Reddit CEO admits to altering user comments that were critical of him

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5ekdy9/the_admins_are_suffering_from_low_energy_have/dad5sf1/

by wildmusings • 10 years ago

668 625 10 years ago

JorgeGT3• 10 years ago

And without an "edited" mark, which means that any comment of any user can be covertly modified by an admin. Very concerning since Reddit comments have provoked even Congress hearings: http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/296680-house-pan...

wvenable• 10 years ago

The fact is anything digital can be modified this way; it's probably good that it happens and there are public examples so people learn not to trust it.

ErikAugust2• 10 years ago

Would be good to have some distributed model (like Bitcoin, etc.) for message platforms like Reddit?

taneq2• 10 years ago

After all, Confucius say "do not believe everything you read on internet."

dvt2• 10 years ago

It's more concerning that Congress is that stupid (one can only hope the Courts haven't been making rulings based on untraced emails and anonymous tweets). Social media is a canonical exemplar of hearsay.

There's a reason Wikipedia isn't an acceptable source in college-level courses.

Throwaway234122• 10 years ago

No, but Wikipedia's sources usually are. I feel like there's a world of difference between a well-sourced encyclopedia entry and a comment on a somewhat anonymous forum.

mixedCase4• 10 years ago

The reason being Wikipedia is a summary made by a constantly changing group of people out of actual sources with a real name attached to it, which are the ones you're supposed to link.

In any case, a permalink to a specific revision that includes a sha256sum of the article is a good way to ensure you're getting a reliable link to information which can not be tampered without failing the checksum.

wildmusings5• 10 years ago

When a website receives a court order or congressional subpoena to preserve data, they are under penalty of perjury and contempt of court/congress to not alter it. Physical evidence can be just as subject to tampering as digital data. For both, the integrity of the court system is enforced with strong penalties for those who are dishonest.

Ph0X• 10 years ago

Reddit isn't meant to be a source nor is Wikipedia, but it's a place to find information. They can be seen as central hubs to get information.

If a person comments on Reddit with a valid point and sources all his facts, why does it matter where said comment is made, and honestly, it doesn't matter if admins can edit it or not, really.

Look at it like posting an EXE and also linking to a credible site containing it's checksum. As long as you trust the linked site, then it doesn't matter where the EXE is posted and if someone has access to modifiying the EXE, all that matters is that 1. you got the data, 2. the data checksum matches the source.

Natsu3• 10 years ago

It's more concerning that Congress is that stupid

Congress was looking at evidence of what that particular user was doing online at the time, because /u/stonetear posted questions that look rather incriminating in retrospect based on what we've learned since then.

This kind of thing is why it's important to establish a chain of custody for evidence.

AgentME• 10 years ago

You're not supposed to cite Wikipedia because it's an encyclopedia! You're supposed to cite the sources that it cites.

x0x02• 10 years ago

In which people discover admins can admin a database.

Also, ceo of reddit looks like a horrid job.

noobermin5• 10 years ago

Look, I get that being lambasted by your base sucks, but yes, being the boss means you have to keep your cool and not abuse your power, as difficult as that is. The job demands you have a superhuman temperament...and he definitely is human, but that shouldn't excuse his behavior.

mullen2• 10 years ago

Also, ceo of reddit looks like a horrid job.

You could not pay me enough to be CEO of that cesspool. People take Reddit way too seriously.

dhruval• 10 years ago

He changed a 'F U CEO' (upvoted by 1.6k users) comment to 'F U unpaid reddit moderator', without any indication that the comment was edited.

Very juvenile and unprofessional way of dealing with the situation, really erodes trust in the platform (simply deleting the comment would have been a better response).

Would maybe expect this from the founder of a young fledgling startup, but the 33 year old CEO of a company like Reddit ought to know better.

kordless• 10 years ago

It's well within his power to change a comment. What's not cool is that he changed it to a lie. If he's the CEO, he's paid.

yuhong2• 10 years ago

To he honest, he was one of the founders of Reddit.

MicroBerto2• 10 years ago

This is an offense worth firing someone over in a "real" company...

ajkjk2• 10 years ago

How differently would you be reacting if he hadn't admitted it, apologized, explained that he was reacting impulsively under pressure and stress, and fixed the changes?

I'm worried that the answer is "not at all", which seems weird.

ozgune• 10 years ago

I met Steve several years back while going through YC. He's a much calmer and nicer person than most founders I've met, myself included.

If I read this Reddit thread without knowing him, I would have deemed him unprofessional and maybe even upvoted some of the comments.

When I read the thread knowing who he is, I'm thinking "I can't imagine how stressful it must be to run Reddit. He made one mistake in a bad day, apologized for it, and now everyone's talking about it. Steve's way nicer and more professional than I am, so I would probably have messed up big time in his shoes."

ineptech• 10 years ago

Oddly, I find juvenile-ness of this rather reassuring. Anyone who is using mod powers for surreptitious reasons (swaying public opinion, or discrediting opponents) has too much to hide to also use them for a silly prank.

Of course it was still dumb and he shouldn't have done it. But it's hard to credit the people saying this is evidence of more sinister revelations yet to come.

69mlgsniperdad2• 10 years ago

I highly doubt secretly editing a comment of another user is one of his account's listed privledges. Not marked edited, I highly doubt its a built-in feature of the website for even administrators. What if a low level employee, who doesn't even have privilege to ban users, had leveraged his technical back-end access to their databases to alter a comment. Act as the person who made the original comment, effectively impersonating them by using their technical access to reddit's data to basically 'hack' that users account. I highly doubt this is 'within his rights' as a founder, as someone here commented...

defgeneric• 10 years ago

At the same time though, you'd imagine reddit has some sort of distributed backend so that getting direct access to the datastore and doing something like

    UPDATE the_donald SET comment = replace('/u/spez', '/u/notspez', comment) WHERE 'fuck /u/spez' in lowercase(comment);

would create massive consistency headaches.

epicureanideal• 10 years ago

I just went to look at Reddit to learn more about this. Someone there makes the good point that if the mods can edit user comments, they could in theory plant false evidence of crimes.

https://i.reddituploads.com/26af29432a2340a98d83052a0ed3efcc...

I didn't understand the significance of this until reading that comment.

Sacho• 10 years ago

Sorry to nitpick, but I'd like to point out that "administrators" and "moderators" are two different groups in Reddit. "Administrators"(which spez is part of) are Reddit staff; Moderators are users who create a subreddit or are enlisted to help manage it; Moderators do not have the power to edit user comments.

nialv72• 10 years ago

I think I would attach a PGP signature to my reddit posts from now on....

necessity3• 10 years ago

Not surprising at all.

grzm8• 10 years ago

Why? Would you add some context to your comment?

Throwaway234122• 10 years ago

Not him/her, but I suspect he/she is referring to:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3cuk3y/what_i...

necessity3• 10 years ago

Reddit is known for censoring subreddits the admins do not like or when they're involved in some drama, they have a specific algorithm to filter out Trump's subreddit from /r/all[1][2], the default subs are strictly aligned with the admins' political views, and recently the CEO mocked Facebook's knowledge of their users data saying that at Reddit they know not only what one publicly speaks (such as in Facebook), but also their users "darkest secrets" (in an interview about advertising on Reddit).

[1] https://voat.co/v/MeanwhileOnReddit/1373659 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/shittychangelog/comments/59s3ao/red...

qwertyuiop92428• 10 years ago

Reddit's mods are famous famous for doing all kinds of horrible crap, as are their employees.

Gargoyle3• 10 years ago

Wow. And he knew it was stupid when he did it. There's been a lot of talk about having the right temperament for leadership lately, and this is an excellent example of lacking it.

ghayes• 10 years ago

And the thread was otherwise so civil: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5ekdy9/the_admi...

arama4712• 10 years ago

Lack of civility does not make these actions ok. /r/The_Donald is not a bar you want to measure yourself against.

mixedCase4• 10 years ago

This is like sarcastically mocking how "serious" /r/coaxedintoasnafu is.

