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Deleting the golang subreddit

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Re: Deleting the golang subreddit

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reddit SREs You've been working at Google too long. Reddit has on the order of a few dozen employees, not all of them technical. Welcome to how the rest of the Internet works.

I've never worked at any company with more than 50 employees, and have worked on a team with as few as 5 engineers. Even without an explicit SRE role, someone is doing that work -- keeping the servers (reliably) on the internet and performing, mitigating attacks, etc. You should be able to tag the row with a dirty flag on second (or later) write using rules internal to the DB without incurring a large performance pen…

Either you are the outlier or I am - I'm honestly not sure. But having consulted with a dozen or so digital agencies over the past year not a single one had the sort of monitoring that you're suggesting. This doesn't mean that it's a bad idea, quite the opposite, but in my experience the reality of a small to medium sized agency is that if a client isn't paying for it than you're not working on it.

Re: Deleting the golang subreddit

#283
post #279

This is asinine and it going through would seriously harm how mature I assumed the community around Golang was (actually reading through those posts already did, but either way I guess I'm just one person right?). The CEO edited a comment and admitted he edited it, and it was stupid, and he shouldn't have done it. I'm 100% sure there is a way for someone at any given platform they'd choose to replace it with to acces…

> The CEO edited a comment and admitted he edited it, and it was stupid, and he shouldn't have done it. The only reason I've heard that this even remotely defensible is because it was against Trump supporters. I'm sorry, but that doesn't cut it with many of us.[1] I don't care about political beliefs. He abused his power in such an obvious & egregious way that he should be terminated. [1] And not that it should matte…

I guess it wasn't really against Trump supporters, but against people causing a restaurant owner to be harassed in real life. Happened to be Trump supporters, but to be honest it could have been any other subreddit; wouldn't have been the first time.

Re: Deleting the golang subreddit

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>It turns out we didn't create it No shit. https://imgur.com/a/K2cWx

Yes, that's what I learned too. That was before my time.

Did you learn it by scrolling down on the front page and looking at the text below the list of moderators? I sincerely hope you aren't trusted to run a public community ever again if your first reaction is to start an off-site proposal to shut a community down.

Re: Deleting the golang subreddit

#285
post #102
post #57

This is about trust. If a space where a community gathers isn't trusted, core members of that community are going to want to leave. Trust is delicate. Trust is giving someone the power to do harm you or to misuse what you have given them, in the belief that they will not do those things. The trust has been shattered, and probably only the core members currently realise this. Those are the users for whom "this is our…

Look, you can ramble all about your 'trust'. But the fact is that the community on Reddit still trust Reddit. They're not asking to shut down the subreddit. It's the moderators in power, who use google groups instead of Reddit, who want to shut the subreddit down.

Ironically you're both in agreement without knowing it. Yes, trust is important and yes, the 'community on Reddit' still trust Reddit.

The bulk of Reddit users don't mind that spez had a momentary lapse of judgement and corrupted some r/The_Donald stuff. They find it amusing; left to them r/The_Donald would have been nuked long ago on the way to making Reddit into the sort of safe space echo chamber they want. The fact that spez had a little fun with it just affirms that he's on the right side of that mentality and secures his trust among these people. They're not proud that one of theirs has been caught so embarrassingly, but he's on their side so it's easy to forgive.

Re: Deleting the golang subreddit

#286
post #262
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Larry Page or Sundar Pichai edited some of your emails, would you still want to use Gmail? And before you say that it's "different" because emails are private, let's remember this: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-26677607 Emails are not private. At least not Gmail/Outlook emails. ProtonMail or PGP email should be safer.

It's not really comparable. He wasn't editing Private Messages between two people, but public discussion (which was calling him a pedophile supporter). The reddit admins aren't known for making the greatest judgement calls, but that just makes them more human. The fallout of this will probably be a bunch of nothing. It doesn't affect the 90% of lurkers, nor the rest of the site which doesn't give a shit about US poli…

> It's not really comparable. He wasn't editing Private Messages between two people, but public discussion (which was calling him a pedophile supporter).

Why does it matter what the discussion was about?

>The reddit admins aren't known for making the greatest judgement calls, but that just makes them more human.

I don't get it. Is being 'more human' good or bad? Is 'humanity' somehow a property that emerges from deceit and hypocrisy, or does it emerge from some other portion of this scandal?

>The fallout of this will probably be a bunch of nothing. It doesn't affect the 90% of lurkers, nor the rest of the site which doesn't give a shit about US politics.

agreed that the fallout will be minimal, but I disagree that it only affects US political boards. The reality is that we don't really know the scope of the problem; we have to take the word of parties, that have already been proven dishonest, regarding the depth and scope of their own wrong-doings.

>It's doubtful their community could stand own their own or it would have done so already.

I'm sure reddit was an awesome vehicle for their messages, but the internet is a big place, and there were people/places/forums/groups/zines like this before reddit was around.

> It's no secret that they didn't trust the admins before the election.

and now it's no secret that they were right.

Re: Deleting the golang subreddit

#287

Closing a thriving community just because an admin feels some moral imperative to do it is just short sided. If you don't like Reddit, write a blog post, blow some steam, delete your Reddit account, be as critical as you wish, but don't kill a community just because you can.

I feel like some people don't understand the gravity of what he did. He edited someone elses comments. What is the point in being part of a community where the website owners may be editing random comments? It undermines the whole thing. Let me ask a question. If it turned out that Google had started selectively "editing" peoples email coming from Gmail, would you still be fine using Gmail?

> would you still be fine using Gmail?

Well, no. But I also wouldn't force others to stop using it too.

You want to know who is harmed by this? Those of us that read the subreddit but are not on Google Groups.

Re: Deleting the golang subreddit

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that event, wouldn't it better to pull down the post? Better than edits, no?

Of course, but like I said in another post, human beings are not 100% rational 100% of the time, particularly when suffering from a barrage of abuse.

Sure, but he should resign. Pizzagate is ridiculous, "spez is a pedo accusations" are ridiculous, but a CEO of a massive (user-wise) company silently and childishly editing their comments in a confusing way is also ridiculous.

Re: Deleting the golang subreddit

#289
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

> 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.

Re: Deleting the golang subreddit

#290

I was the one who proposed deleting /r/golang. It is not some official Go or Google position. As much as I used to love Reddit and was addicted to it, my personal position is that Reddit is no longer a trustworthy platform (if it ever was). Editing user content is beyond offensive. I never even considered such a thing in my years of running LiveJournal. That is a major violation of user trust and trust in the platfor…

Worth noting that moderators, admins, or community-team level employees do not have the power to edit comments – I believe this was done at the database level. Signed comments is a good idea though.
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