Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: I Screwed Up and I Want Reddit To Trust Me Again (cnbc.com)
The most anxious day of Reddit CEO Steve Huffman's life, he says, was showing up to work on the Monday after Thanksgiving this year. The week before, he had thrown the company into a minor political crisis. From a CNBC report: After weeks being antagonized by the users of Reddit communities like /r/The_Donald and /r/pizzagate, Huffman had covertly edited messages posted by other users that were critical of him, to instead be critical of those communities' leaders. On the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, Huffman said he conceived this as a prank, "in the spirit of fun." "I figured, I'm just going to mess with these bullies, and I actually have the capability of messing with them, so I'll do so," Huffman said. "I wanted to do something. I didn't do the right thing, but that was my mentality." Huffman says the aftermath of this "prank," users questioning whether their posts had ever been edited without their consent in the past, was "devastating," and that he knows it will take time to rebuild trust within the community. At an all-hands staff meeting on that anxious Monday, he apologized directly to Reddit's staff and said he wanted them all to be proud to work there.
everybody head on over to voat. reddit sucks. reddit's the new digg
He did this to people calling him a pedophile, not people he discovered that voted the way he didn't want.
I had a sucky sig.
There is no coming back from this. Until he decides to leave, trust cannot be rebuilt.
Reddit is dead. The 2016 election was much worse than this incident. Widespread shadowbanning of non-conforming opinion. It was already more than apparent that reddit admins and moderators were using "editing by omission," where non-conforming opinions were deleted and/or the accounts were shadowbanned. Now we know they also did regular old editing too. Reddit is a propaganda machine now, nothing more, nothing less.
The site was founded on fake. They never had integrity, never will.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
The Russian hacker thing is especially bad because I've seen how many people can't comprehend that there are no less than 3 different leaks in play here. Or especially they conflate Hillary's private email server with the DNC leaks. Yes, there probably are some emails common to all the dumps--Podesta certainly emailed Hillary & the DNC and vice versa--but they could not have been obtained all in the same way, as we will see below:
Hillary's emails
Allegedly hacked from her home server, but we have no logs of this. She turned over paper copies. Some redacted emails (on paper) were released by the FBI. This has never been fully turned over to the public (or to the people investigating Benghazi). Trump joked that Russia (or whoever) could always release these after the fact, but nobody ever has released them all, including Hillary herself. We have posts by /u/stonetear on Reddit, who was a staffer there, talking about selectively wiping emails in the right time frame. All of this is public evidence that has been seen (and archived) by many people, unless someone wants to claim that /u/Spez edited that in to make Hillary look bad :)
Podesta's Gmail account
This was hacked by a very simply spear phishing email. It's DKIM validated by both Hillary & Google's servers, so anyone claiming this is fake can be proven wrong mathematically. Google signs them with the b and bh parameters (body & body hash) so no, it doesn't just cover the headers, but the body too. And no, there is a way to revoke the keys. Go look up the selector in the DKIM header if you know how, both keys are still there as of right now.
We also have good reason to believe they fell for this, both because we can see the staff saying this is real and because bit.ly has that link being clicked on twice in the relevant time frame as you can see from their stats page for the link: https://bitly.com/1PibSU0+
That bit.ly link resolves to a .TK URL the lameness filter hates which is obviously fake. You can see it from the previous stats page if you're curious. The TK domain is Tokelau, which a territory of New Zealand, if you were wondering. The phishing email itself claims there were hack attempts from the Ukraine.
DNC Leaks
This is alleged to have been leaked by a DNC insider. Wikileaks pointed out the suspicious death of DNC intern Seth Rich who was murdered but not robbed in the middle of the night. They have put up a reward for information on his killer(s). At this time, no one has been identified as the leaker, though there are a lot of stories quoting anonymous insiders claiming circumstantial evidence. There was also the 17 agencies of the USIC (i.e., the Coast Guard & co.) whose director put out a statement saying this was exactly the kind of thing Russia might do, but they did not give any specific evidence therein.
You can find more discussion about that here: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/12/cias-absence-conviction/