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Comment by benmmurphy | Hacker News Reader

I suspect this is a case of an isolated demand for rigor. It’s quite difficult to have a political reddit with 700,000 subscribers and not have comments or post being made that break the rules. Especially when there are strong incentives for people to use alts to make false flag posts.

I strongly doubt r/the_donald is being fairly treated by reddit when most of the admin team has a fundamental objection to the sub’s message. The admin team in the past have shown they cannot act professionally. For example the CEO edited user’s messages in the r/the_donald to try and create discord between users.

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> For example the CEO edited user’s messages in the r/the_donald to try and create discord between users.

This is inaccurate - it was very clearly not intended to 'create discord between users' and claiming that it was is at best politically biased and at worse a lie.

I just googled it and it seems like he changed messages that were insulting him to insult moderators of the subreddit. The parent's comment doesn't seem wrong to me, if that's true. He altered communications of reddit users to make it look like they were insulting reddit moderators, in such a way as to falsely attribute those insults to the original authors.

You're still spinning it unfairly, by leaving out relevant information. It was a pranking attempt that fell flat, and was neither intended to nor successful in having the effect of surreptitiously turning T_D users against each other. The admin in question quickly admitted to the deed and explained his motives. Attributing other, conflicting motives without further justification is misleading at best.

No you're spinning it by saying "It was a pranking attempt that fell flat". Either way do you really think it's okay for a CEO to "prank" users by silently editing their posts then only admitting to it after being caught. Seems like the "prank" excuse is a spin.

If it was a prank he would have done it and admitted it without getting caught in-between.

Also, it has to be funny to be a prank, otherwise it's bullying, where was the punchline?

It wasn't just any admin, it was the CEO.

> You're still spinning it unfairly

> It was a pranking attempt that fell flat

You're spinning, not them.

Even assuming it was a "prank", it was meant to create discord, otherwise the CEO would have chose a different, funnier, more obvious edit.

Instead, he chose to make a subtle change and then only admitted it after getting caught.

Imagine Mark Zuckerberg using FB admin rights to turn a "Donald Trump is the worst president of our generation" post by Biden into "Bernie Sanders would be the worst president of our generation".

Would characterizing that as "an attempt to turn democrats against each other" be fair?

> For example the CEO edited user’s messages in the r/the_donald to try and create discord between users.

Do you really feel that's a fair summary of what happened, in spite of the discussion of that incident elsewhere in this thread?

It's an extremely fair piece of information to use when trying to decide just how impartial the Reddit Admins are.

It's fair to consider as evidence of potential bias or lack of professional restraint, but only if you aren't lying about what actually went down.

Yeah, it is clear evidence that reddit and this subreddit are in open conflict for quite a while. I find it quite impressive admins didn't just end this spat, but instead go more creative routes like this one or creating quarantine mode for subs, beside the infamous & less impressive events. I totally had expected this sub to get banned already. Well see about the future...

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