Deleting the golang subreddit
groups.google.com
groups.google.com
The CEO edited a comment and admitted he edited it, and it was stupid, and he shouldn't have done it.
I'm 100% sure there is a way for someone at any given platform they'd choose to replace it with to access a DB of posts and edit it without triggering any sort of edit marker.
I'm also sure if that process exists a CEO is someone who could probably make it happen, and in fact in some (most?) places someone lower in the chain of command can probably make it happen.
Spez's actions harm himself more than users of the site. By confirming what any technically minded person probably already knew (you can edit raw data backing something like a post), he gave the masses a new source of drama any time something they don't like appears on the site.
The sensible amongst us should be above childish drama like this.
What is there on /r/Golang that they expect to see edited?
If their qualm is political instead of practical then the users themselves should leave Reddit, and not burn down the entire village on their way out.
I don't think it's a bad idea to disassociate yourself from a company who's behaving in a way you don't want to condone.
Individuals deciding to exit because they disagree with company policy (editing content and apologizing) is one thing, forcing others, who don't care about stupid internet drama and conspiracy theories, to do the same is entirely something else. (that something else is borderline despotic)
An admin abused their power. It's ripe for abuse and they've proven they're willing to abuse it and not mature enough to treat that power respectfully. I have a hard time respecting a company with someone like that as CEO. No conspiracy, no politics, just what happened.
If that possibility is too much of a concern, maybe we need to come up with an alternative - like some kind of decentralised, mass-distributed reddit-like. Actually, wasn't that usenet? Is it too late to get that back?
Invisibly editing comments is a very unexpected route to take. I doubt you could push most CEOs to that. They would just delete the comment.
That you'd say this is an indication of how far the culture online has fallen. What's now taken as an accepted use of moderation power was once considered abusive.
We all know that site operators can change things, but some of them have enough integrity to be trusted not to.
And you know this how, exactly? Because the perpetrator said so?
I find the scenario that this was the first and only time this was done implausible.
[1] Modifying Reddit software to let them hide the edit from the comment author would be visible to anyone with source access, meaning it can't be done without the support of all of their developers, and so probably wasn't.
How is this a big deal?
If you're not comfortable with a platform then by every means, don't use it.
...but why does what you think mean that everyone should be affected?
As mentioned by someone else in the thread: the subreddit was in existence before being taken over by the golang team, it was fine before them, it will be fine after them if they choose to leave.
I do not know if that is the case, that is up to the mods of /r/golang.
Who cares? If people don't want to use the language they won't, and if people do, they will. I refuse to feel bad for the language.
Social media isn't mostly about free thought, free speech, and free inquiry anymore. Nowadays, it's mostly about the rapid dissemination of conformity. Woe betide you if you actually have a nuanced opinion that doesn't fit neatly with either side of an issue. Your fellow posters/commenters will reject their pattern-match and call you a liar and 5th columnist for the other side.
Technology came and killed the impulse towards freedom. It taught people through repeated iteration that conformity to the mob was the highest good. It taught smart people that wrangling their way into positions of centralized power to exercise authoritarian rule was the insider move. It taught everyone that suppression of anything that you didn't like was the winning move. It was called the internet.
You aren't free to dictate the behaviour of companies who don't want content on their site that is objectionable or factually baseless.
Likewise it is just hypocritical and hilarious to complain about conformity just because your opinions don't correspond with theirs. Those people have the right to say and think what they want just like you do.
I'm not so sure you're understanding where I'm coming from. I used to find online a place where I could freely express an opinion without fear of onerous consequences. Back in the old USENET days, there were trolls and heavy-handed moderation and all manner of unpleasantness, but there was also a widespread cultural respect for free speech.
Would you say that undoing net neutrality, then Comcast dropping all packets associated with anything expressing an anti-Comcast opinion is good and savory behavior? Would complaining about that be self righteous, moralizing nonsense?
The idea that people shouldn't engage in physical violence and intimidation could by the same logic be called self righteous, moralizing nonsense. ("FFS, just go and work out, take karate, or buy a gun or something!") Well, of course not. There is tremendous value in an open society where people can depend on the rule of law, driveable roads, electricity, plumbing, etc... Being civilized is literally valued at trillions of dollars in productivity. Likewise, there was tremendous value in open forums where people were free to express themselves and generally agreed to disagree. That's not what we have today. Basically, people bully other people by numbers and social pressure, or through moderation mechanisms. Your idea of "freedom" seems to be like a medieval form of "freedom" where any robber baron can set up a castle and start issuing his own laws and coinage. A truly open society is open globally, and people are free to roam and transact in a relatively relaxed fashion. Now, the morality of today's online world seems to be leaking into the real world, with that kind of deleting "moderation" applied to people's membership in civic organizations. Sorry, but that's petty and non-enlightened. It's like you don't believe the truth will set you free, and it's only pressure, numbers, and mechanisms that will win the day.
lol, his comment fits this perfectly.
That is the perfect analogy for this situation.
Furthermore, I'd say a group of moderators who resort to discussing the future of their subreddit in a democratic and mature fashion; ensuring the integrity of their future, is far from comparable to what the CEO of Reddit has done.
There is a ton of drama and conspiracy nonsense tied up in this. Frankly /r/the_donald should have been removed as well for the libelous and disgraceful comments.
The issue is, and has always been, caused by a serious problem in the reddit's admins have in being perceived as being unable to enforce the rules fairly.
From time to time communities that are overall "okay" get deeply invested in an issue and "drama" is spawned. Sometimes rules are broken. When particular subs visibly break rules and the rules are not enforced their opponents feel license to also break rules. Both sides of these disputes could name a dozen or times that the other side broke the rules. They have mountains of evidence of this, and don't trust the admins as a result.
Because of that, and the explicitly political nature of r/the_donald, none of the admins have felt they could enforce those rules. Into that toxic hellbroth of a situation /r/pizzagate repeatedly had dox-drops containing actual child pornography. Visibly breaking like the only true real rules reddit has, the admins took the only option they had, and ware demonized for it.
