According to /u/Spez, Reddit CEO, the reports of messages edited without any user consent or knowledge are correct as he admits to have done it so himself:
Hey Everyone,
Yep. I messed with the "fuck u/spez" comments, replacing "spez" with r/the_donald mods for about an hour. It's been a long week here trying to unwind the r/pizzagate stuff. As much as we try to maintain a good relationship with you all, it does get old getting called a pedophile constantly. As the CEO, I shouldn't play such games, and it's all fixed now. Our community team is pretty pissed at me, so I most assuredly won't do this again.
Fuck u/spez.
The edits were made in a thread linked from the Washington Post which described the recent ban of the /r/pizzagate subreddit which tried to uncover child-molesters and recently moved to voat.co.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday November 26 2016, @10:48PM
like I said, Snowden threads were being censored 5 years ago. Reddit is crap and has been. I even posted this in my early days in Soylent News.
There are a lot of things which surprise us, however, Reddit being compromised should not be on that list. They made their agenda known years ago, you're just an idiot for not getting the memo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 26 2016, @10:53PM
Your harsh words hurt me and my delicate snowflake edges are melting with tears!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 27 2016, @12:49AM
Meh. There will always be more snowflakes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 27 2016, @06:33AM
Please, head posthaste to room 163! There are coloring books, play-dough, and even a video loop of puppies!
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 26 2016, @11:17PM
Censorship is the worst, but EF you are #2 on the list and your shitty antics are the type of thing making the general population more amenable to such crap. Censor fake news? "Yes" cries the short sighted angry mob! Ban internet trolls with a 3 strikes law? "Yes" cries the angry mob tired of seeing horrible shit in every comment section.
Seriously, if such witch hunting comes back in vogue SN will probably end up on the chopping block after places like 4chan. "They use profanity and say ALL of the forbidden words on there!" Freedom of speech is great, but if you push the envelope of how offensive can you be, well don't be surprised when some idiots try and bring down the hammer.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday November 26 2016, @11:26PM
To Quote Darth Vader - "Strike me down, and I will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
Go ahead, try. The people are not as stupid and foolhardy as you believe they are. Your foolish attitude already let Trump win. Keep digging your own grave.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 27 2016, @12:51AM
To Quote Darth Vader - "Strike me down, and I will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
I know Darth Vader. You, sir, are no Darth Vader.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday November 27 2016, @01:10AM
Oh, right, that was Obi Wan-Kenoba-Whiteboy. Still, my message remains the same. Stand strong in the face of the Black man and your strength becomes that of the Black man.
When I left you I was but the house-nigga. [youtube.com] Now, I am da massa.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Sunday November 27 2016, @04:32AM
“Darth Ethanol, Massa of Evil” would be a great name for a satirical superhero. His arch–enemies could be the Army of Special Schnowflaykes, whose greatest weakness would be their tendency to become blinded by their own tears when offended.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Hairyfeet on Sunday November 27 2016, @01:17AM
Sigh...that was Obi Wan Kenobi, in his light saber battle on the death star. I appreciate your brain is usually a wee bit pickled EF, but c'mon man, that is like saying Han Solo said "use the force Luke" during the trench run.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 27 2016, @01:20AM
To quote Darth Vader ? You mean Obi-Wan Kenobi and his garbage friends ? Darth Vader is not the person to quote in a political chat anyway, he lacked any conviction, he was a fan of nepotism. At least THE Emperor believed in the Dark Side unlike that traitor, Anakin.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 27 2016, @01:35AM
Unless that was some kind of tongue in cheek joke on your part, in which case it flew above me.
Pretty sure neither Vader nor Palpatine would agree with that, since their desires for power were in this world, where as Obi-wan was more like some sort of enlightened warrior-monk whose death could serve just as much purpose as his life had.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anal Pumpernickel on Sunday November 27 2016, @12:21AM
Censor fake news? "Yes" cries the short sighted angry mob! Ban internet trolls with a 3 strikes law? "Yes" cries the angry mob tired of seeing horrible shit in every comment section.
