Reddit’s CEO edited comments that criticized him
theverge.com
theverge.com
To explain what's happened to anyone not wanting to dig through the threads, Spez, the CEO of Reddit, has admitted to editing some comments on The_Donald. Specifically, he changed mentions of his name in insults to the usernames of The_Donald moderators. According to his comment, he did this for about an hour before stopping. His comment states that he was very stressed over dealing with the removal of r/pizzagate and being called a pedophile for it, resulting in him going out of line and making edits to comments. He also says that he won't do it again, and that the community management team is angry with him.
The Reddit admins have had a strained relationship with the moderators and users of The_Donald, for multiple reasons. For a lot of users there, this validates some beliefs about the admin's treatment towards them, specifically that they make an active effort to censor their content. Other users on the site feel like this sets a dangerous precedent, as it demonstrates the admins can and have edited comments without disclosure. Further users feel like, while Spez made a mistake, he was unfairly treated and harassed by TheDonald and his response was an understandable outburst.
Now, people around the site are wondering what the repercussions of this will be. Some question if Spez will be removed from his position over this. Some wonder if the admins will come forward and admit they've edited comments in the past. Others wonder if a significant population from The_Donald will migrate to Voat, a Reddit alternative.
And I thought that I work in an unprofessional company on a useless project. I feel a lot better now.
This reads like a chatlog from minecraft server for teenagers.
But yes, it's pretty awful and highly unprofessional. spez's comments in the chat are unprofessional and concerning as well.
Ohh wait... there is.
Oh let them please do that. Rats belong in the sewer
And I have no qualms about what Spez has done. Internet trolls deserve it.
The problem for the reddit admins is how to control and contain it and punish the trolls without affecting real people, or being overly censurous.
So for someone who's basically being sniped at by hundreds of guerilla warriors who can make thousands of other people dance as their puppets, it's not surprising they'd reach for a similar tool in frustration when attacked directly, wrongly and frivolously.
FB was allowing employees to simply READ any comments/posts/PMs between users and recall what a shitstorm that was... but now imagine if Zuck was personally freaking editing posts about him? (or if he had a team of ppl doing it for him and then admitting to it/bragging about it on corp comms???)
/u/spez may have truly done a really big hit to reddits future.
Can we get @DANG's opinion?
Shouldn't the mods clean up after the trolls who don't abide by the subreddit rules? If a post stays up for days, it is safe to assume the mods condone it whether it was posted by a 'troll' or a 'real person' - this goes for any subreddit.
Every black-hat should be trying to get access to /u/spez's account to see if they can pwn reddit as a whole. But I am hopeful that reddit has that account compartmentalization and security under control.
1. the actual reddit account /u/spez would presumably be just like any other account (meaning no god-mode, where he can edit shit) - that should be compartmentalized to system level accounts for cassandra, mysql etc... such that /u/spez cannot (via the web-account login) access an option to modify content thusly. The reason for this is to assume that /u/spez's account is prolly being attacked by brute force continuously.
2. we should assume that their DB practices, hosted on AWS, have both logging and alerts such that there should be a log of any DB statements submitted are logged.
3. that logged events stat who did what when
4. It's actually far more common to not have a CEO's account having root access to everything -- this is why you create a company. We are far more advanced than that. While Zuck may have "authority" to access any single system that FB has, I doubt he knows every single password - and that he would rely on his officers and teams to access/modify anything (given their current maturity level asa company)
I'd bet my life that if you put a gun to Tim Cook's head - he would not be able to login and gain access and them modify your icloud account.
have you ever heard of how slippery certain slopes can be?
All I saw was a white background and one character (or two!) per line on the left. What garbage.
And no, Reddit is not a democracy, there's no free speech there. Still, it is much, much more tolerant than facebook. But a limit exists
1. Removal of Post outright
2. Editing of post WITH ATTRIBUTION or Acknowledgement of edit
3. Banning of user/thread/topic/etc with full and open disclosure
This habit of Redit and other sites have of "hidden" moderation needs to end
The Practice of silent moderation, silent editing of post, shadow bans, etc should not be acceptable to anyone that values free Speech
And before you go off on your moronic tangent about Reddit not being a democracy. Yes Reddit can legally choose to censor anyone they want, or do anything they want really on their platform, that is not the topic of debate. The topic of debate is around do YOU a presumed reddit user want to continue to support such a site. Do you want to visit an ecochamber of heavily censored topics and discussion?