Largely because all moderator actions had become so politicized, and after reviewing reported content that I suspect may have been genuinely traumatizing to review he made a mistake.
He's the CEO. He has absolutely no need for that level of access to end user accounts, any more than the CEO of a bank needs permission to silently skim money out of customers accounts.
Many comments.
If you had guessed stupid political garbage mixed with internet trolling, congratulations you get a cookie.
And also take note that witch-hunting is prohibited on reddit and can warrant legal action.
Quoting from Reddit Help: Will you remove something defamatory about me or my friend? [0]:
The best way to deal with incorrect information on the Internet is to post
the correct information next to it. The reddit community is usually very
supportive of such a response, and will likely vote to give the correction
greater prominence than the original post. Redditors love a good
counterpoint.
The reddit community is usually very
supportive of such a response
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ceo-reddit-confessed-modifying-po...
This is where I'd insert a certain GWBj quote about being fooled again...if I was on /.
I see this kind of reductionism to what's "technically possible" a lot around here in regards to security and user trust. Let's go back to meatspace to get a more balanced perspective perhaps. Your mailman can read your mail and steal your packages. Your bank can steal your money. Your waiter can poison you. Your car mechanic can overcharge you.
It's not about what's "technically possible" (though a solution to make it technically impossible would be useful). It's about TRUST in another human being who is in a position of power. Trust is built by having a long record of good behavior and can be destroyed by a single bad action.
And then they could end up prosecuted and/or loose their jobs, will any of it happen to Reddits CEO?
Exactly.
If my mailman edited one of my letters he would be instantly fired and hopefully prosecuted.
Well, it was an entire page of them, but an interesting thing I found while following a bit of this as it blew up was coming across a user that mentioned a comment that was seemingly also deleted by the admin [1]. It seems the CEO may have been doing more than just editing comments. Not that it changes the view of your post though.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5ekdy9/the_admi...
And before you say that it's "different" because emails are private, let's remember this:
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-26677607
Emails are not private. At least not Gmail/Outlook emails. ProtonMail or PGP email should be safer.
The reddit admins aren't known for making the greatest judgement calls, but that just makes them more human.
The fallout of this will probably be a bunch of nothing. It doesn't affect the 90% of lurkers, nor the rest of the site which doesn't give a shit about US politics. The people who it does affect (/r/The_Donald) will find that they need reddit to attract new users. It's doubtful their community could stand own their own or it would have done so already. It's no secret that they didn't trust the admins before the election.
Why does it matter what the discussion was about?
>The reddit admins aren't known for making the greatest judgement calls, but that just makes them more human.
I don't get it. Is being 'more human' good or bad? Is 'humanity' somehow a property that emerges from deceit and hypocrisy, or does it emerge from some other portion of this scandal?
>The fallout of this will probably be a bunch of nothing. It doesn't affect the 90% of lurkers, nor the rest of the site which doesn't give a shit about US politics.
agreed that the fallout will be minimal, but I disagree that it only affects US political boards. The reality is that we don't really know the scope of the problem; we have to take the word of parties, that have already been proven dishonest, regarding the depth and scope of their own wrong-doings.
>It's doubtful their community could stand own their own or it would have done so already.
I'm sure reddit was an awesome vehicle for their messages, but the internet is a big place, and there were people/places/forums/groups/zines like this before reddit was around.
> It's no secret that they didn't trust the admins before the election.
and now it's no secret that they were right.
Because anybody would get pissed off if they were called that for doing their job (stopping a witch hunt). He inadvertently deflected the hatred causing the doxing of a pizza shop to himself.
He should have just ignored it, since you can't really nuke the thread or it'd make things worse, but at the end of the day you'd still feel like shit.
> and now it's no secret that they were right.
Editing user content tends to get caught. Especially in high profile shit like the elections. The editing tools he used were probably spam related (so the spammer wouldn't know).
The "known secret" was that they were trying not to drown /r/all in US politics everyday, which is justifiable.
Only incident we know of. It's overwhelmingly likely that they both had tools built for this and had used them before.
And admitted he edited them? Yeah, after he was called out in front of the entire world.
>The sensible amongst us should be above childish drama like this.
Not sure if trying to rationalise massive fuckups by C-level execs like this is "sensible", nor is ignoring the fact that reddit in all likelihood has ready tools (unless you're saying that it's more likely he had direct access to prod db) for stealthily editing user comments.
Lots of my comments go several points negative only to be dug back out hours later as the more sporadic, calmer crowd filters through and quietly votes.
>Spez's actions harm himself more than users of the site.
If people like you keep defending him for really no reason. People lose jobs over much less. I think he has got to go.
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/4lmfmj/ceo_of_reddi...
Link to relevant video section: https://youtu.be/uSVqoW1rz6w?t=13m55s
Vehemently disagree. You can extend the same argument to the NSA conducting effectively unrestricted surveillance on citizens. Those of us who are technically minded knew it was going on years before Snowden showed up. That still doesn't make the action morally correct, nor justifiable in any way.
I seem to recall it being dismissed by the technically minded as possible but largely tinfoil hat conspiracy before Snowden showed up.
I'm not sure. If everyone would say "alright, it was incorrect but we don't want any internet drama", then how exactly would it hurt him? Closing a subreddit seems to me like exactly the kind of thing that could communicate a "not OK".
I think it's especially necessary as the edits had been done in a trump support group subreddit. Even though I don't agree with them at all, I think setting a precident that manipulating discussions are ok if I don't like the political content would be even worse.
There weren't any safeguards or anything to catch it on the reddit organisation side. It was only users noticing forcing an admission that means it's even a matter of record.
This is bigger than trolling. We know people inspect the social network activities of others. This kind of abusive can result in all sorts of bad things. What if and admin didn't like you, edited your history, and then suddenly you lost your job for some fabrication of, e.g., a racist comment?
