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

And without an "edited" mark, which means that any comment of any user can be covertly modified by an admin. Very concerning since Reddit comments have provoked even Congress hearings: http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/296680-house-pan...

He changed a 'F U CEO' (upvoted by 1.6k users) comment to 'F U unpaid reddit moderator', without any indication that the comment was edited.

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.

I met Steve several years back while going through YC. He's a much calmer and nicer person than most founders I've met, myself included.

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 a mistake that has profound implications. Not just your average mistake like "I broke the build and didn't tell anyone" nonsense.

You're being awfully charitable. It's on the order of magnitude of royal fuck-up. How can any user expect to be safe on Reddit anymore?

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.

the functionality is probably a UPDATE comments where id=x set content="newcontent"

I seriously doubt he individually looked up comment ids and updated them with database commands.

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.

He probably just scripted it. There doesn't need to be any default functionality for it, if you know how the database works.

Do you honestly believe that they didn't have existing tools for this?

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.

You know what I have just considered....

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_...