Reddit CEO Admits To Editing User Comments Amid Pizzagate Malarkey (cnet.com)

Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, today admitted to editing several comments that criticized him on the site. He made the admission on Reddit, where he posts under the username Spez. CNET adds: Huffman got a lot of flak from members of the The_Donald, a subreddit for supporters of President-elect Donald Trump, after Reddit banned the Pizzagate subreddit. Pizzagate was dedicated to a debunked conspiracy theory linking Hillary Clinton to a paedophile ring. In response, he edited comments reading "fuck Spez" to instead be directed at moderators of the The_Donald subreddit. "I messed with the "fuck u/spez" comments, replacing "spez" with r/the_donald mods for about an hour. It's been a long week here trying to unwind the r/pizzagate stuff," he wrote. "As much as we try to maintain a good relationship with you all, it does get old getting called a pedophile constantly." Huffman added: "Our community team is pretty pissed at me, so I most assuredly won't do this again."

Comments

The First Rule...

[mrchaotica]

...of Usenet is of course, "you do not talk about Usenet." I'm breaking that. Sorry.

More importantly in this case, Second Rule of Usenet is "Usenet can't be subverted by its owner because, as a decentralized service, it doesn't have one." And that's why it needs to be supported instead of centralized shit like Reddit!

Re: The First Rule...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, the first time you say something someone with something to hide doesn't like, he driwns you in commercial speech (spam). Now your forum is gone.

Oh you are going to mod it? Cool, now he has someone to subvert, or he just gets mod himself.

Usenet is functional exactly because it is small. If it was large and threating, standard shit would work just fine.

Decentralized email became unuseful due to spam. Once enough of everyone was on a corporate plantation, it became possible to slurp everything wholesale. Private websites get ddosed until they cloudflare up, once that happens incoming connections can be logged wholesale.

The same thing happens everywhere. Maybe it is an accident. But it sure as fuck is consistent.

Re:The First Rule...

[mysidia]

Usenet can't be subverted by its owner because, as a decentralized service, it doesn't have one.

That's also its downfall.... too much spam and abuse, and there's no such thing as a team who can review posts, delete them, and block spammers.

On the other hand, each individual ISP /news provider can still censor content they don't want you to see, or tamper with posts; but there is just way too much spam/abuse for each news provider to create their own clean version.

Re:And what else?

[mysidia]

In response, he edited comments reading "fuck Spez" to instead be directed at moderators

He let them off easy. He should have just deleted the comments and applied a 30 day shadowban to the users.

Re:Debunked?

[Mashiki]

It was deleted because people were using it to harass people in the real world, some users were even making up stories about unrelated restuarants and posting child pornography to go with those stories.

Not quite true. People there weren't harassing people, nor were they doxing them. There was a non-doxing/harassment rule like on most subs. What's interesting is that members of the /r/pizzagate mod team have claimed that the administration were unbanning people, who were being banned by the subs mods. Those people who were being banned included those who were doxing, and posting CP. On top of this, that subreddit had already broken open a massive CP ring on twitter. Last count ~7000(I've seen numbers as high at 14k) or more accounts. Twitter's response so far has been to ban the people who found the accounts. Some of those CP accounts have been banned but most have not.

This entire thing stinks. On top of that with Spez deciding to pull this bullshit, they've also likely lost their safe harbor provisions. On top of that, toss in the absolutely weird shit in the podesta emails, including wording that seems to indicate some kind of pedophile stuff going on? They may have found something, they might not have. But reddit turning around and banning the sub is going to toss more fuel on the fire.

Re:And what else?

[Mashiki]

4chan, of all places, lost its shit when the owner had to ban GamerGate.

That's probably because the people in Gamergate were right. Never mind that mootles didn't have any problems with project chanology, until he got leaned on by them. And the so-called people who claimed they were "anti-harassment specialists" were the ones out there harassing, doxing, and doing the shit that they claim gamergate was. The "game journalism" industry is and was corrupt, several of those sites are now gone though. Having collapsed under their own corruption, many of the people involved in the "gamers are dead" articles are no longer writing in the industry. People like Sarkeesian have moved on to a new batch of suckers(just a fyi her dvd videos are only like 4 years late now and she hasn't even finished the project). But you can see that in the gamejournopros leaks exactly how corrupt. Not only were authors colluding, they were pushing particular political and social narratives. Shit like doritogate and kane & lynch were just the start. It took years for it to finally hit a breaking point. You know, much like how the brexit campaign or Trump's election.

But I'm guessing that you haven't learned anything from those two cases either.