Without being in the loop of the pizzagate drama, it's really hard to see this as "okay" (the actions that Spez took). I can understand frustration and wanting to edit comments as payback to people that have wronged you, but this is a pretty dangerous action by an administrator. If he wanted to close the thread(s) or disallow posting on the_donald, sure, it's a visible action and I could understand that. I could even understand removing comments he finds offensive (even if it's not right, I can understand it and it's a visible action). But surreptitiously editing a comment is not okay, because while this is a relatively minor use of that power it's not unthinkable that other admins with that power might use it for less minor things.
Here's the problem: thedonald is a subreddit full of both real trump supporters, AND trolls who're acting surreptitiously to rile up the real supporters and piss off everyone else; which is also spilling over and affecting other parts of reddit, including /all.
The problem for the reddit admins is how to control and contain it and punish the trolls without affecting real people, or being overly censurous.
So for someone who's basically being sniped at by hundreds of guerilla warriors who can make thousands of other people dance as their puppets, it's not surprising they'd reach for a similar tool in frustration when attacked directly, wrongly and frivolously.
It took people harrassing him personally, and at scale, for him to snap. And even then he did not ban anyone, but did what amounts to a prank. And even then he did not hide it, but owned it and apologized.
At every turn of this he showed himself to be a greater man than most of us.
Silently editing their comments shows that reddit has very poor data management practices. It shouldn't be possible for the CEO to edit content like that.
There's no forum where the people running it don't have trivially easy access to do what he did. The point is that he has clearly shown what kind of thing it takes to push him that far, and it's clearly not done trivially.
E: I'm trying to say, your perspective is off. Reddit is an internet humor place. Just because it's big enough to have a CEO doesn't mean it's suddenly run with all the seriousness and as tight as a bank.
Sure, I am agitated - but given that if anyone who has ever worked for me on any system who had root access to a publicly used (by many millions of people) changed content from the ACTUAL USERBASE based on their ego being hurt, they would be fired on the spot. A statement would be made saying that we are assessing our data-access policies and auditing who has access to what.
You state I am "over reacting" but are you not aware that the entire premise of credibility in data driven companies is based on access to data? Have you ever been through ANY audits ever?
I am going to make a simple foundational audit question to you:
"Who has access to the financial information of the company"
"Well, our VP of IT, the CFO, the CEO are the only three"
So... this CEO of reddit has been known to abuse his power in his own companies product to edit the contents of that product (userbase comments with interests in various topics which is a sellable marketing package)....
So... whos to say if he reacts like this that he wont edit the financials/user-base counts/whatever he has access to if he isnt happy with the data?????
THIS IS A FUNDAMENTAL trust issue with him... to blow it off as a prank is abhorrent.
While I expect this issue to blow over, you are right that defending the CEO's actions by saying he was "frustrated" or it was a prank or whatever else is ridiculous. Imagine the CEO of Google editing YouTube comments.
I don't know if these analogies are totally apt or not, though; it sounds like the CEO here is also a moderator of a forum and may have edit privileges by virtue of that; it's
not like he's executing SQL queries to rewrite the comments in place, I assume, he's just abusing "editorial" powers in pretty much the worst way possible (quietly changing content to say the opposite).
> I assume, he's just abusing "editorial" powers in pretty much the worst way possible
The platform shouldn't provide editorial powers that allow you to edit others comments. Removal of comments and banning of users is sufficient. There's no legitimate need to have that functionality built it.
"I just committed a mass edit on posts on one of the largest public forums on the internet with 100's of millions of users who want to share their perspective and opinions - where that site I did these edits on is where I am CEO -- and I was upset, within the context of how my ego was hurt -- but it was just a prank"
"IT WAS A PRANK BRO"
You need to take some time to evaluate you're understanding of "false" equivalence.
/u/spez is falsely equating his actions with a "prank"
As long as he follows up in the same mature manner, it'll be unfortunate, but forgivable. :)
Also, calling someone a dumbfuck and pretending you didn't just do that because it's "just a quote" is not the greatest a look a person can aim for. ;)
The people he did this to were jabbing him in the eye with a sharp stick because reddit took action against them for falsley accusing people of being pedophiles.