That works well for nuclear launch codes because the only time you need to combine the split parts to make the full launch code is when you are actually going to launch (and perhaps during scheduled readiness tests). This should be fairly infrequent.
For a database, you'll have processes that frequently need access. For persistent processes, you'll need to have the reconstituted password available at least whenever the persistent processes start. If you architecture has dynamic processes that access the database (e.g., you have something internal working over a REST or CGI or similar interface, that starts upon receiving a request), you need a way to get the password to them.
Most solutions I've seen for supplying the full password in these cases have been fairly easy for someone with admin access to the machine running whatever it is that holds the full password and/or to a machine running one of the processes that needs to full password to get a copy of the password.
If I'm mad at the US president, burning down my house isn't an effective protest and would hurt basically everyone but the president.
Literally, in that Google Groups conversation they said they wanted to delete everything and make it private so no one could ever use it again. That's insane.
Then when posts are no longer allowed, leave a read only copy up for some time, then leave nothing but the links to other communities.
It stops being a community it the non-experts are separated from the experts by inaction of the experts.
If someone really likes Reddit that much, let make another go language sub.
A) the community does not belong to the golang team, the subreddit originally existed independently of the golang team. B) The community is not a piece of furniture to be moved at will; they have to choose to move.
If they do proceed with this (say they take a vote), the best they can hope for is fragmenting the community between Reddit and Voat or whatever.
Got a source for this? From what I've read about what happened (not a whole lot), this seems like it's been passed through multiple rounds of the telephone game.
All solid information I've heard, and seen directly admitted, is that he edited mentions of /u/spez to mentions of /u/<random-moderator-of-the-subreddit> in a single thread in a single subreddit.
https://np.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5ekdy9/the_admin...
The only reason I've heard that this even remotely defensible is because it was against Trump supporters.
I'm sorry, but that doesn't cut it with many of us.[1]
I don't care about political beliefs. He abused his power in such an obvious & egregious way that he should be terminated.
[1] And not that it should matter, I hate Trump as much as the vast majority of Reddit & Hacker News.
This is an insane question to ask. This is as flawed as arguing for mass surveillance because you have nothing to hide now.
The questions should instead be "can we trust our comments to not be edited when management disagrees?". What if future management starts loving python so much they decide to do something malicious to other programming languages? It wouldn't be hard to really hurt Go with the eyes of 25,000 Gophers subscribed.
All sites have this ability but few successful ones have demonstrated a willingness to use it. I fully expect that if Twitter or Facebook were caught doing this we would see an enormous backlash and huge drop in stock price. Then shortly after stockholders would demand the CEO leave.
EDIT - If you must downvote, please comment so we can discuss.
Well, why not figure it out then? Why solve a problem you haven't had yet? That seems to fall squarely under YAGNI.
As much as I used to love Reddit and was addicted to it, my personal position is that Reddit is no longer a trustworthy platform (if it ever was).
Editing user content is beyond offensive. I never even considered such a thing in my years of running LiveJournal. That is a major violation of user trust and trust in the platform.
If Github or Gerrit or Google Groups or Google's SMTP servers were modifying our code or mailing list content, we would ditch them in a heartbeat.
We shouldn't demand less from Reddit.
But because I learned that /r/golang existed 7 years ago (before I or other Googlers were even involved with it), I no longer propose deleting it. But I think the Go project should disassociate from it and give it back to the community as an unofficial space, as it used to be.
It's just too unreliable of a platform to be official in any regard.
Now I'm brainstorming how one might build a federated Reddit with public, signed mutation log, ala CT or other chains. And then multiple UIs could render the same public & federated data set.
If you happen to dislike reddit, please feel free to step down as moderator and move on. Please do not use this opportunity to grandstand and destroy the community for the rest of us, who do not happen to care about the drama surrounding the CEO (personally, I think it was childish of him, but I would not go to the extent of disrupting the community for others).
Thanks for listening.
I thought our subreddit was an official space that we created. It turns out we didn't create it, so it's not ours to delete.
I'm now proposing we just make it unofficial.
No shit.
You can't reasonably expect someone to never have gaps in their knowledge.
Even if he tried he couldn't have done it. :v
Could you get any more childish?
If AWS started MITMing client HTTP connections and injecting code, would you be surprised people moved their official websites off the platform, even if a lot of people knew the old IP address?
That's not childish, that's not doing business with bad partners, and Im not convinced a space that started as official could ever truly be made "non-official".
If AWS started MITMing my connections, absolutely, I would drop it. But the analogy doesn't hold because /r/golang isn't bradfitz's subreddit.
The proper and only response would be to drop moderatorship, leaving in a thread his reasons, and leaving /r/golang as it is. As it stands, the only thing stopping him from doing that is that the he's not the original owner.
And, you could also argue that when a community reaches a certain size, it doesn't belong to you anymore. It belongs to that community. To delete it is petty and childish.
Google actively helps China censor dissent.
Reddit is 100% open source: https://github.com/reddit/reddit
it is about convenience. Almost all traffic for my FOSS projects has come from Reddit and because of Reddit, from twitter.
It would be interesting to figure out how to tackle, well, "voter fraud" in that kind of system. I see lots of people complaining about how Reddit is vulnerable to upvoting brigades but I don't see anyone proposing solutions.
>It's just too unreliable of a platform to be official in any regard.
The /r/golang subreddit is for devs who want answers and who don't want to be held up by the whims of stackoverflow mods. It isn't rocket science and even if we can't trust the answers, why would anyone edit the answers? If you remember, the reddit CEO only edited the usernames, that too, I am sure it was a prank.
If anyone edits the messages which we post on /r/golang, it will lead to the answer being invalid and or something else, the world isn't going to collapse, there won't be congressional hearings just because some dev wasn't able to run gofmt and the answer posted by another random guy on the Internet was changed and can't be "trusted".
We want answers on /r/golang and it isn't much about trust.
