There's a reason Wikipedia isn't an acceptable source in college-level courses.
That congress sees fit to investigate Reddit comments and news websites find credibility in re-posting them are separate issues that absolutely deserve discussion. But the editing of "Fuck [username]" posts...
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3cuk3y/what_i...
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.
[1] https://voat.co/v/MeanwhileOnReddit/1373659 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/shittychangelog/comments/59s3ao/red...
Reddit (the company) is a wretched hive of scum an villany, where this sort of stuff seems almost regular. Perhaps it wasn't always so: I don't know.
But I can't think of any other forum that would put up with this. If an owner or mod did this on the *chans, the chan in question would be abandoned within the week.
As for HN, dang does as he sees fit, as do the admins: they'll split your thread, redact your post (and if they doesn't, the software will if it gets flagged enough, IIRC), and (or so I heard) even shadowban you of you're bad enough. However, they're mostly right, and not corrupt. And they wouldn't pull crap like this. Blocking a comment that talks about how HN is just a massive circlejerk is one thing: actually altering it to say something else is quite another.
I suppose it might be common on forums run by egotistical gits, but come on, you're heading a company running a large forum/news aggregator. You can do better than an egomaniac with a website.
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.
Very toxic.
Everyone has been accusing of Facebook and twitter for spreading fake news while reddit has also been absolute shit at it.
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.
[0]http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tw...
Adding that citation is one of my proudest Wikipedia edits ever.
I feel stupider just for having had to type that..what a world we've built.
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.
My grandparents didn't fight on two fronts to see this bullshit taking over the United States.
I just wanted to point out the growing problem that is the The_Donald and similar communities, where they relentless harass others.
They then proceeding to post the owners information and make death threats against him and his staff.
Absolutely despicable behaviour. And completely criminal.
Posting in ALL CAPS, posting fake news or insults to other members of the community, posting to incite anger, etc. does not make for good discussion, and hurts the sense of community. That, and bringing that to other subreddits via brigading, etc.
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.
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.
but he didn't mess with any of the content of any messages.
If he did, the entire chan would have gone up in flames.
If anything, the insane censorship, hivemind of r/politics is more toxic.
But I guess the latter is "quiet" so it's alright. No discussion makes the best discussion.
You can visit http://reddit.com/r/all and see that Pro-trump posts are always in the top 10 and at least 2 will be shown in the top 40. So no they don't filter our pro-Trump posts. They merely made the algorithm more balanced to showcase some of the smaller sites.
And the defaults are not political at all:
https://www.reddit.com/r/defaults/comments/4l3svc/list_of_de...
Reddit is not an oft-cited source of news. By and large, it is a marketplace for link sharing coupled with a comment system and a currency of reputation. In other words, a forum focused on reacting to content elsewhere around the web but with some original content here and there. Where there is credible content, it is often from somewhere else like a news vendor. Everything else, including all comments on any thread, must be subjected to scrutiny and distrust as with any other forum. For starters, any comment can be a deliberately hyperbolic or entirely false/nonsensical assertion — rhetoric or sophistry — and thus no comment should be trusted on the grounds that it being correct may be coincidental if the intention was not to be correct, but rather to incite a reaction from others (trolling).
Then there is of course the possibility (indeed inevitability) that posts will be edited silently by those with sufficient permissions in the forum system, or access to the database if the system does not have silent edits built in. I say 'inevitable' because, given enough time, those with access to administrative power or the database itself will find a reason to silently edit something, by someone, somewhere.
No forum should be treated as credible. Even if your study is about how forum users behave, you cannot trust those you study to be behaving normally as their intentions are always questionable. We don't have Asimov's psycho-history yet.
I do not think forums have ever been credible sources of information, and I have participated in discussions on forums for fifteen years now. HN has more credibility than others, but that has been earned by clever people who visit this community for the sake of discussing intellectual topics — not the founding ideal of Reddit.
If the US has had congress hearings on the basis of Reddit posts, as was stated in a comment above, that is testament only to the ignorance of the US congress.
Edit: if you mean viability when you say credibility, i.e. in terms of generating revenue/getting investment, that depends on the rationality of its current/future investors. Assuming rational behaviour, this probably won't make any difference. The users will still come and if anything Reddit users should feel better precisely because the CEO fessed up to silent edits. It means that the issue can be addressed, perhaps with PGP signatures as suggested by others here; the ability to make silent edits by administrators could be removed; and the code powering Reddit could be open-sourced to prove that (apologies if it already is open-source, I am ignorant of the state of Reddit's back-end).
I mean, where else would the right-leaning Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists hang out?
Users might think this is a breach of trust, but I really cant make that jump.
The important thing is that the_donald followers need a controversy to latch onto and will do so.
That would have been elegant and not touched user history.
I honestly can't tell with that sub at all. Its fascinating to visit like the redpill used to be, some very strange people out there.
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.
I personally want to see more corporate leadership taking responsibility and leadership for backing up their personal views and those of their employees. A good example is how Grubhub's CEO Matt Maloney sent a company-wide email about the culture of the company that I respect quite a lot. http://media.grubhub.com/media/press-releases/press-release-...
Now do I agree with exactly what /u/spez did? Personally, the vindictive part of me likes the idea of fucking around with the morons in that subreddit. But as the ceo of the company, no. If it was any employee that had done it, they would likely have been terminated or at least had a severe write-up, no matter how much the leadership agreed with it. But when its the ceo, I'm not sure what the outcome will/should be.
To be completely honest, we have to remember that reddit is a company and not the public airwaves. There is no requirement that it be a bastion of free speech for all users. If I were running reddit, I would have banned that subreddit months ago. Any users found to be making racist, homophobic, hateful, or any other kind of similar commentary would have been permabanned a long time ago. The internet is a big place and its already too full of negativity. There are no socially positive reasons to provide places for it to fester.
Here is a report from the NY Times (an actual respected organisation) who shows the damage this type of Fake News has:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/fact-check-this...
I am talking about the fact that the pizzeria owner and his staff have had death threats against them from members of the Reddit /r/pizzagate sub. The FBI should be investigating this and charging people.
r/The_Donald mods were censoring all comments against Donald Trump (hence why they didn't reach r/all)
> the CEO mocked Facebook's knowledge of their users data saying that at Reddit they know not only what one publicly speaks (such as in Facebook), but also their users "darkest secrets" (in an interview about advertising on Reddit).
It was clearly a joke taken out of context from conspiracy theorist.
Use uneddit.com on the_donald if you want to laugh.
As far as the editing Spez did, if they were really out there calling him a pedophile, they should have expected some backlash. You can only push an authority figure so far before they're going to go on the defensive. This will definitely make things worse though.
If that's not what they want to have (as its clearly making the CEO on edge), why not enforce some strict rules? The people they don't like will simply flock to other communities that will allow it and it becomes their problem.
Those people have been mislead, to be sure, but it isn't accurate or useful to assume they are malicious.
It is much more honest and within reason to take steps like deleting posts, suspending or even outright banning users.
Reddit is generally best consumed by selecting small subreddits. I really recommend against /r/all unless you enjoy internet drama and subreddit wars.
https://www.wired.com/2005/12/wikipedia-founder-edits-own-bi...
It set off the overheated discussion detector (a.k.a. flamewar detector), which lowers the rank of a thread. We do turn that penalty off for particularly substantive discussions—which, though this may surprise you, I'm not sure this one is. Not every Reddit drama shitshow is uniform in its excellence. Can I say that without evil catnip effects?
