz 10y ago
  I was the one who proposed deleting /r/golang. It is not some official Go or Google position. As much as I used to love Reddit and was addicted to it, my personal position is that Reddit is no longer a trustworthy platform (if it ever was). Editing user content is beyond offensive. I never even considered such a thing in my years of running LiveJournal. That is a major violation of user trust and trust in the platform. If Github or Gerrit or Google Groups or Google's SMTP servers were modifying our code or mailing list content, we would ditch them in a heartbeat. We shouldn't demand less from Reddit. But because I learned that /r/golang existed 7 years ago (before I or other Googlers were even involved with it), I no longer propose deleting it. But I think the Go project should disassociate from it and give it back to the community as an unofficial space, as it used to be. It's just too unreliable of a platform to be official in any regard. Now I'm brainstorming how one might build a federated Reddit with public, signed mutation log, ala CT or other chains. And then multiple UIs could render the same public & federated data set.
  • twixbix 10y ago
    Hey bradfitz, thanks for coming over to HN. I created an alt account just to appeal to you: Please do not delete r/golang. I happen to like the subreddit and the community of people on there. It's great place for me to find news & learn more about the language, and it would be very hard for me (who doesn't happen to be in a physical environment that fosters the discussion of the language) to find a similar community online. If you happen to dislike reddit, please feel free to step down as moderator and move on. Please do not use this opportunity to grandstand and destroy the community for the rest of us, who do not happen to care about the drama surrounding the CEO (personally, I think it was childish of him, but I would not go to the extent of disrupting the community for others). Thanks for listening.
  • saboot 10y ago
    You have every right to take this position, and if you feel strongly have no obligation to stay. What I cannot understand is the next step of proposing to close the entire subreddit. Don't want to moderate it anymore? Then don't. A subreddit is made up of it's users, not just the moderators.
• draw_down 10y ago
  Quite frankly, reddit has way bigger problems than that. I mean, do what you want with your subreddit, no skin off my back. But it is borderline insane to me that this is what is turning people against it. Ignominious.
• dekhn 10y ago
  Since the golang community was originally independent, and then the golang owners took it over, instead of deleting it, they should return it to the community with a disclaimer it's not an official venue.
• jsprogrammer 10y ago
  The CEO of Google was busted by his emails for conspiring to suppress wages. WikiLeaks recently released a 2014 email[1] from Eric where he appears to conspire with the Clinton campaign/dnc to have "low paid permanent employees". [1] https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/37262 https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/37262 E: bots are out?
  • hga 10y ago
    More like acquiescing to Apple's demands that Google do that, and they did quite actively, but not at his/Google's initiation. Which doesn't change the crime that much. The greater point is that the CEO of a company with digital user assets, let me call them, can be thoroughly evil, while company policy and enforcement keeps his hands from directly tampering with those assets. Silently changing someone's postings is one of the vilest betrayals of trust a platform can commit, the only worst I can think of is forging new ones out of whole cloth, and if that happens without major changes resulting in the company, that says a great deal about it as a whole, and whether you should have any dealings with it, especially seeing as such assets have been used to criminally convict people, and specifically one Rowan O'Connell for this company.
  • sachel1sta 10y ago
    Your text is nearly white within 19 minutes of being posted. It's obvious HackerNews is not safe--from certain people.
    • dang 10y ago
      It's plainly off-topic, and the worst kind of off-topic tangent: the kind that makes a thread even more generically political.
      • jsprogrammer 10y ago
        CEO of Google emails being used in a court of law to secure a negative outcome for Google, is off-topic in a sub thread about the CEO of Google being able to edit Google emails and other data? Did Eric challenge the authenticity of the emails? I've never heard him do so. I now understand why you couldn't specify in what way my comment was "off-topic".
• elcct 10y ago
  I think it is time to sign comments, that way these will be tamper proof. Regarding the subreddit, I would just leave it. It was hard work of the community to create content that exist there and it will not be nice to remove it just because of some immature CEO. But once suitable alternative comes to the light, would be nice to disallow further posts and add a redirect to the new community.
• phn 10y ago
  Now would be an awesome time for reddit to add support for signed posts and comments.
• LordFrith 10y ago
  This is the oddest consequence of the pizzagate thing I could have dreamed of. http://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...
