He changed a 'F U CEO' (upvoted by 1.6k users) comment to 'F U unpaid reddit moderator', without any indication that the comment was edited.
Very juvenile and unprofessional way of dealing with the situation, really erodes trust in the platform (simply deleting the comment would have been a better response).
Would maybe expect this from the founder of a young fledgling startup, but the 33 year old CEO of a company like Reddit ought to know better.
I met Steve several years back while going through YC. He's a much calmer and nicer person than most founders I've met, myself included.
If I read this Reddit thread without knowing him, I would have deemed him unprofessional and maybe even upvoted some of the comments.
When I read the thread knowing who he is, I'm thinking "I can't imagine how stressful it must be to run Reddit. He made one mistake in a bad day, apologized for it, and now everyone's talking about it. Steve's way nicer and more professional than I am, so I would probably have messed up big time in his shoes."
You're being awfully charitable.
It's on the order of magnitude of royal fuck-up.
How can any user expect to be safe on Reddit anymore?
This is the sort of situation that irrevocably damages trust.
What's the guarantee that this won't happen again?
What bothers me more is that this sort of functionality exists in the first place. All it would take is one compromised admin account, and boom, you can rewrite somebody's entire comment history without it being logged anywhere.
Recall when they were trying to sell "social media influencing" services to STRATFOR? [0] [1]
What tools did they create for that "product";
* An astroturfing account mgmt platform? Mass comment editing tool?
* Deep comment search tool?
* comment-graph showing cross /r/ posts by a user to develop a profile of the person?
* Tools to seek out what users from reddit were which users on FB, Google+, Youtube etc.
These all above are just the most obvious off the top of my head.
The schema for reddit comments is (at least when I last looked at it) is fairly simple and it would be easy to create such tools against that data.
Are there any third party services that allow for this.
Especially if you think about DLing the comment blob and then do these retroactively against all comments in the past to graph out the personal-profiles of each user....
BRB, need to head out to get more tin-foil.... for the Turkey! not, /r/conspiracy
I don't know how things would work with a larger database such as reddit as I never worked on one. But I imagine if he had access to the database, he can just go in and change the comment on the database without writing any special program for it. I know reddit uses Postgre and that has a function that lets you go in and change field values.
Really, when you think about it, changing user comments would probably be a really easy undertaking for any forum administrator with access to the database.
So since the founding of Reddit in 2005 and now—we're expected to believe that Reddit hasn't hired a single security expert, engineer or otherwise which has rightfully removed any unnecessary access to user data? This seems incredible to me.
> I can't imagine how stressful it must be to run Reddit. He made one mistake in a bad day, apologized for it, and now everyone's talking about it. Steve's way nicer and more professional than I am, so I would probably have messed up big time in his shoes.
If it was a mistake resulting from inaction one could attribute that to stress.
This was deliberate action. I assume/hope that this special mode of editing (without the "edited" asterisk signifier) isn't just the default "edit" button Spez gets for every post if he's logged in, but that he had to jump through a few hoops and "are you sure" boxes to get there (or maybe was it direct DB editing).
There's some things you just don't do with admin powers, lines you don't cross, not even for shits 'n giggles. And apparently he doesn't truly believe that, because the amounts of stress that would make one cross those lines are way beyond ability to function as a person, let alone CEO of Reddit.
Hang on a second here: many people comment that murderers seem like really nice people when they met them briefly. You don't really know anything about someone just because you met him for a bit a few years ago. He can be both unprofessional and seem like a calm and nice person, while being neither if you had gotten to know him better.
You comment that he's made just one mistake on a bad day. Perhaps this is just his most visible mistake, and he's been making these kinds of bad mistakes for the past month. It didn't take him 10 seconds to do this - he had to log in with full access to the reddit database and run unprotected queries against the live running copy. That's both shocking security, operations and basic common practice. For a childish insult.
And finally, he did not actually apologize for any of this. "I fucked up" is not the same as "I'm sorry".
A friend proposed another theory, inappropriate as it may seem. That it's a way to draw attention to Reddit needing to make money, and Steve, being the CEO, has to find a way to do it and take blame for it.
If so, he deserves to be applauded. There are things a founder/CEO has to do you can't say.
Facebook, etc terminated those with power for doing things like stalking on an ex-girlfriend. This seems similar. It is an abuse of power, and frankly, we don't know if this is the first time it has happened—it simply might have been the most extreme case
During the conversation, Zuckerberg writes: "Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard, just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS."
When the friend asks him how he got the information, Zuckerberg replies: "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."
He's almost certainly still the asshole he was then, but there's a pretty large gap between abusing access to a website you run in college and abusing access to a website you're payed to be the CEO of in your 30s.
But publicly denying your platform[0] did not affect the recent election; After research have confirmed prior to the election that Facebook have a fake news problem.
No... it really isn't. This is abusing power to attempt to manipulate public opinion on a message board. Stalking is a horrible invasion of privacy that has a tendency to escalate into violence. And even when it doesn't, it results in drastically increased anxiety and fear for the person being stalked if they find out.
How differently would you be reacting if he hadn't admitted it, apologized, explained that he was reacting impulsively under pressure and stress, and fixed the changes?
I'm worried that the answer is "not at all", which seems weird.
Probably the most useful piece of advice I ever read (readers digest about 20 years ago) was...
"Never Ruin an Apology With an Excuse."
I read Steve's apology and to be honest it was more dismissive and excusing than it was a real apology. So, it shouldn't surprise you that he isn't being cut the same slack you would expect after a sincere apology.
Here's a better advice. Never apologize, never surrender. If you apologize the attacks don't relent. Instead they use your apology as an admission of wrongdoing and defeat and try to hang your wrong doings over your head so you succumb to their wishes for irrelevant moral bullshit.
You tell them to roundly go fuck themselves and appeal to the people that agree with you, the opposition's feelings be damned.
Both advices have merit, however it entirely depends on the context.
The perceived sincerity of apology delivered to someone who is receptive to an apology can indeed be diminished by accompanying it with an excuse.
On the other hand, an apology delivered to someone who is categorically unreceptive to any apology can only be entirely futile. Since there is nothing to gain yet possibly something to lose, the rational course of action would be to not apologize.
Edit: since the latter example seems to be the controversial one, here is a popular scenario in which a significant number of individuals can always be characterized as being "categorically unreceptive to an apology": partisan politics.
It can absolutely be a valid strategy. I have used both, the true apology without excuses, and the FU one.
It depends. Do i really regret what i did? Was it the wrong thing to do? Then i'll apologise, and try to get rid of all the excuses.
Was someone offended and want me to apologise, but when i look at it, i stick to my guns? Then FU strategy, no apology, i'll fight for my point all the way.
I don't know. What if he actually buckled under prolonged stress and frustration? What could he have said differently to make that reason more .. reasonable?
I am not discounting how difficult and stressful his situation might be, and I am not saying I would have acted any better...
But, This is exactly my point. His reason doesn't matter. Reasons aren't relevant to apologies.
When you are apologizing, you are admitting wrongdoing...defending yourself in the same breadth is essentially saying you didn't do anything wrong in the first place.
Every time I have to apologize I am tempted to throw in a reason/excuse and everytime I remind myself of that quote and stick with just "I'm sorry" I end up with a better result than when I tag on a reason...
That being said, if you read his post...he actually doesn't apologize at all. He even goes so far as to say he wont do it again (only) because it upset the community team, not because it was wrong to do. He also claims he fixed it. He might of changed back the comments...but he certainly didn't fix anything.
If you feel "I'm sorry" is too short, the only reason you can give, is the reasons why it was wrong what you did. As long as you don't leave out major important ones, it can strengthen the apology, showing sincereness and that you really understand.
But he didn't "buckle under" anything, he went out of his way and "buckled into" directly modifying Reddit's DB.
It wasn't something you accidentally do when the stress gets too much all the while you really know and believe how wrong it is. They have rules about this.
He obviously didn't believe that. Or that the rules don't apply to him.
> What could he have said differently to make that reason more .. reasonable?
Nothing, probably. He done fucked up, that's it. This is firing-on-the-spot material if he weren't CEO. If they have to keep him for being important as CEO in other ways maybe, at the very least they should take away all his toys and admin powers and uh oh yeah, BAN his reddit account. He can talk announcements through some communication team, but I don't think he should be really touching or modifying anything on the site any more.
Excuses and reasons are pretty irrelevant here. The last part is forgiveness, a dish best served cold :)
And here he is boasting about knowing "all your dark secrets" at TNW - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lALKRayDLuk - meant in jest but shows incredibly poor judgement as a CEO
Anybody can go through the comment history of any redditor and know their dark secrets.
I don't mind Reddit fucking up. If they were competent they would have monetized the users a long time ago and it would be an broken mess that feeds daily spam to my inbox like every other social media platform. Reddit is too valuable to take seriously.
But they have your upvotes, saved links, private messages, and at least some idea of which outbound links you've clicked (you can turn some of that off).
It's like an ISP knowing a significant portion of your web browsing behaviour.
Of course they have that data - you have chosen to send it to their website. It would be physically impossible for that website to run if the data could not be read. Obviously, it's preferable if only 'the right people' can read it, but it's much safer to assume that isn't the case.
If you're concerned about the outbound link issue, disable javascript. A cursory look at the page source should convince you that that's the only way they can track outbound clicks.
The parent commenter was saying anybody can go through your comment history, and by extension admins have no special access to 'dark secrets'. I was pointing out that that's just not true.
Not if you always post with the realization that the one day you could be doxed, no matter how anonymous you think you are being. If I can dark secrets, I don't upvote, comment on them or include them in my comments on reddit.
Well, Obama joked about weaponizing the IRS and he did it through Lois Lerner and then Podesta BFF Peter J. Kadzik at the DoJ was personally responsible for clearing her of any charges.
I know someone in high school who joked about murdering someone and he's doing 25 to life for it now so I've learned to realize that someone joking about something is in no way proof that they wouldn't do it.
Also, in what way would he NOT be looking at dark secrets of people? Reddit makes money on selling packages of personally-identifiable information / and IPs so that you can pay them and be able to link reddit accounts to facebook accounts and google accounts and so on. People think they have some sort of anonymity on Reddit but if you pony up cash Reddit will strip anyone's away for you. And I'm sure he's looking at what he's willing to sell to others. If anyone posts something juicy but anonymous on Reddit, he's looking at their real name attached to their facebook account.
Spez isn't emotionally adept to handle the abuse you get as a reddit CEO. Yishan wrote before that he was good at the technical side of the job but he's neither a strong businessman nor a community leader.
Oddly, I find juvenile-ness of this rather reassuring. Anyone who is using mod powers for surreptitious reasons (swaying public opinion, or discrediting opponents) has too much to hide to also use them for a silly prank.
Of course it was still dumb and he shouldn't have done it. But it's hard to credit the people saying this is evidence of more sinister revelations yet to come.
While an abuse of power, I'm not sure I see the outrage.
It's Reddit. It's an Internet forum run by a private corporation. The users in question abusing spez have zero right to their speech on the platform. You have zero recourse if Reddit edits your comments.
Nuke /r/the_donald, nuke the users and hellban their IPS of those who sent abusive messages, and let's move on. Bask in the irony when I say, "Drain the swamp"
> While an abuse of power, I'm not sure I see the outrage.
This is one of the most bizarre statements I have ever read. You don't understand why people are outraged over abuse of power? Seriously?
> It's Reddit. It's an Internet forum run by a private corporation.
A forum used by users who are pretty much famous for taking a strong dislike to censorship.
> You have zero recourse if Reddit edits your comments.
Zero legal recourse. Plenty of recourse to make a big deal out of it online and damage Reddit's reputation and make others aware when the CEO makes it clear there are additional risks that people didn't expect with using their platform.
Abuses of power happen, and are bad, but changing a comment on an internet forum is about as low down on the scale of seriousness as you can get.
The only real problem I can see is that people (at least, here in the UK) have been charged with crimes relating to something they've posted on reddit. Clearly, that's ridiculous if there can be no expectation of proof of authorship.
> The users in question abusing spez have zero right to their speech on the platform.
Oh God, this tired distraction again? We know they have no "right to free speech" on a private platform. We know. Everybody knows. Reddit is not the government and can do what it wants. It could replace every instance of "/u/spez sucks" with "/u/spez is great!" and be absolutely within its rights. What we're saying is that such behavior would not be in the spirit of free speech and would raise questions about Reddit's claimed commitment to that principle, not that it's actually illegal.
> Nuke /r/the_donald, nuke the users and hellban their IPS of those who sent abusive messages, and let's move on. Bask in the irony when I say, "Drain the swamp"
Try to prevent the people whose views you don't like from speaking, eh? That certainly worked out well in the last election.
Did you even read my comment? Like, the bit where I stated repeatedly that there is no right to speak somewhere online?
What I am pointing out is that the let's strategy in this election was suppression and abuse, and it resulted in President Trump. Maybe try a different approach next time!
There is a massive difference between Twitter banning accounts, and Twitter transparently editing accounts to harass someone else.
It would be like you posting a Twitter message that says "I hate Donald Trump" and Twitter transparently changing that message to "I hate Tim Cook" so that anybody reading your timeline thinks you're someone you aren't. See the problem now? Now imagine if Twitter's management was taken over tomorrow and this actually happens.
Well then maybe reddit should stop lying about what it stands for?
If it doesn't care about the principles of free speech (principles, not the amendment) then it should stop giving fake lip service to it.
Also, what you say isn't really true. 4chan does a good job of not censoring anything that isn't obviously illegal.
Any chat system built on top of the blockchain for that matter would actually be impossible to censor.
Or even just a simple email list, is in some sense an uncensored chat room.
Or text messages. Or phone calls.
All of these are in some sense, technology assisted chat services, run by private parties. And I'd describe them all as "bastions of free speech".
What if, to prevent harassment, your phone company listened to all of its customers phone calls and selective moderated them whenever you said a bad word? That is the equivalent.
Ok. How would you feel if Zuckerberg secretly edited your Facebook status, and swapped his name out with someone else's, because what you said about him was kind of mean?
> While an abuse of power, I'm not sure I see the outrage.
I don't see it either when something happens on reality TV (direct analog). It's fine and dandy that reddit mods post about liberal values, which is purely political posturing, not technical or legal limitation. That kind of lip-service doesn't mean anything to me...insofar as I'm not counting on it being true any more than a politician making promises about their platform. I'm certainly not surprised (or outraged?) when there are cries for forgiveness after acting against those political statements.
Yes. Twitter gets shit for borderline bans, but can you imagine if they went in and edited the person's tweets instead? There'd be a riot.
These platforms are not just a playground anymore. Politicians come on and make on-the-record statements on them, the news sources stories off them, etc. Integrity of the record is critical. Reddit jeopardizing that platform is very bad for them and erodes their credibility enormously. I can see major figures declining to perform AMAs anymore based on the uncertainty that someone at the company will get triggered, jump in, and change their stuff.