Edit: ok, we've reduced the penalty and changed the title to something the post actually says. (The submitted title, "Reddit CEO admits to altering user comments that were critical of him", breaks the HN guideline about not changing titles unless they are misleading or linkbait. Please don't do that when submitting here.)
I didn't know that was so common on SA. I knew the site was heavily-moderated, despite The Goons' famous repuation. But it's still terrible there, too.
By... Filtering out r/The_Donald. You can claim the reason was apolitical. Fine. But I think you have to be extremely naive to do so, given what was going on on reddit during the elections.
>And the defaults are not political at all:
Some are not, some are. All that are, are aligned with the admins' political view and routinely ban users that disagree with them.
That particular sub-reddit is a mixture of real people, and trolls who pose as trump supporters to egg the supporters on, as well as scaring and pissing off people against trump. The result being that with little effort and prodding on their side they get to see glorious internet mudfights.
However due to the way they're doing it, it's hard to tell which is which. That puts reddit admins in a bind and they have to balance things. Do they keep distance and let subtle trolls go unscathed? Do they take harsher measures and hit actual trump supporters? How much of this spills over into other reddits? How to handle the /all pollution? Letting it get in there just increases the mudfights, but if they take steps they'll be accused of censorships.
That's what they mean when say they're a "free speech" subreddit: they're protesting against restrictions on free speech, they aren't providing a place for free speech.
what exactly is the point of your comment. do you think you are providing any sort of service to the readers of this thread.
does the fact that the OP was incorrect in a minor part of his comment invalidate the rest of it?
does your comment make you feel superior in anyway?
in the future, when posting a retort please ellucidate.
Didn't they already do that when Morgan Freeman's AMA was staged? (If not Freeman, then another AMA. Some big celebrity's AMA was staged within the past year.)
A Digg reskin* with a huge library of adult content.
*By Digg reskin, I am referring to Digg right before everyone left. I mean, there is a high possibility that any sort of "Reddit v3" would cause people to leave.
Yes, you can find unhinged conspiracy stuff written about this. I'm not aware of any proof of anyone committing crimes, nor am I going to claim anyone is guilty without evidence. But there's enough weird that people are going to be digging into this one for a while.
Which is why I can't really feel outraged that a nonsense comment was changed into another nonsense comment. Nothing of value was lost.
[0]http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/21/hillary-pac... [1]CTR Spent: 8MIL https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997
I've settled on a side project of just editorials that dissect the rhetoric and logical strengths of current stories in aggregate.
I think the next version of reddit is going to have to be on a blockchain or something decentralized and verifiable.
That being said, I really have to give props to the HN team for how well they do their job technically and politically compared to most internet forum sites.
Your countryfolk elected "this bullshit", so consider that what you and your grandparents want might not really be relevant.
I'm guessing that's likely because you agree with the political stances of Spez and Mr Maloney. Would you be equally supportive of a leader of a large company espousing the virtue of traditional gender roles or other socially conservative stances?
I'm glad dang answered though since I've been wondering for quite a while why some stories seemed to sink much faster than others.
I don't know what Steve was thinking, but 10 seconds in that thread makes me start to understand.
Fascists and white nationalists defend it by claiming it's just clownish fun. (which, unamusingly, is EXACTLY the same explanation given by the supporters of fascism in Italy, and Russia, and Germany). Trolls really are having fun, they just don't give a fuck.
It's propaganda. It's gross. All of the donald's loser readers and writers have the right to share their bad ideas; but they have no particular right to say it on Reddit.
Now we know that spam and abuse make any large Internet forum suck. Your choice: moderation or cesspool.
Also, getting rid of the really extreme filth on the Internet is no fun and people generally have to be paid to do it, which is one of the things that keeps larger social networks in business.
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.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11387934/internet-moderato...
The key is to look in the comments, not in the main post itself.
i still stick by my point that there is a level of pedantry on HN that really turns me off
Only communities small enough, or moderated enough, to not be interesting to a troll or nefarious person are spared.
The idea of a completely self governed haven of mass free speech is a wondeful one, but no community large enough stays uncorrupted. It has never worked.
It is the ideals and application of those ideals through moderation that make any community bearable, just like in real life.
If I am to be part of a community I would rather it moderated, otherwise the people of the internet ruin all things in time.
I just want to have useful conversations, not circlejerk over freedom of speech while being interrupted by adolescent screaming.
I think people can pretty well figure out what the story is from the linked page and the HN comments. No?
There's a downside to spelling things out completely—it gets people out of the habit of doing their own work to figure things out. Admittedly it can sometimes be helpful for getting a story attention in the first place, but once it's on the front page, there's nearly always a good reason for that, and it's good to expect readers to have to dig a little sometimes to find it.
Edit: There's another aspect too. When a title uses language that isn't from the article itself, it typically departs from the article in ways that subtly reframe it into something it isn't. (This is also the case with many media pieces whose headlines are not written by their authors.) For example, the courtroom tone of the submitted title frames this story as a grave breach of trust and leaves out the (I'll be generous) equally important aspect that this is a Reddit shitshow and nothing about it can be taken completely seriously.
This is an important effect to avoid, and sticking to language from the article itself is the way to avoid it.
Reddit's credibility is gone forever. No going back.
When pedantry serves as a roadblock to honest, charitable discussion, I agree :) I've written plenty of comments only to not-submit them, and deleted others right after posting. I've really tried to give people the benefit of the doubt, ignore small jibes if I can, and try to understand where people I may not agree with are coming from. After all, if I can't understand them, I'm not sure I can ask them to understand me. It's a work in progress. :)
PS: And actually, given their other follow-up comment,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027616
I'm not sure if the charitable interpretation was the correct one. Even so, assuming malice rarely moves things forward.
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.
I would rather be a person who voluntarily runs a cesspool than be a person forced to run one.
Reddit should let everything organically perform, and remove things that are against the law. Not things that are against their left-leaning political agenda.
Aaron Swartz would not like Reddit in it's current shape.
I think the real problem is that sites like 4chan makes a tiny fraction of what Reddit does.
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.
An idea that came up recently which we're mulling over is showing 'vouch' links (or something analogous) on stories that are being penalized this way, so users can indicate that they think a discussion is really substantive.
As for why changed, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027515 and the replies.
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.
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.
I ask because I want to figure out if anyone else that works at Reddit was aware of this. It's one thing to have the top of the house do something this betrayingly asinine, but I'd consider it much worse if other staff at Reddit were aware of this.
Two good examples of this are Chick-fil-a and Hobby Lobby. (I worked for Chick-fil-a briefly when I was a teenager. I appreciated never having to work on a Sunday.) Both of these companies establish policies based on the belief structures of their founders. I readily admit to being an liberal atheist and am proud to stand behind that. While I may not agree personally with those policies, the companies are very forthcoming about them and as a customer, it helps me to make decisions about whether I am comfortable or not doing business with them.
To be even more specific, I want leadership of companies to be more open and honest with these things specifically because we have a lot of hard-won laws in the US to prevent discrimination. I want conservative leadership to be called out and potentially punished when they violate the law, rather than being allowed to execute their discriminatory beliefs in private and hide them under made-up reasons.
Now just to round that last statement out, I do not stand for other progressives and liberals to discriminate against people just because they hold personal conservative viewpoints. As long as everyone is obeying the law and not letting their beliefs affect the lives of others, I seriously couldn't care less what they think. Do I personally believe that conservatives are lacking in basic levels of education and compassion for other people? Yes, yes I do. Do I believe that those people should somehow be discriminated against just because they are happy to discriminate against other people? No, I don't.
