I don't think it's a bad idea to disassociate yourself from a company who's behaving in a way you don't want to condone.
Individuals deciding to exit because they disagree with company policy (editing content and apologizing) is one thing, forcing others, who don't care about stupid internet drama and conspiracy theories, to do the same is entirely something else. (that something else is borderline despotic)
An admin abused their power. It's ripe for abuse and they've proven they're willing to abuse it and not mature enough to treat that power respectfully. I have a hard time respecting a company with someone like that as CEO. No conspiracy, no politics, just what happened.
Social media isn't mostly about free thought, free speech, and free inquiry anymore. Nowadays, it's mostly about the rapid dissemination of conformity. Woe betide you if you actually have a nuanced opinion that doesn't fit neatly with either side of an issue. Your fellow posters/commenters will reject their pattern-match and call you a liar and 5th columnist for the other side.
Technology came and killed the impulse towards freedom. It taught people through repeated iteration that conformity to the mob was the highest good. It taught smart people that wrangling their way into positions of centralized power to exercise authoritarian rule was the insider move. It taught everyone that suppression of anything that you didn't like was the winning move. It was called the internet.
You aren't free to dictate the behaviour of companies who don't want content on their site that is objectionable or factually baseless.
Likewise it is just hypocritical and hilarious to complain about conformity just because your opinions don't correspond with theirs. Those people have the right to say and think what they want just like you do.
I'm not so sure you're understanding where I'm coming from. I used to find online a place where I could freely express an opinion without fear of onerous consequences. Back in the old USENET days, there were trolls and heavy-handed moderation and all manner of unpleasantness, but there was also a widespread cultural respect for free speech.
Would you say that undoing net neutrality, then Comcast dropping all packets associated with anything expressing an anti-Comcast opinion is good and savory behavior? Would complaining about that be self righteous, moralizing nonsense?
The idea that people shouldn't engage in physical violence and intimidation could by the same logic be called self righteous, moralizing nonsense. ("FFS, just go and work out, take karate, or buy a gun or something!") Well, of course not. There is tremendous value in an open society where people can depend on the rule of law, driveable roads, electricity, plumbing, etc... Being civilized is literally valued at trillions of dollars in productivity. Likewise, there was tremendous value in open forums where people were free to express themselves and generally agreed to disagree. That's not what we have today. Basically, people bully other people by numbers and social pressure, or through moderation mechanisms. Your idea of "freedom" seems to be like a medieval form of "freedom" where any robber baron can set up a castle and start issuing his own laws and coinage. A truly open society is open globally, and people are free to roam and transact in a relatively relaxed fashion. Now, the morality of today's online world seems to be leaking into the real world, with that kind of deleting "moderation" applied to people's membership in civic organizations. Sorry, but that's petty and non-enlightened. It's like you don't believe the truth will set you free, and it's only pressure, numbers, and mechanisms that will win the day.
That is the perfect analogy for this situation.
Furthermore, I'd say a group of moderators who resort to discussing the future of their subreddit in a democratic and mature fashion; ensuring the integrity of their future, is far from comparable to what the CEO of Reddit has done.
lol, his comment fits this perfectly.
Who cares? If people don't want to use the language they won't, and if people do, they will. I refuse to feel bad for the language.
If that possibility is too much of a concern, maybe we need to come up with an alternative - like some kind of decentralised, mass-distributed reddit-like. Actually, wasn't that usenet? Is it too late to get that back?
Invisibly editing comments is a very unexpected route to take. I doubt you could push most CEOs to that. They would just delete the comment.
That you'd say this is an indication of how far the culture online has fallen. What's now taken as an accepted use of moderation power was once considered abusive.
We all know that site operators can change things, but some of them have enough integrity to be trusted not to.
And you know this how, exactly? Because the perpetrator said so?
I find the scenario that this was the first and only time this was done implausible.
[1] Modifying Reddit software to let them hide the edit from the comment author would be visible to anyone with source access, meaning it can't be done without the support of all of their developers, and so probably wasn't.
How is this a big deal?
If you're not comfortable with a platform then by every means, don't use it.
...but why does what you think mean that everyone should be affected?
As mentioned by someone else in the thread: the subreddit was in existence before being taken over by the golang team, it was fine before them, it will be fine after them if they choose to leave.
I do not know if that is the case, that is up to the mods of /r/golang.
There is a ton of drama and conspiracy nonsense tied up in this. Frankly /r/the_donald should have been removed as well for the libelous and disgraceful comments.
The issue is, and has always been, caused by a serious problem in the reddit's admins have in being perceived as being unable to enforce the rules fairly.
From time to time communities that are overall "okay" get deeply invested in an issue and "drama" is spawned. Sometimes rules are broken. When particular subs visibly break rules and the rules are not enforced their opponents feel license to also break rules. Both sides of these disputes could name a dozen or times that the other side broke the rules. They have mountains of evidence of this, and don't trust the admins as a result.
