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The CEO himself admitted to going into The_Donald subreddit (before it was banned) and editing user comments. I don't think this guy is leading the charge to a

The CEO himself admitted to going into The_Donald subreddit (before it was banned) and editing user comments. I don't think this guy is leading the charge to admin transparency. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/reddit-ceo-edits-user-comments_n_5839cf32e4b000af95ee5b68 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/reddit-ceo-edits-user-comment...

pen2l 6y ago
This gets brought up a lot. And it's a bit of a doozy to make sense of. First, consider the context: the CEO (spez) was an easy punching bag on the_donald subreddit, in fact it was a bit of a meme there to attack reddit's admins (and those in the know do know that the attacks were often crossing a line, like accusing them of being pedophiles and things of the nature). The change that spez made was a bit of a joke itself, it was turning an attack on its head. If the edit had been made in the early early days of Reddit, especially in the jokey context it was made in, I don't think anyone would have batted an eyelash. But in the last few years, right around the time these things happened, it became clear that Reddit is a big deal. I think what I'm trying to say is, whatever may be your feelings of Reddit and its stature, this particular act by spez was pretty insignifiant in the grand scheme of things. Indeed the subreddit that this happened in actually no longer even exists, the_donald and similar subreddits were banned to make Reddit a friendlier place such that it's now an easier decision for corporate America to put ads on there.
- serial_dev 6y ago
  Just replace spez and reddit with Zuckerberg and Facebook and you'll immediately understand why it is bad. Just imagine Mark editing your posts. CEOs shouldn't be monkeying around without a transparent changelog with user content.
  - justbored123 6y ago
    Why not? Is their company and you are not paying them a damn thing. Why the entitlement if you are not paying for the service that you are enjoying? That's not how the world works. If you are not paying don't complain, just move to another site or pay for the service so you are under a different contract and relation and you are no longer the product and are the customer instead. You are not the customer of Facebook, Reddit or Google, the ads buyers are, and the customer is always right. If they don't like your post, it makes all the sense in the world to change it, censor it or kick you out because you are making them lose money and they are not a non-profit existing to serve you. They exist to make money for their share-holders like any other corporation.
- esja 6y ago
  There is really no excuse for what he did and most other businesses would have fired him immediately. Reddit simply has a very immature corporate culture. Post-IPO (if they get that far) I would expect a massive clean-out.
  - caslon 6y ago
    What's the harm in such a pointless joke? It was silly, but it's not like the meme subreddit he did it to was a super serious one like AskHistorians is.
    - formerly_proven 6y ago
      Personally I don't think that action in itself is a big deal, but it shows that Reddit has a lack of internal security i.e. reddit employees are admins in the old-school CMS/forum software sense: they simply can do anything. (Edit: Reply points out that spez says not all admins can do this) For comparison, I don't expect that a Google employee, or C-level executive, has an "Edit" button next to every single post on Google Groups. Being able to silently change the content appearing under a user's name is a big deal. It's a more significant capability than being able to e.g. take down content.
      - caslon 6y ago
        To be fair, nobody has an edit button on any Google Groups post anymore. Nobody has any buttons on them, in fact. Also, when it happened, he also pointed out that most reddit admins weren't able to do this.
        elliekelly 6y ago
        > Also, when it happened, he also pointed out that most reddit admins weren't able to do this. That’s worse though, right? Why does he have this special functionality the other admins don’t have? Why would the CEO ever legitimately need to personally edit a reddit comment? Surely he has many better things to do.
- trident5000 6y ago
  Thats a lot of mental gymnastics and whataboutism to give him a pass. At the end of the day he did what he did. And they lost trust through his actions which is the currency of their platform. As CEO, he made a stupid decision and then joked about it more than he apologized after. If they're doing that type of thing on the front-end, what do you think they're doing on the back-end? I barely even use Reddit anymore because I simply dont trust it for an accumulation of reasons. Its ~50% astroturf for political and commercial reasons, you can somewhat easily game the votes, and I don't think they care because they make money.
- raverbashing 6y ago
  Agreed It's a bit ironic that the group that likes saying how other groups are "snowflakes" get the most offended by what was essentially a joke.
  - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