Thank you for no longer proposing to delete it.
There's three possibilities that come to me:
1. The CEO explicitly told reliability/security staff to ignore his edits. Policy fail of epic proportions.
2. The edits were performed using designed tools and queries, which means reddit had before now intended to make silent edits to user data as part of regular business.
3. Reddit lacks the internal safeguards to know if user data was unexpectedly written to. This option is dangerous to hosting code on reddit, because an attacker could silently, maliciously change examples without reddit ever detecting the damage (or users seeing an edit mark).
I expect that we're in case 2, followed by 3 and then 1 (in terms of likelihood), but none of the ways that a large tech company could have this happen are reassuring about P&P at reddit, or make me want to rely on them for hosting a community.
You've been working at Google too long. Reddit has on the order of a few dozen employees, not all of them technical. Welcome to how the rest of the Internet works.
You should be able to tag the row with a dirty flag on second (or later) write using rules internal to the DB without incurring a large performance penalty, if you already have any kind of sanity checking. So at a basic technical level, this is bad design or an intentional capability.
Similarly, even on the team with 5 engineers, our production DB didn't have a way to directly access it, and tunneling through an API box to get network access would trigger an access warning to the appropriate person, because you shouldn't be accessing prod API servers directly either. (Similarly, spinning up a new instance in a security group to inherit permission.)
This isn't detecting advanced exfiltration techniques using information theory... It's basic network topology and server monitoring. And I suspect that reddit has at least a couple ops guys.
This really smacks of intentional capability, followed to lazy design.
I'm likely the outlier, because my early mentors (college + first couple years of career) were mostly aerospace engineers or chemical processing equipment engineers, where safety is critical. Code can kill in both those fields. (They themselves had adapted a lot of systems and failure mode analysis from mech engineers in the same field.)
I don't think that the mitigations I pointed out require much technical work though -- most of them can be as simple as a single setting, extra program installed during build (and maybe a couple config settings), or a single cloud monitoring rule (eg, detecting launches). They do, however, require adhering to policy, discipline on the part of staff, and analyzing the full scope of your tech (and how it interacts). I guess my point is that these things often aren't done because of ignorance or haste rather than engineering cost (or legitimate need to be done faster).
It's just we have poor standards for what "engineering" is in tech, so we don't cross our 't's and dot our 'i's the way a mechanical engineer is expected to.
But that's no reason not to try and raise the bar.
To be honest, not in any of the several places I've worked. And I'm a security engineer. Lean startups are desperately trying to prove their product; time is spent on reliability, performance, and security almost entirely reactively and not proactively.
I'm not saying this is a good thing. Bad security (and reliability) posture early on inflicts multiples of the original mitigation cost for years. And yet, it's rational. Time spent securing systems from your own employees when you're tiny is time you're not building your product and finding your market. It's a perverse game of Russian roulette: there are 99 bullets and one empty chamber. The analogy is going to break down here, but spending time and money removing one bullet (1:98 chance of death) is less effective than adding another empty chamber (2:99 chance of death).
Especially when having direct access to the database is insanely useful to fix the problems that moving fast and breaking things inevitably causes, only a tiny fraction of startups are going to enact the kinds of measures you mention.
Let's take prod DB access: Im not saying make it super locked down, Im saying set your DB security group to only be connected to from your API security group, and set an email warning when an instance launches in that group. Doesn't stop your engineers doing it, but it makes it pretty easy to shout across the office "Hey, who is fucking with prod and why?" Takes like 30 seconds to configure on AWS.
There are serious questions about why your CEO can launch that instance though, and that sounds like massive policy failure. Again, restricting the CEO IAM from launching prod instances takes 30 seconds. (And all your non-engineer accounts should be IAM restricted!)
Ignoring that your probabilities don't work out, Id argue that the situation is really remove 5 bullets or add 1 chamber, and people pick the chamber purely because it's constructive, not out of genuine cost-benefit analysis.
"If I had 3 hours to chop a tree, Id sharpen my axe" -- I think startups are too hasty to chop, because that's being productive, right?
He edited the mention of a username in a comment and completely changed the meaning of the comment by changing the target.
I'm sure he thought it was a prank, but that shows extremely poor judgement of the CEO of a company that calls itself "the front page of the internet". Just imagine how unacceptable it would be for the Facebook CEO to edit someone's status, or Twitter to edit tweets.
> Now I'm brainstorming how one might build a federated Reddit
> with public, signed mutation log, ala CT or other chains.
> And then multiple UIs could render the same public &
> federated data set.
NNTP + S/MIME
~~~~~~~ end wavy lines flashback ~~~~~~
I blame this on the egos and the expectations of early adopters and contributors. They came from a point of senior systems programmers. As the language grew in popularity, they were unprepared psychologically for dealing with new or junior programmers: the level of questions put forth were things the original crew had learned early in their careers and took for granted.
It is often this way in early languages. We need to always make room for those who are just learning, or are not experienced as those who initially created the language or space. I have seen this improving in the Golang community. The more new people come in, the more it will improve.
This is so ironic. Go gained popularity fast the same way Python did, because it is easy to use and a relatively simple language.
This is double standards of the epic proportions, on the "official" Google group, you have a person call reddit "hive of scum" and what not and that's fine? doesn't the CoC shoved down our throats tell us to respect others? to not be an ass? or does it not apply to the "elites".
let me reiterate again, reddit might be an unwelcoming place, /r/golang is the most welcoming place ever, I posted a query of AJAX, I got two answers within half hour, one with vanilla JS another with jquery, if I had posted to your beloved google group, they'd have pointed me down to some obscure link and asked me to chase my problem on my own and that would have done probably being snarky.
/r/golang is NOT toxic.
edit:
my exp with /r/golang https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/5dkobc/sample_webap....
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/56mgxb/learn_how_to....
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/50ih0s/whats_up_wit....
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4zyjye/network_prog....
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4kbup2/can_webapps_....