So I guess to summarize the answer to your question: Yes I have similar political stances as those two, but I want more openness among all corporate leadership because it makes it much easier and clearer to decide which companies to do business with.
Also, in the end, the people who host a forum get to choose whether they really want to host a cesspool or not. If it's not working for them, they can shut it down, or maybe outsource moderation to Facebook or Disqus.
Are you gonna make every title a puzzle? Or change the title back? Or keep your YC-serving contradiction?
I didn't know who "spez" was until this incident! The title should at least say Reddit! This is a terribly mystifying and non-descriptive title and the previous one was completely accurate.
EDIT WITH REPLY TO THE FOLLOWING:
I only found this thread because I searched "reddit" to see what the discussion was here after reading about this incident in the Yahoo News article. That means I would have passed right over it and not known this article was about Reddit if I had started here because I didn't know what u/spez was yet.
And the title you gave this isn't even a title from the content, it's a partial quote of a line from within the body of a comment underneath a page with a completely different title. All the examples you linked were to pages with titles that were then used or lightly trimmed into the title here (possibly with a year added).
> As much as we try to maintain a good relationship with you all, it does get old getting called a pedophile constantly.
constant fighting and complaining with other subs as well (which normally they would just shut down, but (un)fortunately, the r/the_donald mods are doing all they can do prevent that being needed, so its a constant minor (but active) problem, instead of being a large one-time problem that they can just ban)
Its the whole concept of poisoning the well, you have some people acting bad, and then the other people act bad in return, and then everyone watching just feels bad for watching it, and it makes everyone feel shit
It's like an ISP knowing a significant portion of your web browsing behaviour.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027367
Short (incomplete) answer: it tripped the flame war detector and has likely been flagged by a number of users.
So that means I can go back to posting random 1960s Spiderman memes everywhere? Awesome!
This act will cause /r/The_Donald to leave reddit, saying they don't trust them anymore.
Those opposed to their antics will forgive /u/spez and stay.
The result is that reddit expels it's undesirable members without anything so controversial as banning them.
So you think wiping out a subreddit community is reasonable because some members of that community do idiotic things? People from a subreddit as large as The_Donald aren't some homogenous group.
I'm very pessimistic about the future.
HN for the most part does a good job maintaining comment quality, but it obviously has some advantages that a general community site would not have.
As a die-hard reader, and very rare commenter/submitter, it's frankly very difficult to see this as anything other than obfuscation -- especially given the context & the possible titles for a situation like this.
IMO the original title is about as spot-on as I could have come up with, and the current title is about as ambiguous as I could have come up with; how about at least changing the pronouns to have some context (ie "I" => "Reddit CEO").
No, we're not gonna "make every title a puzzle"—that would be "the opposite extreme".
This has no effect on YC pro or con, it's too inconsequential. Also, we don't moderate HN to be YC-serving. See my comment upthread. Doing so would not be YC-serving anyhow, just idiotic.
Domain names are part of the title on HN, so the title does say Reddit.
I'm glad you know who "spez" is now! See, that wasn't so hard!
It's one thing to "complaining about",,, generalizations. It's entirely different for a CEO to abuse his power and censor those he disagrees with on a social media site.
He should be let go for this! He is literally putting words in peoples mouths!!
It calls into question the credibility of the whole site.
In an October 2014 Wired story, Adrian Chen documented the work of front line moderators operating in modern-day sweatshops. In Manila, Chen witnessed a secret "army of workers employed to soak up the worst of humanity in order to protect the rest of us." Media coverage and researchers have compared their work to garbage collection, but the work they perform is critical to preserving any sense of decency and safety online, and literally saves lives — often those of children. For front-line moderators, these jobs can be crippling. Beth Medina, who runs a program called SHIFT (Supporting Heroes in Mental Health Foundational Training), which has provided resilience training to Internet Crimes Against Children teams since 2009, details the severe health costs of sustained exposure to toxic images: isolation, relational difficulties, burnout, depression, substance abuse, and anxiety. "There are inherent difficulties doing this kind of work," Chen said, "because the material is so traumatic."
The whole thing is worth a read, in a couple of sessions if necessary.
Ok, here you go: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...
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"
But... then again... Reddit's best days are behind it. Doesn't really matter who is at the helm.
* Reddit is still in turmoil | Hacker News || https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12140603
Are you gonna make every title a puzzle?
No, it doesn't need to be all of them --- just enough to provide a healthy level of 'environmental enrichment'. I presume you are familiar with the 'herding cats' metaphor for programmers. Well, we're the cats, and 'dang' is the herder.
Environmental enrichment encourages the use of "puzzle feeders" that require the cats to practice their hunting instincts rather than expecting their meals to be provided to them in a bowl: http://www.catbehaviorassociates.com/the-benefits-of-using-p...
(at least, that's the way I've always viewed it)
I wish I had better tools to deal with assholes. Savvy leadership can come up with clever solutions sometimes, but it'd be nice to somehow reduce the need to be clever.
Complete nonsense, this argument will hold up just as badly as it would've held up before.
Except for the part where the CEO personally edited user's posts to say things they didn't say? Yes. Genius. Not controversial at all...
You're objecting to the most routine of HN practices, which is to replace rewritten titles with original titles (except when the original is misleading or linkbait). In this case it doesn't fit in 80 chars and is pretty baity, so we did what we often do and took the principal sentence from the first paragraph.
Since you're a die-hard reader and therefore we love you, I'd consider suspending this most routine of HN practices just to make you happy, but first you'd have to convince me that you truly, upon reflection, think that the wording of an HN title about a Reddit shitshow is a serious trust issue. I can't bring myself to believe that any of you are really so troubled and zealous about this; it's too silly. Reddit shitshows aren't serious to begin with, and this isn't even that, it's meta Reddit ephemera.
0. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election...
1. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/78761255265415577...
2. http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/22/13714052/d...
3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/trump-revokes...
4. http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/14/media/donald-trump-media-bla...
Let's say that instead of allowing you to express this last comment - he used his admin privileges and made your comment PRO trump.
Do you see the difference? Having a strong opposing - even annoying - demanding - opinion is not the same as impersonating others and censoring their words.
HUGE HUGE DIFFERENCE
Does that make sense?
Interesting way to put it. "in your opinion." Are racist comments and harassment awful only in "opinion"? Are we not at a point where spewing racism in a public forum is not "factually awful" now?
Also, this has potentially far reaching implications not just for comments on reddit, but any comment made on any forum on the internet. Without a way of proving a comment has not been tampered with, how can what you write online be used against you in the court of law?
> Except wait, are you saying anyone reads the FAQ?
Fair point :)
The 'vouch' idea is interesting, but I'm not sure if you really need another click mechanism to accomplish it -- if people above a certain karma threshold are voting it up, it's a topic that people integrated into the community do think is worth being seen, regardless of the quality of the discussion currently in the thread. That said, it might be worth trying -- having a visible indicator might result in a different reaction; it's possible that the majority of such stories would get vouched, which could be a useful signal in tuning your algorithm.
The admins kickstarted reddit by impersonating different users, they even had a field to enter the username which which to post/comment. Fake it 'til you make it. Nothing inherently wrong with it.
I'm not going to stop visiting reddit over this. Hell, if it erodes trust by /r/the_donald who'll move over to something like voat, fair enough. I have no illusions that content is safe from subversion, whether it be in-place or not, and I've myself applied some CSS during April Fools on a major subreddit that modified comments as a lark.