    Every group seems to accuse every other group of being a snowflake and easily offended, in particular it's enemies. “easily offended” is more often than not to be taken as “offended by something I do not find offensive”.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  if I recall correctly, he edited the comment outside the official moderation workflow. there was no indication that the edit was not made by the user themselves. imo, this is a pretty big deal. if it were done in a way that clearly showed the edit was spez's, it would be a harmless joke. instead it raised questions about how many admins are able to silently edit comments and how often it might happen.
- prepend 6y ago
  > pretty insignifiant in the grand scheme of things. It was super significant in that it was evidence that Reddit employees have the ability to edit messages with no audit trail and no governance. So while the individual edit was not important, the fact that it happened was. And there is an unknown number of other edits that were never disclosed and is unprovable. So Reddit broke the one thing it’s supposed to do- allow users to talk to each other. Important for this article too because Knight claims her boyfriend’s Twitter account was hacked and someone else posted about fantasizing about kids. If it was Reddit we wouldn’t be able to know if it was Knight’s boyfriend, hackers, or some Reddit admin.
  - pen2l 6y ago
    > It was super significant in that it was evidence that Reddit employees have the ability to edit messages with no audit trail and no governance. Yeah this is an issue, but let’s be real here, this matters to you me and a few other people here, and outside in the real world no-one cares. Even this expectation is new, any admin who was hosting phpbb forums or whatever else had this freedom to change a few entries in their Mysql Db, heck there was an engineer who was able to go inside people’s private gmail (https://www.wired.com/2010/09/google-spy/ https://www.wired.com/2010/09/google-spy/) — and Google is a company we expected to have better safeguards. Better security measures, sophisticated software architecture to prevent this, these things only happen after a startup reaches a high level of maturity in its timeline, Reddit hadn’t quite reached that point when this happened. I would be concerned if such a thing happened now though. Now these safeguards do exist on Reddit so there’s that.
    - ALittleLight 6y ago
      It mattered a lot to the people in the subreddit who were upset enough about that and other things to create their own website and move their community off reddit. I think it's less about the technical aspect and more about the expectation that people with the ability to change your comments won't do that. If you wrote an opinion letter to a magazine, and they published it, but only after changing a few words in your letter to make you seem dumb, everyone would understand why you were upset even though nobody would doubt that magazines have the technical capability to do this.
- koolba 6y ago
  > I think what I'm trying to say is, whatever may be your feelings of Reddit and its stature, this particular act by spez was pretty insignifiant in the grand scheme of things. In court there’s a concept called “falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus”[1]. If you’re shown to have lied to the court once, then anything else you’ve said can be considered to be a lie as well. You lose the assumption of good faith of the judge and jury. It might not be a courtroom, but the same concept applies to a so called “bastion of free speech” platform like Reddit. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsus_in_uno,_falsus_in_omnibus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsus_in_uno,_falsus_in_omnib...
  - justbored123 6y ago
    Sorry to be so cynic, but why do you assume good faith on the part of Reddit? It's a free product, you are not paying for it, they don't owe you a damn thing. If they don't care about their reputation, they can do whatever they want with your comments, including changing them or deleting them. This is the problem of free stuff, you have no leverage and little to no value to the company as a single user, and if you are the kind of problematic user such as the ones in The Donal, you have negative value because you scare away the ads and ruin the companies reputation, so they actually have a very powerful incentive to push you away and make you leave the site.
- devwastaken 6y ago
  The problem isn't just that spez had an act of weakness - it's that reddits admin tools have built in features to modify comments. Meaning they're using that feature more than just this singular time.
  - irrational 6y ago
    Do we know for the a fact that those tools exist? I work on a website that has a database backend. It is trivially for me to go into the database and make any edits I want. How do we know that he doesn't have that kind of database access?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- esturk 6y ago
  You say the r/the_donald doesn't exist but it's only banned at the moment. Some search engines like Duckduckgo actually keeps a bang shortcut (!) awaiting the day when that subreddit gets unbanned. Its hard to really make something disappear completely once it's on the internet.
- olladecarne 6y ago
  The CEO of a social media company going and personally making political edits to user messages to push their agenda sounds about as bad of a thing as I can imagine. I have a hard time imagining something more wrong for a social network to do. Imagine the CEO of YC editing posts and comments with no way to prove it, people would be rightfully furious. I guess promoting child pornography is worse, but that's also something Reddit and their admins did in the early days. People can say all they want about Facebook and Zuckerberg, but if he had done any of dozens of things Reddit has done and continues to do, he may have literally been crucified. Reddit gets away with way too much crap just because there is no alternative. Reddit is one of the most toxic social networks with the most corrupt leadership but it generally gets ignored because of their political leanings.