/r/The_Donald's purpose is to be a "24/7 Trump rally". There are other Trump-related subs for serious discussion with supporters.

thesagan• 10 years ago

Good thing then; that he mimicked what he might otherwise abhor.

ww5204• 10 years ago

This is pretty bad. That pretty much destroys the credibility of Reddit's commenting system in a single act. No one can look at the integrity of the comments written by others the same any more.

noobermin5• 10 years ago

We already know that Reddit was originally filled by sockpuppets, so more deceptive behavior from reddit higher-ups today doesn't surprise me too much...although this isn't really deception, this seems more like admin trolling.

ww5204• 10 years ago

Sockpuppet is one thing. Altering a user's comment to frame him/her is another thing. Basically any comment cannot be trusted anymore. It takes years to build trust. It can be destroyed in an instant.

dabockster3• 10 years ago

That pretty much destroys the credibility of Reddit's commenting system in a single act.

Didn't they already do that when Morgan Freeman's AMA was staged? (If not Freeman, then another AMA. Some big celebrity's AMA was staged within the past year.)

qq66• 10 years ago

That's different because it's an end-user action, not an internal action. I always know that the person who is saying that they're a Navy SEAL may not be or that it might be Morgan Freeman's or President Obama's PR person answering the questions. It's a lot different when the site admins use their root privileges to put words in people's mouths. Imagine if someone edited your comment or my comment to include a bunch of racist or hateful comments.

5511994• 10 years ago

Also Clinton campaigns Correct the Record[0] took over Reddit during election. Most likely with reddits co-operation. To suppress the voices of Bernie supporters and later Trump supporters.

[0]http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/21/hillary-pac... [1]CTR Spent: 8MIL https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997

kharms• 10 years ago

Oh please, it's not like the Trump campaign wasn't doing the same. If anything, they did it better because they had the support of SV's rich and powerful.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusi...

eridius3• 10 years ago

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

rfrank3• 10 years ago

Potential vs. proof. That is a large distinction.

wildmusings5• 10 years ago

People have the power to do a lot of things. You have the power to quite easily lie, cheat, and steal in this world. When you run a website, like when you run a business, you have to convince your customers/users to trust you not to do those things.

cargo84• 10 years ago

Technically, sure.

But, usually a company of this size/scale puts in place restrictions so that accessing privileged abilities like this is extremely difficult and requires authorizations / clearances / permissions from users, etc.

Generally big / public tech company employees are not even allowed to LOOK at PII or the data of a specific user name etc. You run all tests on staging / fake populated DBs only, etc.

mzw_mzw4• 10 years ago

It's not that people didn't know the admins have the power; it's that people didn't believe they'd use the power.

Your local police or military could just barge into your house and kill you at any time. They have the power to do that. Society functions to the extent that you don't believe they will do that. If you found out one day that your local police chief had, under cover of law, busted into someone's house and waved a gun at them over a petty personal dispute, though, your faith would be a little shaken.

empath753• 10 years ago

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

quink• 10 years ago

That pretty much destroys the credibility of Reddit's commenting system in a single act.

The admins kickstarted reddit by impersonating different users, they even had a field to enter the username which which to post/comment. Fake it 'til you make it. Nothing inherently wrong with it.

I'm not going to stop visiting reddit over this. Hell, if it erodes trust by /r/the_donald who'll move over to something like voat, fair enough. I have no illusions that content is safe from subversion, whether it be in-place or not, and I've myself applied some CSS during April Fools on a major subreddit that modified comments as a lark.

It was wrong of /u/spez, sure. But the guy's pissed off, he should be with the amount of upvoting bots on that reddit and no real solution. He fessed up almost immediately and it's not like they're going to go at it in scale - especially since it's so very easily provable with archive.is.

It was a juvenile messing around with a group that breeds on persecution complex. I consider this a joke. Not bad in taste, not the height of comedy.

But no curtain with the wizard behind it has been pulled open here in my view, it's fine.

...

I think there needs to be some control over the veracity, some intrusion into the bubbles with which we inherit the web. If it takes a reddit admin to cattle prod around the fucking bat-shit insane /r/pizzagate idiocy into outrage and feeding their persecution complex sarcastically and ironically then I may actually be for it.

yuhong2• 10 years ago

It did not include comments AFAIK.

wfo3• 10 years ago

Does it? Really? An admin played a prank on a bunch of insane, out of control conspiracy minded screaming blubbering trolls calling him a pedophile with a dumb silly find/replace rule. God forbid, next forums will start replacing words like 'shit' and 'fuck' with symbols to try and hide the truth of what we /really/ mean from the world.

Who cares? Why is this a big deal? I am so unbelievably unimpressed with the seriousness of this, I feel like there is such an enormous effort to pretend this is "serious business" and "the integrity of reddit" (?) is somehow being compromised. We all knew this could be done. On any forum. Reddit is a silly place. Reddit is a place for people to shitpost memes and puns with throwaway accounts. The Donald is a subreddit that revels in trolling and messing with people, spewing toxic garbage nonstop. They riled up the main admin of reddit so much he did something childish -- a pretty impressive trolling effort. That's the end of this story as far as I can tell.

camperman3• 10 years ago

insane, out of control conspiracy minded screaming blubbering trolls

This attitude is WHY YOU LOST THE ELECTION.

Who cares? Why is this a big deal? I am so unbelievably unimpressed with the seriousness of this,

It is deadly serious. /r/pizzagate was just shut down for posting personal information. No proof was given. Reddit has users like Bill Gates who post regularly, it has interviewed the POTUS and countless movie stars. Just as a pedophile scandal threatens to engulf both Twitter and very senior members of the Democratic Party, the founder of reddit reveals that he fucks around with people's posts. What's to prevent him going into a user's history and falsifying it? We've had the head of the FBI in front of Congress talking about a Reddit comment for crying out loud, because it was about national security.

His actions were extraordinarily poor judgement for an organisation that describes itself as a bastion of free speech.

verroq• 10 years ago

First they came for the_donald, and I did not speak out— Because I was not one of them

You can write the rest of the poem yourself.

Chromozon• 10 years ago

Very well-said.

What's disturbing is how many sane people are getting up in arms over this. The trolls are going to have a field day. Unfortunately, it has already blown up and has hit all the major media outlets. This is a perfect example of something on the Internet done "for the lolz". But people who don't have an understanding of Internet culture just cannot grasp this concept.

Accacin2• 10 years ago

Reddit comments and posts have been used in investigations. In the UK a teenager was sentenced for writing some "racist" comment(I'm not saying this is right or wrong, just that it happened).

Just think, the admins have the power to edit your comment as they see fit and you'll have no proof as your comment isn't even marked as edited.

It's a scary thought.

gspetr2• 10 years ago

Trump did AMA there. Imagine when next time Trump does AMA on The_Donald subreddit:

- Mr. President, are you going to deport american citizens?

- No, I am absolutely not going to do that.

That gets ninja edited to:

- I am absolutely going to do that.

Can you imagine the uproar that would cause? We already have people in the media holding their breath for the next Trump's tweet - if something like this happened, there would be panic, hysteria, people having health complications.

This is extremely serious. Even if this were to be rolled back, damage would already be done by then. That would be akin to screaming "Fire!" in a crowded theater.

netsec_burn• 10 years ago

Exactly my sentiments, and it only took place for an hour. I didn't mind at all, it was pretty entertaining, but then again I don't get drawn into the drama Reddit's userbase has frequently.

ben_jones• 10 years ago

It also came out in another thread that moderators have this power also. Moderators being random reddit users, not employees, can be expected to have much less integrity.

samstave5• 10 years ago

We all knew this could be done. On any forum.

Yeah but for how long have you been in IT/Computers/A Sysop/Sysad????

You do know that this is the mortal sin in IT -- abusing access powers to data and stealing it or fucking with it???

I had a guy ask me "Well cant you just read their email?" - ME: "Technically yes, of course, but I would be fired and thats the last thing you do in IT"

ycbI2• 10 years ago

An admin played a prank on a bunch of insane, out of control conspiracy minded screaming blubbering trolls calling him a pedophile with a dumb silly find/replace rule.

"All Trump supporters are dumb racist bigoted uneducated white hick hillbillies, fuck them with a rusty rebar."

intopieces4• 10 years ago

Usernames on Reddit do not require even an email address. For that reason, I find it hard to muster up even a modicum of concern for the sanctity of 'authorship' and 'attribution' for individual users. For all I know, every comment on Reddit but my own are generated by a very clever computer.