It was wrong of /u/spez, sure. But the guy's pissed off, he should be with the amount of upvoting bots on that reddit and no real solution. He fessed up almost immediately and it's not like they're going to go at it in scale - especially since it's so very easily provable with archive.is.
It was a juvenile messing around with a group that breeds on persecution complex. I consider this a joke. Not bad in taste, not the height of comedy.
But no curtain with the wizard behind it has been pulled open here in my view, it's fine.
...
I think there needs to be some control over the veracity, some intrusion into the bubbles with which we inherit the web. If it takes a reddit admin to cattle prod around the fucking bat-shit insane /r/pizzagate idiocy into outrage and feeding their persecution complex sarcastically and ironically then I may actually be for it.
That's wishful thinking if you ask me.
I'm "opposed to their antics" but I'm 10X more opposed to CEO's censoring people and literally putting words in their mouth!
I feel sorry for those that would forgive that, if in fact many people on a social media site would think that's "no biggy"
In other circumstances this might have gotten laughed off, but The Donald has really developed a bunker mentality IMO after having mods doxxed, the algorithm changed to end their front page dominance, lots of other subs being anti-Trump, and the general tenor of the campaign against Trump.
I hope Spez can take a nice relaxing weekend holiday and let someone else deal with this shit-hurricane.
But he just couldn't quit.
It's since turned back into mostly memes and shitposting though.
All I'm asking is to not automatically dismiss it all as propaganda. Regardless of your political affiliation, the podesta files should be looked at very closely. Most of the mainstream media glossed over it and the only place that really dissected the emails was /r/The_Donald. It's concerning that wikileaks was rarely, if ever, mentioned in /r/politics.
UPDATE the_donald SET comment = replace('/u/spez', '/u/notspez', comment) WHERE 'fuck /u/spez' in lowercase(comment);
But yeah, there's a reason I put so many exclamation marks on that.
I feel sick if I so much at glance at some of those.
https://i.reddituploads.com/26af29432a2340a98d83052a0ed3efcc...
I didn't understand the significance of this until reading that comment.
However, after looking at the Vigilant Citizen article on it, it seems like the ultimate example of false persuasion. It is super bizarre and intriguing, but obviously false.
I still don't understand why a "kid-friendly" place is posting photos on their Instagram with people engaged in sex acts on top of slices of pizza. Not to mention the references to crude sex acts, occult rituals and (objectively) creepy photos of kids.
But, usually a company of this size/scale puts in place restrictions so that accessing privileged abilities like this is extremely difficult and requires authorizations / clearances / permissions from users, etc.
Generally big / public tech company employees are not even allowed to LOOK at PII or the data of a specific user name etc. You run all tests on staging / fake populated DBs only, etc.
I think all presidents have and will.
I would love to keep the naivety that CEO's of social media sites don't censor opposing views.
Suspecting that they do and having proof... are two different things in my book!
This is --- not exaggerating --- the most batshit thread I have ever seen on HN. And I seen some shit.
The next president is making a bunch of public actions that will be critiqued, audited, and probably checked / balanced as the government was set up to do. The CEO of reddit is SECRETLY tampering / modifying the "speech" and content of private citizens without any checks, balances, or even repercussions (so far).
I'd also argue that reddit has a more direct engagement model with private citizens that makes this hit closer to home (i.e. if we actually were real-life friends, or internet buddies for years, and one of our messages/comments to each other was modified that could cause far more direct impact — e.g. "you" convince me to commit a crime because you have my trust as a "personal" friend)
I'm honestly surprised he publicly admitted to it at all, and I'd further be shocked if he doesn't end up stepping down because of this incident.
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.
I abhor the notion that it's acceptable to hack the private communications of a political opponent, and publish them wholesale. I hate that people have decided it's somehow normal (or worse, noble) to engage in such chicanery because it was politically expedient. It's entirely different than other forms of leaks.
Wholesale surveillance is a terrible idea no matter who is doing it.
It's really effective propaganda, because most folks aren't clever enough to realize that the lack of countervailing scandal is solely because the other party didn't do any hacking... but it's a terrible precedent, and anybody who participated in it should be deeply ashamed of themselves.
Anybody who praises it should borrow a moral compass.
I've helped run a popular forum before. We added silly global wordfilters at times, and on a couple occasions when seriously-rule-breaking users repeatedly evaded bans, we applied customized wordfilters to them to help drive them off. (Dropping all of the vowels that weren't at the start or end of a word from their posts to make it look like lazy teenager txtspeak was a favorite.) It worked and people found it hilarious.
Is there actually a long-term analysis about how reddit content and discussion changed over the years?
I would be more surprised if there wasn't a pedophile ring in DC. But I don't think that case will be blown open by Podesta's emails and squiggles on pizza shop walls and a moon and star which is apparently Baphomet?
I agree it was not nefarious, but it was a decision that shows unbelievably poor judgement, especially for a CEO. I'd be surprised if he keeps his position. He's undermined his fundamental role as the leader of one of the biggest social media sites by violating the trust that users put into the site's administration.
The context as I understand it involves some ravenous hordes of conspiracy-theory redditors promulgating fake news stories and doxxing innocent people. However, by changing the text of these users comments, whatever their actions, and by admitting to it, Steve has opened the floodgates. Now there is no question -- in the minds of these users -- that the site is truly "against them" and willing to not only censor them but to rewrite history as they see it. They can no longer trust anything they read on the site.
But what is worse is the effect and message this sends to normal users. How can, for instance, any person safely participate in an AMA now? When the real possibility exists to have their words changed out from under them, and no way to prove they aren't in fact the author? And from that, why would anyone post anything potentially personally identifiable, if (in their mind) some disgruntled admin could modify what they said to include false yet humiliating or criminal things (e.g., throw in racial epithets, link to porn, admit adultery / drug use) that might eventually link back to them. And how far does this go? Can admins send PMs under the name of other users? What else? To me at least, the scary thing is that Reddit posts that only obliquely reference personal information have already been used as the basis for surveillance and legal action [1]...
And taking one final step back, from a business side this drama goes beyond just being unprofessional. Reddit posts are now often linked to from news articles. How can the media trust the source they link to? If the content of posts are 'up for grabs' to be edited by admins in the minds of users and the media (even if they aren't in reality), then one of Reddit's functions that is growing in importance -- that is, news-making -- may be stymied.
Harming trust is extremely dangerous for social platforms. And when it is the CEO themselves doing the harm, it could very well border on being suicidal for the site.
[1] https://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/58hae4/what_is_a_...
It's the actual information that is credible or not, and the NYT hasn't been doing any favours for itself recently on that front.
For those that don't understand what I'm talking about, just look at their response to the pizzagate thing and the response that provoked in turn;
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/801283157244997632
This is not to be taken as an admission that I think the pizzagate stuff is either definitely true or definitely false, merely that their attempt to cover it amounted to "Nothing to see here, please move along" and completely fell flat on its face with actually addressing any of the evidence raised over the course of the affair.
Thanks for keeping it together, and thanks for keeping this from going off the rails.
Banning Pizzagate (as absurd as it is) would definitely have created an uproar, though, much like banning Gamergate did.
I'm worried that the answer is "not at all", which seems weird.
Admins are paid employees of a company (reddit) that provides a platform for communities and discussion. If the platform itself is biased, then it is not really a platform but rather a specific media / viewpoint forum.
The distinction matters.
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."
I don't believe lizard people are real.
Every online interaction that's ever been used in the history of the internet is malleable. There is crypto technology to prevent this, but it isn't being used.
We still try people just fine, based on trust and belief. You can check to see if something's been altered.