Reddit became popular on the back of having very very very few limits on expression, the reason people flocked to it was because of open and uncensored discussion. If the site Admin's want to turn it into a Democrat echo chamber free of any alternative view points they are free to do so. I am also free to fucking call them censorious fuckwits if they do
Some how I have a feeling you would not hold the same opinion spez did this to a community you approve of, or on topic you approve of
//and for the record, and I should not have to say it but I feel I need to which is telling in itself, I did not vote for, nor do I support Donald Trump. I have been for more than 20 years a Libertarian, and voted for Gary Johnson in 2016
Hasn't Reddit claimed it is a place for public and free speech as reason for not shutting down some subreddits?
Admins manually editing posts they see as offensive would seem to create a liability for the owners as they can't then argue they don't control/monitor content.
If someone calls me a paedophile on Reddit (again! it's a not uncommon juvenile taunt) will I be allowed to edit their post, presumably not.
I don't think anyone imagines Reddit is a democracy but the administration should nonetheless adhere to reasonable moral conventions such as flagging moderated posts and giving the same powers to censor personal abuse to all users.
Lets draw some parallels;
* "No, judge, I was not speeding through that intersection" | JUDGE: "Well, hang on a second - my edit to your ticket states that you were... Takem 'em away boys!"
WTF: im livid that anyone on HN would defend literally debasing the credibility of any system with a single freaking action of a CEO/Employee with such an obvious abuse of a root-level position....
I am so angry about this I can't even articulate it well...
instead now is the time when everyone gets serious. it will be hard to separate the principled outrage from the faux manipulative outrage. a new poes law of sorts.
The capacity to do this has always existed and the circumstances are incredibly trivial.
We used to trust that when reddit said a user wrote X, they actually did write X (excluding hacking). This was a violation of that trust.
Yes, getting rid of the hate and the stupid is something the owners of the site (and the content creators) want. It gives them a horrible reputation (and can impact business, as Twitter discovered). But that is still their userbase, and getting rid of the userbase drastically decreases their value.
So it is a balancing act. And the trump subreddit would be a disaster to remove as everyone would REALLY get on them for being "too political"
Only if they wait so long to clean house that their user base consists mostly of the folks who give them a horrible reputation.
The most valuable online communities are those that aggressively clean house along the way. Losing a small amount of jerks is more than made up for by the non-jerk users who feel comfortable enough to join and stay.
That's why HN has grown as fast as it has. That's why the advice for normal people interested in Reddit is "unsubscribe from the defaults and find niche subreddits." Because the niche subreddits moderate aggressively.
That's why web forums beat Usenet in the first place.
I bet they checked it a long time ago: How many of the users that hang out or lurk in those "jerk" subredits also participate in more civil subs? If those people where in their own jerky Venn circle with little superposition with the rest of reddit, I think they would have deleted those subs by now.
HN is largely a tech site geared toward mid-late twenties individuals (the start-up culture, really). Reddit is a social network geared toward late teens to mid twenties (males). Yes, there is overlap, but not to a significant degree.
Reddit tolerates subs that promote all out illegal behavior, so suspending the_donald for being obnoxious would be a bad move. If you have hate speech or whatever you handle that by banning the user not the sub.
Imagine that happened if the political viewpoint of the commenter aligned with something you were not against? Or what if there are edits that Spez isn't mentioning that are more intrusive than what he's admitted to? A commenters own text isn't his own.. It's a slippery slope.
I'll be honest and say that if I was actually worried about such a thing happening, I'd go somewhere else. The bottom line is that Reddit doesn't exist to serve /r/the_donald - and that's not a shot at /r/the_donald, just that clearly it's priorities and Reddit's priorities are fairly different. If I was involved with something that I thought the admins weren't ok with, then I would take it somewhere else because I'd be well aware it's the admin's site to mess with in anyway they please. Even if they 'promise' not to do anything, there's no guarantee. Other sites that align more with their views could give them much better guarantees of that sort.
I'm in agreement with you though, to a point - I think it was a horrible move on Spez's part and I don't really find it funny. But while I (along with probably everybody else) didn't personally think something like this would happen, I didn't ever hold the opinion that it couldn't happen, just that the admins were smart enough not to do something like this, and that the admins had no reason to bother with my posts (And none of my posts are really that important anyway). If I had reason to suspect that the admins didn't like my stuff being there and was concerned about it, I'd go somewhere else. It's no different then why I wouldn't store sensitive information only on Google Drive - Google has full control over it and could take it off on a whim if they really wanted.
The analogy of the rioter among peaceful protesters doesn't really apply to the circumstance, but it's poetic given the situation.
Who cares if you might be "literally hitler" for example.
If you call me "literally hitler" should I be able to edit your post to say, instead, "literally awesome!!!1"?