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  On the contrary, it's the most significant thing I could imagine: The Admin Feels Free To Do Anything. Ponder this. Unconstrained. Doesn't see what the big deal is. Can do, will do. Frictionless, untrackable.
- Taylor_OD 6y ago
  I couldnt disagree more. If Zuck was found out to have been manually changing posts that criticize him would that be insignificant? Not enforcing some moderation policy but manually changing posts. Like is that really the most important thing for any CEO to do? It's incredibly stupid and worse it kills user trust. I think Reddit should have banned TD early on but I still think this act was awful.
caslon 6y ago
It was a single time, and in a way that was an obvious joke (literally just regex to switch his name with mods' names). It's not exactly heinous, what he did.
- Number157 6y ago
  > It was a single time That we know of that he admitted.
  - caslon 6y ago
    He's been remarkably open every time he's changed user content (once with a post in 200...7? I think, and the single time he edited comments). I don't like reddit, and I don't like spez for other reasons (downgraded from Lisp to Python), but what he did was literally just a harmless joke. All reddit posts and comments are publicly archived by services like pushshift; we'd know if they had a habit of doing this.
    - luc4sdreyer 6y ago
      > He's been remarkably open every time he's changed user content I have no stake in this story, but how could you, or anyone, possibly know that?
      - kaba0 6y ago
        As he mentioned in his comment, there are plenty of reddit thread archivers, especially on popular subreddits. But I also have no stakes here.
      - caslon 6y ago
        Everything on reddit is archived roughly as soon as it's posted. Any manipulation can therefore be spotted just by looking at an archive.
    - prepend 6y ago
      > remarkably open every time he's changed user content Are you sarcastic? This is logically a very useless statement due to the nature of trust. Once trust was broken it’s hard to obtain because does clearly lied about other things, why should he be trusted now that he’s been caught. “I’ve been remarkably open about all the extra marital affairs where I’ve been caught, please trust there are no others.” “I’ve been remarkably open about all the robberies where I was convicted, please trust that there are no others.” Etc etc. I would feel foolish even presenting any unsound logic and can’t even think of a situation where it would be relevant to trust. Officiated lie detector? Sodium pentathol administered by an adversarial government? Testimony under oath?
ineptech 6y ago
You left out some context: he did that in a (failed) attempt at lulz. It was a long thread where (IMHO) he was fielding tough questions pretty frankly and honestly, as one might hope he would, but he ruined it by editing someone's post to troll them. In context, it was obvious that he did it, he wasn't trying to be sneaky. I'm not justifying it; obviously it was dumb, given that people are still using it to denigrate him years later. But the implication that this means he is more likely to have edited other peoples' posts surreptitiously is (again IMHO) not true.
- zikzak 6y ago
  Not defending him but it was very clear after this that admins were willing and able to do this. That's good to know, at least.
- SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
  > this means he is more likely to have edited other peoples' posts surreptitiously is (again IMHO) not true. In what way can you support this claim? We’re you provided any indication or proof that this is the first this has happened? Or is the first time they were caught?
  - ineptech 6y ago
    IMHO means "in my humble opinion". The reason I hold that opinion is that when someone is using their power surreptitiously, they generally don't call attention to it. More subjectively, none of us can know for certain, but this line of reasoning just isn't supported by an honest reading of the thread in question. The Reddit leadership was in between a rock ("this sub is full of white supremacists and if you don't ban them you're racist!") and a hard place ("we're being persecuted for being conservative and white and if you ban us you're racist!"). Spez isn't perfect, but he seemed to be at least trying to engage honestly and field questions about what he had done and why. After many hours of arguing with people (and, it goes without saying, taking a fair amount of insults and abuse) he did this thing where he edited some posts in a way that seemed pretty clearly to be an attempt to blow off steam. Now, was that wise? Clearly not, and I'm not defending it. But neither is it defensible to selectively pluck the fact that he edited some posts out of its context and use it to push the idea that Reddit leadership is in the habit of editing peoples' posts surreptitiously to push a viewpoint. AFAIK that's never happened, and I feel like Reddit is under enough of a microscope that we'd know if it had.
lettergram 6y ago
For reference, they moved to: https://patriots.win/ https://patriots.win/ It's been interesting to watch the community actually grow (it was thedonald.win, but there was a difference between moderators - aka the domain owner wanted to make money).