That congress sees fit to investigate Reddit comments and news websites find credibility in re-posting them are separate issues that absolutely deserve discussion. But the editing of "Fuck [username]" posts...

wildmusings5• 10 years ago

Many people post on Reddit under their real identity. Now it is madness to do so, as a malicious Reddit employee can frame you as having said anything.

intopieces4• 10 years ago

This has always been the case. It has always been madness to post on user forums under your real identity. In the 'viral era' -- the age of mobile broadband, the age where any post you make or photo you send can get the attention of millions and ruin your career before your plane lands [0] -- it's pure madness to expose yourself like this.

[0]http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tw...

mejari2• 10 years ago

And any user can claim to not have said something, citing this as evidence.

joshmanders• 10 years ago

I find it odd that people who build websites for a living didn't understand that... Like.. They control the data... They have complete access to the database.. Do you NOT think they could edit comments without updating the edited at timestamp?

dabockster3• 10 years ago

as a malicious Reddit employee can frame you as having said anything

So that means I can go back to posting random 1960s Spiderman memes everywhere? Awesome!

JorgeGT3• 10 years ago

Many people post on Reddit under their real identity.

Among them, two Presidents of the United States, several ministers / PMs / MEPs, a long list of Hollywood stars... what if a rogue employee impersonates or alters POTUS statements?

gottam4• 10 years ago

do you think the same about HN? your email isn't even asked for here.

intopieces4• 10 years ago

Yes. Authorship, "karma," etc do not concern me. Discussion that makes me think, that challenges my preconceptions, that enriches my understanding of technology or that links me to new skills to learn -- those concern me.

Which is why I can't really feel outraged that a nonsense comment was changed into another nonsense comment. Nothing of value was lost.

tsneed290• 10 years ago

Could this hurt Reddit's credibility? Seems like it's kind of a big deal.

barsonme• 10 years ago

I'd think so. Now we _know_ admins can and have edited comments without people knowing. Makes you wonder if they've done it in the past.

return06• 10 years ago

On the other hand, i can claim that the admin edited my comments whenever i 'm wrong.

wanda2• 10 years ago

What credibility? Even on 4chan, which has next to zero credibility AND no voting/reputation system intended for 'self-policing' (so it is not likely to ever become credible), some users express their dissatisfaction with low quality or spammy posts by suggesting the perpetrator go to, or return to, Reddit. This is also a common occurrence here — should a HN user make a useless post, particularly when invoking a meme or trolling, that user is often reminded that HN is not Reddit. This is not a proof of Reddit's lack of credibility, just an interesting/amusing anecdote.

Reddit is not an oft-cited source of news. By and large, it is a marketplace for link sharing coupled with a comment system and a currency of reputation. In other words, a forum focused on reacting to content elsewhere around the web but with some original content here and there. Where there is credible content, it is often from somewhere else like a news vendor. Everything else, including all comments on any thread, must be subjected to scrutiny and distrust as with any other forum. For starters, any comment can be a deliberately hyperbolic or entirely false/nonsensical assertion — rhetoric or sophistry — and thus no comment should be trusted on the grounds that it being correct may be coincidental if the intention was not to be correct, but rather to incite a reaction from others (trolling).

Then there is of course the possibility (indeed inevitability) that posts will be edited silently by those with sufficient permissions in the forum system, or access to the database if the system does not have silent edits built in. I say 'inevitable' because, given enough time, those with access to administrative power or the database itself will find a reason to silently edit something, by someone, somewhere.

No forum should be treated as credible. Even if your study is about how forum users behave, you cannot trust those you study to be behaving normally as their intentions are always questionable. We don't have Asimov's psycho-history yet.

I do not think forums have ever been credible sources of information, and I have participated in discussions on forums for fifteen years now. HN has more credibility than others, but that has been earned by clever people who visit this community for the sake of discussing intellectual topics — not the founding ideal of Reddit.

If the US has had congress hearings on the basis of Reddit posts, as was stated in a comment above, that is testament only to the ignorance of the US congress.

Edit: if you mean viability when you say credibility, i.e. in terms of generating revenue/getting investment, that depends on the rationality of its current/future investors. Assuming rational behaviour, this probably won't make any difference. The users will still come and if anything Reddit users should feel better precisely because the CEO fessed up to silent edits. It means that the issue can be addressed, perhaps with PGP signatures as suggested by others here; the ability to make silent edits by administrators could be removed; and the code powering Reddit could be open-sourced to prove that (apologies if it already is open-source, I am ignorant of the state of Reddit's back-end).

Ar-Curunir• 10 years ago

I would disagree with your claim of Reddit users not creating original content; the moment you step out of the default subs, you have great niche communities where you can find absolute gems on a regular basis.

The key is to look in the comments, not in the main post itself.

geuis6• 10 years ago

It might to some people. It doesn't for me though.

I personally want to see more corporate leadership taking responsibility and leadership for backing up their personal views and those of their employees. A good example is how Grubhub's CEO Matt Maloney sent a company-wide email about the culture of the company that I respect quite a lot. http://media.grubhub.com/media/press-releases/press-release-...

Now do I agree with exactly what /u/spez did? Personally, the vindictive part of me likes the idea of fucking around with the morons in that subreddit. But as the ceo of the company, no. If it was any employee that had done it, they would likely have been terminated or at least had a severe write-up, no matter how much the leadership agreed with it. But when its the ceo, I'm not sure what the outcome will/should be.

To be completely honest, we have to remember that reddit is a company and not the public airwaves. There is no requirement that it be a bastion of free speech for all users. If I were running reddit, I would have banned that subreddit months ago. Any users found to be making racist, homophobic, hateful, or any other kind of similar commentary would have been permabanned a long time ago. The internet is a big place and its already too full of negativity. There are no socially positive reasons to provide places for it to fester.

AlexB138• 10 years ago

I personally want to see more corporate leadership taking responsibility and leadership for backing up their personal views and those of their employees. A good example is how Grubhub's CEO Matt Maloney sent a company-wide email about the culture of the company that I respect quite a lot.

I'm guessing that's likely because you agree with the political stances of Spez and Mr Maloney. Would you be equally supportive of a leader of a large company espousing the virtue of traditional gender roles or other socially conservative stances?

vogt2• 10 years ago

Maloney's email was terrible. I would never want to work for someone like that, and never will if I can avoid it. It was a kind and wonderful thing to send a company-wide email saying something to the tune of "If you ever feel marginalized in any way, come to me personally, immediately." He then promptly shat all over the goodwill by indirectly calling for Trump voters to quit. Screw that. I would have loved to have seen a brazen employee call him on that.

empath753• 10 years ago

Reddit had credibility?

Personally, I think this is hilarious.

philfrasty• 10 years ago

„...getting called a pedophile constantly...“ Why?

ww5204• 10 years ago

From what I have seen. It seems Reddit has shut down a subreddit whose people are in the midst of investigating pedophile rings.

arama4712• 10 years ago

So /r/pizzagate was a subreddit convinced they'd found evidence of a pedophile ring in the government and more specifically implicating Hilary Clinton. They were recently shut down because they kept publishing people's information (which is against reddit ToS _even if said info is publicly available_). This prompted them to assume reddit admins were part of said ring. I assume /u/spez has been receiving accusations since.

JshWright• 10 years ago

"Investigating" is a pretty generous word there... There's not enough tinfoil in the world...

mejari2• 10 years ago

"investigating" in the same way they "investigated" a daycare and the Boston bombing.

pavanky5• 10 years ago

They were just doxxing people left and right. I am not sure how that constitutes an "investigation"

teraflop• 10 years ago

A bit of backstory: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11...

noir_lord7• 10 years ago

/r/the_Donald has this stupid conspiracy that a pizza parlour is a child sex ring and Clinton was involved, that became /r/pizzagate which the Admins tried to clean up because its retarded and was doxxing innocent people so they called the admins paedophiles.

I feel stupider just for having had to type that..what a world we've built.

threeseed4• 10 years ago

It's more than just stupid too.

Innocent people have had death threats over seriously bizarre allegations. The FBI really should be involved and people charged.

perseusprime113• 10 years ago

Don't just write it off. They are onto something! I've seen many redditors solve real life mysteries.

qwertyuiop92428• 10 years ago

I was surprised. This was wrong of me.