If it wants to be anything goes like 4chan, then it's funny and not a thing to care about.
But reddit has always been trying to be more palatable and have better signal:noise than that style. Reddit is a pretend "raw and unfiltered" for users used to facebook, but very much in a safe-for-tv "dangerous" way. They want to be the channel surfing portal for the internet, and that means curbing the actual rough-edges.
And Steve, in the process of trying to get his userbase to straiten up, fly right, and be good unpaid content farm worker bees, can't maintain his own composure.
They should make it harder for anyone other than the user to edit their comments. Maybe sign the messages and store the signature so a flag shows up if the signature doesn't match.
Or users themselves could sign their messages and put the signature as part of the message. Is there an add-on for this?
Quarantining it altogether is under consideration, but as mentioned in the link above, this will need further planning.
During the last year and especially the last 6 months, it was widely known that /r/politics was basically a front for CTR. Pro-Trump posts and even Pro-Bernie to some extent were like a dog who speaks, very rare. Personally I think that the mods tried to counter balance the_donald by making sure that /r/politics was as biased in favor of Hillary as they could.
My guess is, this was the last election cycle where Reddit matters at all for Republicans because it's clear the platform doesn't like free-speech for the sake of free-speech.
admins are employees who work on the platform.
mods have no power to edit the algo.
You either need to ban /r/TheDonald, or just accept it for what it is, hold your nose, and walk away. I believe that I'd choose the former, but if I had the power to do so I might feel differently.
But this is the worst possible thing. It makes Spez look horrible, it undermines trust in the site and the admins, it confirms all the nutty things the alt-right believes about Reddit, etc. It makes actually dealing with any of the underlying issues much harder; anything that the admins do which is or might look anti-The_Donald can now be spun as "another example of their bias". And since we've already got such a glaring example of that bias, the claim is now plausible in a way it wasn't before.
Should have just quietly banned the sub and moved on. Or not banned it and ignored it. Anything but this.
The "fat people hate" sub seemed to be banned, not even for its subject matter, but because it's users were spreading their mess into other subreddits as a group. From what I've seen, the same thing is happening with The_Donald
this ideas of "things we like can leak" but "speech that annoys us should be quarantined" is dangerous.
personally I find t_d somewhat useful to peak inside and see what the community is thinking on a given day. i can go read the liberal media for a while, see how Sessions is a racist, then peak into t_d and see the rebuttal. maybe if /r/politics was neutral /r/t_d wouldnt be necessary, but personally I like being able to see what each thought group is up to.
the admins have tried again and again to suppress a pro-inscere type of speaker who speak in mocking hyperbole and not-literally. now they have grouped into one place, with an ideology (of anti pc speak) that took over a country.
you could argue the liberal pc "polite discourse" tolerance (of everything non white) was winning on reddit. but it didnt last.
t_d is now the anti-liberalism counterculture. the majority suppressing a counterculture they dont like never goes well. the ideas spread and last, and breaking up the places they congregate can make them more sympathetic victims. admins are treading on dangerous ground, and have been for a while.
I think they look at it as emergent behavior from popularity vs encouraged behavior from the attitude of users in a sub, but I also they think they aren't above being biased in how they determine what they act on
I'm not going to pretend the threshold for where this "pizza subreddit" would be considered a problem might not end up higher than the one for a sub about a figure Reddit's core demographic appears to dislike, but the core principle is the same
First, I don't think it really makes sense to say a subreddit has opinions as such; it's simply a place for people to post thing. And while the user's do have opinions, nobody is suggesting the user's themselves be banned. Which brings me to...
Second, it's not about opinions. There are much more fringe groups than that sub, and in any case, politically I'm probably significantly closer to the median The_Donald poster than the median Reddit admin. It's not about opinions, it's about tolerance and disruption. Because...
Third, Reddit is a business and a community which thrives on promoting free, open, tolerant discourse. Just looking at the political subs there are communists, fascists, anarchists, libertarians, and everything in between, all happily posting away in their little corners, and occasionally participating in discussions that bring out proponents of different views. And then you have The_Donald. The issue isn't their strange, outrageous views (which aren't so much "outrageous" as "what you get if you cross standard American conservatism with standard European conservatism, put it in a blender, filter through the eyes of a 16 year old, and sprinkle with american flags and memes"). You're talking about a site with actual unironic advocates of actual literal dictatorship on it, come on.
So when you say:
> They picked side
I'm not seeing it. In fact I think they're trying so hard to avoid even the appearance of having picked a side, that they're erring on the side of taking The_Donald's side, and in so doing they're harming the site.
