Some official folk from Comcast eventually showed up and almost immediately got it fixed (!). Afterwords, there were posts about how "reddit saved the day again". The customer rep who helped out ended up getting more upvotes than any of my posts. I really don't get it.
This is also why /r/askhistorians is so heavily moderated. If you just let it run itself the top comments would be low-effort junk like "Tesla god; Edison devil" and other nonsense with almost no discussions that go counter to the grain or discussion of the many shades of gray between "good and bad" and "right and wrong."
>Afterwords, there were posts about how "reddit saved the day again".
I feel sorry for the people who post incredible things, especially some of the short story writers, but the press narrative becomes "Reddit did it again!" It wasn't "reddit" it was a single author. I really wish there was more of an emphasis on individual contributions there and the people behind the usernames.
Similarly, if a newspaper publishes something about how a local company hurt a customer, it's the clout of the newspaper that "did it", not the customer.
FWIW, the disclosure sparked the discussion about a bug bounty program and a strong interest to reorganize their methods of raising security issues. I'm told both will go public, "soon". Whatever that means.
The skillset to find a unknown security issue is rare. The skillset to post to reddit is common. I think you're wrong here. The author deserves the credit, not the site.
>Similarly, if a newspaper publishes something about how a local company hurt a customer, it's the clout of the newspaper that "did it"
Because the reporter is an employee of the newspaper and like all employees is part of the organization, so its easier to credit the organization. How is reddit like a newspaper? They aren't his employer. Its more like publishing something to the classified sections of a paper than being a reporter. It would be crazy to credit the paper for its classifieds.
Some of the most interesting commentary on reddit are buried at -5 votes because almost all voting is an emotional reaction or treated as a "disagree/agree" button. I think its bad enough as-is. I don't want to see reddit build out a 'safe space' for me by analyzing my views and what subs I visit. If anything, I really want to see the threshold for when comments are collapsed to be much higher than -5, which seems easily gamed and way too quickly drowned out by knee-jerk disagree voters.
I wish these sites would move towards a slashdot-style moderation where your vote needs to be justified. Like "funny," "controversial," "insightful," "well sourced," or "poorly sourced," etc. Then you can adjust your algorithm as needed to promote quality comments, even if they go against the grain. Or users can tweak their own prefences like having a tick box or drag-n-drop to prefer 'insightful' over 'funny', for example. Or 'well sourced' over 'insightful.'
Sadly, social networks, forums, etc probably are highly disincentivized to do this as they assume we all just want tailored content. Or that if there isn't enough tailoring then users will just jump to the competition. I think most people can be okay with contradicting or some low effort, but still, insightful commentary. Perhaps we're overly coddling each other.