Reddit (the company) is a wretched hive of scum an villany, where this sort of stuff seems almost regular. Perhaps it wasn't always so: I don't know.

But I can't think of any other forum that would put up with this. If an owner or mod did this on the *chans, the chan in question would be abandoned within the week.

As for HN, dang does as he sees fit, as do the admins: they'll split your thread, redact your post (and if they doesn't, the software will if it gets flagged enough, IIRC), and (or so I heard) even shadowban you of you're bad enough. However, they're mostly right, and not corrupt. And they wouldn't pull crap like this. Blocking a comment that talks about how HN is just a massive circlejerk is one thing: actually altering it to say something else is quite another.

I suppose it might be common on forums run by egotistical gits, but come on, you're heading a company running a large forum/news aggregator. You can do better than an egomaniac with a website.

codezero• 10 years ago

I was once on a forum where you could pay some of your karma to change someone else's signature. It was pretty good fun.

qwertyuiop92428• 10 years ago

That's very different from changing the actual message text. That lends itself to "disregard that, I suck cocks." Editing content leads to, well, you saw.

VintageCool2• 10 years ago

The rest of reddit will accept this because everyone hates /r/the_donald anyway. That subreddit is an abuse of the system already.

Gargoyle3• 10 years ago

In what way is it an abuse of the system?

noobermin5• 10 years ago

This brings up memories of when moot messed with /pol/. He turned off the spam prevention scripts and captcha, made every post look like a doubles post, and let an audio recording of cuck porn play on the board page. That was sort of expected from moot though and it was 4chan after all.

mb0• 10 years ago

I think you're being a bit over-dramatic with the "wretched hive of scum and villany" stuff. The commonality of this sort of behavior varies from forum to forum, depending on the mood of that forum. For instance, this sort of thing was not abnormal at all during the hey-day of Something Awful (One of the largest forums around some years ago, still #5 in membership numbers).

As far as the editing Spez did, if they were really out there calling him a pedophile, they should have expected some backlash. You can only push an authority figure so far before they're going to go on the defensive. This will definitely make things worse though.

qwertyuiop92428• 10 years ago

Of course I'm being a bit dramatic. But it's pretty bad.

I didn't know that was so common on SA. I knew the site was heavily-moderated, despite The Goons' famous repuation. But it's still terrible there, too.

meowface2• 10 years ago

I don't agree. Chan admins and mods are known for messing with users all the time. This kind of silent word filtering seems right up their alley.

Banning Pizzagate (as absurd as it is) would definitely have created an uproar, though, much like banning Gamergate did.

qwertyuiop92428• 10 years ago

Filtering isn't the same as editing. If you filter, it's automated, and thus fairly obvious. If you edit, you are actually changing somebody's perceived opinion.

whythrowaway3• 10 years ago

This pretty much happened on 4chan with GamerGate and /pol/. Banning GamerGate discussion immediately drove a mass exodus away from the site, and persistently fucking with /pol/ pushed out many more. But 4chan didn't die. The overwhelming majority of 4chan users voted with their clicks that they would tolerate politically motivated censorship, datamining, and adverserial moderation for faster boards and a fatter meme pipeline.

Reddit is exactly the same. Keep pulling shit like this, and it will drive quality users away out of principle. But Zombie Reddit will keep lurching forward, spewing poorly compressed Facebook screencaps and cat gifs.

qwertyuiop92428• 10 years ago

No it didn't. People were banned, but nobody edited message text. That's a huge difference.

thewhitetulip2• 10 years ago

I have been using Reddit to discuss problems with Go programming language and now VueJS. It is fine.

Some subreddits may be "wretched hive of scum an villany", you can't say that the entire website is like that.

qwertyuiop92428• 10 years ago

I was explicitly talking about the company. some of the smaller (and even a few of the larger) subreddits are quite good.

yarrel• 10 years ago

Plugin to add crypto signatures to comments and validate them? :-)

wcchandler• 10 years ago

I could see a small hackfest team of ~5-10 people getting this done over the holiday weekend... maybe that was spez's intentions all along.

brynjolf• 10 years ago

In the past reddit mods and administration threatened to do someone who had a system like that running, especially for direct messages

wildmusings5• 10 years ago

Could you elaborate on this?

return06• 10 years ago

was he drunk or in urgent need of a break? OTOH , good of him to take the responsibility immediately. OTOH, maybe he even wanted to send a message to those who rely too much in reddit's freedom.

qwertyuiop92428• 10 years ago

No, he was tired and emotional.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=z49LjJj3VTI

sundvor3• 10 years ago

Brilliant. I had no idea, got to love the British culture.

neotek• 10 years ago

As a newt.

avs733• 10 years ago

probably because Steve (I'm sorry but in this context /u/Spez just seems inappropriate...) had spent weeks being called a pedophile. Hes a person and he snapped. Bad judgement? yes, obviously. But really hes a person...and this is a group of assholes being assholes and I will generally grant people some empathy for having a limit and maybe not having the most rational reaction.

pavanky5• 10 years ago

While I strongly disagree with what he did, the level of fake news and conspiracy theories hitting the front page has been toxic and out of control this year.

Everyone has been accusing of Facebook and twitter for spreading fake news while reddit has also been absolute shit at it.

oolongCat• 10 years ago

Atleast on reddit someone reading the comments on there (usually the top) will be able to figureout that the story is fake.

Cyph0n• 10 years ago

Not on /r/The_Donald.

rhizome2• 10 years ago

Information can be a weapon, and all available avenues are going to be used to establish that fact.

dglass5• 10 years ago

Exactly who gets to decide if news if fake?

There's a lot of theories going around because there's quite a lot of circumstantial evidence. Just because there's no proof does not automatically make it a conspiracy theory.

tptacek4• 10 years ago

So what you're saying is maybe Hillary Clinton did have an FBI agent murdered, and maybe Putin and the Dalai Lama really did meet up to talk about how Clinton and Obama started ISIS, a few days after the Pope endorsed Trump.

adamrezich3• 10 years ago

Really getting sick of people unironically regurgitating the "fake news" meme, just because the mainstream media pushed it. https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=fake%20news

retrogradeorbit2• 10 years ago

I think your cast of 'fake news' may be way too narrow.

Remember the WMDs? The babies thrown out of the humidi-cribs? Jessica Lynch? This goes back through all news. Dan Rather's comment on air after seeing the classified Zapruder film,"went forward with considerable violence"? A complete lie. All news contains significant spin. And most mainstream news is completely fake.

No, what they mean now when they say "fake news" is "news that disagrees with my political leaning".

kennysmoothx2• 10 years ago

Politics and the ethics of what spez did aside, /r/The_Donald seems to be one the most nightmarish communities one can think of, and it's a huge.

Very toxic.

qwertyuiop92428• 10 years ago

I can put the politics aside. But the ethics? No. The_Donald might be awful, in your opinion. But what spez did isn't just awful. It's the canonical example of bad behavior on the internet from a mod.

kennysmoothx2• 10 years ago

I agree, and there are many comments threads on this post describing the magnitude and the consequences of what he did.

I just wanted to point out the growing problem that is the The_Donald and similar communities, where they relentless harass others.

smrtinsert• 10 years ago

thankfully its a free market. those angry at spez can tske their business elsewhere.

giarc5• 10 years ago

The_Donald might be awful, in your opinion.

Interesting way to put it. "in your opinion." Are racist comments and harassment awful only in "opinion"? Are we not at a point where spewing racism in a public forum is not "factually awful" now?

partiallypro• 10 years ago

I'm banned from /r/The_Donald, and am/was a #NeverTrump person, and I find the subreddit to be hilarious and one of the few things Reddit has going for it right now. Everything is basically what people post on Facebook, the original content of Reddit is sparse.

ufo• 10 years ago

I think the admins were quietly hoping that Trump would lose the election and that it would die out or they would be able to remove the sub without being accused of taking a side against a presidential candidate. But now that Trump actually won the election they have a big problem in their hands.

ibejoeb3• 10 years ago

It is a lot of people who support their candidate who is now the president-elect, some memes, and some good debate.

