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

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.

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

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

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

Also, ceo of reddit looks like a horrid job.

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.

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.

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.)

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

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?

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

Nothing about it warrants spez's behavior.

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".

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.

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.

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.)

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"

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...

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.

Personally, I think this is hilarious.

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).

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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!