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Comment by lumb63 | Hacker News Reader

I’m astounded and confused that you and a lot of other commenters are giving Reddit the benefit of the doubt. At a time when tensions between Reddit management and its users are at an all-time high, and both sides are maliciously striking back and forth, most commenters are assuming that an act like this is due to incompetence rather than malice? I don’t understand the thought process.

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Innocent until proven guilty can be a decent philosophy even outside the courtroom. Especially when tensions are high. Both sides giving the other the benefit of the doubt can help to deescalate.

Unless the objective isn't to deescalate.

Well Reddit's objective certainly isn't to deescalate.

That's the thing: you are deemed innocent until proven, guilty or innocent.This framework supposes there is a common search for truth and working together. The current situation is not that: there is no accountability of reddit, no desire to be open or to listen to the users, contempt towards users for years,...

If there's no due process, reddit doesn't deserve to be held innocent.

There are different thresholds in the legal system for criminal (beyond a reasonable doubt) versus civil (the preponderance of the evidence.) It already varies by venue and consequence. This is a social discussion. 4 year old comments being restored means Reddit is doing something to restore them now, which they didn’t do before.

Outside of court, the preponderance of evidence changes with a history of operating in bad faith.

Except in this case, we have a proven bad faith actor with a pension for deceit and vindictive behavior.

A penchant for*

> Unless the objective isn't to deescalate.

Oh, the sleighthanded irony.

It's also worth noting that reddit admins have maliciously modified comments in the past.

This one in particular, in fact - Steve Huffman, aka spez. Google "fuck spez" to see just how popular this guy is.

Same guy who un-personed Aaron Swartz, claiming he wasn't a cofounder after Swartz died, and removing him from Reddit's founder page.

> I’m astounded and confused that you and a lot of other commenters are giving Reddit the benefit of the doubt.

I think it makes sense for anyone who values objective truth above any other agenda. "Benefit of the doubt" is just acknowledging that we don't know for sure.

Because there's no apparent benefit to reddit to bring back long deleted comments from arbitrary users. When you can think of no motive for malicious behavior, it is unparsimonious to assume malicious behavior.

Of course there is a benefit. If users leave and remove their comments in protest, the data content available on Reddit is lowered, thereby lowering one of the IPO metrics. By un-deleting comments, the site's message count and user activity goes up, and thereby its IPO value.

But that's not what's happening (only those protesting having their comments restored).

The point stands…more comments, more content, more value, higher exit price

It's probably more about search engine results than the appearance of user account.

Investors aren’t that dumb, and if they were, your theory would create liability for securities fraud.

> Investors aren’t that dumb

Maybe not individually, but this is an IPO and the P stands for Public, and when you aggregate everyone together then intelligence is a moot concept.

There’s a huge incentive for Reddit to retain the comments - that’s their knowledge base. Without that a lot of their value is gone.

Retain is not equivalent to undelete (making visible to everyone).

If it’s not visible to other users or paying LLMs then it’s worthless. That’s what I’m getting at.

Strong incentive also exists to undelete.

It is in this case. They don't "need" the data themselves, they need Googlebot to see it to get traffic, which is their lifeblood both in general and for IPO.

Have you heard the recent popular saying that Googling things barely even works anymore unless you append reddit to the query, which tends to bring up actual information instead of SEO trash?

Arguably the perception of the size of their knowledgebase is more important than the actual size, at least when talking about the upcoming IPO.

Do you think that choosing to believe it is malice somehow punishes Reddit?

you and a lot of other commenters are giving Reddit the benefit of the doubt

It's what normal people did before the internet.

People who didn't were known as lynch mobs, and were considered bad.

Thanks to the web, it's now perfectly normal to believe the worst of people for no better reason than to fuel one's own anger issues.

> Thanks to the web, it's now perfectly normal to believe the worst of people for no better reason than to fuel one's own anger issues.

I believe that in this case it's more that Reddit's management has completely lost any sort of trust, it's not so much to fuel one's own anger issues but give the current context there's very little in terms of Reddit's management being trustworthy, transparent. Spez was caught lying in the open, how can one still have any trust they aren't lying in other aspects?

Let's agree that this particular case is not a baseless witch hunt, Reddit's management own dishonest actions have brought a dissatisfied lynching mob to them.

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