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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 perso

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.
- iainmerrick 10y ago
  It was just an overreaction (and a pretty understandable one) because he is so pissed off at Reddit.
  - blitzd 10y ago
    ...funny, that's basically the same thing Spez said about what he did.
    - notheguyouthink 10y ago
      Well, except Spez actually did it. Brad asked for feedback/proposed doing it.
- bradfitz 10y ago
  The background is that we have some official spaces and some unofficial spaces. I thought our subreddit was an official space that we created. It turns out we didn't create it, so it's not ours to delete. I'm now proposing we just make it unofficial.
  - Avshalom 10y ago
    >>It turns out we didn't create it No shit. https://imgur.com/a/K2cWx https://imgur.com/a/K2cWx
    - bradfitz 10y ago
      Yes, that's what I learned too. That was before my time.
      - canttestthis 10y ago
        Did you learn it by scrolling down on the front page and looking at the text below the list of moderators? I sincerely hope you aren't trusted to run a public community ever again if your first reaction is to start an off-site proposal to shut a community down.
qz_ 10y ago
> 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. Reddit is 100% open source: https://github.com/reddit/reddit https://github.com/reddit/reddit
- bradfitz 10y ago
  That is necessary but not sufficient. The design is wrong.
- tapirl 10y ago
  No, the voting algorithm is not open sourced.
  - chromakode 10y ago
    https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/db/_sorts.pyx https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/db/_s...
  - problems 10y ago
    The only part not open sourced is the spam filters.
- ben_jones 10y ago
  Also the infrastructure which allows Reddit to exist is not. All those scaling issues they've "solved" over the past ten years? Have fun with those if you're trying to copy and paste the repo..
Tinyyy 10y ago
-
- ryanlol 10y ago
  How is that not almost exactly what he is suggesting? His just includes that Go project also distance themselves from reddit, which is more than reasonable.
visarga 10y ago
You don't need to rebuild reddit. Just add offsite, trusted backups of comments. If you want to be fancy, allow redditors to enable monitoring of their comments with a bot command, and get notifications in their inbox.
- thewhitetulip 10y ago
  Using /r/golang is the community's call, why do they care about federated things? It isn't like we discuss some sensitive information over it that we need to "trust" reddit. Do we really "trust" Google/FB? it is about convenience. Almost all traffic for my FOSS projects has come from Reddit and because of Reddit, from twitter.
iainmerrick 10y ago
Make a federated replacement for Twitter while you're at it! It would be interesting to figure out how to tackle, well, "voter fraud" in that kind of system. I see lots of people complaining about how Reddit is vulnerable to upvoting brigades but I don't see anyone proposing solutions.
- justinsaccount 10y ago
  He kinda did... at least the foundation for such a system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PubSubHubbub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PubSubHubbub
thewhitetulip 10y ago
The symbolic gesture that the project is disassociating is okay. Deleting the repo is not. >It's just too unreliable of a platform to be official in any regard. The /r/golang subreddit is for devs who want answers and who don't want to be held up by the whims of stackoverflow mods. It isn't rocket science and even if we can't trust the answers, why would anyone edit the answers? If you remember, the reddit CEO only edited the usernames, that too, I am sure it was a prank. If anyone edits the messages which we post on /r/golang, it will lead to the answer being invalid and or something else, the world isn't going to collapse, there won't be congressional hearings just because some dev wasn't able to run gofmt and the answer posted by another random guy on the Internet was changed and can't be "trusted". We want answers on /r/golang and it isn't much about trust. Thank you for no longer proposing to delete it.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  The question I've had is why didn't reddit SREs stop the DB edits as an attack. Even using valid creds, the queries should've been anomalies and logging should've picked up the unusual access pattern. There's three possibilities that come to me: 1. The CEO explicitly told reliability/security staff to ignore his edits. Policy fail of epic proportions. 2. The edits were performed using designed tools and queries, which means reddit had before now intended to make silent edits to user data as part of regular business. 3. Reddit lacks the internal safeguards to know if user data was unexpectedly written to. This option is dangerous to hosting code on reddit, because an attacker could silently, maliciously change examples without reddit ever detecting the damage (or users seeing an edit mark). I expect that we're in case 2, followed by 3 and then 1 (in terms of likelihood), but none of the ways that a large tech company could have this happen are reassuring about P&P at reddit, or make me want to rely on them for hosting a community.
  - stouset 10y ago
