1. Reddit's moderators can make their own decisions, but that should not change things here. It's an untrustworthy site with a culture and moderation system that rewards untrustworthy users. If it went out of business tomorrow the world would be a better place.
2. The article is genuinely interesting.
3. If all he bot does is link us to genuinely interesting back catalog .net writing, that's probably a service (at least for now) as this venue has long ignored a lot of interesting content from that ecosystem.
People can break the rules here and then we'll ban them here.
Why would say Reddit is an untrustworthy site, with a system that rewards untrustworthy users? I'm not a particularly active Reddit user, in fact it's been a while since I've even visited the site so I'm not taking this personally at all, but I'm genuinely interested as to why anyone would consider it an untrustworthy site that encourages untrustworthy users.
It's worth noting that there's nothing inherently bad about this. Possible valid reasons why this step might be taken include gaming of the algorithm by specific groups, or to even out the distribution of front page items is one of the goals for the algorithm is to have a heterogeneous set of items for the front page. Not that I have any specific information in this case to point one way or the other. I just think it's important to not immediately jump to negative conclusions about that, even if a group that experiences some loss of exposure feels negatively affected.
> At one point, the CEO manually edited some comments in the database that were critical of him.
That part is pretty egregious, and while I understand the impulse to do what he did if we take his explanation at face value (I don'[t see a particular reason why not to, it's not flattering), one would hope someone as high up in the organization would understand that playing with the trust of your userbase that way (especially with the group in question) is not likely to end well.
> They could just come out and ban or quarantine the subreddit, but instead they've chose to subversively go Digg-mode and essentially start curating what users see rather than allowing it to rise/fall organically.
I'm not specifically aware of what steps they are taking now. Do you have references to point me towards so I can catch up?
Try this: post a positive comment about a policy change there. They also talk openly about using multiple identities to control what is allowed to the top. If you watch the "new" section you can see negative or even just not-content-free stories get added often.
There are folks on various forums and IRC channels who will sell you good placement of a story on reddit for a reasonable sum of bitcoin now. It'd be interesting to enlist them to start getting policy questions onto the top of that subreddit.
[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/spezgiving-how-re...
Their voting system encourages people to build elaborate bot networks to game the system. They know it, they refuse to do anything about it.
Reddit is a untrustworthy site that grew and untrustworthy community.
Users get shadowbanned on Reddit all the time for stupid reasons.
I'm assuming that's not the intent of the submission function, but short of clarification from dang etc, I'll assume no one has a problem with it.
Well, they would actually need to be interesting. There have been users who do what amounts to "interesting article arbitrage" by automatically submitting popular posts from other platforms.
You can find the submission guidelines here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). The only one that really would apply to a bot, anymore than a normal person, is "Please don't submit so many links at once that the new page is dominated by your submissions.", which naive bots are likely to do.
Yes, I would say so. Nobody is going to complain (at least not with a valid complaint) as long as the articles are perceived as interesting and upvoted. In fact, I imagine you could do a good Show HN about the bot if it worked well enough.
The problem is when the quality slips, and it starts sliding towards spam (even if the intention was good).
Seriously, though, do you have any evidence that this guy is a bot?
And yet this post is back up, which means someone vouched for it.
Flagged it.