The CEO changed a single post from "fuck <his username>" to "fuck <username of the moderators of the specific sub-board>" for an hour. While certainly this action was not received well, the drama it caused is way overblown and isn't evidence of being 'plagued with censorship.'

If anything it's plagued with shills from governments and corporations.

Sure, the size of Huffman's change was small and limited in scope, but the injustice that it represented combined with the incredible lack of judgment by the Chief Executive rightfully rightfully caused a loud response.

He absolutely should've been fired for it, or permanently lost DB access at a bare minimum.

> If anything it's plagued with shills from governments and corporations.

Again, accountability for that behavior ultimately rests on the executive team, no? If content generation or interaction, the core of Reddit's business, is being manipulated, who bears responsibility to correct it?

Let's chill out with the over-the-top rhetoric because few of us are paying customers of reddit and it's their database at the end of the day.

Stop manufacturing outrage please

As others have pointed out, people have gone to jail for what they write on social media and forums. If the universal expectation that a user's posted words are theirs and theirs alone breaks down, as Huffman showed us can be done, then platforms like Reddit can become much more dangerous.

> it's their database at the end of the day.

and that gives them free reign to do whatever they like to content that other people post? If Huffman decided one day that he didn't like you and retroactively edited posts on your Reddit account to make you sound like a white nationalist, that would be wrong, correct?

Reddit is more dangerous when the universal expectation is that a user's posted words are theirs and theirs alone because Huffman showed that is not necessarily the case. People believing things because they are on Reddit -- which is, again, routinely manipulated by corporations and state actors -- is a problem.

Besides, the core controversy wasn't that the CEO changed a person's post. He could do that to 99.9% of posts and it wouldn't have made a difference. It was that he changed the post after it was a top-rated comment, meaning it had be 'validated' by the crowd. A crowd that has not been vetted to be legitimate in any sense. It could have been upvoted 20k times by bots, by shills, by real people agreeing with the comment... and most likely by a mix of all these.

The point is: hand-wringing about this form of manipulation, to one post for one hour, is really missing the forest for the trees. Reddit is minefield of trust in systems with no transparency whatsoever. It shouldn't be trusted at all, and it certainly shouldn't be expected to live up to the standard of a "free speech platform."

Except that they let The_Donald and other rigid subreddits constantly ban people with opinions contrary to their group-think. Where is the speech protection there?

Let's also not forget spez and other moderators routinely get death threats. If you're going to be an asshole by saying "fuck spez" or throwing out a death threat, I'm pretty sure you give up whatever "basic and fundamental extension of speech" you think reddit guarantees you.

Going in the gardening subreddit and talking about your cat will not be looked on positively. Same as the donald with whatever viewpoint you have that doesn't lineup.

That makes no sense. You're getting banned for breaking the rules, but lets not pretend the rules were written with the spirit of speech protection in mind.

The rules exist because "we want this community with this content because reddit says we can enforce arbitrary rules in our own gardens". That can include, e.g., only having positive opinions of Trump, so we can ban all negative opinions of Trump.

>Can their users (and consumers of their ads) trust that posts aren't being doctored?

So far one post has been doctored that we know of out of millions (billions?) of posts on the site, so reasonably, yes you can.

Where does it end? What threshold must be crossed until it can't be trusted? Who knows how many times it's been done. He got caught ONCE. Who knows how many OLD posts have since been slightly altered for FUTURE visitors who weren't there to see the original?

Even if we allow that Reddit owns all content in its database absolutely, they are also making an implicit representation that what is in the database is what the user actually typed. A poll of all reddit users asking "do you expect what is shown to be what the user typed?" will come up "Yes".

I imagine the outrage felt by those reddit users is not for this violation, which is small in scope, but for the realization that reality can be changed out from under them, and the uncertainty about that power asymmetry being used against them.

Who said it needs to be corrected? Is the Reddit CEO in the business of killing golden geese? 'Post edit' scandal notwithstanding?

Reddit profits from a combination of true believers, sophisticated attention merchants, and fly-by-night lurkers who keep the ad execs convinced that clicks equal purchases.

They don't seem to be at risk of losing any of these.

You are being manipulated everywhere. From constant talk to your doctor in drug ads to learn this series of facts and opinions in school to vote for me because I represent you. You are responsible for filtering and learning.