It generally shouldn't be. It's my understanding that once you take on the investment and corporate governance that Reddit has, you'll have "need to know" controls in place that prevent the appropriation of company resources for personal use -- so even the CEO doesn't have the kind of unrestricted database access needed to do this kind of thing.
The fact is anything digital can be modified this way; it's probably good that it happens and there are public examples so people learn not to trust it.
Don was talking about alt.right (obviously a play on alt-right: but probably also the alt-right news group, if there is one). However, the standard acronym expansion for the alt hierarchy on the usenet (it actually stands for alternative) is Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists: partly a running gag and partly because alt.* was (and still is) the wild west of the usenet: a lawless wasteland, with the occasional specks of civilization.
Well, you see, there used to be a network coexistant with the internet, backed by UUCP, because Unix didn't have internet support yet (among other reasons).
And then there were these guys called Tom and Steve. And they wrote Usenet. And all was well until September fell. And then the usenet gradually faded into obscurity, as users moved towards walled gardens, and away from netnews. Some of these users were weeaboos: This is how the -chans made their way here from Japan.
Awesome! that totally reads like a future history of post apocalyptic script kiddy explaining the current state of the world.
Usenet was created because "networks" were expensive and "fax lines" were cheap. If you did it correctly machine A could call machine B in its local calling zone which could call machine C in its local calling zone and a message could go from A!B!C!user without incurring any long distance charges (aka "free").
Because you would lose your news feed if you pissed people off, spam was low because no admin would tolerate one of their users putting their system at risk of disconnection.
When networks because "free" and anyone could talk to anyone, there was no impediment to spam and no way to scale, and much of the infrastructure collapsed on itself.
That said, there is absolutely nothing preventing anyone from creating their own peer to peer messaging network. They could re-use the netnews code or write their own with a bit more security built in. The argument to that is "but hey no one will use it." to which you say "Who cares? My friends and I will use it." and since it is free and it is just you and your friends it will be fun and enjoyable. And if you're very unlucky everyone will join you.
Ah, Byte. There's nothing like it, and there probably never will be. Where else could you find circuit diagrams, assembly listings, and explorations of HLLs, next to all kinds other computer-related explorations?
It has a kind of magic to it, which I can't find in any other magazine to this day.
Each user gets his or her own newsfroup subhierarchy which anyone may subscribe, cache, archive, or distribute.
Postings are signed by the user, where the signature points to a parent, Merkle-tree style. A valid posting must encrypt its Message-Id and Newsgroups header lines with the newsgroup's posting-user's private key, and with half of a key shared with the hierarchical parent newsgroup's owner set out in e.g. the cmsg newgroup message and follow-ups to it.
Postings may be signed cleartext or signed ciphertext with the decrypt key encrypted on the public keys of eligible readers.
Postings may be dropped (and should not be presented by a reader UA) if a signature trace upwards, potentially to the root of the hierarchy -- there may be many hierarchies, but each would have unique root newsgroup -- fails.
Posting would work like moderated newsgroups, with the "moderator" being whoever posseses the valid signing information, and any unmoderated postings going ignored.
The equivalent of posting on a friend's wall would involve either posting into a subgroup of the friend's primary newsgroup for which the posting-friend has the appropriate signing information, or goes into a dropbox subgroup encrypted on the wall owner's public key, which the wall owner should monitor, and from which the wall owner could sign-and-promote postings onto her or his own wall or some other non-dropbox subgroup.
There are similar drawbacks to USENET: once posted, a message cannot be unposted or edited reliably. Postings may be lost.
Additionally, postings might not be permanently secret. Posting and reading credentials may be lost or stolen. Legitimate readers might repost information they shouldn't. None of these are too different from the facebooks.
The bright side is that this could be started today with just UA work, using the existing USENET transfer-and-storage systems. Newsgroup creation and policies on expiration and peer-and-downstream transferring would need to be made more scalable; the line about "cmsg newgroup" exposes the problem even in the hundreds of users of USEFACE, let alone several orders of magnitude more newsgroups than exist today.
However, there aren't obvious ultimate scaling limits thanks to hierarchicalization; the hardest part is probably organizing where UAs will get their NNTP reader service from -- it's unlikely to be just one reader that happens to subscribe to all USEFACE hierarchies and stores all postings indefinitely. This was already a problem for USENET, although there are various partial solutions that already exist.
The way I'm imagining it, you can both use server based and P2P based distribution.
You can federate across servers, have channels/rooms with filters / blacklists set by the moderators.
You can have one-time user keys and PFS algorithms, with optional support for users later claiming authorship if they preserved their old keys.
And everything would be timestamped using transparency logs or a blockchain.
Edits are diff messages.
Yeah props to you, whatever your age! And fwiw I'm too young to have used the Usenet in its prime.
"<Imperative>, kids" is just an ideom. The proverbial kid would be somebody here that hasn't heard of the Usenet or didn't make the connection—not you.
>"<Imperative>, kids" is just an ideom. The proverbial kid would be somebody here that hasn't heard of the Usenet or didn't make the connection—not you.
Yeah, I know. I felt that it was an entertaining enough juxtaposition that I said it anyways.
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But it does get annoying to sign every comment.
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I know its considered wrong to mess around with the structure, but this is reversible, looks neater, n' can be hidden (after verification) by third party tools with a simple "is this PGP-like, if yes, delete element" instead of mucking around, splitting arbitrary html
I just went to look at Reddit to learn more about this. Someone there makes the good point that if the mods can edit user comments, they could in theory plant false evidence of crimes.
Sorry to nitpick, but I'd like to point out that "administrators" and "moderators" are two different groups in Reddit. "Administrators"(which spez is part of) are Reddit staff; Moderators are users who create a subreddit or are enlisted to help manage it; Moderators do not have the power to edit user comments.
It's more concerning that Congress is that stupid (one can only hope the Courts haven't been making rulings based on untraced emails and anonymous tweets). Social media is a canonical exemplar of hearsay.
There's a reason Wikipedia isn't an acceptable source in college-level courses.
> It's more concerning that Congress is that stupid
Congress was looking at evidence of what that particular user was doing online at the time, because /u/stonetear posted questions that look rather incriminating in retrospect based on what we've learned since then.
This kind of thing is why it's important to establish a chain of custody for evidence.
Maybe. It depends on what internal controls they have (or don't) and whether it was evident to other admins that the comments had been altered.
There's a lot we don't know without knowing the internal workings of Reddit, though I agree that you can't have to think that if one rogue person (even someone like that) can just do such things, they don't have robust internal controls at all.
The reason being Wikipedia is a summary made by a constantly changing group of people out of actual sources with a real name attached to it, which are the ones you're supposed to link.
In any case, a permalink to a specific revision that includes a sha256sum of the article is a good way to ensure you're getting a reliable link to information which can not be tampered without failing the checksum.
If they control the checksum check they can alter it too. Maybe, if you are careful enough to store all the checksums of everything you do online you will be able to tell, but others that see your posts won't even notice.
Merkle trees can help here. Basically a tree of hashes. If you keep track of the root hash, it's easy to prove any individual leaf has not been altered.
Reddit isn't meant to be a source nor is Wikipedia, but it's a place to find information. They can be seen as central hubs to get information.
If a person comments on Reddit with a valid point and sources all his facts, why does it matter where said comment is made, and honestly, it doesn't matter if admins can edit it or not, really.
Look at it like posting an EXE and also linking to a credible site containing it's checksum. As long as you trust the linked site, then it doesn't matter where the EXE is posted and if someone has access to modifiying the EXE, all that matters is that 1. you got the data, 2. the data checksum matches the source.
When a website receives a court order or congressional subpoena to preserve data, they are under penalty of perjury and contempt of court/congress to not alter it. Physical evidence can be just as subject to tampering as digital data. For both, the integrity of the court system is enforced with strong penalties for those who are dishonest.
The problem isn't tampering after a request -- it's before.
If the reddit admin edits of comments aren't appropriately stored in comment history, the logs turned over won't tell the whole story, but reddit will (mistakenly) testify that it's the complete history.
You can even add a dash of malice: an exec edits a rival's post, but the subpoena is filled by a line tech (possibly unaware of the admin tools, even).
Unless the defense knows to press reddit on the actual veracity of their logs and ways they could be compromised, the erroneous data seems a fact to the court.
No, but Wikipedia's sources usually are. I feel like there's a world of difference between a well-sourced encyclopedia entry and a comment on a somewhat anonymous forum.
Wikipedia's sources are usually terrible (a blog post), unverifiable (I don't have access to the actual book), or they 404.
Sometimes, Wikipedia editors don't understand the source so the Wikipedia article and the source are actually at odds with one another. I've witnessed this a few times when I investigated dubious claims.
One time while studying for a final exam, I did a final review of the Wikipedia article and noticed a quote which was an exact match for a paper that I had just read, and it was followed by [citation needed].
Adding that citation is one of my proudest Wikipedia edits ever.
And then you get out of high school and you start to actually do research and learn the real answer: Primary sources are always better than secondary or tertiary, so use them when you can.
But Wikipedia IS good for finding those primary/secondary sources. And, depending on the topic, wiki is great for getting a quick primer to a subject or to have an example and is often cited in lectures to students who are expected to be old enough to not stop you and say "Teacher! Teacher! You said to never use Wikipedia!"
Not as seriously as The New York Times, which has been guilty of far worse gaslighting.
Walter Duranty and The New York Times were enough to make Ukranian survivors of Holomodor thought of as crazy in this country for about 50 years: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2010/07/crimes_of_th...
Think about that next time you read about how Google and Facebook are going to tell you which sources are fake news and which aren't. Or not actually tell you, just put all the blacklisted ones down a memory hole.
The NY Times apologized and agrees with the critique that its reporter was terrible:
The Times sent von Hagen's report to the Pulitzer Board and left it to the Board to take whatever action they considered appropriate.[27] In a letter accompanying the report, New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. called Duranty's work "slovenly" and said it "should have been recognized for what it was by his editors and by his Pulitzer judges seven decades ago." (from Wikipedia)
It is serious, though, to not discount reddit as important.
The point is that you shouldnt, generally speaking, take reddit as a serious place (puns, memes, trolls, inside-jokes, meta, etc) -- but it is HAS accomplished something very significant; actually achieving being the Frontpage of the Internet....
Look at the chaos and beauty that reddit's userbase can create...
Dont take reddit seriously - but take the people who use reddit serious. Seriously.
if you can leverage them as a LOIC you can achieve some amazing things --- or fuck up really bad...
Look, I get that being lambasted by your base sucks, but yes, being the boss means you have to keep your cool and not abuse your power, as difficult as that is. The job demands you have a superhuman temperament...and he definitely is human, but that shouldn't excuse his behavior.
It would also be perfectly reasonable to bulk ban anyone suggesting the reddit ceo is a pedophile, plus any subreddit that tolerated it. Using reddit does not give you the right to abuse people that way.
What he did -- which I can't really tell, because something about pizzagate, and the whole thing is just too dumb to care about -- was probably dumb, but whatever.
I highly doubt secretly editing a comment of another user is one of his account's listed privledges. Not marked edited, I highly doubt its a built-in feature of the website for even administrators. What if a low level employee, who doesn't even have privilege to ban users, had leveraged his technical back-end access to their databases to alter a comment. Act as the person who made the original comment, effectively impersonating them by using their technical access to reddit's data to basically 'hack' that users account. I highly doubt this is 'within his rights' as a founder, as someone here commented...
At the same time though, you'd imagine reddit has some sort of distributed backend so that getting direct access to the datastore and doing something like
UPDATE the_donald SET comment = replace('/u/spez', '/u/notspez', comment) WHERE 'fuck /u/spez' in lowercase(comment);
This is pretty bad. That pretty much destroys the credibility of Reddit's commenting system in a single act. No one can look at the integrity of the comments written by others the same any more.
Does it? Really? An admin played a prank on a bunch of insane, out of control conspiracy minded screaming blubbering trolls calling him a pedophile with a dumb silly find/replace rule. God forbid, next forums will start replacing words like 'shit' and 'fuck' with symbols to try and hide the truth of what we /really/ mean from the world.
Who cares? Why is this a big deal? I am so unbelievably unimpressed with the seriousness of this, I feel like there is such an enormous effort to pretend this is "serious business" and "the integrity of reddit" (?) is somehow being compromised. We all knew this could be done. On any forum. Reddit is a silly place. Reddit is a place for people to shitpost memes and puns with throwaway accounts. The Donald is a subreddit that revels in trolling and messing with people, spewing toxic garbage nonstop. They riled up the main admin of reddit so much he did something childish -- a pretty impressive trolling effort. That's the end of this story as far as I can tell.
Reddit comments and posts have been used in investigations. In the UK a teenager was sentenced for writing some "racist" comment(I'm not saying this is right or wrong, just that it happened).
Just think, the admins have the power to edit your comment as they see fit and you'll have no proof as your comment isn't even marked as edited.
To clarify, are you suggesting that someone was indicted based purely on a Reddit post?
If so, that in itself is scarier than anything else being discussed here.
To assume Reddit is a unedited source of truth is just insane. Why people felt it was 100% tamper proof is beyond me. I wouldn't even trust public companies like Twitter to not have potential flaws like this.
It's nothing new in UK, they are literally CCTV state now. Don't forget American folks that in most of the countries over here we don't have free speech ;)
And in the light of this news that Reddit CEO edited comments -- it's scary stuff -- for fun or not.
No, nor elected prosecutors. There is however a system where if you plead not guilty and are convicted you have to pay towards the court costs: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32078676
What's disturbing is how many sane people are getting up in arms over this. The trolls are going to have a field day. Unfortunately, it has already blown up and has hit all the major media outlets. This is a perfect example of something on the Internet done "for the lolz". But people who don't have an understanding of Internet culture just cannot grasp this concept.
Trump did AMA there. Imagine when next time Trump does AMA on The_Donald subreddit:
- Mr. President, are you going to deport american citizens?
- No, I am absolutely not going to do that.
That gets ninja edited to:
- I am absolutely going to do that.
Can you imagine the uproar that would cause? We already have people in the media holding their breath for the next Trump's tweet - if something like this happened, there would be panic, hysteria, people having health complications.
This is extremely serious. Even if this were to be rolled back, damage would already be done by then. That would be akin to screaming "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
Yep. It's not so much that Reddit management did something hugely awful in this, or are likely to repeat it. It's that it's opened the door to the suspicion of repeat behavior. Let a million conspiracy theories bloom!
Really, the one this actually hurts is Reddit itself. To hurl in this stinkbomb when a good chunk of the site already considers itself at war with the management... Just profoundly stupid.
Nobody's content was edited. Contentless shitposts saying nothing more than "fuck the reddit CEO pedophile" were edited. To say something equally contentless instead.