So when these angry mobs' commitment to their supposed principles are actually put to the test, they abandon those principles immediately? These sound like the same types of people who would advocate that we give up all of our freedoms after a terrorist attack: unprincipled, ignorant, unintelligent, and/or irrational fools. It's so easy to say you're committed to freedom when everything is fine, but it's just talk until something you think is horrible happens.
Freedom of speech is great, but if you push the envelope of how offensive can you be, well don't be surprised when some idiots try and bring down the hammer.
Freedom of speech is great, but if you try to use it in ways that an angry mob doesn't like, then prepare to be censored. Is that it? Then do you truly have freedom of speech? If you ask me, the envelope should be pushed as much as possible; there will be push back, but it's a way to fight for a society that truly values freedom of speech.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday November 27 2016, @04:10PM
The reason for the troll bans is that trolls run legit users from the site. K5 was a good site until Rusty took his eye off the ball and the trolls took over. It's a ghost town now,
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 29 2016, @02:29AM
Well, this site doesn't ban people merely for trolling, and I quite like that even if I disagree with the troll posts. Maybe a lot of "legit users" are just cowards?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by NCommander on Sunday November 27 2016, @12:07AM
I'm horrorified about this, and honestly it justifies my decision here that we can't (easily) edit posts on the site. The only way to change a post is to actually go into the database and do manual UPDATE statements. We can delete with a webUI if a superadmin enables the feature, or replace the text with a DMCA takedown message if we're legally required by it but that's it.
When I used to admin message boards, I never really thought that much about the fact that mods/admins have the ability to edit everyones posts. Now? Now I'm thinking a lot that feature should be a lot more restricted, and come with a log that says who edited what.
Still always moving
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 27 2016, @12:26AM
You could put a hash of each post into a blockchain, bitcoin or one of the other ones.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Sunday November 27 2016, @12:34AM
i used to moderate on a harm reduction board, and there were obvious reasons why moderators needed the ability to edit users' posts - to shut down any illegal activities being conducted publicly through the board, like drug sourcing, giving out grey-market vendor information (protecting both the users and the vendors from law enforcement), etc. any edited posts always indicated that they were edited, by whom and at what time, though. reddit regularly gets used for meeting for illegal activities (like meeting people in your area to buy drugs), so i can't say i'm against mods having the ability to edit users' posts, but there needs to be something indicating that a post was edited, and maybe just limit it to subreddits associated with illegal activities.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Sunday November 27 2016, @03:27AM
To my knowledge on Reddit, subbredit moderators can only delete posts, and not edit individual ones. I never bothered to setup the reddit.com source code so I don't really know the full scope of admin powers over there. In addition, I can understand in some cirmstances unrestricted editing is warrented as long as its posted that it does happen (usually in forum rules), and there's notification that it has happened.
For something like a harm reduction board, hosting something like that on USENET would be extremely tricky due to the almost non-existant availability to delete posts (yes, I know cancelation messages exist, most servers ignore them for better or worse).
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday November 27 2016, @03:18PM
Wouldn't deleting/blocking posts be sufficient for that purpose?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Sunday November 27 2016, @04:15PM
if the whole post is bad, sure, but often there would be a good, useful post with somebody's phone number or a website or something tacked on there, so deleting the whole post would be overkill. the goal in harm reduction is to save lives, and getting more people to adopt the mindset helps the cause, deleting a whole post rather than just the offending information can lead to a counter-productive "well fuck you too" kind of response from the poster, decreasing our pool of knowledge and potential lifesavers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 27 2016, @08:26PM
People before rules.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 27 2016, @01:29AM
Comments should really be signed blockchain-style (as long as your comments are numerically increasing it should be fine to just use that as an index.) with the blockchain signatures for all comments distributed ala bitcoin. While this may sound silly, given sufficient encryption (or better yet multiple ciphers signing the messages to ensure all keys would need to be broken, not just one.)
So long as a copy of the original message db survives, along with a copy of the blockchain, all messages could be authenticated as originally published, regardless of the anonymity(or lack thereof) of the poster, and without needing to trust the future maintainers of the site, so long as the already published blockchain remained online and outside the realm of a majority signing node compromise (same issue as bitcoin.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 27 2016, @11:35AM
This post was removed due to Dice content standards violations.