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4jxtdg/building_an_....
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4jaiun/updated_my_t....
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4ihjk7/added_sessio....
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/46vb6x/want_to_disc....
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/45uqpw/updated_my_t....
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/439asd/simple_comma....
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/3zle8c/i_am_writing....
The fact that I do not have a single (+ve) link on go-nuts speaks volumes about which forum is toxic.
Just read this thread which I started on go-nuts
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang-nuts/F4LJwyYZcX....
And tell me later which community is helpful.
edit2: formatting.
Your post to delete /r/goland triggered me to actually work out an idea for this ;)
The idea would be to use importers to provide reddit and other sources like mailing lists within the site and at the same time provide native content through Pubsubhubbub.
Of course everything uses Ed25519 Signatures for verification, including user-content.
Tho atm it's merely a pipe-dream with a short and shitty readme.
The tricky thing is that the admin team is still doing things that you want and need out of a reddit alternative. For example, ensuring that child pornography isn't getting shared. The question is how to set things up so that the right content gets removed while ensuring that how we decide what the right content to remove gets isolated from political pressures that want to influence the narrative.
I see no problem with individuals leaving, and I see no problem with advocating a shutdown or at least encouraging other people to leave. Work out what the community wants, and go from there.
(I don't use go, but from my personal "this cannot be allowed to stand" perspective: I would love to see communities that are _not_ about hot-button topics stand up and walk out.)
Get over yourself. In the grand scheme of things, a guy editing a handful of posts on a public forum is beyond trivial. There are about a billion things going on in the world which are worse.
I would contribute to a federated non-repudiable system.
Moderation can be just as auditable. (Perhaps with some emergency actions that then require a follow up consensus to make permanent)
On some occasions the original content must be purged, but the signatures can remain. Communal censorship is vastly different from changing the content.
We know that politicians and corporations game the system already with fake accounts, presumably as a tool for manipulating public opinion. We know from the code that user comments aren't encrypted at all, or their voting tallies. It would require a very small tweak to manipulate things from the server side.
Given that, users should _not_ have been placing any trust in the sanctity of the results they see to tell them how the hive actually thinks or even if the linked source is accurate. People need to learn to question the motives of what's presented to them. I'm not saying to automatically distrust everything, just to look past whatever spin is put on an article and look at the primary sources.
The fact that someone has the capability and willingness to edit comments was so shocking to some people is a sign that these surprised people needed this kind of a wake-up call.
We can speculate, due to the missing warrant canary, that the government has, or has had, at least one user under surveillance from the system. This is very public proof that even the content of comments can be manipulated, which might help some poor schmuck out one day when his 'anonymous' internet comment gets misconstrued and comes back to bite him.
Another suspect thing is that time when the Reddit algorthm broke and the first 50 pages of r/all were turned into /r/the_donald post. Apparently what happened is that the sorting broke and they were ordering posts by activity, revealing that /r/the_donald posts were being upvoted at a rate that dwarfed other subreddits.
Disregard the title as it's not a "botnet." It's a user script that adds functionality to RES: automatically upvote everything in The_Donald, automatically downvote everything in other subreddits, and allows importing lists of specific users to up/downvote.
Edit: to people downvoting, please elaborate.
This coming from a person who filters out /r/the_donald so I don't have to see it.
EDIT: Apparently reddit has changed the /r/all algorithm so this is no longer true. Thanks everyone for informing me!
Which basically looks like a political move and it is kind of sketchy in that regard, but for users like you it's probably beneficial.
A subreddit with a fraction of the userbase and activity than other subs would constantly have multiple posts on the frontpage at any given time, and noone cared to look into it or do something against it. I wouldn't be surprised if that sub beat out some default subs during that time, which is just straight up ridiculous.
This shouldn't have happened, true, but the reason for that is not as much /u/spez screwing up than it is all of reddit screwing up.
You are talking about r/all, which almost no one browses according to the Reddit admins themselves. And as of a few months ago, at most 3-4 posts from any one subreddit are on each page of r/all.
Why exactly should they be banned? I can't help but suspect that the real reason is that you want to silence their politics.
To remove politics from the argument, I don't watch basketball. So if /r/nba decided they wanted to have all their posts on the front page and told their readers to up vote everything they see no matter what, I'd have the same reaction. It's not what the system was designed for. I want to see a healthy mix of what reddit users actually think are the most interesting posts of the day. One subreddit, especially one that's not even that popular, taking over /r/all is not what I want to see. Doesn't matter which subreddit. I want to see a good mix.
Reddit is gamed all over the place, in all subs. Between that, and fake amazon reviews, it's really feeling like this is a problem we need to start spending some time to try and push against.
No idea what we can do.. probably nothing..
This service could be extended by the community to other social feeds and blogs - just archive them to have traces of their change in time.
Of course not, how would you show the comments to visitors if they were encrypted?
This is very public proof that even the content of comments can be manipulated [...]
How would anyone be surprised by this, it's all just rows in a database. If you are in the right position with the right credentials, you can do whatever you want.
By encrypting them with a key before storing them, and decrypting them before rendering them. It's not difficult, but could put additional load on the server.
Protecting access to the key would be more difficult, but it's possible with security tools. If it's a file, the idea would be to restrict access to the key to the service processes so a user on the system can't use it to encrypt their own entry. If it's an environment variable then you need to protect where that is inevitably stored and called. Then you restrict access to the database so its only accessible from specific production servers, and restrict access to the servers to only people who need the access. It's separation of duties.
But I get your point about the right person being in the right position. Separation of duties goes to hell when you've got a CEO who's a developer and also works in operations. You can't restrict his write access to production data while allowing him to work on the code. Even if your processes are in place, surely the CEO of a company can get around them.
If the Go team could just abandon Google Groups as the main forum for discussing Go, then just maybe there wouldn't be a need for the subreddit. I know that some people like Google Groups, but there's at least an equally large group that absolutely hate it. Personally I find it to be such an awful platform that I would prefer pretty much anything else, that includes tolerate shitty behaviour from the Reddit CEO.