pen2l 6y ago

This gets brought up a lot. And it's a bit of a doozy to make sense of. First, consider the context: the CEO (spez) was an easy punching bag on the_donald subreddit, in fact it was a bit of a meme there to attack reddit's admins (and those in the know do know that the attacks were often crossing a line, like accusing them of being pedophiles and things of the nature). The change that spez made was a bit of a joke itself, it was turning an attack on its head. If the edit had been made in the early early days of Reddit, especially in the jokey context it was made in, I don't think anyone would have batted an eyelash. But in the last few years, right around the time these things happened, it became clear that Reddit is a big deal. I think what I'm trying to say is, whatever may be your feelings of Reddit and its stature, this particular act by spez was pretty insignifiant in the grand scheme of things. Indeed the subreddit that this happened in actually no longer even exists, the_donald and similar subreddits were banned to make Reddit a friendlier place such that it's now an easier decision for corporate America to put ads on there.

serial_dev 6y ago
Just replace spez and reddit with Zuckerberg and Facebook and you'll immediately understand why it is bad. Just imagine Mark editing your posts. CEOs shouldn't be monkeying around without a transparent changelog with user content.
- justbored123 6y ago
  Why not? Is their company and you are not paying them a damn thing. Why the entitlement if you are not paying for the service that you are enjoying? That's not how the world works. If you are not paying don't complain, just move to another site or pay for the service so you are under a different contract and relation and you are no longer the product and are the customer instead. You are not the customer of Facebook, Reddit or Google, the ads buyers are, and the customer is always right. If they don't like your post, it makes all the sense in the world to change it, censor it or kick you out because you are making them lose money and they are not a non-profit existing to serve you. They exist to make money for their share-holders like any other corporation.
esja 6y ago
There is really no excuse for what he did and most other businesses would have fired him immediately. Reddit simply has a very immature corporate culture. Post-IPO (if they get that far) I would expect a massive clean-out.
- caslon 6y ago
  What's the harm in such a pointless joke? It was silly, but it's not like the meme subreddit he did it to was a super serious one like AskHistorians is.
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    Personally I don't think that action in itself is a big deal, but it shows that Reddit has a lack of internal security i.e. reddit employees are admins in the old-school CMS/forum software sense: they simply can do anything. (Edit: Reply points out that spez says not all admins can do this) For comparison, I don't expect that a Google employee, or C-level executive, has an "Edit" button next to every single post on Google Groups. Being able to silently change the content appearing under a user's name is a big deal. It's a more significant capability than being able to e.g. take down content.
    - caslon 6y ago
      To be fair, nobody has an edit button on any Google Groups post anymore. Nobody has any buttons on them, in fact. Also, when it happened, he also pointed out that most reddit admins weren't able to do this.
      - elliekelly 6y ago
        > Also, when it happened, he also pointed out that most reddit admins weren't able to do this. That’s worse though, right? Why does he have this special functionality the other admins don’t have? Why would the CEO ever legitimately need to personally edit a reddit comment? Surely he has many better things to do.
trident5000 6y ago
Thats a lot of mental gymnastics and whataboutism to give him a pass. At the end of the day he did what he did. And they lost trust through his actions which is the currency of their platform. As CEO, he made a stupid decision and then joked about it more than he apologized after. If they're doing that type of thing on the front-end, what do you think they're doing on the back-end? I barely even use Reddit anymore because I simply dont trust it for an accumulation of reasons. Its ~50% astroturf for political and commercial reasons, you can somewhat easily game the votes, and I don't think they care because they make money.
raverbashing 6y ago
Agreed It's a bit ironic that the group that likes saying how other groups are "snowflakes" get the most offended by what was essentially a joke.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  Every group seems to accuse every other group of being a snowflake and easily offended, in particular it's enemies. “easily offended” is more often than not to be taken as “offended by something I do not find offensive”.
leetcrew 6y ago
if I recall correctly, he edited the comment outside the official moderation workflow. there was no indication that the edit was not made by the user themselves. imo, this is a pretty big deal. if it were done in a way that clearly showed the edit was spez's, it would be a harmless joke. instead it raised questions about how many admins are able to silently edit comments and how often it might happen.
prepend 6y ago
> pretty insignifiant in the grand scheme of things. It was super significant in that it was evidence that Reddit employees have the ability to edit messages with no audit trail and no governance. So while the individual edit was not important, the fact that it happened was. And there is an unknown number of other edits that were never disclosed and is unprovable. So Reddit broke the one thing it’s supposed to do- allow users to talk to each other. Important for this article too because Knight claims her boyfriend’s Twitter account was hacked and someone else posted about fantasizing about kids. If it was Reddit we wouldn’t be able to know if it was Knight’s boyfriend, hackers, or some Reddit admin.