I'll humor you and imagine your ridiculous doomsday scenario. Trump would say "that's not what I said, it was edited" and his supporters would stop using reddit and everyone would stop trusting it as a serious source. Crisis averted, win/win/win. Can we make that happen please ASAP?
> An admin played a prank on a bunch of insane, out of control conspiracy minded screaming blubbering trolls calling him a pedophile with a dumb silly find/replace rule.
"All Trump supporters are dumb racist bigoted uneducated white hick hillbillies, fuck them with a rusty rebar."
So in this analogy the CEO of a cat meme shitposting website is Hitler? And he's "coming for you?" That's what you're saying? We have an anti-free speech facist in the middle of public discourse already, he's the president elect and that's a lot scarier than the CEO of reddit being sick of people using his own website to scream at him and call him a pedophile.
Yeah but for how long have you been in IT/Computers/A Sysop/Sysad????
You do know that this is the mortal sin in IT -- abusing access powers to data and stealing it or fucking with it???
I had a guy ask me "Well cant you just read their email?" - ME: "Technically yes, of course, but I would be fired and thats the last thing you do in IT"
Exactly my sentiments, and it only took place for an hour. I didn't mind at all, it was pretty entertaining, but then again I don't get drawn into the drama Reddit's userbase has frequently.
> insane, out of control conspiracy minded screaming blubbering trolls
This attitude is WHY YOU LOST THE ELECTION.
> Who cares? Why is this a big deal? I am so unbelievably unimpressed with the seriousness of this,
It is deadly serious. /r/pizzagate was just shut down for posting personal information. No proof was given. Reddit has users like Bill Gates who post regularly, it has interviewed the POTUS and countless movie stars. Just as a pedophile scandal threatens to engulf both Twitter and very senior members of the Democratic Party, the founder of reddit reveals that he fucks around with people's posts. What's to prevent him going into a user's history and falsifying it? We've had the head of the FBI in front of Congress talking about a Reddit comment for crying out loud, because it was about national security.
His actions were extraordinarily poor judgement for an organisation that describes itself as a bastion of free speech.
I originally dismissed it before the elections, thinking it was all a whisper campaign but it has gotten legs after the election.
That doesn't mean it has substance but I now believe infowars objectively did a better job reporting the facts of what is presently known than the New York Times's supposed exposure of the story. The NYT piece contains a well placed lie I am certain isn't true.
There is enough circumstantial evidence to warrant a careful police investigation.
I would put it like this: the odds are not good but the goods are definitely odd.
To those who think "too obviously in the open to be true" I'd like to point out the case of Jimmy Saville.
I think the media went out of their way to slant things towards Hillary in this election. I suspect they consensus in the media was something like "we created this monster, now we have to kill it" regarding Trump.
To me this was both wrong, since it basically ignored the basic responsibility of the media in our civilization, and counter productive, since it was so obvious that they were 'in the bag' that people stopped trusting the major news outlets entirely and started getting their 'information' from non-traditional sources, like the alt-media, social networks, etc.
So you can say that everyone is a bunch of 'whack jobs', but it seems like we have a competition here between the 'traditional media' who are being incredibly dishonest and more or less repeating talking points from the DNC, the 'marginally traditional' media like fox news, which is just as much in the bag for the right and so also not really a trustworthy source of information, and the 'other stuff' people are now getting information from, which is just a total mess of false information and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories mixed into all the actual things going on in the world.
So if you want to blame someone, blame the traditional media, of all the things that happened they were the only ones who abandoned their responsibility, and everything else followed from that.
The equivalence you draw is terrifying (and, I think, false, but mostly terrifying).
Yes, in a sense I think it's true that the "traditional media" is probably mostly staffed by people who tend to oppose the Trump presidency. But this is for two very specific reasons:
1. Trump ran a divisive campaign that was in many ways--perhaps primarily--a campaign against both the demographics of most media reporters and the actual institutions of media itself. Reporters, being humans with feelings, probably did respond to that a bit.
2. Trump ran a campaign that was founded on literal falsehoods.
Extending reporters some degree of professional respect, I tend to believe #2 is the primary factor here.
The terrifying equivalence here is between "traditional media" reporting factual truths where you can kinda-sorta-sometimes tell that the reporter probably doesn't respect Trump as a candidate and "alt media" reporting things of huge consequence that never happened and have no basis in fact.
Those are fundamentally different things, and what truly worries me about both the stupid shit like "pizzagate" and the significant lies (on economic measures, on science, on documented reality as we know it) is that our politics appear to have become unstuck from consensus reality.
There's no rational discussion--and, I believe, truly no hope for the democratic process--if we're not arguing about mutually agreed-upon facts. Yet that's where we are.
Do you actually believe that the 'traditional media' just reports 'facts' as they are? Do you have no historical perspective whatsoever?? Because if they were just 'reporting factual truths' in this election cycle, that would literally be the first time they've ever done it.
In every election since I can remember, both sides have claimed, and many have believed, that the person on the other side was literally going to ruin the country and should they win the country was going to fall apart.
You happen to feel that way about Donald Trump. You're just as wrong as the people who thought that Hillary was going to start WWIII, and the people that thought Bush was going to try to become a dictator, and the people that thought Reagan was going to start WWIII, and the people that thought Bill Clinton was literally a murderer who killed state troopers and who killed Vince Foster, and the people that thought Obama was a Muslim 5th columnist, and on and on.
So there have always been crazies, getting obsessed with them or paying attention to them is pointless.
This time we have the 'alt-right', whatever that is, some make believe group created by being named in the media. I'm not sure where they are or who they are, but if you listen to the media they're 'out there' and they are rising.
So my advice is read some history, get some perspective, and move on as though nothing is really different than it ever has been, because it isn't.
EDIT: here is a video of the media 'just reporting facts': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NVVwZVd6ZM Look how stunned the 'reporter' is when they mess up and don't manage to cherry pick the clip to support the false narrative they are trying to reinforce..
(I read a lot of history. I do find the suggestion to "read some history," absent any actual historical argument being made, to be condescending and sort of useless, but I may be misunderstanding your intent here.)
I completely agree that asking one to perceive the world without ones' own biases is quite difficult. Would I know if I had a biased worldview? Maybe not.
On the other hand, I hear a view similar to yours quite commonly expressed. I read it as, "Both sides lie, everyone lies about the same amount, and we shouldn't try to call bullshit on those lies." That's exactly the view I find terrifying: it implicitly rejects the notion of objective truth, or at least rejects the idea that we can benefit from such truth in any way.
To take a counter view: do you think it's possible, in a given election (if not this one), for one candidate to be significantly more mendacious than the other? If so, how could we discover it? How could we agree when it is happening?
Absolutely, some politicians are more honest than others.
How can we discover it? Well that's pretty much impossible to do perfectly. There is a whole industry that for a long time has owned the mechanism by which the world is revealed to us, and if nothing else positive comes from this election, they have been exposed as being a very broken filter that is using their position to intentionally push their own agenda.
My hope is that the new forms of media that are developing step in to fill the void, and that a new kind of journalism comes about that grows beyond the irresponsible and incompetent 'traditional media'. That hasn't happened yet, and it seems like the democratization of news has actually led to more polarized outlets and given people the ability to tune into 'news' that just reinforces their beliefs.
At least with the 'mainstream media' there was some corrective pressure since there were only a few outlets and they were at least slightly sensitive to criticism, so they had to maintain at least the appearance of balance. They've completely thrown away that appearance now, and sadly the alternatives are insane.
I don't think things are going to go back to where they were, where the newspapers and other sources of reporting saw themselves as 'up against the system'. Traditional media depended on a lack of alternatives as part of their business model, and that model is dying very rapidly. Traditional news is rapidly going bankrupt, and as a result our 'best' newspapers have been sold at bargain basement prices to people who want to own that influence while it lasts. This isn't new either, but you used to have to be a massive industrial conglomerate to 'buy the news', like GE or Westinghouse. Now we have Bezos and Carlos Slim able to personally buy that influence very cheaply (while it lasts).
Being concerned about children is not a wack job. With yesterdays arrest in Norway and allegations about UK elites. Why do you think same can't happen in America.
Is there any evidence for the accusation? On its face, the whole claim appears to be entirely baseless and without merit, and its defenders appear to argue that it's hard to disprove so it deserves credence.
Am I missing something? I read the subreddit (before it was shut down) and was quite unable to tell if it's just a big Internet in-joke or if the participants are serious. Are they serious? If so, why?
It was deadly serious. But the evidence is purely circumstantial. However, the more you dig the more data you find. From another comment of mine:
James Alefantis posts suggestive pictures of children on his Instagram AND He makes lewd comments about them AND Many of his friends do too AND Some of those friends are into weird things like making child-sized coffins AND There's FBI-confirmed pedophile codes and symbols everywhere AND Alefantis knows John Podesta WHO is into Spirit Cooking with Marina Abramovic AND Podesta hangs disturbing child abuse-style art on his wall AND He likes artists who produce disturbing images of abuse AND His emails have masonic images hidden in the attachments AS WELL AS Pictures of children with notes saying "Happy Birthday John" AND contacts of his mail him with messages promising "entertainment" from the young children in the pool AND He and his brother look EXACTLY like the photofits of two men who abducted Madeleine McCann in 2007 AND they were connected to the McCanns through a mutual friend who lived nearby AND ....
There's literally thousands of people digging and all they do is keep throwing up more connections and suggestions that there is a pedophile ring hiding in plain sight.
It also came out in another thread that moderators have this power also. Moderators being random reddit users, not employees, can be expected to have much less integrity.
Wrong. Only admins, not moderators, can edit content. I should know, I'm moderating /r/crypto in Reddit. You can confirm it too by simply creating your own subreddit and look at what moderator tools you have available - removal and adding flairs is really all you can do.
But, usually a company of this size/scale puts in place restrictions so that accessing privileged abilities like this is extremely difficult and requires authorizations / clearances / permissions from users, etc.
Generally big / public tech company employees are not even allowed to LOOK at PII or the data of a specific user name etc. You run all tests on staging / fake populated DBs only, etc.
CEOs don't get to break the rules just because. These kinds of restrictions exist to protect consumers (and their data) and the business legally from liability, etc.
It's not that people didn't know the admins have the power; it's that people didn't believe they'd use the power.
Your local police or military could just barge into your house and kill you at any time. They have the power to do that. Society functions to the extent that you don't believe they will do that. If you found out one day that your local police chief had, under cover of law, busted into someone's house and waved a gun at them over a petty personal dispute, though, your faith would be a little shaken.
People have the power to do a lot of things. You have the power to quite easily lie, cheat, and steal in this world. When you run a website, like when you run a business, you have to convince your customers/users to trust you not to do those things.
We already know that Reddit was originally filled by sockpuppets, so more deceptive behavior from reddit higher-ups today doesn't surprise me too much...although this isn't really deception, this seems more like admin trolling.
Sockpuppet is one thing. Altering a user's comment to frame him/her is another thing. Basically any comment cannot be trusted anymore. It takes years to build trust. It can be destroyed in an instant.
>That pretty much destroys the credibility of Reddit's commenting system in a single act.
The admins kickstarted reddit by impersonating different users, they even had a field to enter the username which which to post/comment. Fake it 'til you make it. Nothing inherently wrong with it.
I'm not going to stop visiting reddit over this. Hell, if it erodes trust by /r/the_donald who'll move over to something like voat, fair enough. I have no illusions that content is safe from subversion, whether it be in-place or not, and I've myself applied some CSS during April Fools on a major subreddit that modified comments as a lark.
It was wrong of /u/spez, sure. But the guy's pissed off, he should be with the amount of upvoting bots on that reddit and no real solution. He fessed up almost immediately and it's not like they're going to go at it in scale - especially since it's so very easily provable with archive.is.
It was a juvenile messing around with a group that breeds on persecution complex. I consider this a joke. Not bad in taste, not the height of comedy.
But no curtain with the wizard behind it has been pulled open here in my view, it's fine.
...
I think there needs to be some control over the veracity, some intrusion into the bubbles with which we inherit the web. If it takes a reddit admin to cattle prod around the fucking bat-shit insane /r/pizzagate idiocy into outrage and feeding their persecution complex sarcastically and ironically then I may actually be for it.
>That pretty much destroys the credibility of Reddit's commenting system in a single act.
Didn't they already do that when Morgan Freeman's AMA was staged? (If not Freeman, then another AMA. Some big celebrity's AMA was staged within the past year.)
That's different because it's an end-user action, not an internal action. I always know that the person who is saying that they're a Navy SEAL may not be or that it might be Morgan Freeman's or President Obama's PR person answering the questions. It's a lot different when the site admins use their root privileges to put words in people's mouths. Imagine if someone edited your comment or my comment to include a bunch of racist or hateful comments.
Also Clinton campaigns Correct the Record[0] took over Reddit during election. Most likely with reddits co-operation. To suppress the voices of Bernie supporters and later Trump supporters.
Oh please, it's not like the Trump campaign wasn't doing the same. If anything, they did it better because they had the support of SV's rich and powerful.
The tension that The_Donald and many alt-right subreddits place on reddit in general seems to be reaching a boiling point. I get the feeling the admins are just waiting for a credible reason to present itself that lets them cleanly wipe out all of them.
I think it's more about the way they express their opinions, rather than the content of those opinions.
Posting in ALL CAPS, posting fake news or insults to other members of the community, posting to incite anger, etc. does not make for good discussion, and hurts the sense of community. That, and bringing that to other subreddits via brigading, etc.
Plus heaps of users browse /r/all and the the_donald community is so large, and the upvotes come so quickly (some insist it's upvoting bots since it's so fast) that the top of /r/all is often the_donald. Right now the nr. 1 post and another one on all are from the_donald.
We're making some headway with /r/EnoughTrumpSpam though, which is often at the top of /r/all too. Personally I enjoy the /r/all war between The_Donald and EnoughTrumpSpam. Everyone has a "safe place" to retreat to now, so it's all more funny than harmful. (I read The_Donald, and EnoughTrumpSpam lets me post similarly-styled comments and get massive upvotes, so I generally enjoy it. Kind of an Internet performance art.)
Reddit is generally best consumed by selecting small subreddits. I really recommend against /r/all unless you enjoy internet drama and subreddit wars.
Claiming that EnoughTrumpSpam is making headway just supports that the Reddit of today is a cesspool. I greatly miss the Reddit of 5 to 10 years ago. I'd love to see a new community site spring that figures out how to maintain quality and grow. And no, small subreddits aren't the answer. Seriously, Reddit about oh 8 years ago was just fantastic.
HN for the most part does a good job maintaining comment quality, but it obviously has some advantages that a general community site would not have.
Maybe it is large? I mean, around 50% of Americans voted for Donald. Why do you want to find some kind of conspiracy... like it not, racist or not, but this is half of your society.