People have been arrested because of Reddit posts they made. If the admins can edit comments without any indication to the users... They can falsely accuse you of a crime. They can also identify you and ban you specially if you do or say things not in alignment with the founders of Reddit(criticizing Serina Williams got a subreddit banned recently).

Sincere question: Was it actually criticism of Serena Williams ("she exhibited poor behavior", "she's lost a step", "her fashion sense sucks", etc) or was it abuse ("she's a man", "she's an ugly pig", etc)?

Banning because of the former is unacceptable, but I see no reason why we would expect her husband to permit the latter on his platform.

What it is is rich and powerful people using their influence to step on the little guy, and that behavior trickling down in a bizarre quest for faux-vindication by petty commissars. The kind of person who wants to be a Reddit mod on a big subreddit is not your average Joe. If they're not outright getting paid under the table by interested actors, they're doing it for the power trip.

Although I must confess I'm no expert on Reddit. After all, real men discuss Serena on 4chan and post gun videos on Pornhub /s

I feel like this is possible on every website ever made.

How many are going to say no?

If the company is public, all of this is covered under SOX compliance or other regulations. If you're truly going to get fired by the CEO for not complying, better that than be the one thrown under the bus when the SEC (or other gov body) comes knocking.

Idea: Reddit, but the comments are a blockchain.

Don't get me wrong, as much as I support the idea of no censorship, there's always a need for a janitor to clean somebody's graffiti on the wall. In an online world, those janitors tend to abuse their power though.

What could anyone do about it, other than promising not to do it again? I guess there could be some kind of certificate transparency thing? Other people could make copies of messages and verify that they haven't changed?

I firmly believe people should be held responsible for what they say and do but there has to be freedom to say things that are offensive or scary or there's no protection for any speech.

What bothered people was spez editing the actual database, no timestamp, etc...

There's zero specification in either law around oversight into or appeal of any decision to disallow a gun purchase on the basis of what the reviewer finds.

A proposed law isn't a law, after all. Anyone can propose anything.

This "proof" they have the ability to do that somehow signaling danger is nothing short of ridiculous.

Reddit is not always casual chat.

There is hide, delete and edit with a clear history for all involved.

Touching the database changes the record of reality without leaving history of it happening.

The database edit is what drove the spez controversy.

This isn't some kind of dark secret backdoor spez built into the reddit codebase. Immature and stupid action maybe, but some kind of scary sentinel of how admin power can be uniquely abused at reddit, it isn't.

The argument here isn't if he should have did it, he obviously shouldn't have. The argument is about how incredibly overdone the outrage over the specific circumstances is.

Of course it is possible.

That it was done, and why is a big issue.

And it did not need to be done, nor that way.

A direct edit can make sense, and when it does, there is also every reason to communicate why.

The why of what spez did is a significant contributor to the controversy. Lack of a record and no communication, until forced is another significant contributor.

People do care. And this is a basic trust problem inherent to computing.

Ever notice how there is often redundancy and history present?

This is why.

Another place this shows up is electronic voting. Lack of personally identifiable records leave people in a position of forced trust, unable to know the record is accurate.

Motive plays a role here.

Spez had a childish, bigger dick type ego motive. Untrustworthy.

The same exact thing done to protect someone, and done with rational communication would be far less controversial.

As for the hard drive, the defense must speak to motive and it must be compelling, or we are all likely to trust the person doing that necessary work.

Your comparison is germane, but too simple, in my view.

Maybe "plagued" doesn't apply but that was an important event, at least because it showed that it wasn't just a theoretical possibility and but something that has happened already. So now imagine if there is a court case and content posted on Reddit is used as evidence, I can see an argument being made "it can't be relied one as it could have been edited just like that one time by the CEO himself"

and on the drama end of things

> former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao weighed in on the thread with her own criticisms of the current CEO. "I would have immediately fired anyone who did [what Huffman did]," Pao wrote.

I guess it'd be the instant death of the network.

That this action a) happened on Reddit + b) was mostly/quickly forgotten says a lot about the different demographics.

Audiences who largely come for cat pictures and political snark don't have to worry about CEOs breaking the 4th wall.

I've been a Redditor for 9+ years and I still am one. But today's Reddit isn't the one I signed up for.

Either they wanted their advertising money or were simply supportive of their platform/actions, but eventually it was enough for me to leave Reddit entirely.