Why are people pretending this is new or a big deal? Of course online forums aren't reliable. Of course they are owned by the administrators and can be modified at will. Did an administrator do it to mess with a bunch of screaming blubbering nasty and horrible trolls calling him a pedophile, and institute a silly find/replace rule as a kind of petty revenge? Yeah. Was it childish? Sure. But seriously, who cares? Who really believes that reddit is serious business? When online forums take your swear word and replace it with symbols do you throw a hissy fit about "freedom of speech"?
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.
While I "get" the Maria Abramovic "Spirit Cooking" stuff qua art, it pretty clearly also shows art as "high-class trash". When people see Abramovic's art, then see pictures of her with all kinds of elites and celebrities, they're right to see the culture as decadent. But then again bourgeois decadence isn't anything new...
Who cares? Why is this a big deal? I am so unbelievably unimpressed with the seriousness of this, I feel like there is such an enormous effort to pretend this is "serious business" and "the integrity of reddit" (?) is somehow being compromised. We all knew this could be done. On any forum. Reddit is a silly place. Reddit is a place for people to shitpost memes and puns with throwaway accounts. The Donald is a subreddit that revels in trolling and messing with people, spewing toxic garbage nonstop. They riled up the main admin of reddit so much he did something childish -- a pretty impressive trolling effort. That's the end of this story as far as I can tell.
edit: Once the information is out there, it's out there. You should not dismiss illegal or unethical activity because of the way in which that information was obtained.
"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.
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)
This attitude is WHY YOU LOST THE ELECTION.
> Who cares? Why is this a big deal? I am so unbelievably unimpressed with the seriousness of this,
It is deadly serious. /r/pizzagate was just shut down for posting personal information. No proof was given. Reddit has users like Bill Gates who post regularly, it has interviewed the POTUS and countless movie stars. Just as a pedophile scandal threatens to engulf both Twitter and very senior members of the Democratic Party, the founder of reddit reveals that he fucks around with people's posts. What's to prevent him going into a user's history and falsifying it? We've had the head of the FBI in front of Congress talking about a Reddit comment for crying out loud, because it was about national security.
His actions were extraordinarily poor judgement for an organisation that describes itself as a bastion of free speech.
And since now we know that the CEO (at least?) has edited comments, users' comment history should be considered suspect..
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.
You tell them to roundly go fuck themselves and appeal to the people that agree with you, the opposition's feelings be damned.
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".
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.
Although this is an odd thread to use Urban Dictionary as an authoritative source, that's what I've got: [1]
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Weeaboo&defid...
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.
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 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.
(2): this is an impressive extension of the 'sour grapes' response meme. We're going to shit on WWII vets if they don't (rhetorically) get on the trump train now?
spez was engaging in a bit of the Internet pastime... trolling. It wasn't some conspiracy to control information on reddit, he was just having fun. Dastardly fun, yes, but fairly innocent, all things considered.
The contention seems to be where they draw the line, and just how free their version of free is.
There is no other side to this story. There is no partisan tilt that cherry picks facts to construct a narrative. It is entirely fabricated, and crafted specifically to disinform its audience.
http://www.denverpost.com/2016/11/23/the-man-behind-denver-g...
Basically irrelevant. One hell of a veil to pierce.
This isn't even the first time reddit's indicated they're kind of... flexible, let's say, with how they handle certain kinds of data; but it always seemed like they stopped just short of crossing lines.
Unmarked edits to user comments was absolutely not something I'd've expected to come of that, so I can't say I'm not surprised; still, this seems like it's just the next stage of something that's always seemed to exist (or not exist, I suppose) for them.
Reddit is exactly the same. Keep pulling shit like this, and it will drive quality users away out of principle. But Zombie Reddit will keep lurching forward, spewing poorly compressed Facebook screencaps and cat gifs.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256
But it does get annoying to sign every comment.
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-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----That doesn't mean it has substance but I now believe infowars objectively did a better job reporting the facts of what is presently known than the New York Times's supposed exposure of the story. The NYT piece contains a well placed lie I am certain isn't true.
There is enough circumstantial evidence to warrant a careful police investigation.
I would put it like this: the odds are not good but the goods are definitely odd.
To those who think "too obviously in the open to be true" I'd like to point out the case of Jimmy Saville.
I would guess that this exposure is also the reason he edited this thread in particular.
Your post is a good example of how the left is going to lose really hard in the coming years. Politically motivated leftist outsiders like you, reaching reasonable conclusions of your ideology, are pushing the exact opposite narratives that your overlords want you to. The result can only be more infighting destroying you from the inside out.
I feel confident entering the hornet's nest to say this because I know the mob will not heed my warnings, and instead devour any of their own that stop to listen. The left can neither win with nor without people like you, and so it is doomed to either disappear or transform into something not recognizable in comparison to its former self. Something far more right wing.
Happy Thanksgiving!
thats how r/all looks for me without all the politic subreddits, which I assume is mostly the_donald and enoughTrumpSpam
What's disturbing is how many sane people are getting up in arms over this. The trolls are going to have a field day. Unfortunately, it has already blown up and has hit all the major media outlets. This is a perfect example of something on the Internet done "for the lolz". But people who don't have an understanding of Internet culture just cannot grasp this concept.
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.
That's not my read. I think the art is key, but I think the majority involved genuinely believe they have discovered evidence of pedophilia, and consider the art a strong part of the evidence. Consider how the imagery in the Heavy Breathing videos would be received by the authors and target audience of this: http://truediscipleship.com/ten-scriptural-reasons-why-the-r....
One of the discussions that surprised me was genuine concern over a picture showing someone next to a cardboard cutout of the Pope. My guess is that most of the participants don't attend a lot of parties that display potentially blasphemous portraits of religious figures, and tend to make assumptions about the other amoral practices of those who do.
I think this sarcasm is misplaced given the number of scandals surrounding trust in police and the evidence they put forward.
For example, the mishandling or tampering of evidence in crimina labs:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/forensic-techniqu...
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/11/16/sjc-hear-argume...
http://photographyisnotacrime.com/2016/03/02/new-jersey-lab-...
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/csi-is-a...
And of course there's fabricated police reports and officers lying under oath - http://www.salon.com/2016/01/06/perjury_usa_rampant_police_l...
There's also the tons of Brady violations which are lies by omission - http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/epidemic_of_brady_vio...
A lot of these situations have the same parallel of trust - we trust prosecutors to produce all exculpatory evidence, because it is very difficult to determine that they haven't(since the defense doesn't have access to the evidence like prosecutors do). We trust labs to not tamper with the evidence, because the defense does not have the resources to challenge every lab analysis. We trust police officers to not lie under oath, because they are often the sole "untainted" witness of a crime, especially in controversial police shooting cases. When that trust is broken, it is difficult to rein in the backlash - there is no way to know just how often it was broken in the past without us knowing.
Just think, the admins have the power to edit your comment as they see fit and you'll have no proof as your comment isn't even marked as edited.
It's a scary thought.
You are absolutely right that he wouldn't like Reddit in its current shape. But not for the reasons you seem to think.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/shifting1
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001599
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/newmccarthy
I have no idea if this would work, but.. I've been doing lots of ML lately where it is often pretty hard to beat random, and throwing noise into a system make it much more robust.
Remember the WMDs? The babies thrown out of the humidi-cribs? Jessica Lynch? This goes back through all news. Dan Rather's comment on air after seeing the classified Zapruder film,"went forward with considerable violence"? A complete lie. All news contains significant spin. And most mainstream news is completely fake.