    > Reddit SREs You've been working at Google too long. Reddit has on the order of a few dozen employees, not all of them technical. Welcome to how the rest of the Internet works.
OldSchoolJohnny 10y ago
It's adorable that you think any site is immune to that kind of interference.
kps 10y ago
> 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. ~~~~~~~ begin wavy lines flashback ~~~~~~ NNTP + S/MIME ~~~~~~~ end wavy lines flashback ~~~~~~
johnnydoebk 10y ago
I'd make the subreddit unofficial, too but for other reasons. It is a very unwelcoming place. I'm not the first one who's saying this, but it's really a shame how toxic the /r/golang is.
- ben_jones 10y ago
  Is it? There is some hivemind like the rest of the internet, and tech discussion in general (including here), but the value of the people who frequent the sub should definitely override that. It's still much better then stackoverflow etc.
- m3talsmith 10y ago
  In order to keep this from being swept under the rug, I can say that I highly empathize with you. I will also say that this issue has improved greatly. When I used to hang out in #gonuts it used to be worse. I blame this on the egos and the expectations of early adopters and contributors. They came from a point of senior systems programmers. As the language grew in popularity, they were unprepared psychologically for dealing with new or junior programmers: the level of questions put forth were things the original crew had learned early in their careers and took for granted. It is often this way in early languages. We need to always make room for those who are just learning, or are not experienced as those who initially created the language or space. I have seen this improving in the Golang community. The more new people come in, the more it will improve.
  - IndianAstronaut 10y ago
    >As the language grew in popularity, they were unprepared psychologically for dealing with new or junior programmers: the level of question.. This is so ironic. Go gained popularity fast the same way Python did, because it is easy to use and a relatively simple language.
- Sphax 10y ago
  Please show me how we are toxic. As far as I'm concerned, it's not true at all.
tscs37 10y ago
>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. Your post to delete /r/goland triggered me to actually work out an idea for this ;) The idea would be to use importers to provide reddit and other sources like mailing lists within the site and at the same time provide native content through Pubsubhubbub. Of course everything uses Ed25519 Signatures for verification, including user-content. Tho atm it's merely a pipe-dream with a short and shitty readme.
1wd 10y ago
On Hacker News user submitted content gets silently edited by the admins all the time. (Specifically submission titles.)
- sctb 10y ago
  Submission titles "belong" to the content, not the submitter, and that has always been the case.
problems 10y ago
Only played with it a bit in the early days, but someone has an open source distributed reddit clone called Aether http://getaether.net/ http://getaether.net/
ThrustVectoring 10y ago
>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. The tricky thing is that the admin team is still doing things that you want and need out of a reddit alternative. For example, ensuring that child pornography isn't getting shared. The question is how to set things up so that the right content gets removed while ensuring that how we decide what the right content to remove gets isolated from political pressures that want to influence the narrative.
- sacado2 10y ago
  You "just" need (yeah, easier said than done) to ensure that any intervention from an admin is publicly logged. If admin "foo" removes some content from user "bar", it should just be made visible, something like "user foo removed offensive content from user bar" or "that comment was edited by user foo". The problem here with reddit was not the fact that content was edited, it was that content was edited without anyone knowing it.
koko775 10y ago
Worth noting that moderators, admins, or community-team level employees do not have the power to edit comments – I believe this was done at the database level. Signed comments is a good idea though.
endgame 10y ago
Agreed with the above, but also: in this world of "free" services (where the users are farmed like honeybees), voting with one's feet is about the only way to send a message that a company will actually listen to. I see no problem with individuals leaving, and I see no problem with advocating a shutdown or at least encouraging other people to leave. Work out what the community wants, and go from there. (I don't use go, but from my personal "this cannot be allowed to stand" perspective: I would love to see communities that are _not_ about hot-button topics stand up and walk out.)
retube 10y ago
> Editing user content is beyond offensive Get over yourself. In the grand scheme of things, a guy editing a handful of posts on a public forum is beyond trivial. There are about a billion things going on in the world which are worse.
danmux 10y ago
Totally agree with distancing from Reddit. I would contribute to a federated non-repudiable system. Moderation can be just as auditable. (Perhaps with some emergency actions that then require a follow up consensus to make permanent) On some occasions the original content must be purged, but the signatures can remain. Communal censorship is vastly different from changing the content.