I think the distinction is behavior, not "people they don't like". Witch hunts are against the guidelines of reddit; that's not a secret. Whether you support Trump or not isn't relevant, if you're on a witch hunt. Likewise, posting personal information has, from almost the very beginning of reddit, been the one cardinal sin. The sin that'll get you banned or a subreddit closed down.
That's what spez was responding to. He did it in a terribly immature way that I could never condone (unless it were really funny, like this, in which case, I think it's hilarious). But, it was not a random "I don't like this group" situation, and to frame it that way is to manipulate the narrative. The behavior in question was a witch hunt, and against reddit rules; the witch hunt started because a subreddit was banned for posting (tons of!) personal information and launching a witch hunt against a random restaurant and bar and its owners. Again, that's clearly against reddit rules. Those rules are reasonable, and if someone doesn't like them, they should take their shit elsewhere.
It's not about not liking The_Donald. Nobody likes The_Donald, but reddit has always been more than fair in dealing with all of their bullshit; the vote brigades (against reddit rules), the orchestrated abuse of other subs and moderators and users, etc. Large swaths of them probably should have been banned months ago. But, Steve has always been slow to ban. Probably to a fault. When you fail to ban folks like this you breed a community of people like this, who feel entitled to be abusive without response.
You're describing a seemingly natural human reaction. However - the CEO shouldn't be reacting like this - he needs a PR team to spin it however he wants to spin it - but he shouldnt single-handedly, with one action, literally destroy any semblance of credibility the 8th largest site in the US even has.
FB was allowing employees to simply READ any comments/posts/PMs between users and recall what a shitstorm that was... but now imagine if Zuck was personally freaking editing posts about him? (or if he had a team of ppl doing it for him and then admitting to it/bragging about it on corp comms???)
/u/spez may have truly done a really big hit to reddits future.
> /u/spez may have truly done a really big hit to reddits future.
Oh man, if Reddit takes a stand and says "we're not going to treat trolls and non-trolls the same anymore", I would feel a ton better about spending time there.
You also have to consider that, as incredibly ridiculous and batshit crazy as it is, a high percentage of the /r/pizzagate people 100% believe it's true and that they're uncovering a massive criminal ring.
> Here's the problem: thedonald is a subreddit full of both real trump supporters, AND trolls who're acting surreptitiously to rile up the real supporters and piss off everyone else
Shouldn't the mods clean up after the trolls who don't abide by the subreddit rules? If a post stays up for days, it is safe to assume the mods condone it whether it was posted by a 'troll' or a 'real person' - this goes for any subreddit.
I don't quite follow the argument that you are making - are you saying they mods are overwhelmed? The whole point of having mod(erator)s is to moderate - subreddits are their own communities with the mods in charge. They are responsible for setting the ground rules and enforcing them, if you have a different understanding of how Reddit works, please let me know.
Regardless of anything - the CEO of reddit's personal reddit user-account SHOULD NOT have the ability (assuming he is using his reddit login creds (surely hes got 2FA etc..)) to modify comments like this....
Every black-hat should be trying to get access to /u/spez's account to see if they can pwn reddit as a whole. But I am hopeful that reddit has that account compartmentalization and security under control.
How would you propose that a root level administrator of a server, for a site running code he original wrote, be prevented from modifying the content of that site?
1. the actual reddit account /u/spez would presumably be just like any other account (meaning no god-mode, where he can edit shit) - that should be compartmentalized to system level accounts for cassandra, mysql etc... such that /u/spez cannot (via the web-account login) access an option to modify content thusly. The reason for this is to assume that /u/spez's account is prolly being attacked by brute force continuously.
2. we should assume that their DB practices, hosted on AWS, have both logging and alerts such that there should be a log of any DB statements submitted are logged.
3. that logged events stat who did what when
4. It's actually far more common to not have a CEO's account having root access to everything -- this is why you create a company. We are far more advanced than that. While Zuck may have "authority" to access any single system that FB has, I doubt he knows every single password - and that he would rely on his officers and teams to access/modify anything (given their current maturity level asa company)
I'd bet my life that if you put a gun to Tim Cook's head - he would not be able to login and gain access and them modify your icloud account.
1 - I don't think he used his /u/spez account on reddit to make this change. I think he hit the lower level parts of the system. I can't imagine he wanted to spend hours manually editing things.
2 - How do we know it wasn't logged? I assume it was.
