This is pretty bad. That pretty much destroys the credibility of Reddit's commenting system in a single act. No one can look at the integrity of the comments written by others the same any more.
replies(7):
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.