• exception_e 10y ago
  E̶l̶l̶e̶n̶ ̶P̶a̶o̶ Spez should step down!
• mankash666 10y ago
  Yes. Let's delete our accounts from Google for Google's unfair treatment of protonmail and yelp in yesteryears. Let's get off Facebook for fake stories swinging elections. Don't even get me started on Microsoft, just get off it. Get off everything. Everything sucks
  • krick 10y ago
    Sounds funny to me, because I'm avoiding Google, Facebook and Microsoft products when it isn't way too problematic, and I do it because of political/moral reasons not in the last place. I'm not saying I agree with r/golang deletion, by the way. Surely this is stupid and inadequate, as reddit it made out of drama anyway. But getting off something you don't agree with in general is quite noble, I'd say.
• hota_mazi 10y ago
  I thought it was a joke but I realize they are seriously considering doing this. Overreaction much? People want to talk about Go, regardless of how the Go team feels about reddit's ethics. I'm not sure what doing this will serve except lead to the creation of another Go subreddit that's no longer moderated by the Go team. Really su2rprised and disappointed by bradfitz and team's childish (over)reaction to this.
• gaur 10y ago
  The reddit admins allow subreddits that loudly promote white supremacism. Comment editing is not the most pressing ethical failing of that site.
• bromuro 10y ago
  Classic reddit drama: reacting to a childish action with even more childish actions.
• zouhair 10y ago
  That is quite an immature thing to do.
• 1_2__3 10y ago
  How about we let the drama stay in the drama subreddits, and in the non-drama subreddits we act like adults. For fuck's sake, not everything in life has to be a cause.
• deleted 10y ago
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• deleted 10y ago
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• jondubois 10y ago
  I think that the CEO of Reddit should step down. I believe that the odds of him getting caught for this were very small - So that begs the question; how many times did he pull this off in the past without anyone noticing? The almost unnoticeable subtlety of the act is what I find most disturbing. It's not that the act was abominable (it could be worse). It's just that this position demands higher ethics than that - It needs someone with the right motivations. I think people are too easy on CEOs; if a regular employee messes up, they get fired. Why doesn't this apply to executives? We should be much tougher on executives... It's not like they'd lose their house or their family if they got fired.
• johnnydoebk 10y ago
  I never liked the /r/golang subreddit and its atmosphere. But at the moment it's the most active golang community that I'm aware of.
• jarcane 10y ago
  So, reddit actively continues to be a playground for fascists, racists, and sexists, has a history of hosting borderline child pornography, but what drives the golanger in question to finally leave is spez had a bit of a temper tantrum (with some of said fascists I might add) and edited some posts harassing him? Some people's values are utterly alien to me.
• mseepgood 10y ago
  Why pollute HN with reddit drama? Aren't we all glad to have left reddit behind?
• shanemhansen 10y ago
  This guy should be applauded. Here's why: He made a mistake by making a childish response to a childish attack and then he admitted fault. That's so rare. I wish more CEOs had his backbone. I'm sorry to be inflammatory, but it seems like people take reddit a little too seriously and this is the real world not /r/relationships. It's probably not time to: "lawyer up, hit the gym, delete /r/golang".
• stcredzero 10y ago
  > I would argue that a moderator shutting down a community of 25,000 individuals because of their own personal opinions is just as much if not the greater abuse of power. (blitzd) This is emblematic of what's wrong with so many subreddits and so much of the social web that comes in the form of "forums" -- it seems like we have entire generations of users who have associated the totalitarian nature of forums with things being "advanced" on the internet. Social media isn't mostly about free thought, free speech, and free inquiry anymore. Nowadays, it's mostly about the rapid dissemination of conformity. Woe betide you if you actually have a nuanced opinion that doesn't fit neatly with either side of an issue. Your fellow posters/commenters will reject their pattern-match and call you a liar and 5th columnist for the other side. Technology came and killed the impulse towards freedom. It taught people through repeated iteration that conformity to the mob was the highest good. It taught smart people that wrangling their way into positions of centralized power to exercise authoritarian rule was the insider move. It taught everyone that suppression of anything that you didn't like was the winning move. It was called the internet.
• ben_jones 10y ago
  PLEASE don't force me to use google groups more then I have to!