That particular sub-reddit is a mixture of real people, and trolls who pose as trump supporters to egg the supporters on, as well as scaring and pissing off people against trump. The result being that with little effort and prodding on their side they get to see glorious internet mudfights.
However due to the way they're doing it, it's hard to tell which is which. That puts reddit admins in a bind and they have to balance things. Do they keep distance and let subtle trolls go unscathed? Do they take harsher measures and hit actual trump supporters? How much of this spills over into other reddits? How to handle the /all pollution? Letting it get in there just increases the mudfights, but if they take steps they'll be accused of censorships.
I see very little there that is objectionable, certainly nothing that seems worthy of shutting it down.
Certainly there is a lot of 'things to piss off people against trump', but how is that different from any other political site/sub?
If it managed to stay entirely within the subreddit then the admins would never need to be concerned with it and none of this would've happened.
Absolute free speech can have real consequences, here's a sad example from the Rwandan Genocide (copied from Wikipedia):
> The Power groups also believed that the national radio station, Radio Rwanda, had become too liberal and supportive of the opposition; they founded a new radio station, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLMC), which broadcast racist propaganda, obscene jokes and music, becoming very popular throughout the country.[89] One study finds that approximately 10% of the overall violence during the Rwandan genocide can be attributed to this new radio station.
There are much more active subreddits that side with SRS if you want to go there, like circlebroke. There are also much more extreme subreddits than the_donald, like TheNewRight. Nobody is talking about banning those subreddits. This isn't a partisan argument. The_Donald is (purposely) interrupting how reddit works. I'm not an American and I have no dog in this fight, but the_donald is ruining reddit for a lot of us.
The admins aren't even on their side (their political leanings are assuredly different); SRS were just never as bad as people claim, and so the admins never had a reason to ban it.
A small extract from r/The_Donald:
> There are already loud voices saying Paris isn't Paris anymore, with more african/middle eastern faces than french ones, it's not surprising. (+124 points)
> So much cultural enrichment, how would our nation ever survive with out such multiculturalism and diversity? (+44 points)
> No mention of race or religion? Guess that only means one thing.
on another one:
> Arabic? Don't you mean Swedish?
I just took a random thread, there's probably 100s of others.
Even if you think whining about how liberals are treating Blacks laxly with affirmative action isn't racist, there's someone saying he favors people creating racially homogenous communities in the US.
/r/AynRandIsGod would also be wrong, but it would be legitimately wrong. Same for r/PracticalCommunism.
I'll start worrying if server hosts were doing this, but if Reddit doesn't want a reputation of "slightly better than 4chan", it should try cleaning up a bit.
Edit: and routinely
"How far have I strolled from the herd?"
There's just too many forces that want to make sure China doesn't become a superpower that spreading fake news would be a huge weapon against the government.
Even "real" news would be spun in a way that could hurt the rising stability of the Chinese people so I can see why the government would rather just ban the foreign instigators.
Could go one step further and just ban the entire subreddit and move on with his life.
Since when did terrible jokes and politically incorrect opinion become reason to ban something?
Places like Something Awful r Digg will ban people for being shitty and bad for the community. The community being, circularly, the set of people willing to use the website with such rules.
What's so special about Reddit that it doesn't need to cultivate the community?
If a group of friends get together all the time and then one of them is being a jerk all the time, that person stops getting invited. It's not censorship, it's unfriending.
This is an issue of integrity, so it's one of those 'fireable offences' type things.
I have no idea who this guy is, and certainly, many 'big corp' CEO's get away with much worse ... but it's definitely a problem.
Anyhow. Not good.
Because the buck stops with someone and there are several reasons (security vulnerabilities, legal, copyright) to have text removed
But editing them without notice, putting words in other people's mouths is a serious breach.
in my opinion, it's made me lose a lot of trust (not that I had a ton anyway) for the entire site.
That said - it's 'by young people for young people' - and the CEO is pretty young it seems.
If I were the board - I'd cut the kid some slack, make him apologize, put some process/measures in place, 'be better' and move on. My hunch is the guy was just emotional about it, and had a lapse of judgement. People make mistakes.
If this were a bank, or a 'real' news site, or if the guy had serious issues with reality, I'd sack him, but for this ... no. Learning lesson.
Oddly - if it were their last CEO - that ex-VC ... I'd probably sack her, she should have known better ... she's super educated, been on a lot of boards, a lot of exposure to companies, CEO's, a lot more experience/maturity, I'd kind of expect a much higher standard. Then again, I'm being totally speculative about all of this.