3 - Same as above. I assume it would have been traceable had that been necessary. But, Steve posted about it. No need for spelunking in the logs.
4 - Tim Cook didn't/couldn't build iCloud from the ground up. Zuck hasn't been a primary coder on facebook in years, and nearly always had a lot of help. Steve built almost all of reddit in the beginning, and even now, seems to still be involved in the code.
Is administrators editing users' posts as a norm of the internet something you would be comfortable with? Are spez's actions acceptable in a vacuum, or should they be a norm of internet moderation in your eyes?
It should not be the rule, but when you call someone a pedophile and breed a feud of hate and misinformation under their nose don't expect your welcome to last
And no, Reddit is not a democracy, there's no free speech there. Still, it is much, much more tolerant than facebook. But a limit exists
There should only be 3 options to moderation that are acceptable
1. Removal of Post outright
2. Editing of post WITH ATTRIBUTION or Acknowledgement of edit
3. Banning of user/thread/topic/etc with full and open disclosure
This habit of Redit and other sites have of "hidden" moderation needs to end
The Practice of silent moderation, silent editing of post, shadow bans, etc should not be acceptable to anyone that values free Speech
And before you go off on your moronic tangent about Reddit not being a democracy. Yes Reddit can legally choose to censor anyone they want, or do anything they want really on their platform, that is not the topic of debate. The topic of debate is around do YOU a presumed reddit user want to continue to support such a site. Do you want to visit an ecochamber of heavily censored topics and discussion?
Reddit became popular on the back of having very very very few limits on expression, the reason people flocked to it was because of open and uncensored discussion. If the site Admin's want to turn it into a Democrat echo chamber free of any alternative view points they are free to do so. I am also free to fucking call them censorious fuckwits if they do
Some how I have a feeling you would not hold the same opinion spez did this to a community you approve of, or on topic you approve of
//and for the record, and I should not have to say it but I feel I need to which is telling in itself, I did not vote for, nor do I support Donald Trump. I have been for more than 20 years a Libertarian, and voted for Gary Johnson in 2016
I think Shadowban has an important role in spammers and (heavy) trolls. It should not be discarded
Free speech has a limit, unfortunately, because large groups can't police themselves. And then the trolls take over (either on the internet or outside, see Antifa)
> Do you want to visit an ecochamber of heavily censored topics and discussion?
No, but if you go to the_donald that's what you get. Or do you really think they don't censor certain discussions?
> Some how I have a feeling you would not hold the same opinion spez did this to a community you approve of, or on topic you approve of
The topic or community is irrelevant, because it was directed to a troll. A message like "F U $ADM" has no place in any subreddit
Sorry no. The second you limit speech it is no longer free speech. This is a concept people have a hard time grasping.
People that say reddit is not free expression are correct. It is limited expression. There used to be fewer limits, than today, and reddit seems to want to massively increase those limits even more.
>because large groups can't police themselves
Based on your subjective view on what they should and should not say they cant.
>No, but if you go to the_donald that's what you get. Or do you really think they don't censor certain discussions?
Dont know, never once visited, dont care what they do
We are not talking about the Policies of a indivual subreddit. Most subreddits are not for Free Expression, most are topic based and heavily censoured to ensure the topic of discussion stays on topic. For example posting political threads on /r/sysadmin is not allowed, I have no problem with this as the rules are fully disclosed, open, and I know what I am getting into when I subscribed
You see I have no problem with Moderation. I have extreme problems with SECRET moderation.
>A message like "F U $ADM" has no place in any subreddit
I would tend to agree, and would have no problem the SPEZ removing the posts. But redirecting F U $ADM to F U $MOD secretly is not the solution, it is childish and should not be viewed as acceptable.
>I think Shadowban has an important role in spammers and (heavy) trolls.
Shadowban is a common knowledge at this point, writing a script that checks if the account is shadowbanned is trivial. At this point it only hurts actual users.
As someone who used to admin/moderate a medium-large forum for over five years, let me voice my strong disagreement. It's taking the easy route.
You're really only punishing those who aren't clever enough to (trivially) detect or circumvent a shadow-ban. And those are actually exactly the people that you didn't need to resort to shadow-banning for in the first place. And there's no excuse for that (I'd like to hear, why would stupid people be more deserving of punishment?).
