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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.
There is no coming back from this. Until he decides to leave, trust cannot be rebuilt.
If I did this as an employee, I'd be fired on the spot.
everybody head on over to voat. reddit sucks. reddit's the new digg
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.
We paying reddit users want his head on a pike; fire his ass
You could care less? Well then, why don't you?
Then redditors will realize things aren't so bad and ask him back.
I stopped going to Reddit a week before this happened. There was a palpable feeling to the website that a lot of views were no longer welcome. What happened to the freedom of speech?
I really can't say what happened to Reddit but I have some thoughts. If you go to the smaller sub reddits they are great. But anything with a large amount of people becomes ridiculously political. You can't even say anything or have a discussion without someone attempting to force you to find a source for every little thing you say.
People need to learn how to just talk to each other again. That is where my mind goes.
Throw all this BS with the people leading reddit into the mix and you're finding people are now realizing the internet has limits. Yeah we can unite behind causes easier but people are still people. Coming up with names like trolls and fake news isn't going to stop people from being people. They talk. They spread information and half the time it isn't accurate. How is that any different then what goes on in most groups at school, work every day?
This isn't some legal filing server, or your email provider. It's a fucking web forum. And one that lets you use it for free. If the CEO if a dick, take your eyeballs and go elsewhere*.
*Please
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
'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.
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.
... 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.
If you care about what you say on the internet not being changed, use a digital signature.
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?
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/
Once censorship is allowed who really wants to stay on a managed site?
Once topics people have put a lot of work into get banned, edited or removed?
Other really good US sites offer freedom of speech, freedom after speech and the freedom to read a comment later.
They trust their users, their users ideas, thoughts, words, comments and topics.
If a site does not like or trust its users to comment maybe the site should just publish the news, topics it likes?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
That would be great, if not for the fact that Hillary didn't release all of the emails to the FBI to begin with. The FBI only got paper copies after a lot of them were deleted and /u/stonetear (AKA Hillary's IT guy, Paul Combetta) had done whatever he was doing in that infamous post.
Also, we know now that they use a bunch of aliases that make it hard to tell who is who. Here's a short cheat-sheet of those I happen to know. All of this is easily discovered by reading Wikileaks, so every item is an open secret at this point to anyone who cares to find out. I'm sure I forgot a few so feel free to correct me. This is interesting because sometimes there are subpoenas / FOIA requests that only target specific email addresses or names.
Hillary Clinton
hrod
HRC
Evergreen
Chelsea Clinton
CVC
Diane Reynolds
Anthony Wiener
Carlos Danger
Doesn't block the above ad! Absolutely terrible!
Why don't you include all the negative reviews that you have been keeping in your dossiers of everyone that responds to your ads?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Users will not trust Reddit headed by someone that edits their posts "because I can" for any reason whatsoever. This is more than a relatively innocent screwup. This is clear fraud and violation of the fundamental nature of Reddit. FIRE!
> Everything else you wrote is bullshit conspiracy theory
Everything else? Not going to be specific, just going to write off everything?
I said we don't know who killed him and why. Surely you're not actually contradicting that part? Look at the police report, there's just not much there.
Are you contradicting the part where I said there are security cameras in the area? Here's a nice list of them and maps. You can walk all around Flagler Place & W St. NW and look at them if you want. The linked thread has a picture of each one. Feel free to post your own photos showing the cameras aren't where they are shown to be.
Now if you're saying the killer(s) were found on camera, contrary to what I said above, well, the only source I can find claiming that is Fox News and there's been nothing public about it since then as far as I know. Should I be taking their word for it? Is that the point you want to argue?
I can go over DKIM cryptography if you want or pull the keys for you directly from the relevant DNS servers (they're still there... for now). Anyone who tries to tell you they've modified those has apparently hacked both Google and Hillary, or broken DKIM's cryptography. Do you need a lesson in exactly how to pull the keys from the DNS servers? Would you like to look at the RFC? Should we discuss what non-repudiation means and why it's important here?
But it's probably the Wikileaks thing, right? All I've said is "this is what Wikileaks said and why." I can only really go on what they've said, which is that they don't know who their sources are exactly. This implies that the only way they know a source is gone is that they cannot contact them any longer. There are surely many ways for this to be purely coincidental and I've said as much. But that puts you in the position of not disagreeing with something I said, but something I said someone else said. And they certainly did say what they said, you can go read it on the Wikileaks Twitter account if you wish.
Perhaps you are you disagreeing with the parts where I said Clinton didn't actually lie? You weren't very specific, you know. I pretty much have to guess here.
So please identify the specific item(s) you're disagreeing with here. I have specific, public sources that I have linked to. And if you're going to natter on about conspiracies based on "literally no evidence" please actually talk about the evidence I have presented instead of pretending you can't see it. Or make sure you disagree with claims I've actually made, not something someone else said.
As you may note, my posts above did not say that Clinton did anything to Seth Rich, nor have I alleged any direct evidence thereof, I just pointed out that people, like Wikileaks, have been suspicious, which is demonstrably true however much you hate them for it.
A few months ago, our CEO lost badge access to our main data center. That was his pride and joy, and now he needs an escort in, because his job doesn't involve any requirement to work inside the room.
If you are a content provider, you probably need one or two people who are capable of editing any post, so that you can fix problems. However, there is no way that the CEO should have that kind of power. The fact that the CEO can just randomly edit content anywhere on the site, without auditing or accountability means that there is a culture out of control.
There is no legitimate reason the CEO of a company should have administrative access to that data and editing privileges in the first place. Not once you have more than three employees anyhow.
I'd question why the capacity for an administrator to directly edit all users post data exists in the first place when you already have options to delete or hide the content. If there isn't the function built into the management interface and someone is directly editing the database contents, that's even worse.
The whole thing reeks of complete dysfuction at an operational level. No CEO should have that kind of access in the first place, let alone after they've demonstrated they can't be trusted not to use it recklessly.