Reddit isn't stackoverflow. This is an open source community, if someone has a problem with it, they are welcome to leave, make /r/golang as an unofficial subreddit, which it was, when it started and before the robotic overlords took over the subreddit.
I say this by proof.
1. One year ago I started learning Go. It was difficult to understand it, I read a lot of books and stuff. I started working on http://github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks, Later, I realised that there isn't a free resource to teach what I learned, so I tried to share my knowledge by creating this, http://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textbook....
The first post I made was to /r/golang: I got immensely +ve feedback, suggestions etc.
The second post I made was that google group, I was told "The language is called Go and not Golang" and the condensed feedback from the elites was (after someone rallied behind me saying that give real feedback and this is being jerk and blah blah) that "it might be the case that suraj wrote a good book but people won't take it seriously until the language name is corectly used"
Who cares about the title of the book? I certainly don't. I have read astaxie's book, codegansta's book, both had golang in their title. Their content was amazing. I loved them, didn't care about the title
The links are below
As another instance, I wanted help in AJAX one year ago, I asked /r/golang, I got two examples in half hour, one with plain JS another with jquery.
Do you really think that if /r/golang was so "toxic" and "scum" as they call it on the go-nuts mailing list (a glaring violation of the CoC shoved down our throats) that there would be a consensus among /r/golang to unequivocally say "if Go authors don't participate in /r/golang then they are welcome to step down?"
I do not understand what they want to do, Guido created python, is he the mod of /r/python, does he care what authors name their book? "oh the language is Python with a capital P", no, he does what he does and let's the community handle the community.
my exp with /r/golang
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/5dkobc/sample_webap...
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/56mgxb/learn_how_to...
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/50ih0s/whats_up_wit...
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4zyjye/network_prog...
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4kbup2/can_webapps_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4jxtdg/building_an_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4jaiun/updated_my_t...
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4ihjk7/added_sessio...
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/46vb6x/want_to_disc...
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/45uqpw/updated_my_t...
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/439asd/simple_comma...
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/3zle8c/i_am_writing...
The fact that I do not have a single (+ve) link on go-nuts speaks volumes about which forum is toxic.
Just read this thread which I started on go-nuts
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang-nuts/F4LJwyYZcX...
And tell me later which community is helpful.
Some of us prefer mailing lists and interacting over email in our preferred client over having to go to various websites and deal with their varying user interfaces.
Except absolutely awful, it's worse than the standard mailman ML and that's saying something.
> you want it to be a forum, but that's not the point or what it is meant to be.
One of the issues being google groups looks a lot like a forum (dedicated web UI, starring, replies to threads, etc…) without any of the good points of a forum.
Basically, for most people google groups is the lowest common denominator of a forum and a mailing list, making it unmitigated garbage.
But yes, an old fashion mailing list, archived on marc.info, would be a huge step up.
I can only assume that Google Groups is some sort of half baked example to show that GWT works.
I'm on a few Google Groups, Mailman, Majordomo, etc. lists and I can honestly say that it doesn't make a huge difference to me. I will agree that the Google Groups archives are somewhat unpleasant.
Responding to immaturity with immaturity is a bad idea altogether.
I have never understood Google's choice of "use google groups" for projects, then farming out community relations to third parties like StackOverflow, Reddit, etc. They have enough resources to manage their own support, news dissemination, and discussion mechanisms.
There are a number of reasons to not have an official presence on Reddit, but "I'm taking my ball and going home" isn't one of them.
A knee jerk reaction, we want the subreddit back!
p.s. after the Google Pixel thing, I do hope that they don't shut my google account down because I am saying that google groups sucks by citing some hidden rule or something.
Sticking to principles, even when it's uncomfortable and inconvenient to do so is "immature" now?
You know the phrase "I'm taking my ball and going home"? What he wants to do is take someone else's ball, go home, and make sure that no one else is playing with a ball again after he leaves.
He's wanting to destroy something the community finds useful, and not only that, wanting to prevent the community from building and using it on their own in the future if they wanted to continue without his involvement. That's the harmful action. It's fine if he says "I won't use reddit anymore". Perfectly fine. But shutting down the subreddit, deleting all of its content, and specifically reserving the name so the community can't continue in his absence is just... well, immature. There are better ways to handle it. This is a pure temper tantrum.
Maybe they should just call for the CEO to leave or something.
Yet when people protested against SOPA/PIPA, we took it down for a day. Not indefinitely.
I don't know what the correct answer is other than to say that everyone currently involed looks bad, and anyone who jumps in will come off looking bad. Is the only thing we can do stand back and watch it burn?
And yet as soon as he shut it down, someone opened a request with the admins to take it over, it was granted, and the community now is stronger then ever. If mods want to leave reddit then so be it, but they need to stop any delusions that they are the keystones holding their communities together.
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/5eqs64/proposal_to_...
From what I understand, the golang team does not want any association with the subredit or reddit as a whole. But I don't understand how /u/spez actions have triggered this. It looks like the proposal of /r/golang deletion is either a political statement, or go team wanted to get rid of it before and were just looking for an excuse.
Everything at expense of /r/golang (and therefore the go language itself) users.
Edit: disregard this. I remember reading some things a while ago and haven't looked into it, and I shouldn't have jumped in without doing some due diligence.
This is my opinion alone.
I edited my original comment, I shouldn't have said anything without actually knowing what I was talking about.
Want to make a personal statement? Leave the platform, demand the subreddit being marked as unofficial (AFAIK it did start out as a random sub by a random person and only later added people from the Go team as moderators). Don't decide for your users that yes, you don't want to meet there anymore, so we torched it for you.
> So people that rarely use this subreddit want to get rid of it? Okay.
It seems like the Google Groups people are not the same as the r/golang people.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/5eqs64/proposal_to_...
