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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.