Nothing about it warrants spez's behavior.

seanalltogether• 10 years ago

The tension that The_Donald and many alt-right subreddits place on reddit in general seems to be reaching a boiling point. I get the feeling the admins are just waiting for a credible reason to present itself that lets them cleanly wipe out all of them.

return06• 10 years ago

the donald is well moderated, esp. from doxxing and other personal stuff. they are of course very lively and get to the nerves of leftists, but that's about it. it's actually quite entertaining if you can leave behind enmities (and don't take it too seriously).

pavanky5• 10 years ago

"lively" would be a very very generous representation of what that sub is.

SquareWheel• 10 years ago

Considering the thread thread above, I certainly wouldn't call it "well moderated". The all caps and inciting users come off as extremely childish and unprofessional.

I don't know what Steve was thinking, but 10 seconds in that thread makes me start to understand.

marxbroseph3• 10 years ago

/r/The_Donald is a place where a mix of trolls, fascists, and white nationalists get riled up, and work to start a horrifying new chapter in history.

Fascists and white nationalists defend it by claiming it's just clownish fun. (which, unamusingly, is EXACTLY the same explanation given by the supporters of fascism in Italy, and Russia, and Germany). Trolls really are having fun, they just don't give a fuck.

It's propaganda. It's gross. All of the donald's loser readers and writers have the right to share their bad ideas; but they have no particular right to say it on Reddit.

gottam4• 10 years ago

What is the tension about exactly? That they don't align with their own personal political views?

Mithaldu3• 10 years ago

That you think they're actually expressing their political views instead of shitposting to rile up actual trump voters while pissing off the rest of the internet is fairly naive.

bcherny2• 10 years ago

I think it's more about the way they express their opinions, rather than the content of those opinions.

Posting in ALL CAPS, posting fake news or insults to other members of the community, posting to incite anger, etc. does not make for good discussion, and hurts the sense of community. That, and bringing that to other subreddits via brigading, etc.

RubyPinch5• 10 years ago

Its in the link, isn't it?

As much as we try to maintain a good relationship with you all, it does get old getting called a pedophile constantly.

constant fighting and complaining with other subs as well (which normally they would just shut down, but (un)fortunately, the r/the_donald mods are doing all they can do prevent that being needed, so its a constant minor (but active) problem, instead of being a large one-time problem that they can just ban)

Its the whole concept of poisoning the well, you have some people acting bad, and then the other people act bad in return, and then everyone watching just feels bad for watching it, and it makes everyone feel shit

rednerrus2• 10 years ago

Everyone is pissed that T_D won an election with meme magic.

amorphid• 10 years ago

A couple months ago I was on the bus, and a religious person started preaching. Loudly. It was really annoying. I asked him to stop, and he hid behind some reference to his constitutionally protected rights. I did nothing, but I really wanted to do something. A certain subreddit reminds me of preacher duds on the bus.

I wish I had better tools to deal with assholes. Savvy leadership can come up with clever solutions sometimes, but it'd be nice to somehow reduce the need to be clever.

EpicEng• 10 years ago

In this case, they are clearly a large group of belligerent morons.

Waterluvian• 10 years ago

Political opinion blended to a puree with racism and harassment.

odonnellryan• 10 years ago

Do they need a reason? It is their platform + they need their advertisers to stick around...

idbehold• 10 years ago

Why didn't he simply delete them? Editing their comments seems so odd.

noobermin5• 10 years ago

Clearly to troll them.

soup10• 10 years ago

Reddit has large radical left and radical right communities that are constantly fighting and overwhelm the site with political drama and propaganda. If they don't do something about it they are going to lose the users that come there to look at cats.

scott_karana2• 10 years ago

Sounds like real life. :/

return06• 10 years ago

and what is reddit without drama?

noir_lord7• 10 years ago

Hacker news with a lot more users and cats?

dabockster3• 10 years ago

what is reddit without drama?

A Digg reskin* with a huge library of adult content.

*By Digg reskin, I am referring to Digg right before everyone left. I mean, there is a high possibility that any sort of "Reddit v3" would cause people to leave.

ng122• 10 years ago

That's the problem -- there should be no "Reddit". The only interesting part of Reddit are the communities and there's no reason why the_donald and SRS can't exist under the same reddit.com domain. I really wish /u/spez et al. would take a hands-off approach except for cases where users are breaking the law.

bmon• 10 years ago

I disagree. As nice as it would be, subreddits do not exist in isolation from one another and very often, trends and behavior set in one subreddit trickle to others. This was noticeable leading up to the removal of /r/fatpeoplehate et al, and it's noticable right now. The flamewar between the radical left and right flows onto almost all default subreddits, and it does drive overall quality down.

skybrian2• 10 years ago

Yep, that's the libertarian dream. It makes me nostalgic for the 90's when the web was new.

Now we know that spam and abuse make any large Internet forum suck. Your choice: moderation or cesspool.

Also, getting rid of the really extreme filth on the Internet is no fun and people generally have to be paid to do it, which is one of the things that keeps larger social networks in business.

sergiotapia2• 10 years ago

I say this all the time and people immediately accuse me of being a racist.

Reddit should let everything organically perform, and remove things that are against the law. Not things that are against their left-leaning political agenda.

Aaron Swartz would not like Reddit in it's current shape.

ww5204• 10 years ago

Reddit has evolved. IMO it as a place to let the lefts and rights to hash it out serves a much better purpose than just a cat picture showoff, (not that I don't enjoy the cat pictures).

daodedickinson6• 10 years ago

Social networks as war by other means.

jelder• 10 years ago

Gas lighting is some pretty advanced abuse. I wonder how often this has occurred before now.

geuis6• 10 years ago

Please stop using this "alt-right" terminology. All its doing is trying to put a neutral label on a group of vile people. People that are blatantly racist, misogynist, and just anti-American. These are the same kinds of monsters that started the "National Socialist German Workers' Party" in the 1930's. They used the same rhetoric and played on desperate people's fears and prejudices.

My grandparents didn't fight on two fronts to see this bullshit taking over the United States.

noir_lord7• 10 years ago

I'd be wary of calling things anti-american in the context of politics, that label has something of a history.

siddboots• 10 years ago

I think the "alt-right" term has its use. After all, not all of the people we are talking about here are sadistic monsters. Even among those engaging in the juvenile, antagonistic bigotism and bullying that is pervasive on /r/the_donald are a large group of otherwise reasonable people who feel alienated by the progressive left, and have simply bought into the all of the recent rhetoric against political correctness.

Those people have been mislead, to be sure, but it isn't accurate or useful to assume they are malicious.

yolesaber• 10 years ago

Impact matters more than intent.

dang15• 10 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027203 and marked it off-topic.

obstacle12• 10 years ago

My grandparents didn't fight on two fronts to see this bullshit taking over the United States.

Your countryfolk elected "this bullshit", so consider that what you and your grandparents want might not really be relevant.

kristjansson• 10 years ago

(1): That's a gross oversimplification. Trumps support was not primarily alt-right, they were at best a vocal, but small part. Even if they were a significant part of the coalition, this election doesn't suddenly validate those views. A fundamental part of our system is the protection from the tyranny of the majority...

(2): this is an impressive extension of the 'sour grapes' response meme. We're going to shit on WWII vets if they don't (rhetorically) get on the trump train now?

whythrowaway3• 10 years ago

You've got it backwards. Almost nobody encompassed by the "alt-right" label approves of its usage. It was created by the left to brand and contain the movement. See this movement? They're the alt-right because I said so. Oh and they have nazis. Bingo, movement discredited. You can see the wheels turning in the old media's head.

Your post is a good example of how the left is going to lose really hard in the coming years. Politically motivated leftist outsiders like you, reaching reasonable conclusions of your ideology, are pushing the exact opposite narratives that your overlords want you to. The result can only be more infighting destroying you from the inside out.

I feel confident entering the hornet's nest to say this because I know the mob will not heed my warnings, and instead devour any of their own that stop to listen. The left can neither win with nor without people like you, and so it is doomed to either disappear or transform into something not recognizable in comparison to its former self. Something far more right wing.