No, what they mean now when they say "fake news" is "news that disagrees with my political leaning".
Among them, two Presidents of the United States, several ministers / PMs / MEPs, a long list of Hollywood stars... what if a rogue employee impersonates or alters POTUS statements?
For real numbers, there are ~300k the_donald subs. If you are not a sub (and use their subreddit style) they have intentionally stopped you from up or down voting their posts or comments, and if you are a sub there is only an upvote button (seriously, something something safe spaces…). Looking at their front page, every single post has between ~3000-6000 "points" (which, taking spam magic out of the mix, means roughly that many upvotes minus downvotes).
Contrasting that, there are 9 million DIY subs, and most of their posts on their front page have <100 points, where a couple of ourliers have ~5k.
Or, there are 11 million r/news subs, and their front page consists of the top 4 posts being in the ~6000 points range, while the rest of that page is more in the hundreds.
The pizza-man is the 49 most influential person in D.C ? More children disappear in the US than people dying from cancer ?
This is very suspicious (considering all the high-profile cases of child-abduction coming out). NyT disappoints again with its quasi-religion.
They modified it before the election (during implied they did it and then put it back, and unfairly implies it was because they wanted to "suppress the truth" or whatever), and to be clear it was to combat the fact that the_donald readers upvote all their posts with a huge amount of fervour that doesn't align with other subreddits.
The New York Times is only going to magnify this effect. The skeptical argument has to acknowledge the inappropriateness of some of the pizza shop's Instagram posts.
Here's some "fake news" for you, from a news site listed on the fake news list:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-18/5-times-when-mainst...
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."
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.
About titles: I see you get complaints about titles. I'm not sure if people understand how often commentors will respond to the title. I've submitted articles and seen that people haven't read the article but have responded directly to the title.
But also, it's pretty hard for submitters to understand what to change about a title. And the desire to provide a descriptive title is strong, and there are no reminders when submitting about not doing that.
Usually if you have to ask, it is.
- Mr. President, are you going to deport american citizens?
- No, I am absolutely not going to do that.
That gets ninja edited to:
- I am absolutely going to do that.
Can you imagine the uproar that would cause? We already have people in the media holding their breath for the next Trump's tweet - if something like this happened, there would be panic, hysteria, people having health complications.
This is extremely serious. Even if this were to be rolled back, damage would already be done by then. That would be akin to screaming "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
People are getting too tied up in what this "potential power" and "loss of integrity" means.
In reality is it means nothing. There never has been and never should be a guarantee or even an assumption of integrity of comments posted on the internet unless they are cryptographically signed.
He trolled some trolls for the lulz. It was a bad idea, hopefully he just drops the banhammer on all of them next time. Hell, ban the entire subreddit while you are at it for excessive harassment and be done with it.
I sure as heck hope that everyone doesn't join me in my communities: the magic would go away.
Also, while I think it's awful, there may be others who do not.
The problem here is people taking an entertainment site so seriously, oh they are blatantly fucking up and btw have been in the past other shady things, so stop using it.
The good thing is that the AI can be completely open: how is it trained? what are the parameters? This AI can still have bias, but that bias will be obvious to anyone joining this community.
If anything, a more realistic vision of what will happen:
-Asker: Mr President, <insert question>
-President: <insert unpopular answer>
-Fans of President: I BET THEY EDITED THE PRESIDENT'S ANSWER and a bunch of drama
He got stressed and did something unprofessional. But at the end of the day it's just reddit. The world will not end.
Anyone know if there is a way to shout him a beer. Sounds like that man needs a cold one and some quiet time.
Some subreddits may be "wretched hive of scum an villany", you can't say that the entire website is like that.
- Yishan Wongs various missteps and eventual bizzare (looking) departure
- Ellen Pao had haters on the site from day 1, Hitler memes etcetera. And then when they fired u/Chooter all hell broke loose and some subs were shut down by their own mods. The integrity of AMA was permanently ruined by this IMO. Anyway, Pao was hated by the idiots immediately, but hated universally after this.
- Spez started strong but this is going to affect his credibility, and seems to me to be part of the same downward spiral that happens to the CEOs when they get caught up in some bullshit happening on the site.
Reddit of 8 years ago had on the whole much smaller subreddits, so that does suggest that the size of the communities plays a role in their quality.
If so, that in itself is scarier than anything else being discussed here.
To assume Reddit is a unedited source of truth is just insane. Why people felt it was 100% tamper proof is beyond me. I wouldn't even trust public companies like Twitter to not have potential flaws like this.
Reddit is "https", and did that help here? No, in the sense that it only ensured the unaltered delivery of what Reddit was sending. It did nothing to preserve the integrity of comments that were originally written. This was not a “secure” web site for this case, yet many people would assume so due to the one layer of security that was present and prominently displayed in the browser! Now extend this to any given web site, and data that is far more important than a stupid comment. Real security is not trivial, and figuring out a good way to manage trusted parties is especially hard.
It could undermine the legitimacy of the system, as well as put more load on the server.
I'll humor you and imagine your ridiculous doomsday scenario. Trump would say "that's not what I said, it was edited" and his supporters would stop using reddit and everyone would stop trusting it as a serious source. Crisis averted, win/win/win. Can we make that happen please ASAP?
To me this was both wrong, since it basically ignored the basic responsibility of the media in our civilization, and counter productive, since it was so obvious that they were 'in the bag' that people stopped trusting the major news outlets entirely and started getting their 'information' from non-traditional sources, like the alt-media, social networks, etc.
So you can say that everyone is a bunch of 'whack jobs', but it seems like we have a competition here between the 'traditional media' who are being incredibly dishonest and more or less repeating talking points from the DNC, the 'marginally traditional' media like fox news, which is just as much in the bag for the right and so also not really a trustworthy source of information, and the 'other stuff' people are now getting information from, which is just a total mess of false information and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories mixed into all the actual things going on in the world.
So if you want to blame someone, blame the traditional media, of all the things that happened they were the only ones who abandoned their responsibility, and everything else followed from that.
I mean is reddit going to start deleting every sub that becomes popular because it will have too much stuff on /r/all? What kind of reasoning is that?
It's nothing new in UK, they are literally CCTV state now. Don't forget American folks that in most of the countries over here we don't have free speech ;)
And in the light of this news that Reddit CEO edited comments -- it's scary stuff -- for fun or not.
[0] http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/watch-mom...
The real sensible thing to do would be to recognize reddit as a platform for open and free discussion. saying the wrong things or in the wrong way should be as far away from the admins concerns as possible, so long as the org itself is not threatened. I think reddit is far too obsessed with /r/thedonald, to the point where their obsession is actually becoming tangibly harmful (see: this post)
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...
Maybe he posted "I did not do this. Get off my back people. I don't know what is going on here."
Later, another admin may have gone in and changed Spez's comment to read "Yep. I messed with the ...".
(I'm being facetious)
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.
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.
Maybe it is large? I mean, around 50% of Americans voted for Donald. Why do you want to find some kind of conspiracy... like it not, racist or not, but this is half of your society.
In less than 2 minutes of googling and reading you can find a comprehensive answer to all your questions, but instead you put forward a leading statement like "it was an interesting email that was uncovered."
It genuinely was not. It's not interesting, it's mundane.
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.
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.
If so, he deserves to be applauded. There are things a founder/CEO has to do you can't say.
Here's my sketch for a system like that;
https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/01/a-dec...
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.
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.
Their claim is the admins were unbanning users posting PII as pretext for nuking the sub
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 :)
>http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusi...