If you don't like Reddit, write a blog post, blow some steam, delete your Reddit account, be as critical as you wish, but don't kill a community just because you can.
Let me ask a question. If it turned out that Google had started selectively "editing" peoples email coming from Gmail, would you still be fine using Gmail?
GPG sign everything online if you're concerned about your data changing. Even HN could change your comments if they wanted. What's stopping people? "Trust"?
I don't treat everyone like a psychopath because they COULD stab me. I only care if they do.
Also I fully understand what Spez did and I find it not OK. If you don't agree with what an admin did, you could ask for the respective admin/CEO to resign. The answer should not be to delete a community that you don't own on a whim.
If Google started modifying my emails, I would stop using Gmail and advise my friends not to use Gmail. But I won't ask for Gmail to be killed/deleted just because I don't like it or I don't agree with it.
People have been prosecuted and JAILED for reddit comments don't forget.
Well, no. But I also wouldn't force others to stop using it too.
You want to know who is harmed by this? Those of us that read the subreddit but are not on Google Groups.
If a space where a community gathers isn't trusted, core members of that community are going to want to leave.
Trust is delicate. Trust is giving someone the power to do harm you or to misuse what you have given them, in the belief that they will not do those things.
The trust has been shattered, and probably only the core members currently realise this. Those are the users for whom "this is our voice, this is what we've said" is important.
It is really sad that the trust has been broken, but there you have it. If key people in any community believe that their words (which are their reputation) can (will) be edited, misrepresented... then there really is a problem.
The worst-case logical conclusions are legal liability, the best case is stress and friction caused by confusions and mis-truths.
I run forums, I know this is about trust, I've seen it played out.
When I designed the forum software for the sites I run I made the database an append-on-write system to store historical revisions of every comment. I can't display those (if a user edited something to remove something that had legal/personal implications then they should not be public) but I do store them and provide no moderator any access to edit them.
Trust is really important. This isn't, as others suggest, petty.
The bulk of Reddit users don't mind that spez had a momentary lapse of judgement and corrupted some r/The_Donald stuff. They find it amusing; left to them r/The_Donald would have been nuked long ago on the way to making Reddit into the sort of safe space echo chamber they want. The fact that spez had a little fun with it just affirms that he's on the right side of that mentality and secures his trust among these people. They're not proud that one of theirs has been caught so embarrassingly, but he's on their side so it's easy to forgive.
What is it about a critical mass of people in one place on the web that causes these kinds of behaviors?
How lucky that their group happens to be the good one!
Google Groups is not my preferred alternative by any means. Google Groups is a 1990's webmail interface to crappy but federated SMTP.
There is very little to like about it, but at least the underlying protocol (SMTP) is federated.
It is NOT an alternative to Reddit, which has a nice UI & voting system.
It's unfortunate that Reddit is not a reliable platform which can be trusted.
If Github were modifying our code for their own amusement we wouldn't trust them for a platform either.
The CEO of reddit edited a few posts, after having been sent masses of hate mail, then backed it out and apologized. You cannot seriously think there's any chance he'd do the same to /r/golang; there's little chance he'll do it again at all.
While I agree deleting the subreddit is excessive, I think you're downplaying it. Reddit has increasingly censored more and more content that the admins disagreed with (rightly or wrongly). Now they've taken it a step further and started to modify content they disagree with. If this was early on in reddit's history and they made the modifications as a joke then it wouldn't be a big deal, but the CEO modifying posts seen by probably 10s of thousands of people (that subreddit has 300k very active subscribers) is a huge slip down the slippery slope. I mean, think what your reaction would be if I misquoted you at the top, and I'm just a random user quoting you, not an admin actually changing what you said.
I think this is an overreaction. If Google were found to be manipulating search results, would that be cause to leave Google? If Google were collecting information in a means inconsistent with user privacy agreements would that be cause to leave? How about Google collecting wifi data in violation of several countries' laws? (To be fair, the wifi issue is a fact the others are just hypotheticals.)
My point is if we are becoming self righteous about the CEO of Reddit doing something stupid, must we also maintain similar outrage when Google does something illegal or unethical as well?
We might run out of internet if we disengaged every time a company did something stupid.
The question that really should be asked: is this an ongoing pattern of behavior that harms users or is this just a knee-jerk bout of self-righteousness?
You put the word 'crappy' in the wrong place. Google Groups is a crappy webmail interface to federated SMTP.
Hundreds of Googlers, during a dozen years, never managed to get SMTP or NNTP right, whereas many clients written by single independant developpers were at the same time more fully featured, more reliable and more respectful of standards and good pratices of interoperability. For many years, Google Groups was to NNTP/mailing lists web interface what Outlook was to mail clients. The difference is that after those many years, Outlook improved a bit.
Did that happen in the golang subreddit?
If so, those comments should in fact be deleted entirely. Criticizing the CEO of Reddit is not topical in a golang subreddit; it is off-topic trolling.
Reddit has multiple faces; if you're in your technology subreddit you exist in another world from all the literally crazy drama and harassment that goes on. Running reddit is not likely to be a pleasant experience anymore.
Reddit can broadly be partitioned into a small number of very popular "front page" subs, such as /r/TIL, /r/AskReddit, and /r/news, where drama and toxicity abound, and a vast number of topical subs (such as /r/golang), where discussion is focused on a specific topic, and generally friendly, civil, and useful.
I'm not a fan of the front page myself, although usually for reasons unrelated to the recent drama. But with a nicely curated set of subreddit subscriptions, I find the site to be a nice collection of news and discussion that interests me.
Hopefully the golang community shows some maturity and doesn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Overreaction much?
People want to talk about Go, regardless of how the Go team feels about reddit's ethics. I'm not sure what doing this will serve except lead to the creation of another Go subreddit that's no longer moderated by the Go team.
Really su2rprised and disappointed by bradfitz and team's childish (over)reaction to this.
It seems like a pattern of trying to enforce the unenforceable.
