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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

> Spez's actions harm himself more than users of the site.

I'm not sure. If everyone would say "alright, it was incorrect but we don't want any internet drama", then how exactly would it hurt him? Closing a subreddit seems to me like exactly the kind of thing that could communicate a "not OK".

I think it's especially necessary as the edits had been done in a trump support group subreddit. Even though I don't agree with them at all, I think setting a precident that manipulating discussions are ok if I don't like the political content would be even worse.

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Closing /r/golang would only hurt the people who subscribe to /r/golang, which is probably not /u/spez.

If I'm mad at the US president, burning down my house isn't an effective protest and would hurt basically everyone but the president.

Moving your community to another platform which has a better history of respecting their users isn't metaphorically similar to burning your house down. Its more like immigrating to Canada because Trump won.

If there are 25,000 users in a community, then it's not "your" community.

If he just left reddit and deleted his account, that's one thing. Shutting down the community and deleting the content is another. But going through steps to make sure that community can never rebuilt itself after it's gone is so far beyond a protest against one person that I can't even believe it's being considered.

Literally, in that Google Groups conversation they said they wanted to delete everything and make it private so no one could ever use it again. That's insane.

There has to be a less destructive way than to simply delete the subreddit, perhaps put up a date that new post will be disallowed and links to other official Forums.

Then when posts are no longer allowed, leave a read only copy up for some time, then leave nothing but the links to other communities.

Why even disallow new posts? What's the point? It's not an official support forum, he shouldn't have the right to shut down a community site and bar people from using it.

Many people not be aware of the issue and the network effect would have those people stay, despite the most talented leaders of the Go community leaving.

It stops being a community it the non-experts are separated from the experts by inaction of the experts.

If someone really likes Reddit that much, let make another go language sub.

> Moving your community to another platform

A) the community does not belong to the golang team, the subreddit originally existed independently of the golang team. B) The community is not a piece of furniture to be moved at will; they have to choose to move.

If they do proceed with this (say they take a vote), the best they can hope for is fragmenting the community between Reddit and Voat or whatever.

One act of self-immolation is widely credited with catalyzing the Arab Spring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Bouazizi

I agree, and also yes he admitted it, but isn't that worse?

There weren't any safeguards or anything to catch it on the reddit organisation side. It was only users noticing forcing an admission that means it's even a matter of record.

What kind of safeguards could be put in place that couldn't be disabled or overridden by the admins?

Use a bot to monitor comments and an SCM like git to detect potentially suspicious differences. Like a comment change that is not marked as user edited. Or a comment change that seems to shift the original meaning significantly.

Would those be managed by the community, or by the admins? If it was official, it seems like the admins could still shut it down, or edit that database to ignore their changes.

No UI for traceless edits and DB password split in three parts like nuclear launch codes. Then the CEO couldn't do it alone and he would have some time to think things through before others agree to participate in such fishy business, if they do at all.

The password one is good, but if three admins decided to conspire to change a comment, what then?

Then you have collusion, and this is what we want. This is a very typical control in regulated environments. It makes the action more difficult to execute, and it tends to carry an additional penalty as a separate offense.

This is bigger than trolling. We know people inspect the social network activities of others. This kind of abusive can result in all sorts of bad things. What if and admin didn't like you, edited your history, and then suddenly you lost your job for some fabrication of, e.g., a racist comment?

> No UI for traceless edits and DB password split in three parts like nuclear launch codes.

That works well for nuclear launch codes because the only time you need to combine the split parts to make the full launch code is when you are actually going to launch (and perhaps during scheduled readiness tests). This should be fairly infrequent.

For a database, you'll have processes that frequently need access. For persistent processes, you'll need to have the reconstituted password available at least whenever the persistent processes start. If you architecture has dynamic processes that access the database (e.g., you have something internal working over a REST or CGI or similar interface, that starts upon receiving a request), you need a way to get the password to them.

Most solutions I've seen for supplying the full password in these cases have been fairly easy for someone with admin access to the machine running whatever it is that holds the full password and/or to a machine running one of the processes that needs to full password to get a copy of the password.

That's proposing a technical solution for a social problem, which is usually a bad idea.

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