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

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

The site was founded on fake. They never had integrity, never will.

Re:Only Fixed by Resigning

[Solandri]

That was my first thought upon reading OP's post too. Huffmann may have actually done the world a favor. He's opened people's eyes to the possibility that this type of behind-the-curtain manipulation can happen; something the tech community has been trying for years without success to warn the general public about with respect to electronic voting machines.

If we're lucky, this will kick off a wave of forum sites coming up with clever hash systems allowing you to confirm that the message you posted on a forum has not been altered. And the best of these systems could trickle down into a way to confirm that a ballot you cast on an electronic voting machine has not been tampered with.

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

[slashdot_commentator]

There's no point in pushing for an electronic voting machine when optical machines are superior, because they leave a paper trail. Granted higher costs in managing paper ballots are unavoidable, but I prefer that to an electronically rigged election.

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

[irving47]

He did this to people calling him a pedophile, not people he discovered that voted the way he didn't want.

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

Bring back Pao and all will be forgiven

[JoeyRox]

Then redditors will realize things aren't so bad and ask him back.

Used Reddit for roughly 7-8 years, my thoughts.

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Used Reddit for roughly 7-8 years, my thoughts.

[penandpaper]

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.

Citation needed.

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.

It's easier if you know there are 3 sets of leaks

[Xenographic]

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/