The people attracted to those communities don't just stay in them; they spread out and infect the rest of the site as well with 4chan-style shitposting, trolling, and bigotry.

If Reddit banned it, then they'd likely drive said users to a competitor (like Voat) and divert all that media attention from Reddit to said competitor in the process.

Banning t_d could be construed as political speech, and a form of political donation. And reddit most definitely doesn't want legal inquiries of that kind, I bet they have a lot of dirty laundry there - did you guys forget how "cleanly" /r/politics switched overnight (literally) from bernie central to hillary propaganda?

They most definitely want to ban it, as demonstrated in leaked logs from private admin chat some time ago, but they do not dare.

Around the time of the comment-editing fiasco I remember a couple of other subreddits' mods saying the admins were quite friendly to the TD mods on the Reddit mod discourse. I wouldn't be surprised, considering the behavior they constantly got away with.

You also have places like ChapoTrapHouse that openly called for brigading of the Libertarian subreddit while the admins were paying close attention to the sub. Nothing happens, of course.

Nonsense. HN moderators already act with zero accountability. This is possibly the only major site that shadowbans users as a matter of course.

And of course! It is their house. Play nice, or see the impact. And they do have accountability. Users are here because it makes sense. Should that change, so will users do something else.

Nothing out of the ordinary there.

Maybe I'm wrong though, and it didn't happen here but somewhere else.

You think a critical mass of HN users would band together to bring down a social media site because the company participates in censorship?

No. It's moderated and we love it that way. I might even have been shadowbanned and I still love it. Moderation rocks!

(Not being sarcastic btw. I really do like HN moderation)

If the user's post was about the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and included baseless, highly offensive libel of the YC folks? Yeah, I don't think many people here would care. Especially since most users here understand that a website's comment database can be edited arbitrarily, it's not nearly as unthinkable as you assume. Don't like it, get your own website.

/u/spez's main mistake was pushing it as an actual change to the comments database. If he'd forced a CSS change or whatever this overblown censorship/deception narrative would never have arisen.

EDIT: So actually on https://www.reddit.com/comments/5frg1n he did actually say that he was sorry and he wouldn't do it again. That's interesting, because I have a very strong memory of that not being the case. Weird. Either there was an initial acknowledgement that didn't have any sort of apology, or I missed something. I still stand by my minimization of the thing to which he reacted.

It seems a bit like your feelings on this issue are stronger than your recollection.

All forums are "plagued" in that way, though. This one too. Everyone who wants to run such a service has a personal idea of what expression is appropriate within the vision of the site and which ones aren't welcome. And everyone has personal sensitivities and makes moderation mistakes, too.

Honestly if reddit has failed, it's been in the opposite direction. They've been too lax with moderation and had to make rapid and disruptive course corrections when people point out the garbage they've been tolerating.

You have a first amendment right to express your opinions to anyone you want, but you don't have a right to do it on someone else's moderated forum.

There needs to be room for public spaces to just be venues. Service providers should be able to just be service providers.

There should be limits, but they should mostly align with legal limits and they should be enforce by law enforcement officers accountable to the public primarily by observing public posts or through warrants and subpoenas.

There should additionally be norms about, broadly, what counts as disruptive behavior, but it needs to be agnostic about content.

I don't really care if it is hard to make 100 billion dollars because there are too many trolls or because the content doesn't align with "corporate values".

There's no lack of "true" free speech opportunity on the internet. Sites like stormfront and 4chan remain a thing. Don't pretend like that's what we all want from Reddit, is all I'm saying.

I want private organizations to choose between being objective platforms like libraries or subjective organizations with a voice like The Washington Post. And I want norms, not laws, to enforce that distinction.

I don't want jerks interrupting my conversations with spam, but that's a very different matter than censoring people's thoughts because I don't agree or have unpleasant emotions when exposed to them.

I think HN is overmoderated, for what it's worth. It used to be more interesting but its habit of dinging threads with lots of discussion has a habit of filtering out important discussion in addition to heated discussion.

I definitely don't hold HN accountable for what random people post here.

It sounds like you have a pretty good idea of what kind of moderation you are looking for. Have you found a forum that is aligned with that?

They tried the hands-off approach and it failed spectacularly. The site spent its boom years with basically negligible community-management while it spent its efforts doing damage-control on its overwhelmed servers.