Happy Thanksgiving!

arkadiyt2• 10 years ago

This post is decaying off of the front page of HN very quickly (every few refreshes it drops a position or more), despite have more upvotes and being posted more recently. Reddit is a YC company as well. Is this post being artificially pushed down?

scott_karana2• 10 years ago

It's well known that HN has anti-flamewar algorithms. Too many comments vs votes (or user flagging too, presumably) causes its rank to drop.

Figs2• 10 years ago

I've been here fairly regularly for 8 years and didn't know about it, so I'm not sure I agree that it's "well known". It definitely isn't in the FAQ's section about how stories are ranked: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html -- which, in my opinion, would be an excellent place to describe it.

I'm glad dang answered though since I've been wondering for quite a while why some stories seemed to sink much faster than others.

dang15• 10 years ago

Nope. Literally the first rule of HN moderation is that we don't do that—i.e., we moderate stories less, not more, when they're negative about YC or a YC startup. Also, we were slacking this afternoon (where by slacking I mean hacking on an arc compiler) and had no clue this thread existed.

It set off the overheated discussion detector (a.k.a. flamewar detector), which lowers the rank of a thread. We do turn that penalty off for particularly substantive discussions—which, though this may surprise you, I'm not sure this one is. Not every Reddit drama shitshow is uniform in its excellence. Can I say that without evil catnip effects?

Edit: ok, we've reduced the penalty and changed the title to something the post actually says. (The submitted title, "Reddit CEO admits to altering user comments that were critical of him", breaks the HN guideline about not changing titles unless they are misleading or linkbait. Please don't do that when submitting here.)

rkcr• 10 years ago

What about people who just click on links and don't view comments? Won't they be missing out just because the discussion in the comments isn't great?

arkadiyt2• 10 years ago

Appreciate the response - thanks!

Sir_Cmpwn4• 10 years ago

-1 to the title change. The current title doesn't convey the situation effectively and imo serves to hide the true nature of the incident. There isn't really an article title to source from here, anyway.

adanto6840• 10 years ago

In my opinion, the "title change" is precisely the opposite of moderating YC-related stories less. In this case it [substantially] obfuscates the meaning of what transpired.

As a die-hard reader, and very rare commenter/submitter, it's frankly very difficult to see this as anything other than obfuscation -- especially given the context & the possible titles for a situation like this.

IMO the original title is about as spot-on as I could have come up with, and the current title is about as ambiguous as I could have come up with; how about at least changing the pronouns to have some context (ie "I" => "Reddit CEO").

tptacek4• 10 years ago

I regret that I have but one flag to give.

sweetsweetpie• 10 years ago

People seem to be treating their comments with some kind of sanctity. These changes are most copy-and-replace for humorous effect (message boards in the past have done it). Surely it is obvious that the Reddit staff has the ability to edit or delete comments.

Users might think this is a breach of trust, but I really cant make that jump.

The important thing is that the_donald followers need a controversy to latch onto and will do so.

vnchr• 10 years ago

Surely if Jack Dorsey edited someone's tweet or Eric Schmidt edited a Gmail user's email, that would be cause for great concern. Which user or users it happened to is irrelevant to the breach of trust it represents to all users of the platform.

rspeer2• 10 years ago

On the other hand, didn't moot auto-edit people's 4chan comments all the time? I'm told this is where the current meaning of "weeaboo" came from, because moot was sick of the word "wapanese".

Although this is an odd thread to use Urban Dictionary as an authoritative source, that's what I've got: [1]

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Weeaboo&defid...

lerpa• 10 years ago

It can happen and if you treat your email with that level of seriousness it is a possibility to have in mind that it could have happened.

The problem here is people taking an entertainment site so seriously, oh they are blatantly fucking up and btw have been in the past other shady things, so stop using it.

Mao_Zedang3• 10 years ago

Reddit has been on the road to becoming digg for some time now, the only thing propping them up is the lack of a decent alternative.

arca_vorago• 10 years ago

I seriously considered trying to use elixir to start a new site with similar intentions to hn/slashdot/reddit, but then I did a precursory search of all the legal implications and it seems nightmarish to run a high-volume user commenting site these days.

I've settled on a side project of just editorials that dissect the rhetoric and logical strengths of current stories in aggregate.

I think the next version of reddit is going to have to be on a blockchain or something decentralized and verifiable.

That being said, I really have to give props to the HN team for how well they do their job technically and politically compared to most internet forum sites.

jquip• 10 years ago

Hi, I'd be very interested to be a part of that... PM if you need more hands

raldi• 10 years ago

People have been saying reddit is turning into Digg since the very first comment thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/17913/reddit_no...

Mao_Zedang3• 10 years ago

I think when people say "digg" they mean failure not actually the website digg. And alienating your user base because of your feelings is definitely down the path to failure it definable doesn't endear success.

crayon765• 10 years ago

https://voat.co is one such alternative.

iso-8859-12• 10 years ago

and https://lobste.rs/

perseusprime113• 10 years ago

Shit some people do to stay relevant. That's all I have to say.

CalChris• 10 years ago

This reminds me of Jimmy Wales editing his bio:

https://www.wired.com/2005/12/wikipedia-founder-edits-own-bi...

jabgrabdthrow• 10 years ago

How pathetic

sidcool• 10 years ago

I am /r/outoftheloop. What happened?

ENOTTY• 10 years ago

This is quite concerning. I do wonder if blockchain could fix the problem of stealth edits by privileged users.

rspeer2• 10 years ago

It would fix the problem by making commenting require insane amounts of computation, thus making it require transaction fees, thus making nobody comment, thus making there be no comments to edit, right?

moron4hire• 10 years ago

There is a reason I'm on HN and not on Reddit. Please don't spill your petty in-fighting over to other sites.

adamconroy• 10 years ago

shouldn't he be saying i fucked up?

rfrank3• 10 years ago

Why was the title changed from "Reddit CEO" to "I"? Seems very asinine.

dang15• 10 years ago

When a story is written in the first person it's common for the title to say "I". Sometimes we put those in quotation marks but then we'd have nested quotes in this one.

As for why changed, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027515 and the replies.

rfrank3• 10 years ago

I think that logic is stupid and don't think your comments re: moderation of YC companies on HN are honest.

CarpetBench• 10 years ago

I think you're doing a great job. Moderating threads and submissions that are basically guaranteed to be shitshows (like this one) is an incredibly thankless job.

Thanks for keeping it together, and thanks for keeping this from going off the rails.

winteriscoming• 10 years ago

Am on mobile and that link keeps giving a "something went wrong page" on reddit

sergiotapia2• 10 years ago

Reddit can no longer be sourced by any media outlet because of this. How can any comment be valid on Reddit anymore?

Reddit's credibility is gone forever. No going back.

rawrmaan• 10 years ago

Don't worry, media outlets generally don't care about vailidity.

Yhippa• 10 years ago

I still have no idea what /r/pizzagate is all about.

MicroBerto2• 10 years ago

The more you research, the more horrifying it is. I'd not recommend looking into it if you don't want to go down a rabbit hole, be thoroughly creeped out, and have your day completely ruined.

nness• 10 years ago

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/fact-check-this...

epmaybe• 10 years ago

http://www.snopes.com/pizzagate-conspiracy/

koolba2• 10 years ago

How did he make the changes to the comments? Is it via an audited admin function available to Reddit staff or by directly modifying the backend data store?

I ask because I want to figure out if anyone else that works at Reddit was aware of this. It's one thing to have the top of the house do something this betrayingly asinine, but I'd consider it much worse if other staff at Reddit were aware of this.

thekevan2• 10 years ago

In a slightly twisted way, his mistake is a good thing for the rest of us. With this happening right along side as the "fake news on Facebook" stories that are happening, it shows how so much of what we read on the internet could have been altered or plain old fabricated and should be taken with a grain of salt.

tw04• 10 years ago

I will once again point out the irony of r/The_Donald members constantly complaining about SJWs being up in arms over their racist, sexist, homophobic rants. Yet the second something like this drops, it's the end of the world. Reddit as a whole is going to crumble because the CEO got sick of their childish antics.

gamechangr5• 10 years ago

That's two totally different concepts.

It's one thing to "complaining about",,, generalizations. It's entirely different for a CEO to abuse his power and censor those he disagrees with on a social media site.

He should be let go for this! He is literally putting words in peoples mouths!!