The real sensible thing to do would be to recognize reddit as a platform for open and free discussion. saying the wrong things or in the wrong way should be as far away from the admins concerns as possible, so long as the org itself is not threatened. I think reddit is far too obsessed with /r/thedonald, to the point where their obsession is actually becoming tangibly harmful (see: this post)
Well, the whackjob subreddit was a threat to the org because they were organizing harassment and slander/libel from there and it is a matter of time until there is a lawsuit for damages
And one can argue that the trump subreddit does the same in light of Twitter allegedly not being bought out because of the hate and toxicity. If Reddit can't secure investors and funding because of notoriety, they have to do something.
If reddit is trying to find investors and funding after 10 years of being one of the top traffic sites on the internet, well, that might be a pretty big red flag right there.
(ex-reddit employee, employed during the changes) - we'd been designing changes to the algorithm to not be just a few top subreddits, and to instead show more variety well before r/the_donald even started; in fact, it was one of the first things Steve took on when he came back. There's no anti-r/the_donald conspiracy; there's much less discussion about them internally than they'd like to believe.
I believe there were two edits from the time /r/the_donald became popular, the first was a more general edit as you say, but the second if I recall correctly was all about keeping the /r/the_donald from the top. Though it seemed to have backfired because after the second edit I saw more of them on /r/all not less.
The reason pretty much all posts in the_donald are upvoted by users is due to the fact Clintons Correct the record was downvoting the_donald posts in hordes.
Again if Reddit would not have aligned themselves with one candidate named Clinton they probably wouldn't have this problem now.
Except this thread and subsequent news articles being published on this event contradict that statement. If no one cared then why did the ceo care enough to slight of hand users posts?
I'm specifically referring to the algorithm, not Steve's database admin rights. If you're talking about my "there's no big conspiracy" - all I know is that Steve claims to be a lone agent, and I believe him. But, hey, I'm not there, dunno.
They modified it before the election (during implied they did it and then put it back, and unfairly implies it was because they wanted to "suppress the truth" or whatever), and to be clear it was to combat the fact that the_donald readers upvote all their posts with a huge amount of fervour that doesn't align with other subreddits.
This fact is what got me to learn about RES's feature to hide select subreddits from r/all. It's helped Make Reddit Great Again(TM) (or at least suck less). Now, when reddit's scroll jumps with many 10s of missing posts, I know T_D has been blasting and I smile in willful ignorance of their contents.
Not that it wouldn't appear, but that it would be weighted more harshly against. Specifically because their community upvotes in higher proportions than others (either due to upvote bots or just an over-enthusiastic / fervent community), to such an extend that breaks algorithms, and so the relative worth of their posts is set to be lower than other subreddits.
For real numbers, there are ~300k the_donald subs. If you are not a sub (and use their subreddit style) they have intentionally stopped you from up or down voting their posts or comments, and if you are a sub there is only an upvote button (seriously, something something safe spaces…). Looking at their front page, every single post has between ~3000-6000 "points" (which, taking spam magic out of the mix, means roughly that many upvotes minus downvotes).
Contrasting that, there are 9 million DIY subs, and most of their posts on their front page have <100 points, where a couple of ourliers have ~5k.
Or, there are 11 million r/news subs, and their front page consists of the top 4 posts being in the ~6000 points range, while the rest of that page is more in the hundreds.
I've looked at the_donald a few times to escape my own filter bubble and it's very much censored - stuff like Trump's recent reneging on the persecution of Clinton didn't appear at all, and comments calling out Trump's lie about having saved that Ford factory from relocation to Mexico were promptly deleted. It's in their rules and that's part of the package, it's extremely controlled.
Use uneddit.com on the_donald if you want to laugh.
But the point is, the_donald is obviously biased - it's literally in their name. On the other hand, r/pol is supposed to be politics in general, ideally free of bias, so censorship there is much more deplorable. I wouldn't care if r/leftwing_pol had a bias, but r/pol should be bias-free.
That was the whole point of The_Donald – to protest the perceived abuses of other subs by doing the same thing more blatantly.
That's what they mean when say they're a "free speech" subreddit: they're protesting against restrictions on free speech, they aren't providing a place for free speech.
That is just ridiculous. Creating false stories, calling out anyone who doesnt agree with them with insulting names, going on witch hunts etc is not protesting the restrictions on free speech. This only strengthens the resolve of people who want to restrict free speech even more.
That's the kind of site they're running though. Make your own community with relatively lax rules and freedom of speech, even if the speech is low brow. Kind of like some of the *chans.
If that's not what they want to have (as its clearly making the CEO on edge), why not enforce some strict rules? The people they don't like will simply flock to other communities that will allow it and it becomes their problem.
I agree. I get that free speech is important, but humans on the internet are vile. That is a fact and it hasn't changed in the decades of online communities we have trialed.
Only communities small enough, or moderated enough, to not be interesting to a troll or nefarious person are spared.
The idea of a completely self governed haven of mass free speech is a wondeful one, but no community large enough stays uncorrupted. It has never worked.
It is the ideals and application of those ideals through moderation that make any community bearable, just like in real life.
If I am to be part of a community I would rather it moderated, otherwise the people of the internet ruin all things in time.
I just want to have useful conversations, not circlejerk over freedom of speech while being interrupted by adolescent screaming.
Just to clarify, I believe free speech communities should exist and I am glad they do. I just find that the trolls inevitably take over, and that's no fun. I feel like reddit is currently battling this, and their decision seems to be to hold course, moderate more, and appeal to advertisers.
I disagree. The beauty of reddit is that it has subcommunities. That way, like-minded prople can flock together and even enforce strict censorship rules that make their community better, and reddit as a whole can still be a bastion of free speech (because they allow such diverse communities). Too bad that's not how it actually is...
That is the idea definitely. It mostly works too, just like you said it's a diverse group of subcommunities all with their own rules. But they found that free speech platform wide meant some truly nefarious subcommunities could exist on their infrastructure, these subcommunities didn't self regulate enough. Quite reasonably they have decided they don't want that to happen and have stepped up the platform wide censorship.
The contention seems to be where they draw the line, and just how free their version of free is.
I got an idea. Current machine learning techniques should be advanced enough to detect trolls. What if we have a community that is completely moderated by an unsupervised AI?
The good thing is that the AI can be completely open: how is it trained? what are the parameters? This AI can still have bias, but that bias will be obvious to anyone joining this community.
> Current machine learning techniques should be advanced enough to detect trolls.
So your idea to counteract people playing psychological games on others is to put something without the common sense of a three year old in charge of moderation. That's just glorious.
That you think they're actually expressing their political views instead of shitposting to rile up actual trump voters while pissing off the rest of the internet is fairly naive.
Fair enough. Your question sounded leading to me and given the atmosphere i failed to provide benefit of the doubt.
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.
The bigger issue is with subreddits like r/politics that you would think to be at least somewhat non partisan but was controlled by correct the record during election.
A couple months ago I was on the bus, and a religious person started preaching. Loudly. It was really annoying. I asked him to stop, and he hid behind some reference to his constitutionally protected rights. I did nothing, but I really wanted to do something. A certain subreddit reminds me of preacher duds on the bus.
I wish I had better tools to deal with assholes. Savvy leadership can come up with clever solutions sometimes, but it'd be nice to somehow reduce the need to be clever.
> As much as we try to maintain a good relationship with you all, it does get old getting called a pedophile constantly.
constant fighting and complaining with other subs as well (which normally they would just shut down, but (un)fortunately, the r/the_donald mods are doing all they can do prevent that being needed, so its a constant minor (but active) problem, instead of being a large one-time problem that they can just ban)
Its the whole concept of poisoning the well, you have some people acting bad, and then the other people act bad in return, and then everyone watching just feels bad for watching it, and it makes everyone feel shit
So you think wiping out a subreddit community is reasonable because some members of that community do idiotic things? People from a subreddit as large as The_Donald aren't some homogenous group.
I think there's also an argument to be made that acceptable behavior is socially learned, and having others reinforce destructive behavior is a form of legitimacy.
the donald is well moderated, esp. from doxxing and other personal stuff. they are of course very lively and get to the nerves of leftists, but that's about it. it's actually quite entertaining if you can leave behind enmities (and don't take it too seriously).
Considering the thread thread above, I certainly wouldn't call it "well moderated". The all caps and inciting users come off as extremely childish and unprofessional.
I don't know what Steve was thinking, but 10 seconds in that thread makes me start to understand.
/r/The_Donald is a place where a mix of trolls, fascists, and white nationalists get riled up, and work to start a horrifying new chapter in history.
Fascists and white nationalists defend it by claiming it's just clownish fun. (which, unamusingly, is EXACTLY the same explanation given by the supporters of fascism in Italy, and Russia, and Germany). Trolls really are having fun, they just don't give a fuck.
It's propaganda. It's gross. All of the donald's loser readers and writers have the right to share their bad ideas; but they have no particular right to say it on Reddit.
/r/The_Donald has changed a bit since the election has passed. There was some serious investigative work being done on the wikileaks podesta files. They uncovered things that the maintream media missed because they were too busy convincing people Hillary was going to win by a landslide. Things were uncovered that got some powerful people fired.
It's since turned back into mostly memes and shitposting though.
All I'm asking is to not automatically dismiss it all as propaganda. Regardless of your political affiliation, the podesta files should be looked at very closely. Most of the mainstream media glossed over it and the only place that really dissected the emails was /r/The_Donald. It's concerning that wikileaks was rarely, if ever, mentioned in /r/politics.
If that's their positive contribution to the world, then consider me unimpressed.
I abhor the notion that it's acceptable to hack the private communications of a political opponent, and publish them wholesale. I hate that people have decided it's somehow normal (or worse, noble) to engage in such chicanery because it was politically expedient. It's entirely different than other forms of leaks.
Wholesale surveillance is a terrible idea no matter who is doing it.
It's really effective propaganda, because most folks aren't clever enough to realize that the lack of countervailing scandal is solely because the other party didn't do any hacking... but it's a terrible precedent, and anybody who participated in it should be deeply ashamed of themselves.
Anybody who praises it should borrow a moral compass.
Ashamed? Snowden illegally obtained his information and leaked it to the public. Are you ashamed that you now know about the NSA's surveillance?
edit: Once the information is out there, it's out there. You should not dismiss illegal or unethical activity because of the way in which that information was obtained.
Personal property rights and personal freedom are critical to freedom; and anybody who argues otherwise should be deeply ashamed of themselves. Even (perhaps especially) when they're talking about the rights of those who disagree with them politically.
It's Thanksgiving, and today I give thanks that not everybody wants to shit on freedom and liberty the way you do, just because it makes campaigning simpler.
As for your silly argument about Snowden, he didn't engage in wholesale surveillance; the NSA's wholesale surveillance was public knowledge before his leak; and his leak was meant to change policy, not to attack a political opponent. As such, absolutely none of my criticisms apply to him.
Using HN primarily as a place to do political battle is an abuse of this site. Since your account(s) do that and you've ignored our requests not to, we've banned this one. Please stop creating accounts to break the HN guidelines with.
Having had talked to actual russian nationalists and fascists, it's complete bull. Their views are based on search for sincerety and almost religious revelations, it's a completely opposite mindset of internet trolls.
Having lived in the middle east where fascism and totalitarianism is the norm, the Donald subreddit was child's play. The politics sub reddit had more Implicit propaganda in favor of trump and Bernie (from my cursory readings) but both were pretty bad. I don't remember any pro Hillary propaganda when I used to visit the website. I just stopped going to reddit during this election. I think that helped me keep my sanity.
You could say the same thing about fake TV news comedy shows where lots of millenials get their news. It's all over the spectrum. Be careful what you wish for when you want "bad ideas" banned.
We've banned this account for showing up just to do ideological battle. That's an abuse of the site. We're happy to unban accounts if you email hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll post only civilly and substantively in the future.
The CEO of Reddit is officially a cursed position, on par with the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts.
In other circumstances this might have gotten laughed off, but The Donald has really developed a bunker mentality IMO after having mods doxxed, the algorithm changed to end their front page dominance, lots of other subs being anti-Trump, and the general tenor of the campaign against Trump.
I hope Spez can take a nice relaxing weekend holiday and let someone else deal with this shit-hurricane.
- Yishan Wongs various missteps and eventual bizzare (looking) departure
- Ellen Pao had haters on the site from day 1, Hitler memes etcetera. And then when they fired u/Chooter all hell broke loose and some subs were shut down by their own mods. The integrity of AMA was permanently ruined by this IMO. Anyway, Pao was hated by the idiots immediately, but hated universally after this.
- Spez started strong but this is going to affect his credibility, and seems to me to be part of the same downward spiral that happens to the CEOs when they get caught up in some bullshit happening on the site.
No kidding. They create a platform, and then continually panic like "Oh no! People are using the platform! What do we do? How do we stop people using the platform while making it seem like we want people to use the platform? People are using the site! Something must be done!"
Because it is his fault, that is why I think he shouldn't try to personally deal with it. The Donald was attacking him personally, which is against Reddit policy (no personal attacks,) but he fumbled the ball and weakened his ability to reform them. I don't think there has ever been trust between the mods of The Donald and the reddit admins.
Who would benefit from the departure of Spez? Overall, except from this one incident, he has allowed the continued existence of The Donald. I'm not sure the next CEO would do the same. The only person that I think would benefit from the departure of Spez is Spez.
I can't be the only one that finds this pretty funny, right? Forget about whatever dumb imagined political angle of it. If you go on someone's website and spam "fuck [admin's name]" and call them a pedophile based on ridiculous accusations, it's probably only just because of misplaced mercy that you're not banned for harassment right off the bat. These aren't paying users, and they don't have personal data locked up in their accounts that they may lose access to. Whatever forum they're posting to owes them nothing and they do worse than spit on that. That a wordfilter gets applied to some posts of some users that were basically asking for a ban is pretty funny.
I've helped run a popular forum before. We added silly global wordfilters at times, and on a couple occasions when seriously-rule-breaking users repeatedly evaded bans, we applied customized wordfilters to them to help drive them off. (Dropping all of the vowels that weren't at the start or end of a word from their posts to make it look like lazy teenager txtspeak was a favorite.) It worked and people found it hilarious.
Reddit used to be a place where intelligent users had a quality discussion. It used to happen. At least in my imagination. What I see now is a machine which produces memes (still going strong there) and propaganda (growing stronger) but the discussion is on a much lower intellectual level.
I agree with what you posted that memes and propaganda are still going/growing strong... there is still a TON TON TON of discourse that is important and intellectual.
S:N ratio and all that....
Noise may be growing like mad (Shills/corps/whatever-other-noise-producers/etc).... but Signal is growing as well.
The thing is that NvS ratio has to increase in order to keep status quo....
That doesnt mean that certain stories are not true but that perhaps they are pushed aside with noise to keep certain things seemingly implausible...
Was this before or after 'Jailbait' was the most popular search term that brought people to the site? Or that it became the premiere destination for recruiting and organizing racists?