That said - I think youth and experience has everything to do with errors in judgement. It's why most CEO's are a lot older than the interns :)
I can see myself making that mistake at 24. Easily. And any one of my younger staff doing the same thing.
Much worse?
The act itself seems petty, the larger issue is the breach of perceived trust ... The_Donald finally made the frog boil over. Don't wrestle with pigs, they like it and you get dirty.
I do however have a hard time seeing a better replacement for spez so I hope him and reddit learned a lesson and put some measures in place to ensure this doesn't happen again. Everyone is allowed one major fuck up in my book as long as it isn't systemic, they admit it, and don't repeat it.
This seems to be another sign of reddit isn't quite mature enough both when it comes to leadership and technology to handle the scale of popularity they've grown to. They have all my respect but the league they're operating in provides a new set of unique challenges.
From a technical standpoint, it would be interesting if posts and comments could be signed so tampering wasn't possible and prevent even the temptation of doing so. Hard nut to crack in a user-friendly way though when everything is server-side.
From the fact that those slack logs were leaked, and from reading their contents, there's some significant internal turmoil among Reddit admins that this has only enflamed further. They REALLY want to ban /r/The_Donald. They are extremely frustrated with spez.
Then if /u/spez resigns, the biggest advocate (ironically enough) for not banning /r/The_Donald will not be in the way anymore. Recognizing this, it's possible that spez stays on for the wild ride of banning T_D and then leaves it to the next CEO to run the new reddit husk.
I'm not sure how reddit ever worked, however. Maybe it'll survive this just fine.
Just because these people are heavy users doesn't mean they're high value users. Clearly the opposite.
The reddit I want to see is the reddit Steve wants to build. It's doubly hilarious that the people getting so riled up are the same people who rant about "PC culture" and people being too sensitive. If ya get your knickers in a bunch about this, I think you have revoked your right to call anyone "too sensitive" ever again.
What are you basing this on? This happened on /r/The_Donald, and that sub tends to have people who dislike PC culture. So it's likely true that the groups you're talking about have a lot of overlap, as an accident of population samples.
I do not rant about PC culture or people being too sensitive, and I think spez massively fucked up here. A lot of the commenters on this thread think the same, more strongly than me. Do you just casually assume that those commenters rant about PC culture and people being too sensitive?
I also think that getting annoyed when you can't say what you want to say is a large factor in disliking PC culture; and getting annoyed when admins edit other people's comments seems entirely consistent with this. They want to be able to express themselves in a certain way, and stealth-editing their comments is the exact opposite of that.
Sometimes, I generalize as a tool for understanding large groups of people. Generalization is a useful tool; it isn't always right, but the preponderance of folks on The_Donald have, as a big part of their identity, being "anti-PC". And, the preponderance of folks getting really riled up about this are people who are participants on The_Donald subreddit.
So, sure, I probably swept up some innocent folks in my generalization. It happens sometimes. Luckily, I hold no political power, no power to censor anyone, and no power to cause anyone harm with my generalizations. All I can do is make fun of people on the Internet.
"I also think that getting annoyed when you can't say what you want to say is a large factor in disliking PC culture"
More accurately, it would be "getting annoyed when you can say what you want to say, but other people are allowed to say you're an asshole for saying it", because no argument about being politically correct ever involved police knocking down your door for being an asshole on the Internet (unless "being an asshole" also includes "making actionable threats to someone's health", which might bring a police response). Free speech is a thing, and it applies to people making racist/sexist/homophobic comments, and the people who reply angrily to those racist/sexist/homophobic comments.
If you think that anti-PC people are simply scared of being called assholes, you missed the time when someone got fired making a joke about dongles. And the time when someone else got fired for saying that Donald Sterling shouldn't have been fired for things that he said in his own home. And the time when Bahar Mustafa was arrested, although I acknowledge that a subset of anti-PC people seemed to celebrate that. And the time when a cake chain got successfully sued for not wanting to bake a cake they disagreed with. Just off the top of my head.
> a very specific hack, that required someone to have said "fuck /u/spez" to be changed
This is untrue. E.g. he edited https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5ee6gs/announce... too. The post he was commenting on has before-and-after archives you can look at.
Of course I am painting site admins as too innocent here. Ultimately they brought it on themselves by letting the community norms fall off a cliff. Back in 2000-2010 being the rough underbelly of the internet was fun, but that period is definitely over.
When the Orlando shootings happened /r/news censored it for almost that entire day deleting threads and banning people.
These alt subs only caught traction when the mains started pulling shady stuff
"Edit: ok, we've reduced the penalty"
Apparently not enough to get it visible to the front page again, though.