Because of that, and the explicitly political nature of r/the_donald, none of the admins have felt they could enforce those rules. Into that toxic hellbroth of a situation /r/pizzagate repeatedly had dox-drops containing actual child pornography. Visibly breaking like the only true real rules reddit has, the admins took the only option they had, and ware demonized for it.
Largely because all moderator actions had become so politicized, and after reviewing reported content that I suspect may have been genuinely traumatizing to review he made a mistake.
He's the CEO. He has absolutely no need for that level of access to end user accounts, any more than the CEO of a bank needs permission to silently skim money out of customers accounts.
I see this kind of reductionism to what's "technically possible" a lot around here in regards to security and user trust. Let's go back to meatspace to get a more balanced perspective perhaps. Your mailman can read your mail and steal your packages. Your bank can steal your money. Your waiter can poison you. Your car mechanic can overcharge you.
It's not about what's "technically possible" (though a solution to make it technically impossible would be useful). It's about TRUST in another human being who is in a position of power. Trust is built by having a long record of good behavior and can be destroyed by a single bad action.
Exactly.
If my mailman edited one of my letters he would be instantly fired and hopefully prosecuted.
And then they could end up prosecuted and/or loose their jobs, will any of it happen to Reddits CEO?
I'm not sure. If everyone would say "alright, it was incorrect but we don't want any internet drama", then how exactly would it hurt him? Closing a subreddit seems to me like exactly the kind of thing that could communicate a "not OK".
I think it's especially necessary as the edits had been done in a trump support group subreddit. Even though I don't agree with them at all, I think setting a precident that manipulating discussions are ok if I don't like the political content would be even worse.
If I'm mad at the US president, burning down my house isn't an effective protest and would hurt basically everyone but the president.
Literally, in that Google Groups conversation they said they wanted to delete everything and make it private so no one could ever use it again. That's insane.
Then when posts are no longer allowed, leave a read only copy up for some time, then leave nothing but the links to other communities.
It stops being a community it the non-experts are separated from the experts by inaction of the experts.
If someone really likes Reddit that much, let make another go language sub.
A) the community does not belong to the golang team, the subreddit originally existed independently of the golang team. B) The community is not a piece of furniture to be moved at will; they have to choose to move.
If they do proceed with this (say they take a vote), the best they can hope for is fragmenting the community between Reddit and Voat or whatever.
There weren't any safeguards or anything to catch it on the reddit organisation side. It was only users noticing forcing an admission that means it's even a matter of record.
That works well for nuclear launch codes because the only time you need to combine the split parts to make the full launch code is when you are actually going to launch (and perhaps during scheduled readiness tests). This should be fairly infrequent.
For a database, you'll have processes that frequently need access. For persistent processes, you'll need to have the reconstituted password available at least whenever the persistent processes start. If you architecture has dynamic processes that access the database (e.g., you have something internal working over a REST or CGI or similar interface, that starts upon receiving a request), you need a way to get the password to them.
Most solutions I've seen for supplying the full password in these cases have been fairly easy for someone with admin access to the machine running whatever it is that holds the full password and/or to a machine running one of the processes that needs to full password to get a copy of the password.
This is bigger than trolling. We know people inspect the social network activities of others. This kind of abusive can result in all sorts of bad things. What if and admin didn't like you, edited your history, and then suddenly you lost your job for some fabrication of, e.g., a racist comment?
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/4lmfmj/ceo_of_reddi...
Link to relevant video section: https://youtu.be/uSVqoW1rz6w?t=13m55s
Got a source for this? From what I've read about what happened (not a whole lot), this seems like it's been passed through multiple rounds of the telephone game.
All solid information I've heard, and seen directly admitted, is that he edited mentions of /u/spez to mentions of /u/<random-moderator-of-the-subreddit> in a single thread in a single subreddit.
https://np.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5ekdy9/the_admin...
Well, it was an entire page of them, but an interesting thing I found while following a bit of this as it blew up was coming across a user that mentioned a comment that was seemingly also deleted by the admin [1]. It seems the CEO may have been doing more than just editing comments. Not that it changes the view of your post though.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5ekdy9/the_admi...
Many comments.
This is where I'd insert a certain GWBj quote about being fooled again...if I was on /.
Quoting from Reddit Help: Will you remove something defamatory about me or my friend? [0]:
The best way to deal with incorrect information on the Internet is to post
the correct information next to it. The reddit community is usually very
supportive of such a response, and will likely vote to give the correction
greater prominence than the original post. Redditors love a good
counterpoint.
The reddit community is usually very
supportive of such a response
If you had guessed stupid political garbage mixed with internet trolling, congratulations you get a cookie.
And also take note that witch-hunting is prohibited on reddit and can warrant legal action.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ceo-reddit-confessed-modifying-po...
The only reason I've heard that this even remotely defensible is because it was against Trump supporters.