I can put the politics aside. But the ethics? No. The_Donald might be awful, in your opinion. But what spez did isn't just awful. It's the canonical example of bad behavior on the internet from a mod.
Interesting way to put it. "in your opinion." Are racist comments and harassment awful only in "opinion"? Are we not at a point where spewing racism in a public forum is not "factually awful" now?
I've been to the -chans, and I firmly believe in freedom of expression (my opinion is more complicated, but I'm simplifying). So while I think they're awful, I still think that people should have a place to say them, whether or not that is reddit.
Also, while I think it's awful, there may be others who do not.
According to anti-discrimination laws in many countries, not exactly. Some of it is down to judges opinion but many times there are concrete boundaries for what is considered both harassment and racism.
You say that like this is some new phenomenon. SRS has been around for as long as I can remember. It's probably one of the most vile harassment engines because it disguises itself as a wholesome cause.
Just because we think what spez did is disgraceful doesn't mean we're a bunch of alt-right Donald-worshipers. I'm not a fan of either, I just think editing message text like this is disgusting.
I think the admins were quietly hoping that Trump would lose the election and that it would die out or they would be able to remove the sub without being accused of taking a side against a presidential candidate. But now that Trump actually won the election they have a big problem in their hands.
I'm banned from /r/The_Donald, and am/was a #NeverTrump person, and I find the subreddit to be hilarious and one of the few things Reddit has going for it right now. Everything is basically what people post on Facebook, the original content of Reddit is sparse.
Wow. And he knew it was stupid when he did it. There's been a lot of talk about having the right temperament for leadership lately, and this is an excellent example of lacking it.
While I strongly disagree with what he did, the level of fake news and conspiracy theories hitting the front page has been toxic and out of control this year.
Everyone has been accusing of Facebook and twitter for spreading fake news while reddit has also been absolute shit at it.
I think your cast of 'fake news' may be way too narrow.
Remember the WMDs? The babies thrown out of the humidi-cribs? Jessica Lynch? This goes back through all news. Dan Rather's comment on air after seeing the classified Zapruder film,"went forward with considerable violence"? A complete lie. All news contains significant spin. And most mainstream news is completely fake.
No, what they mean now when they say "fake news" is "news that disagrees with my political leaning".
There's a lot of theories going around because there's quite a lot of circumstantial evidence. Just because there's no proof does not automatically make it a conspiracy theory.
So what you're saying is maybe Hillary Clinton did have an FBI agent murdered, and maybe Putin and the Dalai Lama really did meet up to talk about how Clinton and Obama started ISIS, a few days after the Pope endorsed Trump.
Wow. What a shitty response. If people responded to your comments with that kind of non-sequitur you'd be all over them like a rash. But then you dole our rubbish like this.
Here's some "fake news" for you, from a news site listed on the fake news list:
One of the most egregious examples of fake news is the story from the nonexistent news organization, The Denver Guardian, about an FBI agent involved in the Clinton investigation being found dead in a suspected murder suicide. This article was posted on November 5, 2016. It is unequivocally fake news. The creator of the fake article, is the CEO of a company named Disinfomedia.
There is no other side to this story. There is no partisan tilt that cherry picks facts to construct a narrative. It is entirely fabricated, and crafted specifically to disinform its audience.
I would like to explore the frontiers of what you're willing not to dismiss out of hand. Can I interest you in a story about a secret blood cult John Podesta runs? How about the Lizard People?
All I know is that John Podesta and his brother were invited to a spirit cooking dinner [1]. I haven't seen any evidence they attended but it was an interesting email that was uncovered.
See, this is the kind of dumb crap that isn't news.
In less than 2 minutes of googling and reading you can find a comprehensive answer to all your questions, but instead you put forward a leading statement like "it was an interesting email that was uncovered."
It genuinely was not. It's not interesting, it's mundane.
Reddit has large radical left and radical right communities that are constantly fighting and overwhelm the site with political drama and propaganda. If they don't do something about it they are going to lose the users that come there to look at cats.
That's the problem -- there should be no "Reddit". The only interesting part of Reddit are the communities and there's no reason why the_donald and SRS can't exist under the same reddit.com domain. I really wish /u/spez et al. would take a hands-off approach except for cases where users are breaking the law.
Yep, that's the libertarian dream. It makes me nostalgic for the 90's when the web was new.
Now we know that spam and abuse make any large Internet forum suck. Your choice: moderation or cesspool.
Also, getting rid of the really extreme filth on the Internet is no fun and people generally have to be paid to do it, which is one of the things that keeps larger social networks in business.
I'm not convinced. Maybe a lot of people think of 4chan as a "cesspool" but I think it's actually quite functional with minimal moderation. They have a small volunteer staff to delete the absolute worst of the worst and let the rest roam free. The most radical thing they've ever done is made containment boards to keep the noise down.
I think the real problem is that sites like 4chan makes a tiny fraction of what Reddit does.
It works for 4chan's users or they wouldn't hang out there. But the level of moderation is a competitive feature. Users decide where to hang out based on the quality of discussion, and moderation has a direct effect on that (in both directions - too heavy-handed or too hands-off).
Also, in the end, the people who host a forum get to choose whether they really want to host a cesspool or not. If it's not working for them, they can shut it down, or maybe outsource moderation to Facebook or Disqus.
One of the big problems still is brigading. Even creating a containment board doesn't stop that, and I suspect having a board allows bad behavior to be legitimized through peer approval, and snowballs it. Also, it's so much easier to shitpost than generate quality content, just like its easier to lie than to debunk a lie.
In an October 2014 Wired story, Adrian Chen documented the work of front line moderators operating in modern-day sweatshops. In Manila, Chen witnessed a secret "army of workers employed to soak up the worst of humanity in order to protect the rest of us." Media coverage and researchers have compared their work to garbage collection, but the work they perform is critical to preserving any sense of decency and safety online, and literally saves lives — often those of children. For front-line moderators, these jobs can be crippling. Beth Medina, who runs a program called SHIFT (Supporting Heroes in Mental Health Foundational Training), which has provided resilience training to Internet Crimes Against Children teams since 2009, details the severe health costs of sustained exposure to toxic images: isolation, relational difficulties, burnout, depression, substance abuse, and anxiety. "There are inherent difficulties doing this kind of work," Chen said, "because the material is so traumatic."
The whole thing is worth a read, in a couple of sessions if necessary.
But, to be clear, at the moment Reddit is a moderated cesspool. It's neither embracing free-speech, or quality-control... it's managing to irk both sides and remain unsure of what kind of platform it really wants to be when it grows up.
I disagree. As nice as it would be, subreddits do not exist in isolation from one another and very often, trends and behavior set in one subreddit trickle to others. This was noticeable leading up to the removal of /r/fatpeoplehate et al, and it's noticable right now. The flamewar between the radical left and right flows onto almost all default subreddits, and it does drive overall quality down.
But there's a huge difference between strictly moderation the (default) subreddits in a fair, neutral or balanced way, and deleting whole subcommunities because they "spam" r/all. Maybe a better idea. Would be to delete r/all?!
I say this all the time and people immediately accuse me of being a racist.
Reddit should let everything organically perform, and remove things that are against the law. Not things that are against their left-leaning political agenda.
Aaron Swartz would not like Reddit in it's current shape.
Reddit has evolved. IMO it as a place to let the lefts and rights to hash it out serves a much better purpose than just a cat picture showoff, (not that I don't enjoy the cat pictures).
A Digg reskin* with a huge library of adult content.
*By Digg reskin, I am referring to Digg right before everyone left. I mean, there is a high possibility that any sort of "Reddit v3" would cause people to leave.
What would it take to show the current internet generation that what they really want is usenet? It's impossible to alter a usenet post after it's been sent out. It's decentralized, uncensored, has no economic interests of a company to consider, and no worry of going away when the company calls it quits. It's everything your average redditor wants.
Because spam-filtering and moderation are useful forms of censorship that keep communities alive. In the US, I need to at least be able to remove child pornography (and other illegal content) so that the FBI doesn't come after me.
I will once again point out the irony of r/The_Donald members constantly complaining about SJWs being up in arms over their racist, sexist, homophobic rants. Yet the second something like this drops, it's the end of the world. Reddit as a whole is going to crumble because the CEO got sick of their childish antics.
It's one thing to "complaining about",,, generalizations. It's entirely different for a CEO to abuse his power and censor those he disagrees with on a social media site.
He should be let go for this! He is literally putting words in peoples mouths!!
It calls into question the credibility of the whole site.
And yet Donald Trump is blocking his press core [0], calling for an end to SNL because they made fun of him [1], telling CNN execs that they are all liars [2], revoking credentials of the Washington Post [3] among many others [4]. Sure, the reddit CEO doing it is bad... the president elect though...
Yeah - but imagine that Paul Graham w HN for example disagreed with your position.
Let's say that instead of allowing you to express this last comment - he used his admin privileges and made your comment PRO trump.
Do you see the difference?
Having a strong opposing - even annoying - demanding - opinion is not the same as impersonating others and censoring their words.
No, let's instead say that you and all your pals were spamming "fuck pg" in a "pg is a pedo" thread you made, and he changed your comments to instead say "fuck gamechangr". That would be pretty funny. And also a HUGE HUGE DIFFERENCE from "changing your political messaging to be for what it was supposed to be against".
People are getting too tied up in what this "potential power" and "loss of integrity" means.
In reality is it means nothing. There never has been and never should be a guarantee or even an assumption of integrity of comments posted on the internet unless they are cryptographically signed.
He trolled some trolls for the lulz. It was a bad idea, hopefully he just drops the banhammer on all of them next time. Hell, ban the entire subreddit while you are at it for excessive harassment and be done with it.
It does make sense... however my point is that the next president of the United States talking about manipulating media is much bigger deal than someone changing my comments on a site. Both are bad... one is much worse.
I think we can agree to disagree on which is worse.
The next president is making a bunch of public actions that will be critiqued, audited, and probably checked / balanced as the government was set up to do. The CEO of reddit is SECRETLY tampering / modifying the "speech" and content of private citizens without any checks, balances, or even repercussions (so far).
I'd also argue that reddit has a more direct engagement model with private citizens that makes this hit closer to home (i.e. if we actually were real-life friends, or internet buddies for years, and one of our messages/comments to each other was modified that could cause far more direct impact — e.g. "you" convince me to commit a crime because you have my trust as a "personal" friend)
I'm honestly surprised he publicly admitted to it at all, and I'd further be shocked if he doesn't end up stepping down because of this incident.
Except Trump is doing it secretly. Many of the banned press members don't find out until they try to enter a press conference. We only know about it because they come out and say "Trumps security officials blocked me from entering". It's not like there is a list of who is allowed and who is not that is publically available.
I guess my true point is the hypocrisy of T_D users complaining about spez's actions when the man they are so fond of is doing the same. Except he's the president.
Maybe...but that's soo besides the point. Plenty of presidents do that - maybe all?
This is not a partisan issue??? It's not the "T_D users complaining" that put it all over HN's.
It's unacceptable for CEO's of social media companies to impersonate users. EVER > EVER > EVER.
He could have deleted or changed the comments and posted a note and most of the outrage would go away, but he didn't. He impersonated and censored users comments. Such a slippery slope.
This post is decaying off of the front page of HN very quickly (every few refreshes it drops a position or more), despite have more upvotes and being posted more recently. Reddit is a YC company as well. Is this post being artificially pushed down?
Nope. Literally the first rule of HN moderation is that we don't do that—i.e., we moderate stories less, not more, when they're negative about YC or a YC startup. Also, we were slacking this afternoon (where by slacking I mean hacking on an arc compiler) and had no clue this thread existed.
It set off the overheated discussion detector (a.k.a. flamewar detector), which lowers the rank of a thread. We do turn that penalty off for particularly substantive discussions—which, though this may surprise you, I'm not sure this one is. Not every Reddit drama shitshow is uniform in its excellence. Can I say that without evil catnip effects?
Edit: ok, we've reduced the penalty and changed the title to something the post actually says. (The submitted title, "Reddit CEO admits to altering user comments that were critical of him", breaks the HN guideline about not changing titles unless they are misleading or linkbait. Please don't do that when submitting here.)
-1 to the title change. The current title doesn't convey the situation effectively and imo serves to hide the true nature of the incident. There isn't really an article title to source from here, anyway.
Here's what I just emailed to a user who asked about the same thing:
I think people can pretty well figure out what the story is from the linked page and the HN comments. No?
There's a downside to spelling things out completely—it gets people out of the habit of doing their own work to figure things out. Admittedly it can sometimes be helpful for getting a story attention in the first place, but once it's on the front page, there's nearly always a good reason for that, and it's good to expect readers to have to dig a little sometimes to find it.
Edit: There's another aspect too. When a title uses language that isn't from the article itself, it typically departs from the article in ways that subtly reframe it into something it isn't. (This is also the case with many media pieces whose headlines are not written by their authors.) For example, the courtroom tone of the submitted title frames this story as a grave breach of trust and leaves out the (I'll be generous) equally important aspect that this is a Reddit shitshow and nothing about it can be taken completely seriously.
This is an important effect to avoid, and sticking to language from the article itself is the way to avoid it.
>There's a downside to spelling things out completely
Are you gonna make every title a puzzle?
Or change the title back?
Or keep your YC-serving contradiction?
I didn't know who "spez" was until this incident! The title should at least say Reddit! This is a terribly mystifying and non-descriptive title and the previous one was completely accurate.
EDIT WITH REPLY TO THE FOLLOWING:
I only found this thread because I searched "reddit" to see what the discussion was here after reading about this incident in the Yahoo News article. That means I would have passed right over it and not known this article was about Reddit if I had started here because I didn't know what u/spez was yet.
And the title you gave this isn't even a title from the content, it's a partial quote of a line from within the body of a comment underneath a page with a completely different title. All the examples you linked were to pages with titles that were then used or lightly trimmed into the title here (possibly with a year added).
No, we're not gonna "make every title a puzzle"—that would be "the opposite extreme".
This has no effect on YC pro or con, it's too inconsequential. Also, we don't moderate HN to be YC-serving. See my comment upthread. Doing so would not be YC-serving anyhow, just idiotic.
Domain names are part of the title on HN, so the title does say Reddit.
I'm glad you know who "spez" is now! See, that wasn't so hard!
FWIW I like the moderation. It's made me think before hitting [reply], and I try a little bit harder to avoid the obvious shit-show threads now.
About titles: I see you get complaints about titles. I'm not sure if people understand how often commentors will respond to the title. I've submitted articles and seen that people haven't read the article but have responded directly to the title.
But also, it's pretty hard for submitters to understand what to change about a title. And the desire to provide a descriptive title is strong, and there are no reminders when submitting about not doing that.
> There's a downside to spelling things out completely
Are you gonna make every title a puzzle?