• faragon 10y ago
  Not a problem. They can write their own Reddit in Go, with blackjack, etc.
• sqeaky 10y ago
  Simple question. What happens if spez modifies comments you put on Reddit in the ancient past to make you seem like a Racist, ISIS supporter, Homophobe, or simply puts threats to various heads of state in your name? Can you really trust him not do to so? What if one day he decides that golang is bad because they are badmouthing something that spez really likes?
  • LordFrith 10y ago
    Go through the comment histories of frequent posters to /r/The_Donald . It would be extremely hard to make any of them look 'bad'. They relish being as... deplorable as possible.
    • sqeaky 10y ago
      What about my comments? I am not from that sub, but what if spez decides to do something to my 5 year old reddit comments just because he doesn't like that I am criticizing him? Have you every commented on Reddit? If so, now it could be a threat on the life of a head of state and the investigation could greatly complicate your life just because you ticked off spez.
• plandis 10y ago
  That's fine. I'm not on any mailing lists but I am subscribed to the golang subreddit. I guess this means I will just not stay up to date with whats going on. Edit: https://www.quora.com/What-are-examples-of-Google-acting-unethically-or-illegally https://www.quora.com/What-are-examples-of-Google-acting-une... Perhaps we should close down the google groups too?
• hhsnopek 10y ago
  Lets just remove left-pad from npm while we're at it again
• onetwotree 10y ago
  This seems like an extremely silly move. Reddit can broadly be partitioned into a small number of very popular "front page" subs, such as /r/TIL, /r/AskReddit, and /r/news, where drama and toxicity abound, and a vast number of topical subs (such as /r/golang), where discussion is focused on a specific topic, and generally friendly, civil, and useful. I'm not a fan of the front page myself, although usually for reasons unrelated to the recent drama. But with a nicely curated set of subreddit subscriptions, I find the site to be a nice collection of news and discussion that interests me. Hopefully the golang community shows some maturity and doesn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
• sb8244 10y ago
  I don't understand the argument that this is outrageous and there should be auditing and all of that. How do you know there isn't? How do you know new policies will come into place that prevent this? Jumping ship less than a week after it seems crazy to me.
• erikb 10y ago
  I totally understand the reason, but deleting a subreddit just hurts the community more than it hurts reddit. Working on an alternative to reddit and then dropping reddit once that one works may be a solution.
• andybak 10y ago
  Here's the thing. I read the whole pizzagate vs reddit thing and decided it was interesting in the "let me please think about it in a few years time" kind of way. There's rights and wrong and subtleties but fuck it. I've got more important things to worry about. If I was a Go dev now I'd be furious because this bizarre incestuous little drama suddenly is affecting my actual working day (assuming the golang subreddit is a viable community). I recently became active on the Django subreddit because it seemed more approachable than the main IRC or Google Group. If that suddenly got vanished because of subreddit drama I'd be fairly annoyed. Can we just have a separate room for the children to play in?
• dirtbox 10y ago
  Spez edits comments directed at him in a toxic community that has been pretty much the root of the alt-right echo chamber for the last year. I'm just sad he didn't delete the entire sub. /r/golang can do what they like, but this is no reason.
  • cooper12 10y ago
    Leave it to them to make themselves out to be the victims even though constant username pinging is considered harassment on reddit. (to say nothing of the content of the comments themselves...) The funny part is that if spez is deposed, he was likely the last one fighting against their sub's removal. The same thing happened in the past with Ellen Pao . According to Yishan Wong (another ex-CEO): > Ellen had to take over (I'm not sure she wanted to, but she was the only one) and the board wanted her to just ban all those subreddits but she had been around long enough to know that you can't just do that (they'll just spring up again) so she resisted. (https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/58zaho/the_accuracy_of_voat_regarding_reddit_srs_admins/d95a7q2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/58zaho/the_...) > on at least two separate occasions, the board pressed /u/ekjp to outright ban ALL the hate subreddits in a sweeping purge. She resisted, knowing the community, claiming it would be a shitshow. Ellen isn't some "evil, manipulative, out-of-touch incompetent she-devil" as was often depicted (https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3dautm/content_policy_update_ama_thursday_july_16th_1pm/ct3n7hc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3dautm/conte...)