Another important task was keeping ourselves, the mod-team in check, keeping tabs on each other (because emotions), to not abuse their powers like this, taking the easy way.
Part of that was setting stone-hard rules that were never, ever, to be broken. Obviously, one of those rules was "don't ever edit someone else's post without attribution". We were sure to drill in that rule, calling it out even if it was a "friendly" or helpful edit--partially for the principle of it, but also because not attributing friendly edits still erodes trust.
Oh and if moderating a single troll costs ten times the effort they put in, you probably need to upgrade your mod tools.
How did you deal with trolls when you were a moderator? Any troll who can get around a shadowban can get around a regular ban as well by registering new accounts.
If shadowbans defeated 50% of trolls and made the forum 50% better, I'd consider that progress.
Really depends on the type of troll you're dealing with.
First off, it's important you don't do this alone. Trolls get under your skin and if you get emotional, you're going to make bad calls. Have at least three other mods that you are in constant communication with (via forum-PMs, IRC or other messaging). They also help lighten the load of doing boring non-automatable parts of cleanup jobs. Try to set hard and clear rules of how to act before the situation occurs.
So, there's the crackpots (on a spectrum from deserving-compassion-because-mentally-ill to dangerously-obsessed). There's the spammer-trolls (commercial non-human spambots, human marketers, but also people with a grudge that want to flood threads out of spite, both manually or using tools). Then there's the "classic" trolls that use psychological tricks to push hot-buttons and try to sow discord and strife in the community. There's probably a few more categories but most trolls are some combination of the above.
I'm not really counting users with "objectionable speech" such as racists or (perhaps forum-specific) controversial topics. If it's controversial but (somewhat) on-topic, it's for the community to deal with. If it's off-topic (perhaps for a particular subforum), it's your basic moderator-janitor clean-up job to delete, split, or move. If that's too much work, either man up about it (clean-up is going to suck sometimes, you can't automate everything, but maybe you can automate more), or confer with the other mods whether to treat this troll as a spammer. It probably helped a lot that a good number of the regular users of "my" old forum are very experienced in the ways of the "classic troll", yet level-headed and relatively good people, so the community has a healthy "immune system". But if the community itself can't actually deal with that kind of noise (at least "don't feed the trolls") and relies purely on the moderators to shelter them from "objectionable speech", then you're going to get an echo chamber either way, and I didn't sign up to moderate that :-) Unless it's a forum that mainly hosts under-age kids or other vulnerable categories, that's different. I don't have experience with that, but it's reasonable to expect that bad actors will cause you disproportionate amounts of effort to deal with (shadowbans or no).
Trolls also come in categories of "being really really annoying", "being dangerous to forum users" and "actually damaging the forum itself". Being very clear (among the mods) about which category a troll (currently) falls under already helps showing the path how to deal with them.
I've got to be honest here, if a troll clearly is of the "damaging" type, then IMHO all bets are off and yeah sure you can also use the unethical methods of sanctioning, including the shadowban if you must. The threshold for this is somewhere among the "spammer" category, but if it's someone that turned from "objectionable" to "grudge spammer", discuss and think long and hard and probably reconsider to find a different way. I don't think the shadowban is the most effective tool in this case, a slowban (increasing page-load times) usually works a lot better. Note that I also consider the slowban an "unethical" tool, for the main reason you're not telling the user it's activated. That's the biggest problem I have with such, if the user doesn't know they're being sanctioned they don't know to change their behaviour either, by being better or by leaving. If you apply a "hidden" sanction to a user, you MUST do it with the sole intention that you NEVER EVER want to see this person on the forum again, a very serious decision to make, be very certain that the other methods of banning (account ban, IP ban, or other creative options to prevent them from re-registering) were tried several times and did not work, and that this method WILL work in making them leave. It can't be set-and-forget either, monitor and check if they actually leave, if a user is in shadowban-land for a month and is STILL writing posts, that's ON YOU, you are wasting the life of an actual person, that someone who is apparently not entirely right in the head if they don't notice nobody reads their shit. That is a very sad situation and you should consider this. These are hard decisions to make and that is when you need the mental support of the rest of your mod-team. I find that a slowban is much less likely to lead to this situation. Another thing, why again I think that in nearly all cases you should NOT do this, is if the person is not as stupid as a bag of nails and they find out. In case of a shadowban they find you've wasted their time and effort for a very long time, and they have a very good reason (imho) to be very angry about that because it's a dick-move. Some will then double-down on their efforts.
