←back to thread

Reddit CEO admits to altering user comments that were critical of him

(www.reddit.com)
668 points wildmusings | 3 comments | 24 Nov 16 00:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
Show context
arkadiyt ◴[24 Nov 16 01:51 UTC] No.13027367[source]▶
This post is decaying off of the front page of HN very quickly (every few refreshes it drops a position or more), despite have more upvotes and being posted more recently. Reddit is a YC company as well. Is this post being artificially pushed down?
replies(4): >>13027400 #>>13027491 #>>13027515 #>>13028423 #
dang ◴[24 Nov 16 02:22 UTC] No.13027515[source]▶
Nope. Literally the first rule of HN moderation is that we don't do that—i.e., we moderate stories less, not more, when they're negative about YC or a YC startup. Also, we were slacking this afternoon (where by slacking I mean hacking on an arc compiler) and had no clue this thread existed.

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.)

replies(5): >>13027537 #>>13027544 #>>13027617 #>>13027680 #>>13028136 #
adanto6840 ◴[24 Nov 16 04:36 UTC] No.13028136[source]▶
In my opinion, the "title change" is precisely the opposite of moderating YC-related stories less. In this case it [substantially] obfuscates the meaning of what transpired.

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").

replies(1): >>13028235 #
1. dang ◴[24 Nov 16 04:58 UTC] No.13028235[source]▶
That wasn't the original title. The original title is: The Admins are suffering from low energy - have resorted to editing YOUR posts. Sad!

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.

replies(1): >>13028939 #
2. ramshorns ◴[24 Nov 16 07:56 UTC] No.13028939[source]▶
What's the HN policy on editing titles? Is there always a note in the comments to say that the title was edited? I'm probably missing something, but it seems like the HN admins' ability to edit titles is susceptible to the same kinds of problems as the Reddit admins' ability to edit comments.
replies(1): >>13032464 #
3. dang ◴[24 Nov 16 20:10 UTC] No.13032464[source]▶
We usually post something to that effect, but not always. For one thing, not all the moderators are public. For another, posting that we made a punctuation change, or some such, is tedious.

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.)