- pen2l 6y ago
  > It was super significant in that it was evidence that Reddit employees have the ability to edit messages with no audit trail and no governance. Yeah this is an issue, but let’s be real here, this matters to you me and a few other people here, and outside in the real world no-one cares. Even this expectation is new, any admin who was hosting phpbb forums or whatever else had this freedom to change a few entries in their Mysql Db, heck there was an engineer who was able to go inside people’s private gmail (https://www.wired.com/2010/09/google-spy/ https://www.wired.com/2010/09/google-spy/) — and Google is a company we expected to have better safeguards. Better security measures, sophisticated software architecture to prevent this, these things only happen after a startup reaches a high level of maturity in its timeline, Reddit hadn’t quite reached that point when this happened. I would be concerned if such a thing happened now though. Now these safeguards do exist on Reddit so there’s that.
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    It mattered a lot to the people in the subreddit who were upset enough about that and other things to create their own website and move their community off reddit. I think it's less about the technical aspect and more about the expectation that people with the ability to change your comments won't do that. If you wrote an opinion letter to a magazine, and they published it, but only after changing a few words in your letter to make you seem dumb, everyone would understand why you were upset even though nobody would doubt that magazines have the technical capability to do this.
koolba 6y ago
> I think what I'm trying to say is, whatever may be your feelings of Reddit and its stature, this particular act by spez was pretty insignifiant in the grand scheme of things. In court there’s a concept called “falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus”[1]. If you’re shown to have lied to the court once, then anything else you’ve said can be considered to be a lie as well. You lose the assumption of good faith of the judge and jury. It might not be a courtroom, but the same concept applies to a so called “bastion of free speech” platform like Reddit. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsus_in_uno,_falsus_in_omnibus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsus_in_uno,_falsus_in_omnib...
- justbored123 6y ago
  Sorry to be so cynic, but why do you assume good faith on the part of Reddit? It's a free product, you are not paying for it, they don't owe you a damn thing. If they don't care about their reputation, they can do whatever they want with your comments, including changing them or deleting them. This is the problem of free stuff, you have no leverage and little to no value to the company as a single user, and if you are the kind of problematic user such as the ones in The Donal, you have negative value because you scare away the ads and ruin the companies reputation, so they actually have a very powerful incentive to push you away and make you leave the site.
devwastaken 6y ago
The problem isn't just that spez had an act of weakness - it's that reddits admin tools have built in features to modify comments. Meaning they're using that feature more than just this singular time.
- irrational 6y ago
  Do we know for the a fact that those tools exist? I work on a website that has a database backend. It is trivially for me to go into the database and make any edits I want. How do we know that he doesn't have that kind of database access?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
esturk 6y ago
You say the r/the_donald doesn't exist but it's only banned at the moment. Some search engines like Duckduckgo actually keeps a bang shortcut (!) awaiting the day when that subreddit gets unbanned. Its hard to really make something disappear completely once it's on the internet.
olladecarne 6y ago
The CEO of a social media company going and personally making political edits to user messages to push their agenda sounds about as bad of a thing as I can imagine. I have a hard time imagining something more wrong for a social network to do. Imagine the CEO of YC editing posts and comments with no way to prove it, people would be rightfully furious. I guess promoting child pornography is worse, but that's also something Reddit and their admins did in the early days. People can say all they want about Facebook and Zuckerberg, but if he had done any of dozens of things Reddit has done and continues to do, he may have literally been crucified. Reddit gets away with way too much crap just because there is no alternative. Reddit is one of the most toxic social networks with the most corrupt leadership but it generally gets ignored because of their political leanings.
at_a_remove 6y ago
On the contrary, it's the most significant thing I could imagine: The Admin Feels Free To Do Anything. Ponder this. Unconstrained. Doesn't see what the big deal is. Can do, will do. Frictionless, untrackable.
Taylor_OD 6y ago
I couldnt disagree more. If Zuck was found out to have been manually changing posts that criticize him would that be insignificant? Not enforcing some moderation policy but manually changing posts. Like is that really the most important thing for any CEO to do? It's incredibly stupid and worse it kills user trust. I think Reddit should have banned TD early on but I still think this act was awful.

