How is it possible that these companies are still run like an immature dorm room shitshow? Are there no separation of duties? The CEO should not have admin access to anything (the very least for security purposes).
Calling it a dorm room shitshow is an insult to dorm rooms everywhere.
Although doing Lowtax things may lead to turning into Lowtax, which is probably bad.
I can certainly tell you it's not a serious problem, because it'd be illegal if it was. All serious problems with websites are revenue issues or legal issues.
Fuck r/the_donald - but that's just blatant admin power misuse to deflect criticism. Very topical with all the "fuck u/spez" comments going around these days.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
Should've made it a wordfilter though. Those are more participatory.
(You won't take this advice, which is why I've run a large popular internet forum before and you haven't.)
Users reacted poorly and "shocked" site wide somehow that an admin could exerts admin right and edit database which as a sysadmin made me laugh a lot because I get occasional similar ones from our users when we do admin stuff.
I think you're a very small minority in that opinion, my friend. Perhaps leadership decisions like that are why you refer to your forum in the past tense now?
> One does not spend their preciously scarce free time on an Internet forum if there is nothing funny about it.
By your own metrics, HN is often a failure and you should not (or do not) spend time here.
(Sure, the victim was (probably) a highly unsympathetic and stupid person. What justification is that? It's schoolyard-bully sociology to attack unsympathetic weirdos. Most bullies grow out of it and live with regrets. But 'spez is a fucking adult! What's he doing lurking in the worst subreddits of (his own) website, searching for prey to gaslight? What's the character of a grown-ass man who does that?)
Basically, it's PvP. This is pretty obvious from the design; you post and people reply to you, which they mostly use to argue with you. An example of a product designed for people to be nice to each other is Discourse, which isn't much like HN or reddit.
People do have human rights, which is why I said what matters is if it's illegal or not. Putting slanderous posts under their name would be a real issue - if you think this happened go ahead and sue him - but the most common one would be doxxing: posting your IP and personal info from the admin console. Which he's probably got access to.
Spez is the perfect example of this. His editing of the comments cemented his reputation as corrupt and stupid, and from then on everything he communicated towards the community received a much stronger backlash than it otherwise would have, regardless of how unpopular the decision actually was.
Normal reddit users don't know any inside baseball facts about the site. The normal users are those people who post the same basic "women, what's the sexiest sex you ever sexed?" questions on askreddit once a week.
Of course, their site design makes this a problem since it relies on mods, who are specifically that kind of person since they do it for free.
that seems to be a very poor reasoning. If your honest contention that all things that are a problem are illegal (thus one can assume then also that you 100% agree with all laws on the books as well) seems then we have no societal problems, and the government and laws work perfectly... Thus no need to elections, or changes to those laws.
A common theme on social media is that a group of people care about something and want to ban it, but instead of changing the law, instead they self-enforce their pseudo-laws by yelling at people who violate them. Complaining about the mods being an example, another being fanartists who have a ton of rules about "sourcing your art reposts"/not tracing, another being that 2014 period where everyone went around GitHub projects trying to shame the owners for not having a code of conduct.
This might be because they're anarchists and don't want to call the figurative cops, but usually it's because they're a minority and there isn't actually popular support for it.
So you position is that totalitarianism to the extreme is the only way? That everything, every action, every social convention, every interaction between two people should be under the purview of some law or regulation.
I am not a big fan of codes of conduct, as such I damn sure do not want the government creating a law around code of conduct. If some open source project wants to enact a stupid CoC I want the freedom to fork that project and replace with either a CoC free project or a competing one with a different CoC.
government is not empowered, nor should it be empowered to government what social media ban's, or the conduct of developers interacting with each other on a open source project
In the other examples there are other levels of "government" that have "regulations" that are more official than nothing that you could lobby. You could get GitHub to change the ToS to require CoC, or Twitter to ban certain kinds of things artists don't like, rather than just be personally mean to other users on the site about it.
Or they might have realised that third parties are crucial to their success (they have the stats, they know what % of traffic, commenters, power users, etc. are using third-party apps) and instead added more constraints around the API, like also serving ads (like Telegram), lower rate limits for unauthenticated users, forcing oauth etc. Instead of going the nuclear path of making any third party downright unviable and thus forcing them to shutdown.