Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmarquez | Hacker News Reader

This is incredibly disturbing, in light of the fact Reddit's CEO was once caught secretly editing[1] the comments of The Donald's users. Can't assume this is being done in good faith as the comments leading The Donald to be quarantined could be edits, or shill accounts.

I'm sure someone will say "their website, their rules" but in that case it's better to just ban it entirely instead of engaging in subversive practices. This is the equivalent of China buying a United States forum in order to shape political opinion...oh wait[2]

[1] https://gizmodo.com/reddit-ceo-caught-secretly-editing-user-...

[2] https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/02/08/tencent-invests-so...

View on HN

Disturbing? I don't think so. I subscribe to the_donald because I want to keep up with what the nutters are saying. Yesterday I reported a post where they had photshopped out the dots in the " i "s in all of Mike Bloomberg's ads and replaced them with the star of david. That's just yesterday. And just one post that caught my eye. And it was one of the top posts of the day with thousands and thousands of votes and hundreds of comments. What's actually disturbing is the view that subreddit affords into the minds of 20-30% of the country.

The_donald has always been breaking the rules. The only reason it isn't banned is because reddit doesn't want the bad press of deleting it outright, even by their own rules it should have been nuked ages ago.

Finally, this isn't even touching the level of silent censorship that happens on hacker news to maintain its quality so its a really funny place to take a stand on it. If reddit is disturbing to you then man, you should be horrified by this place. Funny how HN is such a great place for discourse -- wonder how that happened.

edit: since a ne'er-do-well has accused me of lying here's a screenshot of the post. But I want to make it clear, this is one example out of an infinity of examples. I am illustrating that the_donald will not follow the rules and that's why this is happening: https://i.imgur.com/NHN1Mhx.png

I’m a Jew and saw that Bloomberg post. So what. It bothered me but I got over it. Freedom of speech covers things that you may not agree with.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/26/us/bloomberg-anti-semitis...

It wasn't photoshopped.

It's not photoshopped, you're just sensitive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/26/us/bloomberg-anti-semitis...

Your one example is wrong. Maybe you have the wrong idea of the other side? Maybe your bias blinds your judgement and you hate what you don't understand? Certainly seems that way. We can all find hate when we look for it.

You may try linking to the content next time.

>This is incredibly disturbing

Meh. You're blowing this out of proportion.

>in light of the fact Reddit's CEO was once caught secretly editing

Again, you're making this seem more nefarious than it actually was. He did it because he thought it would be appreciated (obviously he was wrong). In the end, it was a dumb and immature move from a young, rookie CEO ... on a social network site (i.e. not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things)

I don't really see this action by Reddit to be newsworthy at all. There are a lot of subreddits that straddle the line of being banned. The_Donald is certainly one of those communities.

> He did it because he thought it would be appreciated (obviously he was wrong).

It's a bit beyond "I thought this would be funny, honest mistake, sorry", isn't it? How often has he (and others) done that without being caught doing so? And of course, once you're caught red handed in the cookie jar, is anything you say about acting alone and that not being SOP true, or is it just damage control?

Regarding him being a "young, rookie CEO", he's been the CEO of reddit for years previously and was the CTO of Hipmunk. It's not like he found himself in a role with a lot of power and overstepped the line a bit in his first week.

I don't think it's a state affair, but it's not "I was tired and emotional and I kind of clicked on the wrong button" either.

You touch upon something that I think we really need to contend with, there's all this pearl-clutching as if the people being who are being affected by this wouldn't a) censor /intimidate into silence other people if they (they actively try) and b) make completely disingenuous arguments all the time.

Conspiracy theories are not considered valuable commentary here on HN, so ironically you may find your post flagged and remove by the community due to violating of this forum’s user and mod expectations.

What's the conspiracy theory? Dude admitted it himself: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...

“Can't assume this is being done in good faith as the comments leading The Donald to be quarantined could be edits, or shill accounts.”

Some mods were caught upvoting content forbidden by the Reddit participation guidelines, leading to the removal of said mods. Are those mods shill accounts? What evidence can you provide supporting that?

My post was not intended to be a conspiracy theory. The point I'm trying to make is that rewriting comments (or reassigning moderation teams) is worse than straight out deleting or banning...because the potential that people can be misled is there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com