What happens if spez modifies comments you put on Reddit in the ancient past to make you seem like a Racist, ISIS supporter, Homophobe, or simply puts threats to various heads of state in your name?
Can you really trust him not do to so? What if one day he decides that golang is bad because they are badmouthing something that spez really likes?
It would be extremely hard to make any of them look 'bad'. They relish being as... deplorable as possible.
Have you every commented on Reddit? If so, now it could be a threat on the life of a head of state and the investigation could greatly complicate your life just because you ticked off spez.
This is emblematic of what's wrong with so many subreddits and so much of the social web that comes in the form of "forums" -- it seems like we have entire generations of users who have associated the totalitarian nature of forums with things being "advanced" on the internet.
Social media isn't mostly about free thought, free speech, and free inquiry anymore. Nowadays, it's mostly about the rapid dissemination of conformity. Woe betide you if you actually have a nuanced opinion that doesn't fit neatly with either side of an issue. Your fellow posters/commenters will reject their pattern-match and call you a liar and 5th columnist for the other side.
Technology came and killed the impulse towards freedom. It taught people through repeated iteration that conformity to the mob was the highest good. It taught smart people that wrangling their way into positions of centralized power to exercise authoritarian rule was the insider move. It taught everyone that suppression of anything that you didn't like was the winning move. It was called the internet.
For fuck's sake, not everything in life has to be a cause.
That's so rare. I wish more CEOs had his backbone.
I'm sorry to be inflammatory, but it seems like people take reddit a little too seriously and this is the real world not /r/relationships. It's probably not time to: "lawyer up, hit the gym, delete /r/golang".
Some people's values are utterly alien to me.
If I was a Go dev now I'd be furious because this bizarre incestuous little drama suddenly is affecting my actual working day (assuming the golang subreddit is a viable community).
I recently became active on the Django subreddit because it seemed more approachable than the main IRC or Google Group. If that suddenly got vanished because of subreddit drama I'd be fairly annoyed.
Can we just have a separate room for the children to play in?
I'm just sad he didn't delete the entire sub.
/r/golang can do what they like, but this is no reason.
> Ellen had to take over (I'm not sure she wanted to, but she was the only one) and the board wanted her to just ban all those subreddits but she had been around long enough to know that you can't just do that (they'll just spring up again) so she resisted. (https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/58zaho/the_...)
> on at least two separate occasions, the board pressed /u/ekjp to outright ban ALL the hate subreddits in a sweeping purge. She resisted, knowing the community, claiming it would be a shitshow. Ellen isn't some "evil, manipulative, out-of-touch incompetent she-devil" as was often depicted (https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3dautm/conte...)
https://np.reddit.com/r/law/comments/5eq9tl/what_does_it_mea...
It looks like it lost it accidently on the same date. A technicality.
It is not a switch that gets flipped for the entire website when one editorial action happens somewhere on a website, and it exhibits total lack of understanding of the safe harbor provisions to suggest it is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/59nk46/stalking_peo...
Edit: https://www.quora.com/What-are-examples-of-Google-acting-une...
Perhaps we should close down the google groups too?
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/fact-check-this...
Then, IMO, deleting the golang subreddit would be a non-issue. The newsgroup doesn't have to be moderated and, if one wants moderation, they can do it via the newsreader program.
Jumping ship less than a week after it seems crazy to me.
Working on an alternative to reddit and then dropping reddit once that one works may be a solution.
The almost unnoticeable subtlety of the act is what I find most disturbing. It's not that the act was abominable (it could be worse). It's just that this position demands higher ethics than that - It needs someone with the right motivations.
I think people are too easy on CEOs; if a regular employee messes up, they get fired. Why doesn't this apply to executives?
We should be much tougher on executives... It's not like they'd lose their house or their family if they got fired.
Get off everything. Everything sucks
I'm not saying I agree with r/golang deletion, by the way. Surely this is stupid and inadequate, as reddit it made out of drama anyway. But getting off something you don't agree with in general is quite noble, I'd say.
Regarding the subreddit, I would just leave it. It was hard work of the community to create content that exist there and it will not be nice to remove it just because of some immature CEO.
But once suitable alternative comes to the light, would be nice to disallow further posts and add a redirect to the new community.
My comments are partly authored by dang, but you will not be able to tell which words are mine and which are not.
I can think of a single example where we edited a user's comment without them asking us to, and it happened a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13012176. As you can see, I posted what we did and why. The alternative would have been to kill the comment outright.
Edit: my conscience reminds me that I've also edited several spelling mistakes over the years. That was mostly when I was filling in for pg.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13038244 and marked it off-topic.
WikiLeaks recently released a 2014 email[1] from Eric where he appears to conspire with the Clinton campaign/dnc to have "low paid permanent employees".
[1] https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/37262
E: bots are out?
The greater point is that the CEO of a company with digital user assets, let me call them, can be thoroughly evil, while company policy and enforcement keeps his hands from directly tampering with those assets.
Silently changing someone's postings is one of the vilest betrayals of trust a platform can commit, the only worst I can think of is forging new ones out of whole cloth, and if that happens without major changes resulting in the company, that says a great deal about it as a whole, and whether you should have any dealings with it, especially seeing as such assets have been used to criminally convict people, and specifically one Rowan O'Connell for this company.
It's obvious HackerNews is not safe--from certain people.
It is a positive example of what the poster I responded to was claiming.
Additionally, this CEO (now of Alphabet) has continued to engage in seemingly illegal behavior over Google email. I'm not aware of Eric disputing any of these allegations, even though I have confronted him on them multiple times.
Others saw something different.
> Additionally, this CEO (now of Alphabet)
Did Eric challenge the authenticity of the emails? I've never heard him do so.
I now understand why you couldn't specify in what way my comment was "off-topic".
How is the sub thread not relevant?
It was a direct, positive example of what the person I replied to claimed.
At least make an actual claim, dang.
Edit: and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13037766 still stands
#comedysite
If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.