No, it doesn't need to be all of them --- just enough to provide a healthy level of 'environmental enrichment'. I presume you are familiar with the 'herding cats' metaphor for programmers. Well, we're the cats, and 'dang' is the herder.
Environmental enrichment encourages the use of "puzzle feeders" that require the cats to practice their hunting instincts rather than expecting their meals to be provided to them in a bowl: http://www.catbehaviorassociates.com/the-benefits-of-using-p...
It's like having having some obscure one word titles on the front page for some company/software/hardware/whatever that I have never heard of and the link content does not make it much more clear either.
Some readers want HN to prepare everything for them like mother birds who chew the worms for their babies. That's not how HN works. Here it's good for readers to have to work a little.
I hadn't seen it before, but your reaction to 'tl;dr' at the end of that search in the Privacy Badger thread is fantastic (which is to say, it matches my own feelings): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7789697. Are you still fighting the good fight, or have you since given in?
Honestly I feel like all this boils down to "I'm friends with spez" and I don't like that. You are suppressing this story. Ironically your moderation in this thread is pretty similar to the behavior on Reddit that's being called out in the first place.
You're imagining things you don't like and then not liking them. I'm not sure I can help much, but I'll try.
I'm not friends with Steve. I was introduced to him years ago, when we went through YC, and that's it. I'd be shocked if he remembered.
Moderators put the story back on the front page, so obviously we weren't trying to suppress it. The thread has over 600 points and over 600 comments now and there is at least one repost nearly as big.
I reverted the title because that's standard practice on HN and spent most of my evening in here patiently trying to explain that to you and others. Actually, normally I'd just do a why bother and give people the title they clamour for, but something about this case struck me as ridiculous, and I'm not going to throw years of moderation practice out the window just because Reddit culture had one of its tantrums here. The reason I feel that way has nothing to do with this particular story; it has to do with the principles of this place, which it's my job to protect.
(If you must know, I actually kind of like it when Reddit shitshows hit HN. The hivemind usually only has indignation for one forum's management at a time. I feel a little guilty about this, but when the wasps go off in a frenzy and are busy stinging someone else, I can't help but enjoy it that, at least for a little while, they're not stinging me. Also, when Reddit is the story I get to do as the Romans do and joke a little. Just a little though.)
No, reverting a title is not "similar" to editing a user's comment. Comments are individual property and titles are shared, so that's like comparing painting a road sign to rewriting someone's diary. A hint that they're not "similar" is that one has been established practice for years while the other is currently provoking multiple rage threads.
When I referred to "you", I kind of meant YC. Fair point, though.
I find all moderator actions inherently distasteful except in the cases of obvious trolling. In this case, though, it's particularly important that posts about i.e. censorship get their fair shake. The title you changed it to didn't really come from anywhere (Reddit comments don't have a title) and fails to convey exactly what's going on. Stepping in to change it like that reduces the weight of the title to the point of being meaningless to lots of people - I'm sure plenty of Reddit users don't even know who spez is.
Alright, I'll buy that, though I don't agree that the story didn't get a "fair shake". It got quite a fair few wiggles and is still getting them. But the point about it being a quasi-censorship story seems reasonable, so I'll change the title back to the submitter's for now.
It would be much better if the title used language from the article itself, so if you or anyone can figure out a fair way to do that, I'd appreciate the suggestion. Obviously my attempt to do so was not universally well received.
As for "I find all moderator actions inherently distasteful except in the cases of obvious trolling", that doesn't rub me the right way at all, for two reasons. First it implies that most of our work is useless, and if that's true, we're fools, wasting our time. Alternatively, if it isn't useless, you're spending time here benefitting from all of it, in which case a line like that seems pretty smug.
Glad you changed the title back, though it's kind of a moot point now. You're right that this story is getting a fair shake now thanks to a seperate post, though.
>As for "I find all moderator actions inherently distasteful except in the cases of obvious trolling", that doesn't rub me the right way at all, for two reasons. First it implies that most of our work is useless, and if that's true, we're fools, wasting our time. Alternatively, if it isn't useless, you're spending time here benefitting from all of it, in which case a line like that seems pretty smug.
Well, I'm sure you've got your hands full keeping up with spam and trolling and such, but fwiw I have disagreed (often silently) with probably 75%ish of the moderator actions I've noticed on HN.
In my opinion, the "title change" is precisely the opposite of moderating YC-related stories less. In this case it [substantially] obfuscates the meaning of what transpired.
As a die-hard reader, and very rare commenter/submitter, it's frankly very difficult to see this as anything other than obfuscation -- especially given the context & the possible titles for a situation like this.
IMO the original title is about as spot-on as I could have come up with, and the current title is about as ambiguous as I could have come up with; how about at least changing the pronouns to have some context (ie "I" => "Reddit CEO").
That wasn't the original title. The original title is: The Admins are suffering from low energy - have resorted to editing YOUR posts. Sad!
You're objecting to the most routine of HN practices, which is to replace rewritten titles with original titles (except when the original is misleading or linkbait). In this case it doesn't fit in 80 chars and is pretty baity, so we did what we often do and took the principal sentence from the first paragraph.
Since you're a die-hard reader and therefore we love you, I'd consider suspending this most routine of HN practices just to make you happy, but first you'd have to convince me that you truly, upon reflection, think that the wording of an HN title about a Reddit shitshow is a serious trust issue. I can't bring myself to believe that any of you are really so troubled and zealous about this; it's too silly. Reddit shitshows aren't serious to begin with, and this isn't even that, it's meta Reddit ephemera.
What's the HN policy on editing titles? Is there always a note in the comments to say that the title was edited? I'm probably missing something, but it seems like the HN admins' ability to edit titles is susceptible to the same kinds of problems as the Reddit admins' ability to edit comments.
We usually post something to that effect, but not always. For one thing, not all the moderators are public. For another, posting that we made a punctuation change, or some such, is tedious.
But the important point is that on HN, titles do not belong to the submitter—they're shared—so submitters don't have any special rights over them. On the contrary, the site guidelines specifically ask them not to change an article's title unless it is misleading or linkbait: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Comments are very different, and we don't edit them without saying so, unless a user asks us to. (Though a few times I've broken down and corrected an obvious typo.)
I've been here fairly regularly for 8 years and didn't know about it, so I'm not sure I agree that it's "well known". It definitely isn't in the FAQ's section about how stories are ranked: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html -- which, in my opinion, would be an excellent place to describe it.
I'm glad dang answered though since I've been wondering for quite a while why some stories seemed to sink much faster than others.
Putting it in the FAQ is a good idea, and if anyone who doesn't see it there in a week or two would email hn@ycombinator.com to bug me about it, I'd be thankful. Except wait, are you saying anyone reads the FAQ?
An idea that came up recently which we're mulling over is showing 'vouch' links (or something analogous) on stories that are being penalized this way, so users can indicate that they think a discussion is really substantive.
Sure, I'll check in a week or so and remind you if needed.
> Except wait, are you saying anyone reads the FAQ?
Fair point :)
The 'vouch' idea is interesting, but I'm not sure if you really need another click mechanism to accomplish it -- if people above a certain karma threshold are voting it up, it's a topic that people integrated into the community do think is worth being seen, regardless of the quality of the discussion currently in the thread. That said, it might be worth trying -- having a visible indicator might result in a different reaction; it's possible that the majority of such stories would get vouched, which could be a useful signal in tuning your algorithm.
You could try the opposite: give entirely random people the ability to vouch.
I have no idea if this would work, but.. I've been doing lots of ML lately where it is often pretty hard to beat random, and throwing noise into a system make it much more robust.
I agree about noise, but you'd need to be careful. People would try to game it by giving themselves as many random chances as possible, by making many accounts or doing whatever was necessary.
It could undermine the legitimacy of the system, as well as put more load on the server.
How did he make the changes to the comments? Is it via an audited admin function available to Reddit staff or by directly modifying the backend data store?
I ask because I want to figure out if anyone else that works at Reddit was aware of this. It's one thing to have the top of the house do something this betrayingly asinine, but I'd consider it much worse if other staff at Reddit were aware of this.
What made this situation more interesting is that Washington Post cited comments from that edited thread in their article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11.... That's not a good look for Conde Nast - should the proper media cites now have a disclaimer that the user "apparently" wrote such and such post?
I would guess that this exposure is also the reason he edited this thread in particular.
It might to some people. It doesn't for me though.
I personally want to see more corporate leadership taking responsibility and leadership for backing up their personal views and those of their employees. A good example is how Grubhub's CEO Matt Maloney sent a company-wide email about the culture of the company that I respect quite a lot. http://media.grubhub.com/media/press-releases/press-release-...
Now do I agree with exactly what /u/spez did? Personally, the vindictive part of me likes the idea of fucking around with the morons in that subreddit. But as the ceo of the company, no. If it was any employee that had done it, they would likely have been terminated or at least had a severe write-up, no matter how much the leadership agreed with it. But when its the ceo, I'm not sure what the outcome will/should be.
To be completely honest, we have to remember that reddit is a company and not the public airwaves. There is no requirement that it be a bastion of free speech for all users. If I were running reddit, I would have banned that subreddit months ago. Any users found to be making racist, homophobic, hateful, or any other kind of similar commentary would have been permabanned a long time ago. The internet is a big place and its already too full of negativity. There are no socially positive reasons to provide places for it to fester.
Maloney's email was terrible. I would never want to work for someone like that, and never will if I can avoid it. It was a kind and wonderful thing to send a company-wide email saying something to the tune of "If you ever feel marginalized in any way, come to me personally, immediately." He then promptly shat all over the goodwill by indirectly calling for Trump voters to quit. Screw that. I would have loved to have seen a brazen employee call him on that.
That's fair and I respect your point of view. But I have a different perspective. I'll grant that emotions are still heightened from the election, but if anything it has brought some long-term underlying issues to the surface. I'm no longer comfortable working for/with people that take positions that disenfranchise and discriminate against other people.
I actually think we agree more than it may seem, even if not entirely. I too am no longer comfortable working for or with those people. I just think it's egregiously bad form for a CEO to send a mass email calling for X group to quit if Y. Whether that's that you voted for a political candidate, or whatever. It's a pitchfork-y mentality that I think only serves to embolden whoever the perceived opposition is, even if it's in the medium or long term rather than the immediate. In this case, it's the racists/alt-right/etc. And to me, actions like Maloney's only strengthen communities like /r/The_Donald. Just my 2c.
Yeah I agree. Actually I'm not traveling for Thanksgiving. If you're in SF and want to get lunch tomorrow send me a message at charles@geuis.com. Be happy to chat for a bit.
> I personally want to see more corporate leadership taking responsibility and leadership for backing up their personal views and those of their employees. A good example is how Grubhub's CEO Matt Maloney sent a company-wide email about the culture of the company that I respect quite a lot.
I'm guessing that's likely because you agree with the political stances of Spez and Mr Maloney. Would you be equally supportive of a leader of a large company espousing the virtue of traditional gender roles or other socially conservative stances?
Well, to be completely honest, yes. It would be honest and help to get away from the common political non-stance that most companies take.
Two good examples of this are Chick-fil-a and Hobby Lobby. (I worked for Chick-fil-a briefly when I was a teenager. I appreciated never having to work on a Sunday.) Both of these companies establish policies based on the belief structures of their founders. I readily admit to being an liberal atheist and am proud to stand behind that. While I may not agree personally with those policies, the companies are very forthcoming about them and as a customer, it helps me to make decisions about whether I am comfortable or not doing business with them.
To be even more specific, I want leadership of companies to be more open and honest with these things specifically because we have a lot of hard-won laws in the US to prevent discrimination. I want conservative leadership to be called out and potentially punished when they violate the law, rather than being allowed to execute their discriminatory beliefs in private and hide them under made-up reasons.
Now just to round that last statement out, I do not stand for other progressives and liberals to discriminate against people just because they hold personal conservative viewpoints. As long as everyone is obeying the law and not letting their beliefs affect the lives of others, I seriously couldn't care less what they think. Do I personally believe that conservatives are lacking in basic levels of education and compassion for other people? Yes, yes I do. Do I believe that those people should somehow be discriminated against just because they are happy to discriminate against other people? No, I don't.
So I guess to summarize the answer to your question: Yes I have similar political stances as those two, but I want more openness among all corporate leadership because it makes it much easier and clearer to decide which companies to do business with.
Based on what you've written here, I think you might find Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" interesting. He's been involved in a lot of recent research into human psychology, morals, and understanding how people can arrive at different political stances.
What credibility? Even on 4chan, which has next to zero credibility AND no voting/reputation system intended for 'self-policing' (so it is not likely to ever become credible), some users express their dissatisfaction with low quality or spammy posts by suggesting the perpetrator go to, or return to, Reddit. This is also a common occurrence here — should a HN user make a useless post, particularly when invoking a meme or trolling, that user is often reminded that HN is not Reddit. This is not a proof of Reddit's lack of credibility, just an interesting/amusing anecdote.
Reddit is not an oft-cited source of news. By and large, it is a marketplace for link sharing coupled with a comment system and a currency of reputation. In other words, a forum focused on reacting to content elsewhere around the web but with some original content here and there. Where there is credible content, it is often from somewhere else like a news vendor. Everything else, including all comments on any thread, must be subjected to scrutiny and distrust as with any other forum. For starters, any comment can be a deliberately hyperbolic or entirely false/nonsensical assertion — rhetoric or sophistry — and thus no comment should be trusted on the grounds that it being correct may be coincidental if the intention was not to be correct, but rather to incite a reaction from others (trolling).
Then there is of course the possibility (indeed inevitability) that posts will be edited silently by those with sufficient permissions in the forum system, or access to the database if the system does not have silent edits built in. I say 'inevitable' because, given enough time, those with access to administrative power or the database itself will find a reason to silently edit something, by someone, somewhere.
No forum should be treated as credible. Even if your study is about how forum users behave, you cannot trust those you study to be behaving normally as their intentions are always questionable. We don't have Asimov's psycho-history yet.
I do not think forums have ever been credible sources of information, and I have participated in discussions on forums for fifteen years now. HN has more credibility than others, but that has been earned by clever people who visit this community for the sake of discussing intellectual topics — not the founding ideal of Reddit.
If the US has had congress hearings on the basis of Reddit posts, as was stated in a comment above, that is testament only to the ignorance of the US congress.
Edit: if you mean viability when you say credibility, i.e. in terms of generating revenue/getting investment, that depends on the rationality of its current/future investors. Assuming rational behaviour, this probably won't make any difference. The users will still come and if anything Reddit users should feel better precisely because the CEO fessed up to silent edits. It means that the issue can be addressed, perhaps with PGP signatures as suggested by others here; the ability to make silent edits by administrators could be removed; and the code powering Reddit could be open-sourced to prove that (apologies if it already is open-source, I am ignorant of the state of Reddit's back-end).
I would disagree with your claim of Reddit users not creating original content; the moment you step out of the default subs, you have great niche communities where you can find absolute gems on a regular basis.