HN's software causes stories to fall off the front page after a while. If you didn't happen to see a story while it was there, that doesn't make it "apparently" suppressed.
Who cares if these people go to Voat or back to 4chan...
you really want to only read things that confirm your beliefs? i actively try and read mostly things I disagree with to see if they can change my mind.
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you" - Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146
Reddit's TOS:
> You are solely responsible for the information associated with Your Account and anything that happens related to Your Account.
Pretty obnoxious person to be honest.
Running around like a headless chicken is the opposite of what was required.
Future people with God Mode should avoid repeating the same mistakes.
But that depends on what the God mode wielders perceive the mistakes were, either:
1) Losing composure and making secret edits
2) Getting caught doing it
Can trust be restored ? Open question.
No thanks.
Any substantial migration from Reddit would drown out those voices pretty quick. Just look at their vote counts compared to practically any medium sized subreddit
I strongly get the feeling that tools were created at Reddit to allow them to do this, suggesting that sometime ago employees at Reddit thought "wouldn't it be great if we could change what users actually said"...
Don't get me wrong I feel no protectionism for a lot of the scumbags on boards like Reddit, but I would find an extreme amount of hypocrisy in "the front page of the internet" actively manipulating its content in such a way.
The CEO didn't just edit the comments, he did so in a way that did not reveal the comment had ever been edited.
1. He directly manipulated the production db (seems like they use Cassandra). Definitely doable for someone with a deep technical background, even if they spent 99% of the the past couple of years working "via other people", rather than writing the code themselves. I could easily imagine him getting database access privileges as a part of the "catching up what's happened since I left" process.
2. Reddit has built easy-to-use, e.g. web based in-house tools for editing comments - without leaving any trace of the fact that they were edited.
I guess there also a third option; that he fudged the truth (err, lied) when confessing: that he asked some developer to do the work for him: presumably while laughing and thinking they were hilarious, and then took the blame for when it was time to confess.)
I think he needs to resign. Such a dumb, irresponsible action. I don't think someone that impulsive and immature should be the the CEO of Reddit. And since he's 33 rather than 23, it's not very likely he'll much more mature within a few years.
I'd imagine comments are stored in plaintext in a table and could be edited by anyone with a modicum of tech experience
If you ignore The Donald people, they implode. Don't respond to them and that's the ball gane. All Spez it is doing is pouring gasoline on the fire. Immature tone at the top doesn't help things right now. Spez needs to go.
As it stands now, reddit is pretty much imparts no trust and nothing read there would have any trust associated with it.
depending on context I wonder what the legal exposure could be. could they trace a modified post that suggested something illegal?
They claim that it's polluting the rest of the site. It's not a default subscription, so it's not on the front page. It's at most a handful of the posts on any page of r/all, which by the way, almost no one browses according to Reddit admins themselves. Yes, the moderators of The_Donald ban opposing viewpoints, just like moderators in other partisan subreddits do. It is advertised as a 24/7 Trump rally, and that's what it is.
They claim that the subreddit is racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. If you took a moment to even read it, you'd find post after post expressing the OPPOSITE sentiment, advocating for equality for all regardless of race, sex, and orientation. The problem is that the definition that the left is using of "racism" has been broadened to include basically anything they don't agree with.
The fact that u/spez did not just laugh at the ridiculousness of it all and instead chose to take it on this way, I'm trying to imagine what kind of abuse he's had to deal with today. :( .
for one, the CEO should be thinking "oh shit what did I do", because he's now responsible for every event on reddit. good job, I can't wait to see what happens, if anything.
for two, it really shows how violent people are towards those with differing political opinions.
note, I'm not referring to /r/The_Donald, I'm referring to everybody who thinks that /r/The_Donald should be shown the door with no other reason than "I don't agree with their views".
you're shouting at someone to shut up because you don't like what they're saying instead of arguing.
note, I don't like the folks there either very much, but they are people, with opinions, and they founded a place to share them, and it just so happens that they're pretty loud and easily spotted.
have some decency. stop calling for a total ban or witch hunts on the people you don't like, because you look exactly like them to the outsider. and outsiders are all over.
develop some common decency. your fellow man isn't as terrible as you think he is. polarization will only cause more problems.
spez, the CEO of reddit, can't make this conclusion, which is kind of funny. if you can't do this, then can your users? can the users who're friends of the users? do you understand how this represents your community? clearly not.
I'll be sitting back and watching the outcome. at the most, it's social commentary. at the least, it's cheap entertainment.
How anyone uses that site after how the Reddit community treated her is beyond me.
It was classic fact-free "women in tech" non-sense. Equality means if you mess up at the top, you take responsibility. What women-in-tech advocates want is all the prestige with none of the flak.