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.

iainmerrick 10y ago
It was just an overreaction (and a pretty understandable one) because he is so pissed off at Reddit.
- blitzd 10y ago
  ...funny, that's basically the same thing Spez said about what he did.
  - notheguyouthink 10y ago
    Well, except Spez actually did it. Brad asked for feedback/proposed doing it.
bradfitz 10y ago
The background is that we have some official spaces and some unofficial spaces. I thought our subreddit was an official space that we created. It turns out we didn't create it, so it's not ours to delete. I'm now proposing we just make it unofficial.
- Avshalom 10y ago
  >>It turns out we didn't create it No shit. https://imgur.com/a/K2cWx https://imgur.com/a/K2cWx
  - bradfitz 10y ago
    Yes, that's what I learned too. That was before my time.
    - canttestthis 10y ago
      Did you learn it by scrolling down on the front page and looking at the text below the list of moderators? I sincerely hope you aren't trusted to run a public community ever again if your first reaction is to start an off-site proposal to shut a community down.

qz_ 10y ago

bradfitz 10y ago
That is necessary but not sufficient. The design is wrong.
tapirl 10y ago
No, the voting algorithm is not open sourced.
- chromakode 10y ago
  https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/db/_sorts.pyx https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/db/_s...
- problems 10y ago
  The only part not open sourced is the spam filters.
ben_jones 10y ago
Also the infrastructure which allows Reddit to exist is not. All those scaling issues they've "solved" over the past ten years? Have fun with those if you're trying to copy and paste the repo..

Tinyyy 10y ago

ryanlol 10y ago
How is that not almost exactly what he is suggesting? His just includes that Go project also distance themselves from reddit, which is more than reasonable.

visarga 10y ago

You don't need to rebuild reddit. Just add offsite, trusted backups of comments. If you want to be fancy, allow redditors to enable monitoring of their comments with a bot command, and get notifications in their inbox.

thewhitetulip 10y ago
Using /r/golang is the community's call, why do they care about federated things? It isn't like we discuss some sensitive information over it that we need to "trust" reddit. Do we really "trust" Google/FB? it is about convenience. Almost all traffic for my FOSS projects has come from Reddit and because of Reddit, from twitter.

iainmerrick 10y ago

Make a federated replacement for Twitter while you're at it! It would be interesting to figure out how to tackle, well, "voter fraud" in that kind of system. I see lots of people complaining about how Reddit is vulnerable to upvoting brigades but I don't see anyone proposing solutions.

justinsaccount 10y ago
He kinda did... at least the foundation for such a system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PubSubHubbub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PubSubHubbub

thewhitetulip 10y ago

The symbolic gesture that the project is disassociating is okay. Deleting the repo is not. >It's just too unreliable of a platform to be official in any regard. The /r/golang subreddit is for devs who want answers and who don't want to be held up by the whims of stackoverflow mods. It isn't rocket science and even if we can't trust the answers, why would anyone edit the answers? If you remember, the reddit CEO only edited the usernames, that too, I am sure it was a prank. If anyone edits the messages which we post on /r/golang, it will lead to the answer being invalid and or something else, the world isn't going to collapse, there won't be congressional hearings just because some dev wasn't able to run gofmt and the answer posted by another random guy on the Internet was changed and can't be "trusted". We want answers on /r/golang and it isn't much about trust. Thank you for no longer proposing to delete it.

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
The question I've had is why didn't reddit SREs stop the DB edits as an attack. Even using valid creds, the queries should've been anomalies and logging should've picked up the unusual access pattern. There's three possibilities that come to me: 1. The CEO explicitly told reliability/security staff to ignore his edits. Policy fail of epic proportions. 2. The edits were performed using designed tools and queries, which means reddit had before now intended to make silent edits to user data as part of regular business. 3. Reddit lacks the internal safeguards to know if user data was unexpectedly written to. This option is dangerous to hosting code on reddit, because an attacker could silently, maliciously change examples without reddit ever detecting the damage (or users seeing an edit mark). I expect that we're in case 2, followed by 3 and then 1 (in terms of likelihood), but none of the ways that a large tech company could have this happen are reassuring about P&P at reddit, or make me want to rely on them for hosting a community.
- stouset 10y ago
  > Reddit SREs You've been working at Google too long. Reddit has on the order of a few dozen employees, not all of them technical. Welcome to how the rest of the Internet works.