It calls into question the credibility of the whole site.

giarc5• 10 years ago

And yet Donald Trump is blocking his press core [0], calling for an end to SNL because they made fun of him [1], telling CNN execs that they are all liars [2], revoking credentials of the Washington Post [3] among many others [4]. Sure, the reddit CEO doing it is bad... the president elect though...

0. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election...

1. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/78761255265415577...

2. http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/22/13714052/d...

3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/trump-revokes...

4. http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/14/media/donald-trump-media-bla...

notaplumber• 10 years ago

/r/The_Donald is such an Internet cesspool.

georgemcbay• 10 years ago

The Internet is such an Internet cesspool these days. You won't believe what happens next!

rednerrus2• 10 years ago

This is the perfect ploy to get conspiracy nuts to leave Reddit. I'm sure spez is tired of dealing with the pizzagate cats and he thought this was the best way to drive them off without creating a bigger shitstorm by telling them all to get fucked.

orthoganol• 10 years ago

I don't understand HN rank algorithms. With 300+ points in 3 hours I would expect this to be at the very top, not sliding off the front page.

grzm8• 10 years ago

See this thread for some details:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027367

Short (incomplete) answer: it tripped the flame war detector and has likely been flagged by a number of users.

ivix• 10 years ago

This is genius really.

This act will cause /r/The_Donald to leave reddit, saying they don't trust them anymore.

Those opposed to their antics will forgive /u/spez and stay.

The result is that reddit expels it's undesirable members without anything so controversial as banning them.

RikNieu• 10 years ago

The result is that reddit expels it's undesirable members without anything so controversial as banning them.

Except for the part where the CEO personally edited user's posts to say things they didn't say? Yes. Genius. Not controversial at all...

giarc5• 10 years ago

I doubt it was planned. I wouldn't be surprised to see spez step down tomorrow.

gamechangr5• 10 years ago

"Those opposed to their antics WILL FORGIVE /u/spez"

That's wishful thinking if you ask me.

I'm "opposed to their antics" but I'm 10X more opposed to CEO's censoring people and literally putting words in their mouth!

I feel sorry for those that would forgive that, if in fact many people on a social media site would think that's "no biggy"

draw_down• 10 years ago

I get why this is bad but the lack of perspective is kind of astonishing. I mean these insane idiots will not give up this stupid idea of some pedophile conspiracy they think they've uncovered. And they don't care whose name they shit on. But edit their internet posts and they scream bloody murder. They can lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and this is what will get talked about.

I'm very pessimistic about the future.

city413• 10 years ago

What would it take to show the current internet generation that what they really want is usenet? It's impossible to alter a usenet post after it's been sent out. It's decentralized, uncensored, has no economic interests of a company to consider, and no worry of going away when the company calls it quits. It's everything your average redditor wants.

wilde• 10 years ago

Because spam-filtering and moderation are useful forms of censorship that keep communities alive. In the US, I need to at least be able to remove child pornography (and other illegal content) so that the FBI doesn't come after me.

dbg314152• 10 years ago

Ok, so Reddit has been filled with some pretty "deplorable" characters as of late... and to censor them and edit comments... holy fuck, these are not the people you want to do that to. Especially given that they will self-destruct if you just leave them alone. Fueling the fire like this... honestly that's some horrific judgement on the part of u/Spez. Probably time for a new CEO.

But... then again... Reddit's best days are behind it. Doesn't really matter who is at the helm.

* Reddit is still in turmoil | Hacker News || https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12140603

healthnutter• 10 years ago

FWIW, I have had a number of incidents with sketchy "content" on reddit over the years. This incident with content modification is in alignment with my experiences.

elevensies4• 10 years ago

The CEO of Reddit is officially a cursed position, on par with the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts.

In other circumstances this might have gotten laughed off, but The Donald has really developed a bunker mentality IMO after having mods doxxed, the algorithm changed to end their front page dominance, lots of other subs being anti-Trump, and the general tenor of the campaign against Trump.

I hope Spez can take a nice relaxing weekend holiday and let someone else deal with this shit-hurricane.

aaron6953• 10 years ago

The CEO of Reddit is officially a cursed position

Not sure it's a curse when you list all the things being done to the sub-reddit?

They get attacked, so they fought back? To be expected, no?

elevensies4• 10 years ago

I'm saying its a curse because:

- Yishan Wongs various missteps and eventual bizzare (looking) departure

- Ellen Pao had haters on the site from day 1, Hitler memes etcetera. And then when they fired u/Chooter all hell broke loose and some subs were shut down by their own mods. The integrity of AMA was permanently ruined by this IMO. Anyway, Pao was hated by the idiots immediately, but hated universally after this.

- Spez started strong but this is going to affect his credibility, and seems to me to be part of the same downward spiral that happens to the CEOs when they get caught up in some bullshit happening on the site.

johnnydoe9• 10 years ago

No, dude it's his fault and people are angry. This is a huge violation of trust and shouldn't be downplayed like that.

elevensies4• 10 years ago

Because it is his fault, that is why I think he shouldn't try to personally deal with it. The Donald was attacking him personally, which is against Reddit policy (no personal attacks,) but he fumbled the ball and weakened his ability to reform them. I don't think there has ever been trust between the mods of The Donald and the reddit admins.

ljk3• 10 years ago

I hope Spez can take a nice relaxing weekend holiday and let someone else deal with this shit-hurricane.

how are people defending Huffman right now? He should be fired over this, not a "nice relaxing weekend holiday"

elevensies4• 10 years ago

Who would benefit from the departure of Spez? Overall, except from this one incident, he has allowed the continued existence of The Donald. I'm not sure the next CEO would do the same. The only person that I think would benefit from the departure of Spez is Spez.

throwaway999998• 10 years ago

I can't be the only one that finds this pretty funny, right? Forget about whatever dumb imagined political angle of it. If you go on someone's website and spam "fuck [admin's name]" and call them a pedophile based on ridiculous accusations, it's probably only just because of misplaced mercy that you're not banned for harassment right off the bat. These aren't paying users, and they don't have personal data locked up in their accounts that they may lose access to. Whatever forum they're posting to owes them nothing and they do worse than spit on that. That a wordfilter gets applied to some posts of some users that were basically asking for a ban is pretty funny.

I've helped run a popular forum before. We added silly global wordfilters at times, and on a couple occasions when seriously-rule-breaking users repeatedly evaded bans, we applied customized wordfilters to them to help drive them off. (Dropping all of the vowels that weren't at the start or end of a word from their posts to make it look like lazy teenager txtspeak was a favorite.) It worked and people found it hilarious.

std_throwaway2• 10 years ago

Reddit used to be a place where intelligent users had a quality discussion. It used to happen. At least in my imagination. What I see now is a machine which produces memes (still going strong there) and propaganda (growing stronger) but the discussion is on a much lower intellectual level.

empath753• 10 years ago

Was this before or after 'Jailbait' was the most popular search term that brought people to the site? Or that it became the premiere destination for recruiting and organizing racists?

samstave5• 10 years ago

Calling BS for the following reason:

I agree with what you posted that memes and propaganda are still going/growing strong... there is still a TON TON TON of discourse that is important and intellectual.

S:N ratio and all that....

Noise may be growing like mad (Shills/corps/whatever-other-noise-producers/etc).... but Signal is growing as well.

The thing is that NvS ratio has to increase in order to keep status quo....

That doesnt mean that certain stories are not true but that perhaps they are pushed aside with noise to keep certain things seemingly implausible...

russelldc• 10 years ago

It wasn't a word filter. He spent ~an hour, according to his apology, editing posts, manually changing his name to other users instead.

std_throwaway2• 10 years ago

In my eyes reddit quality, especially the frontpage, is declining year over year and it's not really getting better. It might be my age but I'm less and less interested in the content which gets all the upvotes. Also, the bigger subreddits seem to show this decline where quality discussion doesn't happen anymore.

Is there actually a long-term analysis about how reddit content and discussion changed over the years?

gormo2• 10 years ago

Made this comment in the other (flagged) thread. Here goes:

I agree it was not nefarious, but it was a decision that shows unbelievably poor judgement, especially for a CEO. I'd be surprised if he keeps his position. He's undermined his fundamental role as the leader of one of the biggest social media sites by violating the trust that users put into the site's administration.