The reason pretty much all posts in the_donald are upvoted by users is due to the fact Clintons Correct the record was downvoting the_donald posts in hordes.
Again if Reddit would not have aligned themselves with one candidate named Clinton they probably wouldn't have this problem now.
2) I don't care who is on what train, and I'm not shitting on anyone. Fact: OP's grandparents didn't fight for Trump to not be president. That what OP's grandparents or OP want is in contradiction with what the USA got isn't an indication of tyranny. What OP or OP's grandparents want doesn't generalize to what everyone else wants or should want, that's the point, and it's not an insult.
Byte Magazine Volume 10 Number 13 December 1985 Computer Conferencing
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!"
And one can argue that the trump subreddit does the same in light of Twitter allegedly not being bought out because of the hate and toxicity. If Reddit can't secure investors and funding because of notoriety, they have to do something.
>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.
I guess my true point is the hypocrisy of T_D users complaining about spez's actions when the man they are so fond of is doing the same. Except he's the president.
It has a kind of magic to it, which I can't find in any other magazine to this day.
Apparently a long history of harrassment from the subreddit in question finally made /u/spez retaliate. The leaks further show the admin team is planning to deal with the subreddit in a more definitive way.
"<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.
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.
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.
"If a website is free, you're the product, not the customer."
Yeah, I know. I felt that it was an entertaining enough juxtaposition that I said it anyways.
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!
1) Direct access to the database at times is needed particularly for bulk edits. In our forum we had certain bans and not all were immediately enforced by the posting software. Some were done in bulk operations down at the database level.
2) Manual semi bulk edits at time were done in places where scripts simple were too much work to get right.
3) Manual direct individual edits also at times happened but they are incredibly dangerous as they can erode the confidence in the site. From what I saw at multiple forum the temptation is very high at the top to rationalize such edits and it tends to work against them badly.
4) Edits at database level often leave little to no trace. That is one reason that makes them so dangerous. At production level very few should have access to the DB for accountability reasons.
5) Nobody really likes DB level edits but they are needed and done. The forum software and support scripts do not cover all situations. Getting 100% rid of them is unrealistic. For audit reasons logging original posts in a tamper proof place may be wise but is rarely done.
6) Clearly someone has abused privileges here, I'm fairly sure such edits are not condoned by any internal guidelines. There must be consequences.
7) Personal consequences. This is about ethics, behavior and trust. These things are not all b&w. Was he hiding the behavior? Is there insight? Are there mitigating circumstances? Also is he the right guy for the job considering the job description requires flame retardant skin? The board needs to look into this carefully and quickly.
8) Organizational consequences. How can they make sure this does not happen again? Do they have all the right controls in place? Are they are properly separating the roles. Should they get audited? The threat for an organization to suffer from catastrophic cyber events increased incredibly. It used be be groups of people revolting on boards. These days certain sites reach out to sizable fractions of the US electorate and whip up attacks (recent: Kelly's book on Amazon or CNN's app in the app store). Very solid organizational and technical controls are needed for a place that so easily gets into the cross-hairs of a mob.
Yes, in a sense I think it's true that the "traditional media" is probably mostly staffed by people who tend to oppose the Trump presidency. But this is for two very specific reasons:
1. Trump ran a divisive campaign that was in many ways--perhaps primarily--a campaign against both the demographics of most media reporters and the actual institutions of media itself. Reporters, being humans with feelings, probably did respond to that a bit.
2. Trump ran a campaign that was founded on literal falsehoods.
Extending reporters some degree of professional respect, I tend to believe #2 is the primary factor here.
The terrifying equivalence here is between "traditional media" reporting factual truths where you can kinda-sorta-sometimes tell that the reporter probably doesn't respect Trump as a candidate and "alt media" reporting things of huge consequence that never happened and have no basis in fact.
Those are fundamentally different things, and what truly worries me about both the stupid shit like "pizzagate" and the significant lies (on economic measures, on science, on documented reality as we know it) is that our politics appear to have become unstuck from consensus reality.
There's no rational discussion--and, I believe, truly no hope for the democratic process--if we're not arguing about mutually agreed-upon facts. Yet that's where we are.
Is there any evidence for the accusation? On its face, the whole claim appears to be entirely baseless and without merit, and its defenders appear to argue that it's hard to disprove so it deserves credence.
Am I missing something? I read the subreddit (before it was shut down) and was quite unable to tell if it's just a big Internet in-joke or if the participants are serious. Are they serious? If so, why?
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.
But I do maintain that that's a little different. That's essentially another instance of "disregard that, I suck cock," whereas spez actually altered people's stated opinions.
...and even that was too restricted for some people, which is one of the reasons free.* was set up.
I'm not friends with Steve. I was introduced to him years ago, when we went through YC, and that's it. I'd be shocked if he remembered.
Moderators put the story back on the front page, so obviously we weren't trying to suppress it. The thread has over 600 points and over 600 comments now and there is at least one repost nearly as big.
I reverted the title because that's standard practice on HN and spent most of my evening in here patiently trying to explain that to you and others. Actually, normally I'd just do a why bother and give people the title they clamour for, but something about this case struck me as ridiculous, and I'm not going to throw years of moderation practice out the window just because Reddit culture had one of its tantrums here. The reason I feel that way has nothing to do with this particular story; it has to do with the principles of this place, which it's my job to protect.
(If you must know, I actually kind of like it when Reddit shitshows hit HN. The hivemind usually only has indignation for one forum's management at a time. I feel a little guilty about this, but when the wasps go off in a frenzy and are busy stinging someone else, I can't help but enjoy it that, at least for a little while, they're not stinging me. Also, when Reddit is the story I get to do as the Romans do and joke a little. Just a little though.)
No, reverting a title is not "similar" to editing a user's comment. Comments are individual property and titles are shared, so that's like comparing painting a road sign to rewriting someone's diary. A hint that they're not "similar" is that one has been established practice for years while the other is currently provoking multiple rage threads.
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_...
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.
I find all moderator actions inherently distasteful except in the cases of obvious trolling. In this case, though, it's particularly important that posts about i.e. censorship get their fair shake. The title you changed it to didn't really come from anywhere (Reddit comments don't have a title) and fails to convey exactly what's going on. Stepping in to change it like that reduces the weight of the title to the point of being meaningless to lots of people - I'm sure plenty of Reddit users don't even know who spez is.
James Alefantis posts suggestive pictures of children on his Instagram AND He makes lewd comments about them AND Many of his friends do too AND Some of those friends are into weird things like making child-sized coffins AND There's FBI-confirmed pedophile codes and symbols everywhere AND Alefantis knows John Podesta WHO is into Spirit Cooking with Marina Abramovic AND Podesta hangs disturbing child abuse-style art on his wall AND He likes artists who produce disturbing images of abuse AND His emails have masonic images hidden in the attachments AS WELL AS Pictures of children with notes saying "Happy Birthday John" AND contacts of his mail him with messages promising "entertainment" from the young children in the pool AND He and his brother look EXACTLY like the photofits of two men who abducted Madeleine McCann in 2007 AND they were connected to the McCanns through a mutual friend who lived nearby AND ....
There's literally thousands of people digging and all they do is keep throwing up more connections and suggestions that there is a pedophile ring hiding in plain sight.
It's Thanksgiving, and today I give thanks that not everybody wants to shit on freedom and liberty the way you do, just because it makes campaigning simpler.
As for your silly argument about Snowden, he didn't engage in wholesale surveillance; the NSA's wholesale surveillance was public knowledge before his leak; and his leak was meant to change policy, not to attack a political opponent. As such, absolutely none of my criticisms apply to him.
