There is really no excuse for what he did and most other businesses would have fired him immediately. Reddit simply has a very immature corporate culture. Post-IPO (if they get that far) I would expect a massive clean-out.
What's the harm in such a pointless joke? It was silly, but it's not like the meme subreddit he did it to was a super serious one like AskHistorians is.
Personally I don't think that action in itself is a big deal, but it shows that Reddit has a lack of internal security i.e. reddit employees are admins in the old-school CMS/forum software sense: they simply can do anything. (Edit: Reply points out that spez says not all admins can do this)
For comparison, I don't expect that a Google employee, or C-level executive, has an "Edit" button next to every single post on Google Groups.
Being able to silently change the content appearing under a user's name is a big deal. It's a more significant capability than being able to e.g. take down content.
To be fair, nobody has an edit button on any Google Groups post anymore. Nobody has any buttons on them, in fact. Also, when it happened, he also pointed out that most reddit admins weren't able to do this.
> Also, when it happened, he also pointed out that most reddit admins weren't able to do this.
That’s worse though, right? Why does he have this special functionality the other admins don’t have? Why would the CEO ever legitimately need to personally edit a reddit comment? Surely he has many better things to do.
I'm sure he could just connect directly to the database if he wanted to. At some point people have enough access to systems to bypass any security checks put in place.
This is the guy who created reddit, by default he can do anything physically possible. The only way he wouldn't have this functionality is if one of his employees specifically added something to block him from being able to do it, and this addition could not be reversed.
And there are many very legitimate reasons to have the capability to modify entries in a database, but honestly even if there weren't, making a system where it's impossible for anyone other than the originating user to modify an entry is a challenging task.
People have been arrested over reddit comments, and what he did showed that there are employees at reddit who can go in and edit your comments to say whatever they want, with no oversight.
It is rather fascinating isn't it. Not that long ago I remember reading FBI agent documentation describing to the judge how he got the information and publicly available comments were a big part of this. It throws a serious wrench into validity of such submissions by LEOs now.
Is this a joke? Why would anyone think that any post or comment on a place like Reddit is real or authentic? The entire thing is an anonymous black hole. It is as far from real and authentic as I can imagine anything being.
The clear harm is that Reddit posts have been used in court cases. People have and will go to jail based on that content.
The unclear harm is they use “we’re being professional business” as an excuse to do unpopular and unfriendly things and also “it’s just a prank bro” when stealth editing posts... no dude. Can’t have it both ways. No one should trust this company at all, and they’re proving why.
Yes. You're the one who chose to use their platform to broadcast your words, if you don't believe they will do so with fidelity use a different platform. You're not paying or otherwise offering them anything in exchange for a guarantee of fidelity, nor are you under any obligation to use their service.
So by your logic, it would be okay for a twitter employee to modify a tweet from of the president's account to declare war (or to any number of things that would have very real repercussions in the real world)
I take no issue with the modification. Trying to start a war is wrong, but that's true regardless of method. Giving someone food isn't a problem, giving someone food you know they are deathly allergic to on the other hand is. They would certainly be responsible for any damages they caused through malice or negligence, but they have the right to face those consequences.
I get where you're coming from, but to the users of the_donald, it wasn't a meme subreddit. They thought they were the main reason he got elected in 2016 and were looking forward to playing a similarly pivotal role in 2020.
It was so close they could have made an impact. The Clinton email address / wikileaks dumps were being mined as a collective in the forum. That probably brought to light some emails the press would have ignored.
> I get where you're coming from, but to the users of the_donald, it wasn't a meme subreddit. They thought they were the main reason he got elected in 2016 and were looking forward to playing a similarly pivotal role in 2020.
That sounds exactly like what a Donald Trump meme subreddit would say.
