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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.
If I did this as an employee, I'd be fired on the spot.
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.
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.
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.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
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?