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.
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."
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.
And if he did this for "about an hour" as he said, he clearly didn't use ... WHERE content='fuck u/spez'
It seems likely there's code in the front end that gives him the ability to edit user's comments in his browser. That should not exist.
Instead, the CEO logged into the production DB and manually edited individual comments there?
Give them some credit, surely even Reddit staff aren't that terrible.
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
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditcancer/comments/3818ti/nev...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5a3ofc/we_were_...
BTW next time add link to source instead of cancerous subreddits.
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.
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.
I think you misjudged his professionalism.
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".
If so, he deserves to be applauded. There are things a founder/CEO has to do you can't say.
http://www.theweek.co.uk/facebook/14625/are-users-dumb-fucks...
From that article:
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."
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.
Does not do his credibility any good.
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11...
But if we focus on the manner that actually occurred, the only additional harm vs. a reply of "no u" is to reddit's reputation.
I'm worried that the answer is "not at all", which seems weird.
"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.
You tell them to roundly go fuck themselves and appeal to the people that agree with you, the opposition's feelings be damned.
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 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.
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.
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 :)
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.
It's like an ISP knowing a significant portion of your web browsing behaviour.
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.
And since now we know that the CEO (at least?) has edited comments, users' comment history should be considered suspect..
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.
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.
It is much more honest and within reason to take steps like deleting posts, suspending or even outright banning users.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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!
Reddit CLAIMS to be a Bastion of free speech. But in reality, is this true?
The answer seems to be NO.
Free speech ends when it's become harrasment. What happened to spez calls for digitally curb stomping the offenders.
This is no different from Twitter having to cull accounts harassing others.
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.
Would you not be a little bit outraged?
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.
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.
Hint: try looking at the "abuse of power" part of your comment.
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.
I mean, where else would the right-leaning Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists hang out?
...and even that was too restricted for some people, which is one of the reasons free.* was set up.
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.
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.
That last line was very poignant.
I sure as heck hope that everyone doesn't join me in my communities: the magic would go away.
Oh, how I pine for the days before the eternal September.
Even Green Day got sad about it.
>Even Green Day got sad about it.
When I heard that song, I noticed how well the lyrics fit:
>Summer has come and passed, the innocence can never last,
The eternal September was the end of innocence for the internet
>Here comes the rain again, falling from the stars,
>Drenched in my pain again, becoming who we are
As painful as September was was, it was instrumental in making the internet and the internet culture what it is today.
>As my memory rests, but never forget what I lost
Many still feel the loss that was September distinctly. I myself wasn't even around, but I still feel it.
Mostly I learnt that just about nothing has changed...
Byte Magazine Volume 10 Number 13 December 1985 Computer Conferencing
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.
"<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.
Here's my sketch for a system like that;
https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/01/a-dec...
OpenPGP works for near anything
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256
But it does get annoying to sign every comment.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
wsBcBAEBCAAQBQJYNp4wCRCuaVAPm2QoyQAAr8sIAHQaE5B+HYdCz6XBrysdHzr4
ykR81zq5TXoMR+/f9UwuSi2I4881H4pEWsN9Fa0/qnpK/asNk+grEaMtB74DOg3p
8Uy3lUvlVglj9QTPZ9Hf90e3HHLOW2OonXitYaf1xPoczIO8NgwwebDDZIVohU4u
4EySOfgbP+VjwGbmtUJFeh0BifGN6b3DtKQrgVziWyumyK3WL9oz1kDAr4s24mCr
227ty9d+7kwtYhaszkM8HwGnstZaNSan1jpVkmsLRMSr4JqNFyNWalN5LU85w2WV
zwY0n8mA7tHnrCd+mWcjp845I8gGn7NoFPHXhG2m+yU/f1LDsyXUib5hut+iduQ=
=jcN5
-----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ${message}
${message sig metadata}
${message sig}
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
https://i.reddituploads.com/26af29432a2340a98d83052a0ed3efcc...
I didn't understand the significance of this until reading that comment.
There's a reason Wikipedia isn't an acceptable source in college-level courses.
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.
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.
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.
This could be done via an open source browser add-on.
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.
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.
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.
Adding that citation is one of my proudest Wikipedia edits ever.
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!"
Also, ceo of reddit looks like a horrid job.
You could not pay me enough to be CEO of that cesspool. People take Reddit way too seriously.
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 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)
> For that I will never forgive the New York Times.
In 50 years time, what disinformation that they are spreading today will they 'apologize' for?
I would rather be a person who voluntarily runs a cesspool than be a person forced to run one.
But he just couldn't quit.
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...
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.
UPDATE the_donald SET comment = replace('/u/spez', '/u/notspez', comment) WHERE 'fuck /u/spez' in lowercase(comment);