The key is to look in the comments, not in the main post itself.
Fair to say. I did not mean to imply that no original content was produced on Reddit, only that its primary mission or purpose is to share and discuss — not to authoritatively, reliably and accountably document — ergo, the site had little credibility to lose.
I seriously considered trying to use elixir to start a new site with similar intentions to hn/slashdot/reddit, but then I did a precursory search of all the legal implications and it seems nightmarish to run a high-volume user commenting site these days.
I've settled on a side project of just editorials that dissect the rhetoric and logical strengths of current stories in aggregate.
I think the next version of reddit is going to have to be on a blockchain or something decentralized and verifiable.
That being said, I really have to give props to the HN team for how well they do their job technically and politically compared to most internet forum sites.
I think when people say "digg" they mean failure not actually the website digg. And alienating your user base because of your feelings is definitely down the path to failure it definable doesn't endear success.
In a slightly twisted way, his mistake is a good thing for the rest of us. With this happening right along side as the "fake news on Facebook" stories that are happening, it shows how so much of what we read on the internet could have been altered or plain old fabricated and should be taken with a grain of salt.
This is the perfect ploy to get conspiracy nuts to leave Reddit. I'm sure spez is tired of dealing with the pizzagate cats and he thought this was the best way to drive them off without creating a bigger shitstorm by telling them all to get fucked.
Made this comment in the other (flagged) thread. Here goes:
I agree it was not nefarious, but it was a decision that shows unbelievably poor judgement, especially for a CEO. I'd be surprised if he keeps his position. He's undermined his fundamental role as the leader of one of the biggest social media sites by violating the trust that users put into the site's administration.
The context as I understand it involves some ravenous hordes of conspiracy-theory redditors promulgating fake news stories and doxxing innocent people. However, by changing the text of these users comments, whatever their actions, and by admitting to it, Steve has opened the floodgates. Now there is no question -- in the minds of these users -- that the site is truly "against them" and willing to not only censor them but to rewrite history as they see it. They can no longer trust anything they read on the site.
But what is worse is the effect and message this sends to normal users. How can, for instance, any person safely participate in an AMA now? When the real possibility exists to have their words changed out from under them, and no way to prove they aren't in fact the author? And from that, why would anyone post anything potentially personally identifiable, if (in their mind) some disgruntled admin could modify what they said to include false yet humiliating or criminal things (e.g., throw in racial epithets, link to porn, admit adultery / drug use) that might eventually link back to them. And how far does this go? Can admins send PMs under the name of other users? What else? To me at least, the scary thing is that Reddit posts that only obliquely reference personal information have already been used as the basis for surveillance and legal action [1]...
And taking one final step back, from a business side this drama goes beyond just being unprofessional. Reddit posts are now often linked to from news articles. How can the media trust the source they link to? If the content of posts are 'up for grabs' to be edited by admins in the minds of users and the media (even if they aren't in reality), then one of Reddit's functions that is growing in importance -- that is, news-making -- may be stymied.
Harming trust is extremely dangerous for social platforms. And when it is the CEO themselves doing the harm, it could very well border on being suicidal for the site.
I get why this is bad but the lack of perspective is kind of astonishing. I mean these insane idiots will not give up this stupid idea of some pedophile conspiracy they think they've uncovered. And they don't care whose name they shit on. But edit their internet posts and they scream bloody murder. They can lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and this is what will get talked about.
People seem to be treating their comments with some kind of sanctity. These changes are most copy-and-replace for humorous effect (message boards in the past have done it). Surely it is obvious that the Reddit staff has the ability to edit or delete comments.
Users might think this is a breach of trust, but I really cant make that jump.
The important thing is that the_donald followers need a controversy to latch onto and will do so.
Surely if Jack Dorsey edited someone's tweet or Eric Schmidt edited a Gmail user's email, that would be cause for great concern. Which user or users it happened to is irrelevant to the breach of trust it represents to all users of the platform.
On the other hand, didn't moot auto-edit people's 4chan comments all the time? I'm told this is where the current meaning of "weeaboo" came from, because moot was sick of the word "wapanese".
Although this is an odd thread to use Urban Dictionary as an authoritative source, that's what I've got: [1]
It can happen and if you treat your email with that level of seriousness it is a possibility to have in mind that it could have happened.
The problem here is people taking an entertainment site so seriously, oh they are blatantly fucking up and btw have been in the past other shady things, so stop using it.
Apparently a long history of harrassment from the subreddit in question finally made /u/spez retaliate. The leaks further show the admin team is planning to deal with the subreddit in a more definitive way.
Ok, so Reddit has been filled with some pretty "deplorable" characters as of late... and to censor them and edit comments... holy fuck, these are not the people you want to do that to. Especially given that they will self-destruct if you just leave them alone. Fueling the fire like this... honestly that's some horrific judgement on the part of u/Spez. Probably time for a new CEO.
But... then again... Reddit's best days are behind it. Doesn't really matter who is at the helm.
/r/the_Donald has this stupid conspiracy that a pizza parlour is a child sex ring and Clinton was involved, that became /r/pizzagate which the Admins tried to clean up because its retarded and was doxxing innocent people so they called the admins paedophiles.
I feel stupider just for having had to type that..what a world we've built.
I am talking about the fact that the pizzeria owner and his staff have had death threats against them from members of the Reddit /r/pizzagate sub. The FBI should be investigating this and charging people.
Honestly, why do people get riled up about death threats on the internet? How many death threats have resulted in actual deaths? I'd put the number at around zero.
Now you know how #spiritcooking got trending on Twitter after people found mentoin of it in the emails and wanted to know what it was about. After that, people started looking at Podesta's art collection. There's an interview somewhere (NYT? it was some big newspaper, IIRC) talking about how pleased they were this one time some group toured his house or something and were mortified.
But yeah, there's a reason I put so many exclamation marks on that.
I feel sick if I so much at glance at some of those.
They wanted to know what it was about, that's the best summary I know of and it has sources you can look up yourself, many of which aren't covered in your article. There is actual weird stuff that's provable at the core of this--a quick search of 'pizza' in the Podesta dumps will give you at least a few WTF moments.
Yes, you can find unhinged conspiracy stuff written about this. I'm not aware of any proof of anyone committing crimes, nor am I going to claim anyone is guilty without evidence. But there's enough weird that people are going to be digging into this one for a while.
This is not to be taken as an admission that I think the pizzagate stuff is either definitely true or definitely false, merely that their attempt to cover it amounted to "Nothing to see here, please move along" and completely fell flat on its face with actually addressing any of the evidence raised over the course of the affair.
So /r/pizzagate was a subreddit convinced they'd found evidence of a pedophile ring in the government and more specifically implicating Hilary Clinton. They were recently shut down because they kept publishing people's information (which is against reddit ToS _even if said info is publicly available_). This prompted them to assume reddit admins were part of said ring. I assume /u/spez has been receiving accusations since.
And there was some evidence. Like people hanging out with convicted pedos, quickly removing symbolics from their sites, emails in Podesta's inbox, and more.
You're getting downvoted because people don't like it, but you're right. People who don't like it don't read about it, and that gives rise to denial and lack of knowledge, like "in the bathrooms of a NY Pizzeria."
If you think it's entirely implausible that there could be organized pedophilia operating out of DC, you're not being honest with yourself. Look at what happened in Norway 4 days ago.
I'm not interested in discussing politics on HN--and I'm not referring solely to this theory--but I am concerned when people are not intellectually curious enough to consider even hear an argument.
This type of breach of trust could be used to help educate people on what digital security really means, and to demand real security in all parts of their digital lives. It is also good to demand multiple layers of security.
Reddit is "https", and did that help here? No, in the sense that it only ensured the unaltered delivery of what Reddit was sending. It did nothing to preserve the integrity of comments that were originally written. This was not a “secure” web site for this case, yet many people would assume so due to the one layer of security that was present and prominently displayed in the browser! Now extend this to any given web site, and data that is far more important than a stupid comment. Real security is not trivial, and figuring out a good way to manage trusted parties is especially hard.
Am I the only one who isn't really concerned with this?
spez was engaging in a bit of the Internet pastime... trolling. It wasn't some conspiracy to control information on reddit, he was just having fun. Dastardly fun, yes, but fairly innocent, all things considered.
As one who moderated a smaller forum for a while in the past:
1) Direct access to the database at times is needed particularly for bulk edits. In our forum we had certain bans and not all were immediately enforced by the posting software. Some were done in bulk operations down at the database level.
2) Manual semi bulk edits at time were done in places where scripts simple were too much work to get right.
3) Manual direct individual edits also at times happened but they are incredibly dangerous as they can erode the confidence in the site. From what I saw at multiple forum the temptation is very high at the top to rationalize such edits and it tends to work against them badly.
4) Edits at database level often leave little to no trace. That is one reason that makes them so dangerous. At production level very few should have access to the DB for accountability reasons.
5) Nobody really likes DB level edits but they are needed and done. The forum software and support scripts do not cover all situations. Getting 100% rid of them is unrealistic. For audit reasons logging original posts in a tamper proof place may be wise but is rarely done.
6) Clearly someone has abused privileges here, I'm fairly sure such edits are not condoned by any internal guidelines. There must be consequences.
7) Personal consequences. This is about ethics, behavior and trust. These things are not all b&w. Was he hiding the behavior? Is there insight? Are there mitigating circumstances? Also is he the right guy for the job considering the job description requires flame retardant skin? The board needs to look into this carefully and quickly.
8) Organizational consequences. How can they make sure this does not happen again? Do they have all the right controls in place? Are they are properly separating the roles. Should they get audited? The threat for an organization to suffer from catastrophic cyber events increased incredibly. It used be be groups of people revolting on boards. These days certain sites reach out to sizable fractions of the US electorate and whip up attacks (recent: Kelly's book on Amazon or CNN's app in the app store). Very solid organizational and technical controls are needed for a place that so easily gets into the cross-hairs of a mob.
It would fix the problem by making commenting require insane amounts of computation, thus making it require transaction fees, thus making nobody comment, thus making there be no comments to edit, right?
The more you research, the more horrifying it is. I'd not recommend looking into it if you don't want to go down a rabbit hole, be thoroughly creeped out, and have your day completely ruined.
In my eyes reddit quality, especially the frontpage, is declining year over year and it's not really getting better. It might be my age but I'm less and less interested in the content which gets all the upvotes. Also, the bigger subreddits seem to show this decline where quality discussion doesn't happen anymore.
Is there actually a long-term analysis about how reddit content and discussion changed over the years?
I'm seeing reddit's user base as less and less valuable. There is so much active disinformation with purchased reddit accounts (because aged accounts attract less suspicions) that's ripe with vote manipulation.
By actively triggering reddit's vote manipulation trigger on somebody's comment, you effectively have a way to censor and control information and how it's portrayed.
Reddit CEO directly altering user's comments that criticize him seems to signal that the platform is incapable or unwilling to address the poor value proposition of a purely anonymous based social networks that serves as stage for anyone with the monetary and networking resource to manipulating the casually browsing redditor and their opinion .
Reddit is known for censoring subreddits the admins do not like or when they're involved in some drama, they have a specific algorithm to filter out Trump's subreddit from /r/all[1][2], the default subs are strictly aligned with the admins' political views, and recently the CEO mocked Facebook's knowledge of their users data saying that at Reddit they know not only what one publicly speaks (such as in Facebook), but also their users "darkest secrets" (in an interview about advertising on Reddit).
> Reddit is known for censoring subreddits the admins do not like
r/The_Donald mods were censoring all comments against Donald Trump (hence why they didn't reach r/all)
> the CEO mocked Facebook's knowledge of their users data saying that at Reddit they know not only what one publicly speaks (such as in Facebook), but also their users "darkest secrets" (in an interview about advertising on Reddit).
It was clearly a joke taken out of context from conspiracy theorist.
Moderators can run their subreddits however they see fit. They're the ones who create the rules and they're the ones that enforce the rules, as long as they don't break the rules of reddit itself. Admins, on the other hand, should not favor one subreddit over the other.
Because mods aren't paid and are generally put in power by their specific community to uphold the communally agreed upon standards and rules.
Admins are paid employees of a company (reddit) that provides a platform for communities and discussion. If the platform itself is biased, then it is not really a platform but rather a specific media / viewpoint forum.
That is complete and utter nonsense. Nothing you said is true.
You can visit http://reddit.com/r/all and see that Pro-trump posts are always in the top 10 and at least 2 will be shown in the top 40. So no they don't filter our pro-Trump posts. They merely made the algorithm more balanced to showcase some of the smaller sites.
>They merely made the algorithm more balanced to showcase some of the smaller sites
By... Filtering out r/The_Donald. You can claim the reason was apolitical. Fine. But I think you have to be extremely naive to do so, given what was going on on reddit during the elections.
>And the defaults are not political at all:
Some are not, some are. All that are, are aligned with the admins' political view and routinely ban users that disagree with them.
> the only thing he secretly altered was the target of the insults
Basically irrelevant. One hell of a veil to pierce.
This isn't even the first time reddit's indicated they're kind of... flexible, let's say, with how they handle certain kinds of data; but it always seemed like they stopped just short of crossing lines.
Unmarked edits to user comments was absolutely not something I'd've expected to come of that, so I can't say I'm not surprised; still, this seems like it's just the next stage of something that's always seemed to exist (or not exist, I suppose) for them.
was he drunk or in urgent need of a break? OTOH , good of him to take the responsibility immediately. OTOH, maybe he even wanted to send a message to those who rely too much in reddit's freedom.
probably because Steve (I'm sorry but in this context /u/Spez just seems inappropriate...) had spent weeks being called a pedophile. Hes a person and he snapped. Bad judgement? yes, obviously. But really hes a person...and this is a group of assholes being assholes and I will generally grant people some empathy for having a limit and maybe not having the most rational reaction.
FWIW, I have had a number of incidents with sketchy "content" on reddit over the years. This incident with content modification is in alignment with my experiences.
There are a lot of politics going on on communities like these. And there are a lot of trolling, people attempting and sometimes successfully summon mobs, sometimes for amusement, sometimes with an agenda. Do not underestimate stupid people in large groups!
This election (seen from outside as a storm in a glass of water) undermined America's best appeal as the only place with the first amendment. Please remain free.
When a story is written in the first person it's common for the title to say "I". Sometimes we put those in quotation marks but then we'd have nested quotes in this one.
I think you're doing a great job. Moderating threads and submissions that are basically guaranteed to be shitshows (like this one) is an incredibly thankless job.
Thanks for keeping it together, and thanks for keeping this from going off the rails.
Reddit (the company) is a wretched hive of scum an villany, where this sort of stuff seems almost regular. Perhaps it wasn't always so: I don't know.
But I can't think of any other forum that would put up with this. If an owner or mod did this on the *chans, the chan in question would be abandoned within the week.