I'm sorry, but that doesn't cut it with many of us.[1]
I don't care about political beliefs. He abused his power in such an obvious & egregious way that he should be terminated.
[1] And not that it should matter, I hate Trump as much as the vast majority of Reddit & Hacker News.
This is an insane question to ask. This is as flawed as arguing for mass surveillance because you have nothing to hide now.
The questions should instead be "can we trust our comments to not be edited when management disagrees?". What if future management starts loving python so much they decide to do something malicious to other programming languages? It wouldn't be hard to really hurt Go with the eyes of 25,000 Gophers subscribed.
All sites have this ability but few successful ones have demonstrated a willingness to use it. I fully expect that if Twitter or Facebook were caught doing this we would see an enormous backlash and huge drop in stock price. Then shortly after stockholders would demand the CEO leave.
EDIT - If you must downvote, please comment so we can discuss.
Well, why not figure it out then? Why solve a problem you haven't had yet? That seems to fall squarely under YAGNI.
Only incident we know of. It's overwhelmingly likely that they both had tools built for this and had used them before.
And admitted he edited them? Yeah, after he was called out in front of the entire world.
>The sensible amongst us should be above childish drama like this.
Not sure if trying to rationalise massive fuckups by C-level execs like this is "sensible", nor is ignoring the fact that reddit in all likelihood has ready tools (unless you're saying that it's more likely he had direct access to prod db) for stealthily editing user comments.
Lots of my comments go several points negative only to be dug back out hours later as the more sporadic, calmer crowd filters through and quietly votes.
Vehemently disagree. You can extend the same argument to the NSA conducting effectively unrestricted surveillance on citizens. Those of us who are technically minded knew it was going on years before Snowden showed up. That still doesn't make the action morally correct, nor justifiable in any way.
I seem to recall it being dismissed by the technically minded as possible but largely tinfoil hat conspiracy before Snowden showed up.
And before you say that it's "different" because emails are private, let's remember this:
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-26677607
Emails are not private. At least not Gmail/Outlook emails. ProtonMail or PGP email should be safer.
The reddit admins aren't known for making the greatest judgement calls, but that just makes them more human.
The fallout of this will probably be a bunch of nothing. It doesn't affect the 90% of lurkers, nor the rest of the site which doesn't give a shit about US politics. The people who it does affect (/r/The_Donald) will find that they need reddit to attract new users. It's doubtful their community could stand own their own or it would have done so already. It's no secret that they didn't trust the admins before the election.
Why does it matter what the discussion was about?
>The reddit admins aren't known for making the greatest judgement calls, but that just makes them more human.
I don't get it. Is being 'more human' good or bad? Is 'humanity' somehow a property that emerges from deceit and hypocrisy, or does it emerge from some other portion of this scandal?
>The fallout of this will probably be a bunch of nothing. It doesn't affect the 90% of lurkers, nor the rest of the site which doesn't give a shit about US politics.
agreed that the fallout will be minimal, but I disagree that it only affects US political boards. The reality is that we don't really know the scope of the problem; we have to take the word of parties, that have already been proven dishonest, regarding the depth and scope of their own wrong-doings.
>It's doubtful their community could stand own their own or it would have done so already.
I'm sure reddit was an awesome vehicle for their messages, but the internet is a big place, and there were people/places/forums/groups/zines like this before reddit was around.
> It's no secret that they didn't trust the admins before the election.
and now it's no secret that they were right.
Because anybody would get pissed off if they were called that for doing their job (stopping a witch hunt). He inadvertently deflected the hatred causing the doxing of a pizza shop to himself.
He should have just ignored it, since you can't really nuke the thread or it'd make things worse, but at the end of the day you'd still feel like shit.
> and now it's no secret that they were right.
Editing user content tends to get caught. Especially in high profile shit like the elections. The editing tools he used were probably spam related (so the spammer wouldn't know).
The "known secret" was that they were trying not to drown /r/all in US politics everyday, which is justifiable.
>Spez's actions harm himself more than users of the site.
If people like you keep defending him for really no reason. People lose jobs over much less. I think he has got to go.
The CEO edited a comment and admitted he edited it, and it was stupid, and he shouldn't have done it.
I'm 100% sure there is a way for someone at any given platform they'd choose to replace it with to access a DB of posts and edit it without triggering any sort of edit marker.
I'm also sure if that process exists a CEO is someone who could probably make it happen, and in fact in some (most?) places someone lower in the chain of command can probably make it happen.
Spez's actions harm himself more than users of the site. By confirming what any technically minded person probably already knew (you can edit raw data backing something like a post), he gave the masses a new source of drama any time something they don't like appears on the site.
The sensible amongst us should be above childish drama like this.
What is there on /r/Golang that they expect to see edited?
If their qualm is political instead of practical then the users themselves should leave Reddit, and not burn down the entire village on their way out.