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.

Comments

Only Fixed by Resigning

[casings]

There is no coming back from this. Until he decides to leave, trust cannot be rebuilt.

Re:Only Fixed by Resigning

[iMadeGhostzilla]

It's not minor if you have to wonder with every post if it's going to be altered or hidden or deleted, you'd just take your time elsewhere. E.g. if it were happening here, I wouldn't bother posting.

Re:Only Fixed by Resigning

[RogueyWon]

When I started my first "proper" job fresh out of university, my first boss told me:

"Your reputation can recover from even spectacular incompetence if you look apologetic and keep your head down for a year or two at most. The moment you lose your integrity, it's gone for life."

Would be a better story if he hadn't been fired and referred to the police a few years later for fiddling money from consultancy contracts.

Re:Only Fixed by Resigning

[LeftCoastThinker]

The problem isn't really the editing of a few posts, the problem is the fact that he can, unilaterally, go in and edit other people's posts. It is only a conspiracy theory until it is proven true. The fact that he did this shows that not only could it be done, but it was done, thus, no longer a conspiracy theory, it is proven fact. The motivation and trying to play it off as a joke because he got caught are also telling. The fact that he thought he could do this makes it likely that it was done in the past, but that he/they got away with it. It would be easy to destroy a person's online reputation in this manner. It is the online equivalent of identity theft.

At a minimum, to restore trust, they need to implement a policy where posts cannot and will not ever be edited by anyone other than the author, and any employee who does will be immediately terminated, regardless of rank. Also implement some software that only allows employees to delete posts, not edit them. Add a method for the software to verify that the post is being edited by the true user and not an employee and if an employee attempts an edit of a post, the original author gets an automated email as well as the entire company describing the infraction along with date, time, ip, user login, original and modified post, etc.

Re:Only Fixed by Resigning

[Anonymous Coward]

"every post"?

You and I are not that special, dude.

Hey, I remember that one. That's what people used to say when us "conspiracy theorists" said the NSA was spying on every American citizen.

Re:Only Fixed by Resigning

[blind biker]

It's not minor if you have to wonder with every post if it's going to be altered or hidden or deleted, you'd just take your time elsewhere. E.g. if it were happening here, I wouldn't bother posting.

It's not even that. The worst thing is that you cannot trust that anything you see someone saying, was actually said by him/her.
That's a much, much more grave issue than having your post hidden or deleted.

Re:Only Fixed by Resigning

[squiggleslash]

if you have to wonder with every post if it's going to be altered or hidden or deleted

Indeed on the first of those three (given they've been hiding and deleting posts for the entire time Reddit has existed, to what extent does that weigh on the mind of any Redditor?)

Now, now many Redditors are actually wondering if their posts are going to be altered? Any?

The circumstances /u/spez altered posts with were exceptional. It may not have been right to alter them (the correct response would have been to delete them and ban the posters) but no sane person would be expecting their own posts to be similarly altered unless they were in the same ballpark.

So, no, I'm not worried that /u/spez is about to edit any of my posts. No sane person is - no sane person who isn't accusing him of pedophilia, at any rate.

Re:Only Fixed by Resigning

[PatientZero]

and of course that perennial favorite, the Patriarchy: the vast conspiracy of straight white men who have worked tirelessly to keep women and minorities wriggling in the dirt since the dawn of history.

I like how you listed a bunch of non-issue conspiracies that only the craziest of crazies on the left actually believe (as opposed to being bombastic) and then neatly conclude that racism and sexism don't exist and never have.

"UFOs, trans-dimensional beings, Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, satellites—utter nonsense!"

Lucky he is CEO.

[PlusFiveTroll]

If I did this as an employee, I'd be fired on the spot.

Avoid banana republic thinking

[magarity]

People who disagree with your political position are not "bullies" that you need to do something like this just because you have the capability. This thinking leads to single party police states.

Re:Avoid banana republic thinking

[ClickOnThis]

My point is that moderators who abuse their power and don't follow moderator guidelines are acting like the "bullies" the OP mentions.

paying reddit users want Steve Huffman's head

[iggymanz]

We paying reddit users want his head on a pike; fire his ass

The Right Thing

[Anonymous Coward]

'The Right Thing' is not to mess with people's speech, even if it disagrees with your political views. This is SOP for the left-leaning these days, and yet they wonder why hillary lost to donald trump of all people.

Now, you have the right to do whatever you want on your platform, but that doesn't necessarily make it 'The Right Thing' to do. This isn't the first time social media has tried to modify narratives of users.

0 sympathy.

"In the spirit of fun"

[taustin]

Er, no, dude, it wasn't in the spirit of fun. If it were, you would have seen the criticism of you as being in the spirit of fun. But that criticism was malice, and your response was malicious. It was in the spiriting of being an asshole.

Apology rejected.

How long will it take to regain trust?

[QuietLagoon]

... and that he knows it will take time to rebuild trust within the community....

A person's integrity is destroyed in seconds, yet can take years to rebuild. I am not sure he can regain the users' trust in a time period he would like.

Privatization of the public square

[anthony_greer]

the idea of the first amendment was that anyone can say anything on the public square, but online the "public" square is all privately owned by mostly large companies based in the Sanfrancisco or San Jose region and run by people who are predominately liberal. They are free to run their businesses as they and their shareholders see fit, but with so much of life hapnenning online, where are we supposed to have the "public square" if anyone with differant ideas gets treated badly or labeled "hate speech" or "fake news"?

If Facebook Twitter, Reddit and other leftist dominated companies run all the communications mediums, how are those who disagree to compete in the arena of ideas?

Re:Privatization of the public square

[prisoner-of-enigma]

If Facebook Twitter, Reddit and other leftist dominated companies run all the communications mediums, how are those who disagree to compete in the arena of ideas?

There's not supposed to be competition in the arena of ideas, didn't you know that? It's supposed to be an infinite echo chamber where all the heads nod up and down at the same time in the same way and nobody ever says anything that challenges anyone's preconceived notions. Those that do must be exiled, ridiculed, and called racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, arachnophobic, hydrophobic, and anything else derogatory the echo chamber can come up with regardless of whether or not it actually applies. Such is the mentality of the left in political discourse.

This is nothing new with the left. Go back to the origins with Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and so forth. Controlling thoughts and implementing groupthink has always been part and parcel of leftist ideology. It preys upon the typical desire to "fit in" and not be left out of a crowd. That's why every leftist government has always sought to ban certain types of speech -- either legally or extra-legally -- as part of its method for retaining power. The USSR did it to great effect for almost a century before it came crashing down. Today's "political correctness" is nothing more than the same ideology repackaged into something more aesthetically pleasing to the masses.