What the hell is a pizzagate? I saw it mentioned a few times while reading the mess that is the reddit detectiving for Assange but never saw a clear description. And now it is apparently a pro-Trump thing too?
What was the logic behind calling him a pedophile for that?
...based on zero evidence, a bunch of alt-right types decided that a pizza shop in Washington was somehow the center of some sort of bizarre satanic pedophilia cult/ring/thing, and that further that Clinton was somehow involved.
It evolved into some sort of weird meme/circlejerk/echo chamber/witchhunt/circus, centered around /r/pizzagate, complete with doxxing, stalking, physical protesters outside the shop, trending twitter hashtags, all sorts of madness
Unsurprisingly, the sub was banned. And if you choose to ban a sub focused around uncovering (I can't believe I'm writing this) Clinton's pedophile sex ring, then obviously this is because you yourself are a pedophile (and probably a Clinton supporter, which is probably worse). Why else would you help coverup Clinton's satanic pedophile sex cult?
(If you're curious, the original spark behind all this is Wikileak's release of John Podesta's emails. In them he mentioned eating pizza there. Which is clearly code for child abuse, and Podesta is sort of close to Clinton, so Podesta eating pizza is literally Clinton abusing children. No, I'm not making this up, and yes, that's the sum total of the evidence behind this. Literally, the whole thing is based on the supposition that it's so unlikely that Podesta likes pizza that it must be a codeword for child abuse, because obviously child abuse is much more understandable than liking pizza, or something.)
This is not true actually.
FBI and some forensic science experts used it internally way back before 4chan was even created.
[citation needed]
When we go out for lunch or whatever, we refer to child porn as CP. It's a bit awkward to explain we house the largest collection of CP.
Intellectually, it appears we're cruising along at approximately the "asphinctersayswhat" level of complexity.
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Jesus Hubert Christ I think Reddit managed to out-detective the folk who accused a victim of being a terrorist.
Thanks, I guess. That, in a way that horrifies me due to what it means about my brain, makes sense now.
But of course, the fact that nobody can find the actual alleged instagram photos is just proof of the coverup!
The Reddit's CEO should have been made aware of such troll'ish behavior. He responded in the worst way possible.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/05/13/flight-logs-show-bill-c...
> “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York Magazine for a 2002 profile of Epstein. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
http://dailycaller.com/2016/10/09/the-friendship-between-tru...
Going meta-conspiracy. Perhaps the pizzagate stuff was a psyops pushed to detract from other, more relevant, stories.
Warning, it's a rabbit hole. I'm not saying any of this is correct but it's pretty weird stuff.
There's a decent amount of circumstantial evidence for it, but I personally still think a bit of a stretch.
Six years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh-dNAby174
Four years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5LyzuVUweU
Eight years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_C75RO6LL4
Once the conspiracy theory exists you're going to get a mix of people who really believe it finding subreddits to share "proof"; trolls who like the lulz; people who don't know and don't care but who hate that politician and will share anything negative about them; and baffled people on the outside who can't tell the difference and can't understand how anyone can think that politicians order children for abuse by email.
Every case has to be considered on its own merits, of course.
It's...reaching.
Spez was in the wrong, but I don't blame him one bit. Trolling that sub with disinformation seems like fair play.
Linking liberals and Democrats with pedophilia has been a staple of American right-wing activism for years.
Yup.
No word on if John Podesta is also conducting satanic ceremonies as well.
Seriously. I can't even say that without snickering. Makes you miss the days when Hillary Clinton was just decorating the White House Christmas Tree with crack pipes doesn't it?[0]
[0] http://libertynews.com/2015/06/flashback-flotus-hillarys-x-r...
Don't get me wrong, I think the evidence for it is a stretch, but there is some objectively weird stuff in the emails that do not make sense if taken literally.
Your proposition hinges on replacing the the axiom that extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence, with extraordinary claims are more plausible to mundane ones.
Satanic child abuse is an old moral panic from the 1980s, of which nothing ever existed. Seriously, they're all discredited. Some even involved people claiming preschool teachers were fucking literal demons while riding on brooms.[0]
I toss out a joke about the completely discredited claim that Podesta is a warlock because of a mention of world famous artist Marina Abramović.[1] But of course, the fault is on me, because this is HN, and of course it's going to be treated as gospel.
But hell, what do I know. I'm contemplating ascending to the Aetheral plane because I've been listening to backmaksed Judas Priest[2] and playing Dungeons and Dragons[3].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satanic_ritual_abuse_a...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backmasking#Subliminal_persuas...