caslon 6y ago

It was a single time, and in a way that was an obvious joke (literally just regex to switch his name with mods' names). It's not exactly heinous, what he did.

Number157 6y ago
> It was a single time That we know of that he admitted.
- caslon 6y ago
  He's been remarkably open every time he's changed user content (once with a post in 200...7? I think, and the single time he edited comments). I don't like reddit, and I don't like spez for other reasons (downgraded from Lisp to Python), but what he did was literally just a harmless joke. All reddit posts and comments are publicly archived by services like pushshift; we'd know if they had a habit of doing this.
  - luc4sdreyer 6y ago
    > He's been remarkably open every time he's changed user content I have no stake in this story, but how could you, or anyone, possibly know that?
    - kaba0 6y ago
      As he mentioned in his comment, there are plenty of reddit thread archivers, especially on popular subreddits. But I also have no stakes here.
    - caslon 6y ago
      Everything on reddit is archived roughly as soon as it's posted. Any manipulation can therefore be spotted just by looking at an archive.
  - prepend 6y ago
    > remarkably open every time he's changed user content Are you sarcastic? This is logically a very useless statement due to the nature of trust. Once trust was broken it’s hard to obtain because does clearly lied about other things, why should he be trusted now that he’s been caught. “I’ve been remarkably open about all the extra marital affairs where I’ve been caught, please trust there are no others.” “I’ve been remarkably open about all the robberies where I was convicted, please trust that there are no others.” Etc etc. I would feel foolish even presenting any unsound logic and can’t even think of a situation where it would be relevant to trust. Officiated lie detector? Sodium pentathol administered by an adversarial government? Testimony under oath?

ineptech 6y ago

You left out some context: he did that in a (failed) attempt at lulz. It was a long thread where (IMHO) he was fielding tough questions pretty frankly and honestly, as one might hope he would, but he ruined it by editing someone's post to troll them. In context, it was obvious that he did it, he wasn't trying to be sneaky. I'm not justifying it; obviously it was dumb, given that people are still using it to denigrate him years later. But the implication that this means he is more likely to have edited other peoples' posts surreptitiously is (again IMHO) not true.

zikzak 6y ago
Not defending him but it was very clear after this that admins were willing and able to do this. That's good to know, at least.
SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
> this means he is more likely to have edited other peoples' posts surreptitiously is (again IMHO) not true. In what way can you support this claim? We’re you provided any indication or proof that this is the first this has happened? Or is the first time they were caught?
- ineptech 6y ago
  IMHO means "in my humble opinion". The reason I hold that opinion is that when someone is using their power surreptitiously, they generally don't call attention to it. More subjectively, none of us can know for certain, but this line of reasoning just isn't supported by an honest reading of the thread in question. The Reddit leadership was in between a rock ("this sub is full of white supremacists and if you don't ban them you're racist!") and a hard place ("we're being persecuted for being conservative and white and if you ban us you're racist!"). Spez isn't perfect, but he seemed to be at least trying to engage honestly and field questions about what he had done and why. After many hours of arguing with people (and, it goes without saying, taking a fair amount of insults and abuse) he did this thing where he edited some posts in a way that seemed pretty clearly to be an attempt to blow off steam. Now, was that wise? Clearly not, and I'm not defending it. But neither is it defensible to selectively pluck the fact that he edited some posts out of its context and use it to push the idea that Reddit leadership is in the habit of editing peoples' posts surreptitiously to push a viewpoint. AFAIK that's never happened, and I feel like Reddit is under enough of a microscope that we'd know if it had.

lettergram 6y ago

For reference, they moved to: https://patriots.win/ https://patriots.win/ It's been interesting to watch the community actually grow (it was thedonald.win, but there was a difference between moderators - aka the domain owner wanted to make money).