OldSchoolJohnny 10y ago

It's adorable that you think any site is immune to that kind of interference.

kps 10y ago

> 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. ~~~~~~~ begin wavy lines flashback ~~~~~~ NNTP + S/MIME ~~~~~~~ end wavy lines flashback ~~~~~~

johnnydoebk 10y ago

I'd make the subreddit unofficial, too but for other reasons. It is a very unwelcoming place. I'm not the first one who's saying this, but it's really a shame how toxic the /r/golang is.

ben_jones 10y ago
Is it? There is some hivemind like the rest of the internet, and tech discussion in general (including here), but the value of the people who frequent the sub should definitely override that. It's still much better then stackoverflow etc.
m3talsmith 10y ago
In order to keep this from being swept under the rug, I can say that I highly empathize with you. I will also say that this issue has improved greatly. When I used to hang out in #gonuts it used to be worse. I blame this on the egos and the expectations of early adopters and contributors. They came from a point of senior systems programmers. As the language grew in popularity, they were unprepared psychologically for dealing with new or junior programmers: the level of questions put forth were things the original crew had learned early in their careers and took for granted. It is often this way in early languages. We need to always make room for those who are just learning, or are not experienced as those who initially created the language or space. I have seen this improving in the Golang community. The more new people come in, the more it will improve.
- IndianAstronaut 10y ago
  >As the language grew in popularity, they were unprepared psychologically for dealing with new or junior programmers: the level of question.. This is so ironic. Go gained popularity fast the same way Python did, because it is easy to use and a relatively simple language.
Sphax 10y ago
Please show me how we are toxic. As far as I'm concerned, it's not true at all.

tscs37 10y ago

>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. Your post to delete /r/goland triggered me to actually work out an idea for this ;) The idea would be to use importers to provide reddit and other sources like mailing lists within the site and at the same time provide native content through Pubsubhubbub. Of course everything uses Ed25519 Signatures for verification, including user-content. Tho atm it's merely a pipe-dream with a short and shitty readme.

1wd 10y ago

On Hacker News user submitted content gets silently edited by the admins all the time. (Specifically submission titles.)

sctb 10y ago
Submission titles "belong" to the content, not the submitter, and that has always been the case.

problems 10y ago

Only played with it a bit in the early days, but someone has an open source distributed reddit clone called Aether http://getaether.net/ http://getaether.net/

ThrustVectoring 10y ago

>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. The tricky thing is that the admin team is still doing things that you want and need out of a reddit alternative. For example, ensuring that child pornography isn't getting shared. The question is how to set things up so that the right content gets removed while ensuring that how we decide what the right content to remove gets isolated from political pressures that want to influence the narrative.

sacado2 10y ago
You "just" need (yeah, easier said than done) to ensure that any intervention from an admin is publicly logged. If admin "foo" removes some content from user "bar", it should just be made visible, something like "user foo removed offensive content from user bar" or "that comment was edited by user foo". The problem here with reddit was not the fact that content was edited, it was that content was edited without anyone knowing it.

koko775 10y ago

Worth noting that moderators, admins, or community-team level employees do not have the power to edit comments – I believe this was done at the database level. Signed comments is a good idea though.

endgame 10y ago

Agreed with the above, but also: in this world of "free" services (where the users are farmed like honeybees), voting with one's feet is about the only way to send a message that a company will actually listen to. I see no problem with individuals leaving, and I see no problem with advocating a shutdown or at least encouraging other people to leave. Work out what the community wants, and go from there. (I don't use go, but from my personal "this cannot be allowed to stand" perspective: I would love to see communities that are _not_ about hot-button topics stand up and walk out.)

retube 10y ago

> Editing user content is beyond offensive Get over yourself. In the grand scheme of things, a guy editing a handful of posts on a public forum is beyond trivial. There are about a billion things going on in the world which are worse.

danmux 10y ago

Totally agree with distancing from Reddit. I would contribute to a federated non-repudiable system. Moderation can be just as auditable. (Perhaps with some emergency actions that then require a follow up consensus to make permanent) On some occasions the original content must be purged, but the signatures can remain. Communal censorship is vastly different from changing the content.