The context as I understand it involves some ravenous hordes of conspiracy-theory redditors promulgating fake news stories and doxxing innocent people. However, by changing the text of these users comments, whatever their actions, and by admitting to it, Steve has opened the floodgates. Now there is no question -- in the minds of these users -- that the site is truly "against them" and willing to not only censor them but to rewrite history as they see it. They can no longer trust anything they read on the site.

But what is worse is the effect and message this sends to normal users. How can, for instance, any person safely participate in an AMA now? When the real possibility exists to have their words changed out from under them, and no way to prove they aren't in fact the author? And from that, why would anyone post anything potentially personally identifiable, if (in their mind) some disgruntled admin could modify what they said to include false yet humiliating or criminal things (e.g., throw in racial epithets, link to porn, admit adultery / drug use) that might eventually link back to them. And how far does this go? Can admins send PMs under the name of other users? What else? To me at least, the scary thing is that Reddit posts that only obliquely reference personal information have already been used as the basis for surveillance and legal action [1]...

And taking one final step back, from a business side this drama goes beyond just being unprofessional. Reddit posts are now often linked to from news articles. How can the media trust the source they link to? If the content of posts are 'up for grabs' to be edited by admins in the minds of users and the media (even if they aren't in reality), then one of Reddit's functions that is growing in importance -- that is, news-making -- may be stymied.

Harming trust is extremely dangerous for social platforms. And when it is the CEO themselves doing the harm, it could very well border on being suicidal for the site.

[1] https://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/58hae4/what_is_a_...

Lily52Lily2• 10 years ago

If you don't trust auditd

Lily52Lily2• 10 years ago

maverick_iceman2• 10 years ago

Combine it with Milo's getting banned by Twitter, Doordash's CEO asking for Trump supporters to resign - a not very pretty picture of Silicon Valley emerges.

ec1096852• 10 years ago

Doordash didn't ask Trump supporters to resign. Please cite your assertions.

vowelless3• 10 years ago

Grub hub not door dash. And it was not trump supporters, but people who supported his racist views.

aaron6953• 10 years ago

Please, don't go all, technically the literal reading is blah.

We all knew what was really being said 'Please quit if you support Trump, you are not welcome here'.

This is what many Trump supporters say, we technically aren't X.

tomp4• 10 years ago

Can you explain how Trump's views are "racist"? AFAIK, he criticised criminal illegal Mexican immigrants, not even a whole nationality, let alone a whole race!

maverick_iceman2• 10 years ago

Stalin would be proud of this guy. (They practice the same brand of politics after all.)

Fej• 10 years ago

Am I the only one who isn't really concerned with this?

spez was engaging in a bit of the Internet pastime... trolling. It wasn't some conspiracy to control information on reddit, he was just having fun. Dastardly fun, yes, but fairly innocent, all things considered.

zedadex• 10 years ago

the only thing he secretly altered was the target of the insults

Basically irrelevant. One hell of a veil to pierce.

This isn't even the first time reddit's indicated they're kind of... flexible, let's say, with how they handle certain kinds of data; but it always seemed like they stopped just short of crossing lines.

Unmarked edits to user comments was absolutely not something I'd've expected to come of that, so I can't say I'm not surprised; still, this seems like it's just the next stage of something that's always seemed to exist (or not exist, I suppose) for them.

zone411• 10 years ago

What made this situation more interesting is that Washington Post cited comments from that edited thread in their article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11.... That's not a good look for Conde Nast - should the proper media cites now have a disclaimer that the user "apparently" wrote such and such post?

I would guess that this exposure is also the reason he edited this thread in particular.

wruza• 10 years ago

I didn't get all the drama even after reading top HN comments. Am I completely lost?

xupybd• 10 years ago

Wow people are freaking out. In a couple of months everyone will forget.

He got stressed and did something unprofessional. But at the end of the day it's just reddit. The world will not end.

Anyone know if there is a way to shout him a beer. Sounds like that man needs a cold one and some quiet time.

z3t4• 10 years ago

There are a lot of politics going on on communities like these. And there are a lot of trolling, people attempting and sometimes successfully summon mobs, sometimes for amusement, sometimes with an agenda. Do not underestimate stupid people in large groups!

makecheck• 10 years ago

This type of breach of trust could be used to help educate people on what digital security really means, and to demand real security in all parts of their digital lives. It is also good to demand multiple layers of security.

Reddit is "https", and did that help here? No, in the sense that it only ensured the unaltered delivery of what Reddit was sending. It did nothing to preserve the integrity of comments that were originally written. This was not a “secure” web site for this case, yet many people would assume so due to the one layer of security that was present and prominently displayed in the browser! Now extend this to any given web site, and data that is far more important than a stupid comment. Real security is not trivial, and figuring out a good way to manage trusted parties is especially hard.

koliber• 10 years ago

How do we know his apology is real?

Maybe he posted "I did not do this. Get off my back people. I don't know what is going on here."

Later, another admin may have gone in and changed Spez's comment to read "Yep. I messed with the ...".

(I'm being facetious)

ktamiola• 10 years ago

Haha! Long live "freedom" of speech!

randomname2• 10 years ago

Leaks from the reddit admin slack channel show the motivations behind this:

http://archive.is/ZmULb

Apparently a long history of harrassment from the subreddit in question finally made /u/spez retaliate. The leaks further show the admin team is planning to deal with the subreddit in a more definitive way.

heisenbit• 10 years ago

As one who moderated a smaller forum for a while in the past:

1) Direct access to the database at times is needed particularly for bulk edits. In our forum we had certain bans and not all were immediately enforced by the posting software. Some were done in bulk operations down at the database level.

2) Manual semi bulk edits at time were done in places where scripts simple were too much work to get right.

3) Manual direct individual edits also at times happened but they are incredibly dangerous as they can erode the confidence in the site. From what I saw at multiple forum the temptation is very high at the top to rationalize such edits and it tends to work against them badly.

4) Edits at database level often leave little to no trace. That is one reason that makes them so dangerous. At production level very few should have access to the DB for accountability reasons.

5) Nobody really likes DB level edits but they are needed and done. The forum software and support scripts do not cover all situations. Getting 100% rid of them is unrealistic. For audit reasons logging original posts in a tamper proof place may be wise but is rarely done.

6) Clearly someone has abused privileges here, I'm fairly sure such edits are not condoned by any internal guidelines. There must be consequences.

7) Personal consequences. This is about ethics, behavior and trust. These things are not all b&w. Was he hiding the behavior? Is there insight? Are there mitigating circumstances? Also is he the right guy for the job considering the job description requires flame retardant skin? The board needs to look into this carefully and quickly.

8) Organizational consequences. How can they make sure this does not happen again? Do they have all the right controls in place? Are they are properly separating the roles. Should they get audited? The threat for an organization to suffer from catastrophic cyber events increased incredibly. It used be be groups of people revolting on boards. These days certain sites reach out to sizable fractions of the US electorate and whip up attacks (recent: Kelly's book on Amazon or CNN's app in the app store). Very solid organizational and technical controls are needed for a place that so easily gets into the cross-hairs of a mob.

brilliantcode• 10 years ago

I'm seeing reddit's user base as less and less valuable. There is so much active disinformation with purchased reddit accounts (because aged accounts attract less suspicions) that's ripe with vote manipulation.

By actively triggering reddit's vote manipulation trigger on somebody's comment, you effectively have a way to censor and control information and how it's portrayed.

Reddit CEO directly altering user's comments that criticize him seems to signal that the platform is incapable or unwilling to address the poor value proposition of a purely anonymous based social networks that serves as stage for anyone with the monetary and networking resource to manipulating the casually browsing redditor and their opinion .

kfo1187• 10 years ago

This election (seen from outside as a storm in a glass of water) undermined America's best appeal as the only place with the first amendment. Please remain free.

imode• 10 years ago

awesome work spez, you're now liable for everything your users do on your site due to your actions.

have fun dealing with the outcome of this. I don't envy you, but this was your decision.

LordFrith• 10 years ago

I would be pretty annoyed if a good chunk of the paranoid pizzagate believing Internet spent all day calling me a pedophile.

Reddit CEO admits to altering user comments that were critical of him

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