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Comment by bevekspldnw | Hacker News Reader

Getting drunk and editing production database to delete mean comments is certainly innovative CEO behavior.

Hah, I saw this:

    Steve was not a big fan of authority, so he also liked the idea of a site without editors.

and remembered him getting prod database access to censor comments criticizing him. I guess it's true what they say about power corrupting you.

Sometimes, those who are most vocal against authority, are projecting their own potential misuse of authority onto others, unable to see someone wielding power differently.

The controversy around this one was always wild to me.

Mods editing comments was the most standard behavior on every phpbb/vb board I grew up on.

His edits were clearly edited, clearly jokes, and TBH I found them pretty funny. And people were *outraged* that he had the capacity and the temerity to edit their sacrosanct posts...

I took it as a sign of the changing times

It’s an abuse of power, that’s why. It doesn’t matter if it is or isn’t funny or if anybody was harmed, the act itself was improper for any engineer dealing with other peoples data and egregious lack of judgement by a CEO.

Yeah this is the changing times I was talking about

The thing is, when the mods would troll the hell out of users on the old BB's, they were doing it all the time, it was part of the culture. It happening on reddit, where a user's posts were thought to be immutable caused very understandable outrage.

And people want to invest in this IPO? Seems like two trains moving towards each other but can’t tell if they are on the same track yet

There is only one set of tracks.

But everything is fine, you can just go swap places with any passenger if you want.

You’d have to be a total moron, but if there’s one thing I learned from Reddit it’s that there are far more morons out there than I realized.

* Editing people’s comments critical of him.

Which is actually worse.

Indeed

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