If Conspirators hold you capable of everything, its sort of flattering - in a darth Vader, Astmatic sort of way..
The only thing that can be debated at this point is if / how to decode the message. I don't believe someone could make a good faith argument saying that it's not an encoded message.
There are about 10 threads on this in the last two hours. Some have 300 comments.
Take a look - one #28 is still on the front page now with almost 500 comments.
Having a CEO of a social media site impersonate users and censor comments calls into question the credibility of the their whole brand.
That's not a partisan perspective???
How would you feel if Paul Graham of HN changed your comment to "I am strong supporter of the alt-right?" ...you wouldn't like that. Opposing opinions are fine - using admin priledges to put words to literally put words in users mouths is madness?
I already made a comment elsewhere - but I'm surprised they haven't let him go. If reddit were a real company, they wouldn't tolerate that. I wonder what would happen if a middle manager started tampering with user comments - he would be gone.
It may very well be that there are "alt-right" people blowing it out of proportion, but that doesn't mean it's not a big deal.
Kidding aside, it is, though. It crosses a line that, from a strict point of view (like that of permissions or data security) can't be uncrossed. It's equatable to any and every comment being edited or editable without labelling, presented as the unmarked original.
We're approaching the point where reddit comments are seen as valid enough to appear in congressional reports (re: the combetta bleachbit thing); I can't even begin to imagine the legal exposure this would give reddit if that were further along. (Though I guess I can; imagine if this were Twitter or FB; I'm sure some tens of thousands of cases would potentially be under question...)
And that's not even approaching the whole 'potential for historical revisionism' can of worms. Don't worry mate - the gravity of this isn't lost on all of us. :)
Censorship of this issue is seriously bad news: Either we expose the pedophile rings in our governments, or we are subject to their will - and abuse of power - at every point.
So, yeah. This is a huge breach of trust, and I hope that this story gets out there so that people can be informed while deciding whether to contribute to the reddit empire.
So, people were saying "fuck /u/spez" (CEO's username), and he edited that.
I'm really disappointed in the quality of the discourse on both sides this election cycle. Straw men abound.
Oh I see you're just trolling
- a thing that is comparable to something else in significant respects: works of art were seen as an analogy for works of nature.
- a process of arguing from similarity in known respects to similarity in other respects.
I don't really understand your analogy because I was not saying there should be no limit, like you implied I did, I simply asked for the limit to be defined.
Look reddit was never a source of real truth. It likes to think it is because every teenager and lonely 50-something wants to feel important.
Fine. Whatever. There isn't a big story here. The Lord of the Flies wanked off on Piggy's dead body.
Anyone who expected otherwise is probably daft enough to reheat pizza in the oven instead of in a skillet with no oil because that's what makes the bottom so crispy and the top so melty.
In other words, you're all mostly heathens and idiots about this.
If you want control of your content, host it yourself. Not on someone else's dime. Especially not an idiotic dime like reddit's that calls dimes gold.
Do I think this is a huge and massive breach of trust for reddit users? Yes. Yes I do.
Do I think it matters and that the people who are surprised by this basically have shit for brains?
Yes. Yes I do.
Does this actually matter?
No. It's just one more social media thing that will go away because the leadership fucked it up. That's all.
Our work is done here. We don't need to do this anymore.
This is really funny, the undoing of Reddit - and for what?
How?
"They paid foreigners because they didn't believe Americans deserved jobs."
You would have to believe some serious conspiracy theory crap to not read that as sarcasm.
But its not a "prank", like what the Reddit CEO did. I make sure everybody knows that I made the edit (signing my name on the edit, using the poster's privileges), just as a warning that yes... as moderator I do have complete control over the conversation.
Its a threat that I make to keep rowdy members in check. But it only works because everyone trusts me (ie: I never "impersonate" the poster, no one ever "impersonates" my edits either). I know that if I "cross the line", then people will no longer trust me as the moderator of discussion. The position of moderator is to serve the forum, not to dictate the direction of every conversation.
The issue here is that Reddit's CEO is in charge of a community, and that community is losing faith in the leader because of his abuse of his power.
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From one perspective, I understand that moderators have surprisingly few options. Mods can delete posts, and maybe edit them (if they're careful and only edit in extreme circumstances). But... that's about it. Otherwise, there's not really much power mods have.
Banning doesn't really work. Everybody knows how to proxy up and reregister accounts to rejoin a forum. Warnings don't really count, a lot of posters don't care about them.
The threat of an edit war however? Well... that's basically the moderator's best tool. But it needs to be more carefully used than what the Reddit CEO did here.
That happened a long time ago.