• j1vms 10y ago
  I know people are talking again about a distributed (blockchain-based?) forum preventing problems like this, and once that happens it will make "message forgery" like this a lot harder. But a "low-tech" solution in the mean time would be for users to post a public-key under their username/account. Then when they publish a message, they include a private-key encrypted SHA256 hash of the contents of their post and append that to their message (in effect, signing it). Other users' client-side tools (say browser plugins) could pick up the hash, verify the message and indicate the message is authentic. Forging the public key or an already posted message would raise an alert for automated tools, other users and/or the poster. Would reduce the need to log all message contents, just the keys. Of course, does not prevent message deletions but that is under moderation scope anyway. Just a sketch.
  • hackerboos 10y ago
    There's Bitmessage[1] but it needs a lot of work before it could replace Reddit. [1] - https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page
• rurban 10y ago
  Aside from the valid point and the little drama involved, the more important point is that reddit just lost its safe harbor protection over that issue, which means it will be either closed down soon (too expensive and risky) or heavily censored with only a few subreddits, which means golang sooner or later might need to find another place. So better look now. https://twitter.com/infinitechan/status/801627024431271936 https://twitter.com/infinitechan/status/801627024431271936
  • rurban 10y ago
    Oops not, apparently too many conspiracy folks involved. https://np.reddit.com/r/law/comments/5eq9tl/what_does_it_mean_that_reddits_safe_harbor/ https://np.reddit.com/r/law/comments/5eq9tl/what_does_it_mea... It looks like it lost it accidently on the same date. A technicality.
  • SwellJoe 10y ago
    That's nonsense. Safe harbor can apply to some parts of a site even if the owners of the site exercise editorial control over some of it. Google has both curated/edited content and user generated content, YouTube has both, facebook has both, newspaper websites have both, WordPress.com has both. It is not a switch that gets flipped for the entire website when one editorial action happens somewhere on a website, and it exhibits total lack of understanding of the safe harbor provisions to suggest it is.
• jsprogrammer 10y ago
  HN moderators absolutely edit user content without notice or attribution. My comments are partly authored by dang, but you will not be able to tell which words are mine and which are not.
  • grzm 10y ago
    Can you provide examples? I'd like to know what types of things they edit.
    • dang 10y ago
      It's quite untrue. I can think of a single example where we edited a user's comment without them asking us to, and it happened a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13012176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13012176. As you can see, I posted what we did and why. The alternative would have been to kill the comment outright. Edit: my conscience reminds me that I've also edited several spelling mistakes over the years. That was mostly when I was filling in for pg.
      • grzm 10y ago
        Given what I've seen of your behavior (and sctb's) on HN, I didn't think my parent would be able to come up with any. I generally push back against apparently baseless accusations (which is what I assumed in this case) by asking for evidence.
        • dang 10y ago
          Thank you. That's a good approach to take, because if people do provide specific links, we can look into what happened and explain it. Grand accusations about HN moderation are nearly always without specific examples, which I suppose is a kind of evidence in its own right.
          • jsprogrammer 10y ago
            Nope, it's just a function of the HN interface. We have discussed this before; even when it has occurred. I've also given you links, I believe. Do you realize that you said I outright lied, but also posted that you did change things once, then admitted that it actually has occurred more than once?
• saurik 10y ago
  Wiping away a massive trove of contextualized historical discussion and even technical content, particularly one about a widely used open source project, is sickening and in my eyes is so much worse than what anyone at reddit did I am shocked that someone would even propose it much less that other people on this mailing list were not only willing to consider it but seem to actively support the idea.
• jonlorusso 10y ago
  meh
• u801e 10y ago
  It would be nice if a usenet newsgroup like comp.lang.golang existed and all posts made to the golang subreddit could be reposted there. Then, IMO, deleting the golang subreddit would be a non-issue. The newsgroup doesn't have to be moderated and, if one wants moderation, they can do it via the newsreader program.
• hashhar 10y ago
  Well, being a lurker in /r/golang for about 8 months now has shown me that the official team was always looking for a way to clear out the reddit community. They have a strict moral police and do some weird shit. https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/59nk46/stalking_people_online_for_thought_crimes_this_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/59nk46/stalking_peo...