As for HN, dang does as he sees fit, as do the admins: they'll split your thread, redact your post (and if they doesn't, the software will if it gets flagged enough, IIRC), and (or so I heard) even shadowban you of you're bad enough. However, they're mostly right, and not corrupt. And they wouldn't pull crap like this. Blocking a comment that talks about how HN is just a massive circlejerk is one thing: actually altering it to say something else is quite another.
I suppose it might be common on forums run by egotistical gits, but come on, you're heading a company running a large forum/news aggregator. You can do better than an egomaniac with a website.
I think you're being a bit over-dramatic with the "wretched hive of scum and villany" stuff. The commonality of this sort of behavior varies from forum to forum, depending on the mood of that forum. For instance, this sort of thing was not abnormal at all during the hey-day of Something Awful (One of the largest forums around some years ago, still #5 in membership numbers).
As far as the editing Spez did, if they were really out there calling him a pedophile, they should have expected some backlash. You can only push an authority figure so far before they're going to go on the defensive. This will definitely make things worse though.
Of course I'm being a bit dramatic. But it's pretty bad.
I didn't know that was so common on SA. I knew the site was heavily-moderated, despite The Goons' famous repuation. But it's still terrible there, too.
This brings up memories of when moot messed with /pol/. He turned off the spam prevention scripts and captcha, made every post look like a doubles post, and let an audio recording of cuck porn play on the board page. That was sort of expected from moot though and it was 4chan after all.
...but those were public. It's one thing to have a computer run search and replace on every post in the board. It's quite another to have a mod specifically edit your post, making it look like you said something you didn't.
I've been wondering about exactly that - would the perception of this be so negative if spez had inserted javascript to rewrite the messages on that subreddit instead?
That's very different from changing the actual message text. That lends itself to "disregard that, I suck cocks." Editing content leads to, well, you saw.
Filtering isn't the same as editing. If you filter, it's automated, and thus fairly obvious. If you edit, you are actually changing somebody's perceived opinion.
This pretty much happened on 4chan with GamerGate and /pol/. Banning GamerGate discussion immediately drove a mass exodus away from the site, and persistently fucking with /pol/ pushed out many more. But 4chan didn't die. The overwhelming majority of 4chan users voted with their clicks that they would tolerate politically motivated censorship, datamining, and adverserial moderation for faster boards and a fatter meme pipeline.
Reddit is exactly the same. Keep pulling shit like this, and it will drive quality users away out of principle. But Zombie Reddit will keep lurching forward, spewing poorly compressed Facebook screencaps and cat gifs.
Mods used to edit posts to "I AM A HUGE FAGGOT" etc. all of the time, and people just laughed. Point is you are overestimating the principles of the average 4channer. The sky has fallen on them repeatedly and they just don't care. I see no reason for the drooling Redditards to be any different.
Huh. Oh well. I guess I need to brush up on my *chan history.
But I do maintain that that's a little different. That's essentially another instance of "disregard that, I suck cock," whereas spez actually altered people's stated opinions.
Please stop using this "alt-right" terminology. All its doing is trying to put a neutral label on a group of vile people. People that are blatantly racist, misogynist, and just anti-American. These are the same kinds of monsters that started the "National Socialist German Workers' Party" in the 1930's. They used the same rhetoric and played on desperate people's fears and prejudices.
My grandparents didn't fight on two fronts to see this bullshit taking over the United States.
I think the "alt-right" term has its use. After all, not all of the people we are talking about here are sadistic monsters. Even among those engaging in the juvenile, antagonistic bigotism and bullying that is pervasive on /r/the_donald are a large group of otherwise reasonable people who feel alienated by the progressive left, and have simply bought into the all of the recent rhetoric against political correctness.
Those people have been mislead, to be sure, but it isn't accurate or useful to assume they are malicious.
(1): That's a gross oversimplification. Trumps support was not primarily alt-right, they were at best a vocal, but small part. Even if they were a significant part of the coalition, this election doesn't suddenly validate those views. A fundamental part of our system is the protection from the tyranny of the majority...
(2): this is an impressive extension of the 'sour grapes' response meme. We're going to shit on WWII vets if they don't (rhetorically) get on the trump train now?
1) What? Fact: the electorate chose Trump as the next US president. The fact that most of the country wants what you don't want doesn't make it a tyranny of the majority.
2) I don't care who is on what train, and I'm not shitting on anyone. Fact: OP's grandparents didn't fight for Trump to not be president. That what OP's grandparents or OP want is in contradiction with what the USA got isn't an indication of tyranny. What OP or OP's grandparents want doesn't generalize to what everyone else wants or should want, that's the point, and it's not an insult.
You've got it backwards. Almost nobody encompassed by the "alt-right" label approves of its usage. It was created by the left to brand and contain the movement. See this movement? They're the alt-right because I said so. Oh and they have nazis. Bingo, movement discredited. You can see the wheels turning in the old media's head.
Your post is a good example of how the left is going to lose really hard in the coming years. Politically motivated leftist outsiders like you, reaching reasonable conclusions of your ideology, are pushing the exact opposite narratives that your overlords want you to. The result can only be more infighting destroying you from the inside out.
I feel confident entering the hornet's nest to say this because I know the mob will not heed my warnings, and instead devour any of their own that stop to listen. The left can neither win with nor without people like you, and so it is doomed to either disappear or transform into something not recognizable in comparison to its former self. Something far more right wing.
It might just be a correction, nothing more. I've done the same in the past in the interest of improving the original comment. Perhaps it could have been made clearer (e.g., "note:", s/1930s/1920/). I'm not sure you can read too much into it.
When pedantry serves as a roadblock to honest, charitable discussion, I agree :) I've written plenty of comments only to not-submit them, and deleted others right after posting. I've really tried to give people the benefit of the doubt, ignore small jibes if I can, and try to understand where people I may not agree with are coming from. After all, if I can't understand them, I'm not sure I can ask them to understand me. It's a work in progress. :)
PS: And actually, given their other follow-up comment,
Parent's rhetoric is self-righteous namecalling. That does nothing to persuade people, it only makes them come back at you. He/she may think they do a service to people, but they are only turning more people to name-callers. As such my snarky comment was deserved. If that interrupted our moment of collective atonement, i apologize.
I initially thought it was a great example of false persuasion.
However, after looking at the Vigilant Citizen article on it, it seems like the ultimate example of false persuasion. It is super bizarre and intriguing, but obviously false.
I still don't understand why a "kid-friendly" place is posting photos on their Instagram with people engaged in sex acts on top of slices of pizza. Not to mention the references to crude sex acts, occult rituals and (objectively) creepy photos of kids.
How is the top comment on an HN thread about Reddit one that burns two paragraphs contemplating whether there is actually a conspiracy running from a DC pizza parlor?
Of course most people don't believe the pedo stuff. However, they're totally on board with slandering the DC power-brokers, especially the ones who exemplify the class-culture of the "liberal elite." That's what this is really about: the attacks on art are the main giveaway.
While I "get" the Maria Abramovic "Spirit Cooking" stuff qua art, it pretty clearly also shows art as "high-class trash". When people see Abramovic's art, then see pictures of her with all kinds of elites and celebrities, they're right to see the culture as decadent. But then again bourgeois decadence isn't anything new...
Of course most people don't believe the pedo stuff. However, they're totally on board with slandering the DC power-brokers, especially the ones who exemplify the class-culture of the "liberal elite." That's what this is really about: the attacks on art are the main giveaway.
That's not my read. I think the art is key, but I think the majority involved genuinely believe they have discovered evidence of pedophilia, and consider the art a strong part of the evidence. Consider how the imagery in the Heavy Breathing videos would be received by the authors and target audience of this: http://truediscipleship.com/ten-scriptural-reasons-why-the-r....
One of the discussions that surprised me was genuine concern over a picture showing someone next to a cardboard cutout of the Pope. My guess is that most of the participants don't attend a lot of parties that display potentially blasphemous portraits of religious figures, and tend to make assumptions about the other amoral practices of those who do.
In fairness to the nutters, it's not like the notion there's a massive pedophile ring operating at the highest levels of government is absurd. We've seen them exposed in several Western countries, and both candidates had ties to Epstein. It's just this particular accusation seems to be bonkers.
I would be more surprised if there wasn't a pedophile ring in DC. But I don't think that case will be blown open by Podesta's emails and squiggles on pizza shop walls and a moon and star which is apparently Baphomet?
We're talking about a conspiracy that runs from a pizza parlor, the credibility of which is bolstered by a first-principles analysis rooted in the dynamics of pizza parlors as the top comment on an HN thread. This is some Tim and Eric stuff here.
There should be a term for your kind of comment, I propose "betterguy trolling", it's very similar to concern trolling but at its core is the belief that you are better than the other person. Your commemts have zero value here, all you said was to point fingers and laugh at the other guy's views. "It's PIZZA how can it be bad" is the extent of your research that you are letting on over the course of what - 4 comments. Maybe there is still a better word for it, it's not just about pretending to be better - ah I think I got it: "in-person trolling". You simply act like your viewpont is the sane normal accepted view.
That is not even close to being a summary of the story. Sorry. It's not just about mentioning pizza in an email. Your comment was once again completely pointless, I have already told you that what you are doing is only virtue signalling. You just call other people dumb and then link to people agreeing with you with 0 information or content.
Do not accuse people on HN of "virtue signaling". That's simply a way of saying that someone is lying, or commenting in bad faith, not because they believe what they're saying but because they're trying to curry favor with some other group of people. It's semantically indistinguishable from accusing someone of "shilling", and that's one of a very few arguments that's specifically forbidden on HN:
There's also no way to make such an argument civilly, and civility is a basic requirement for commenting on HN.
Making arguments on HN is trickier than making them on Reddit, and you may find it's not worth the energy. There's nothing wrong with keeping your discussions there.
While I agree with you, this type of argument doesn't persuade a person from falling to confirmation bias. And the number of people who'd believe such a thing, far exceed the number of people obsessively posting (and trolling) online about it.
The New York Times is only going to magnify this effect. The skeptical argument has to acknowledge the inappropriateness of some of the pizza shop's Instagram posts.
It's not all that much crazier than what we know to be true. Pamela Anderson visited Assange to give him a sandwich the day before his internet git cut off and he more or less disappeared off the face of the planet. Truth is stranger than fiction.
By the power vested in me by the Internet board of governors and Archer Daniels Midland I hereby downplay this particular accusation about child exploitation and may God have mercy on your soul.
I believe the streisand effect is picking up steam with Pizzagate. I would encourage others as well to approach it with an open mind.
Also, this has potentially far reaching implications not just for comments on reddit, but any comment made on any forum on the internet. Without a way of proving a comment has not been tampered with, how can what you write online be used against you in the court of law?
Without a way of proving someone isn't lying about what you said, how can what you say be used against you in a court of law? How could evidence gathered by police be used in a court of law? It could be fabricated! We are just trusting they found those drugs in that car! They could be from anywhere!
Every online interaction that's ever been used in the history of the internet is malleable. There is crypto technology to prevent this, but it isn't being used.
We still try people just fine, based on trust and belief. You can check to see if something's been altered.
Why are people pretending this is new or a big deal? Of course online forums aren't reliable. Of course they are owned by the administrators and can be modified at will. Did an administrator do it to mess with a bunch of screaming blubbering nasty and horrible trolls calling him a pedophile, and institute a silly find/replace rule as a kind of petty revenge? Yeah. Was it childish? Sure. But seriously, who cares? Who really believes that reddit is serious business? When online forums take your swear word and replace it with symbols do you throw a hissy fit about "freedom of speech"?
> How could evidence gathered by police be used in a court of law? It could be fabricated! We are just trusting they found those drugs in that car! They could be from anywhere!
I think this sarcasm is misplaced given the number of scandals surrounding trust in police and the evidence they put forward.
For example, the mishandling or tampering of evidence in crimina labs:
A lot of these situations have the same parallel of trust - we trust prosecutors to produce all exculpatory evidence, because it is very difficult to determine that they haven't(since the defense doesn't have access to the evidence like prosecutors do). We trust labs to not tamper with the evidence, because the defense does not have the resources to challenge every lab analysis. We trust police officers to not lie under oath, because they are often the sole "untainted" witness of a crime, especially in controversial police shooting cases. When that trust is broken, it is difficult to rein in the backlash - there is no way to know just how often it was broken in the past without us knowing.
>/u/spez's admission further raises interesting legal questions for reddit. What happens with /u/stonetear's and other legal case now? How do any legal cases involving content on Reddit work now that the integrity of posts are nonexistent? Any defendant's lawyer will have a field day arguing that somebody who did something illegal here didn't do it.
Complete nonsense, this argument will hold up just as badly as it would've held up before.
In your last two comments you've managed to introduce “white nationalists” and “climate change deniers” out of Everest-thin air. This is an abuse of the site and we have to ban accounts that post like this. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027894 and marked it off-topic.
Combine it with Milo's getting banned by Twitter, Doordash's CEO asking for Trump supporters to resign - a not very pretty picture of Silicon Valley emerges.
Can you explain how Trump's views are "racist"? AFAIK, he criticised criminal illegal Mexican immigrants, not even a whole nationality, let alone a whole race!
Usernames on Reddit do not require even an email address. For that reason, I find it hard to muster up even a modicum of concern for the sanctity of 'authorship' and 'attribution' for individual users. For all I know, every comment on Reddit but my own are generated by a very clever computer.
That congress sees fit to investigate Reddit comments and news websites find credibility in re-posting them are separate issues that absolutely deserve discussion. But the editing of "Fuck [username]" posts...
Many people post on Reddit under their real identity. Now it is madness to do so, as a malicious Reddit employee can frame you as having said anything.
This has always been the case. It has always been madness to post on user forums under your real identity. In the 'viral era' -- the age of mobile broadband, the age where any post you make or photo you send can get the attention of millions and ruin your career before your plane lands [0] -- it's pure madness to expose yourself like this.
I find it odd that people who build websites for a living didn't understand that... Like.. They control the data... They have complete access to the database.. Do you NOT think they could edit comments without updating the edited at timestamp?
Of course it can be done. This is about trust in the people running Reddit. In any operation, people can lie, cheat, and steal. You win the trust of customers and users by proving that you don't.
That anyone trusted the people running reddit -- a free platform that sells users' attention and therefore relies on manipulating them for their business model -- is the real cause for concern in this story.
"If a website is free, you're the product, not the customer."
> Many people post on Reddit under their real identity.
Among them, two Presidents of the United States, several ministers / PMs / MEPs, a long list of Hollywood stars... what if a rogue employee impersonates or alters POTUS statements?
Yes. Authorship, "karma," etc do not concern me. Discussion that makes me think, that challenges my preconceptions, that enriches my understanding of technology or that links me to new skills to learn -- those concern me.
Which is why I can't really feel outraged that a nonsense comment was changed into another nonsense comment. Nothing of value was lost.