Yeah but for how long have you been in IT/Computers/A Sysop/Sysad????
You do know that this is the mortal sin in IT -- abusing access powers to data and stealing it or fucking with it???
I had a guy ask me "Well cant you just read their email?" - ME: "Technically yes, of course, but I would be fired and thats the last thing you do in IT"
It would be much better if the title used language from the article itself, so if you or anyone can figure out a fair way to do that, I'd appreciate the suggestion. Obviously my attempt to do so was not universally well received.
As for "I find all moderator actions inherently distasteful except in the cases of obvious trolling", that doesn't rub me the right way at all, for two reasons. First it implies that most of our work is useless, and if that's true, we're fools, wasting our time. Alternatively, if it isn't useless, you're spending time here benefitting from all of it, in which case a line like that seems pretty smug.
Do you actually believe that the 'traditional media' just reports 'facts' as they are? Do you have no historical perspective whatsoever?? Because if they were just 'reporting factual truths' in this election cycle, that would literally be the first time they've ever done it.
In every election since I can remember, both sides have claimed, and many have believed, that the person on the other side was literally going to ruin the country and should they win the country was going to fall apart.
You happen to feel that way about Donald Trump. You're just as wrong as the people who thought that Hillary was going to start WWIII, and the people that thought Bush was going to try to become a dictator, and the people that thought Reagan was going to start WWIII, and the people that thought Bill Clinton was literally a murderer who killed state troopers and who killed Vince Foster, and the people that thought Obama was a Muslim 5th columnist, and on and on.
So there have always been crazies, getting obsessed with them or paying attention to them is pointless.
This time we have the 'alt-right', whatever that is, some make believe group created by being named in the media. I'm not sure where they are or who they are, but if you listen to the media they're 'out there' and they are rising.
So my advice is read some history, get some perspective, and move on as though nothing is really different than it ever has been, because it isn't.
EDIT: here is a video of the media 'just reporting facts': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NVVwZVd6ZM Look how stunned the 'reporter' is when they mess up and don't manage to cherry pick the clip to support the false narrative they are trying to reinforce..
>As for "I find all moderator actions inherently distasteful except in the cases of obvious trolling", that doesn't rub me the right way at all, for two reasons. First it implies that most of our work is useless, and if that's true, we're fools, wasting our time. Alternatively, if it isn't useless, you're spending time here benefitting from all of it, in which case a line like that seems pretty smug.
Well, I'm sure you've got your hands full keeping up with spam and trolling and such, but fwiw I have disagreed (often silently) with probably 75%ish of the moderator actions I've noticed on HN.
But the important point is that on HN, titles do not belong to the submitter—they're shared—so submitters don't have any special rights over them. On the contrary, the site guidelines specifically ask them not to change an article's title unless it is misleading or linkbait: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Comments are very different, and we don't edit them without saying so, unless a user asks us to. (Though a few times I've broken down and corrected an obvious typo.)
By actively triggering reddit's vote manipulation trigger on somebody's comment, you effectively have a way to censor and control information and how it's portrayed.
Reddit CEO directly altering user's comments that criticize him seems to signal that the platform is incapable or unwilling to address the poor value proposition of a purely anonymous based social networks that serves as stage for anyone with the monetary and networking resource to manipulating the casually browsing redditor and their opinion .
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.
Really, the one this actually hurts is Reddit itself. To hurl in this stinkbomb when a good chunk of the site already considers itself at war with the management... Just profoundly stupid.
Your local police or military could just barge into your house and kill you at any time. They have the power to do that. Society functions to the extent that you don't believe they will do that. If you found out one day that your local police chief had, under cover of law, busted into someone's house and waved a gun at them over a petty personal dispute, though, your faith would be a little shaken.
If you think it's entirely implausible that there could be organized pedophilia operating out of DC, you're not being honest with yourself. Look at what happened in Norway 4 days ago.
I'm not interested in discussing politics on HN--and I'm not referring solely to this theory--but I am concerned when people are not intellectually curious enough to consider even hear an argument.
I completely agree that asking one to perceive the world without ones' own biases is quite difficult. Would I know if I had a biased worldview? Maybe not.
On the other hand, I hear a view similar to yours quite commonly expressed. I read it as, "Both sides lie, everyone lies about the same amount, and we shouldn't try to call bullshit on those lies." That's exactly the view I find terrifying: it implicitly rejects the notion of objective truth, or at least rejects the idea that we can benefit from such truth in any way.
To take a counter view: do you think it's possible, in a given election (if not this one), for one candidate to be significantly more mendacious than the other? If so, how could we discover it? How could we agree when it is happening?
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20shillage&sort=by...
There's also no way to make such an argument civilly, and civility is a basic requirement for commenting on HN.
Making arguments on HN is trickier than making them on Reddit, and you may find it's not worth the energy. There's nothing wrong with keeping your discussions there.
I moderate a small sub. Traffic once something hits r/All is insane.
Recently, here nowe traffic is in the low hundreds on average. The last r/All post resulted in 33,000 sustained for the better part of a day.
The sub basically doubled subscribers and has seen a permanent uptick in here now numbers.
"All Trump supporters are dumb racist bigoted uneducated white hick hillbillies, fuck them with a rusty rebar."
How can we discover it? Well that's pretty much impossible to do perfectly. There is a whole industry that for a long time has owned the mechanism by which the world is revealed to us, and if nothing else positive comes from this election, they have been exposed as being a very broken filter that is using their position to intentionally push their own agenda.
My hope is that the new forms of media that are developing step in to fill the void, and that a new kind of journalism comes about that grows beyond the irresponsible and incompetent 'traditional media'. That hasn't happened yet, and it seems like the democratization of news has actually led to more polarized outlets and given people the ability to tune into 'news' that just reinforces their beliefs.
At least with the 'mainstream media' there was some corrective pressure since there were only a few outlets and they were at least slightly sensitive to criticism, so they had to maintain at least the appearance of balance. They've completely thrown away that appearance now, and sadly the alternatives are insane.
I don't think things are going to go back to where they were, where the newspapers and other sources of reporting saw themselves as 'up against the system'. Traditional media depended on a lack of alternatives as part of their business model, and that model is dying very rapidly. Traditional news is rapidly going bankrupt, and as a result our 'best' newspapers have been sold at bargain basement prices to people who want to own that influence while it lasts. This isn't new either, but you used to have to be a massive industrial conglomerate to 'buy the news', like GE or Westinghouse. Now we have Bezos and Carlos Slim able to personally buy that influence very cheaply (while it lasts).
So your idea to counteract people playing psychological games on others is to put something without the common sense of a three year old in charge of moderation. That's just glorious.
BTW next time add link to source instead of cancerous subreddits.
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.
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.
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...
I agree with what you posted that memes and propaganda are still going/growing strong... there is still a TON TON TON of discourse that is important and intellectual.
S:N ratio and all that....
Noise may be growing like mad (Shills/corps/whatever-other-noise-producers/etc).... but Signal is growing as well.
The thing is that NvS ratio has to increase in order to keep status quo....
That doesnt mean that certain stories are not true but that perhaps they are pushed aside with noise to keep certain things seemingly implausible...
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
This is not a partisan issue??? It's not the "T_D users complaining" that put it all over HN's.
It's unacceptable for CEO's of social media companies to impersonate users. EVER > EVER > EVER.
He could have deleted or changed the comments and posted a note and most of the outrage would go away, but he didn't. He impersonated and censored users comments. Such a slippery slope.