... okay this post is taking quite a bit more time than I expected and I haven't even really gotten to the "what to actually do"-parts :-)
I can continue answering your question (another day) if you like, but please first let me know that you've actually read the above, because I'm answering a 3-days old post, HN has no reply-notifications, and I don't want to spend my time writing to the void (... which would be strangely appropriate, given the subject that prompted this, hahaha ;-) )
As it's being reported the user called spez didn't remove the posts or ban the users or any of the normal things. Instead they committed the same act, calling someone [else] a paedophile but added misattribtion (fraud, libel) and admin abuse to what had already been done.
Hasn't Reddit claimed it is a place for public and free speech as reason for not shutting down some subreddits?
Admins manually editing posts they see as offensive would seem to create a liability for the owners as they can't then argue they don't control/monitor content.
If someone calls me a paedophile on Reddit (again! it's a not uncommon juvenile taunt) will I be allowed to edit their post, presumably not.
I don't think anyone imagines Reddit is a democracy but the administration should nonetheless adhere to reasonable moral conventions such as flagging moderated posts and giving the same powers to censor personal abuse to all users.
Ah, ok, so you're saying if i managed to convince a a few youtube personalities that you're a child trafficker and they talked to their audience and invited them to attack you over it, and the thousands hound you for a month over it on every possible venue you might frequent, including actually calling your home for the lulz, you'd be an emotionless rock and vulcan overlord with not so much a twitch as a reaction, despite things being actively and effectively disrupting for your personal and professional life for a month.
I'm not going to respond to comments that aren't specific about what Huffman did. He didn't randomly edit comments. Be specific, and I'll respond. Or, you know, argue with someone else on HN. I'm of no particular importance here.
By his own admission he's had user mentions turned off for years. Avoiding trolls isn't nearly as hard as people here are making it seem. If you don't want to deal with trolling, don't become the CEO of reddit immediately after their ridiculous community ousted Ellen Pao. The mainstream media and an awful lot of the internet (including the majority of users on this site) paint Trump supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, uneducated, etc. on a daily basis, but calling spez a pedo is somehow beyond the pale? And that justifies him editing user posts to appear as if they've said something they haven't?
>The mainstream media and an awful lot of the internet (including the majority of users on this site) paint Trump supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, uneducated, etc. on a daily basis, but calling spez a pedo is somehow beyond the pale?
Racism, sexism, homophobia and lack of education are not crimes, and never imply criminal activity that police actively investigate.
Pedophilia is not a crime but implies a proclivity towards actions that are a crime and that police actively investigate.
Yes, implying or directly accusing someone of harboring an innate proclivity for sexually abusing children does exceed in severity accusations of racial, gender, or anti-gay bias or lack of education. That people who proudly and on national media flaunt these attributes in themselves is evidence of such.
If you truly believe internet randos are some unstoppable force of human nature, then you're amazingly ignorant, and probably cripplingly sensitive. That must suck, sorry about that.
* "No, judge, I was not speeding through that intersection" | JUDGE: "Well, hang on a second - my edit to your ticket states that you were... Takem 'em away boys!"
WTF: im livid that anyone on HN would defend literally debasing the credibility of any system with a single freaking action of a CEO/Employee with such an obvious abuse of a root-level position....
I am so angry about this I can't even articulate it well...
That has literally nothing to do with the question. Considering whether an action is acceptable only in an instance, or universally, is an extremely basic way of determining if it is morally correct. Do you think spez's actions can or should be made a norm?
from the trolls perspective, and only in that context, it should be funny though. he should be their hero now. they should give props for beating them at their own game. hugs all around.
instead now is the time when everyone gets serious.
it will be hard to separate the principled outrage from the faux manipulative outrage. a new poes law of sorts.
Precisely this. CEOs should have the right to remove vile content from their website. I don't see how this is such a revelatory or unprecedented move - doesn't this capacity to modify content exist on virtually all digital platforms?
Oh let them please do that. Rats belong in the sewer
And I have no qualms about what Spez has done. Internet trolls deserve it.