Everybody generates trash, but not everybody contributes equally to illegal dumping and littering.

That hasn't been forgotten.

Also, it has the wrong number of occurrences to be a persuasive data point toward the characterization "plague."

There will be other places.

Stop enabling centralization, and promote decentralised options =D

Perhaps this could happen though, if they came up with a reasonable fund raiser to buy out that stake? $3B is all it takes :-)

https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/05/raiseit/

Sadly invite only for now.

Reddit has traditionally allowed for users to criticize the admins/founders to their hearts fill. This was one isolated incident, among a 1000 similar comments.

Now, the sudden disappearance of some highly voted posts is something I find more interesting. That, and tolerating subreddits that routinely break the site's rules.

No the user was/is apart of a radical political group that was harassing the admins and other users on a private website, essentially abusing the platform.

Spare me the claims of censorship. We can't even get rid of subreddits that sexualize minors or even safe havens for beastiality.

Free speech has become a thought terminating cliche.

But the conversation was kicked off by it being abused. The conclusion is already there.

It was a prank, a troll on the trollingest people on the platform. That’s all.

I would say 95% of the website is firmly liberal. Try saying anything conservative anywhere on the platform and you'll be either:

- Banned

- Downvoted

- Shadowbanned

I've seen plenty of ant-left, anti-feminist, anti-liberal, anti-democracy, right wing conspiracy stuff on Reddit, and of course mainstream conservative and right-wing political content.

But I don't necessarily think it's censorship to draw a line in the sand where extremism is concerned. Or if it is, then it's censhorship employed for reasons other than mere politics.

I think it's important to differentiate because the narrative here, as it's often employed, has been to describe social media as censoring "conservative" content en masse, on the premise that social media is engaging in an organized leftist conspiracy of censorship, which itself is an extension of the conspiracy theory that all mainstream media is owned and run by leftist/globalist/DNC operatives pushing a political agenda.

I think that's a misrepresentation of what actually happening, or what the motives actually are.

I'm not even sure what you mean by anti-feminist but I'll guess "hate women and their rights", which I'll say leftists are guilty of disrespecting and sending threats to conservative women with "incorrect opinions".

And anti-democracy is a funny point to bring up because a lot of far leftists from reddit are very pro communist and hate democracy.

On top of all this, you lump in anti-left and anti-liberal with your other categories of "evil", making anti-right and anti-conservative the good guys. Your bias is showing, and you're alienating political moderates in the center. This is why people are not voting the way you want them to.

As is you immediately making it personal, but I disagree. As is mentioned elsewhere, "extremist" is a relative term. Plenty of people would consider what I listed to be pretty extremist... but had you made a good faith attempt to read my comment, you would have seen that the premise of it was to point out that there is an entire spectrum of "right wing" content allowed on Reddit, from the mainstream to the fringe.

>I'm not even sure what you mean by anti-feminist but I'll guess "hate women and their rights", which I'll say leftists are guilty of disrespecting and sending threats to conservative women with "incorrect opinions".

Incels, redpillers, mens' rights advocates, etc. And you're correct that this exists on the left, but given that I never claimed it existed exclusively on the right, only that it existed on the right, I don't know what the purpose of the equivocation here is.

>On top of all this, you lump in anti-left and anti-liberal with your other categories of "evil", making anti-right and anti-conservative the good guys.

Who are you quoting here? I never mentioned evil. I never made a moral value judgement at all in my comment.

But... anti-left and anti-liberal would by definition be right-wing. I don't know why that seems to to be controversial to you, as you clearly fall into that category yourself.

>Your bias is showing, and you're alienating political moderates in the center. This is why people are not voting the way you want them to.

Oh.... I see. You're not actually responding to me, you're responding to the strawman.

Fair enough, you do you then.

And extremism is subjective. You could say America is extremist capitalist. Sure we don’t burn books or kill dissidents, but we kill millions through unhealthy food, we have millions addicted to painkillers, porn, social media, and many spend half of their adult lives in a room typing on a computer. All permissible because it’s good for a profit. I’d call that extreme.

Whether you agree with an extreme view doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be allowed to talk about it. Some views that are extreme to you are not extreme to me.

So you're a facist who supports free speech?

I think I'm OK with that.