Yup, I don't trust spez, I don't trust reddit's management (even less after the Chinese investments). This is a case to be cynical, reddit is not transparent and their leadership has been riddled with stupid politics, including the whole weird saga they did with Ellen Pao.
>Yup, I don't trust spez, I don't trust reddit's management (even less after the Chinese investments)
I think you (and many other people) are overestimating how much chinese influence there is on reddit, considering that they have < 10% stake (according to wikipedia they "led" a funding round that raised 10% of valuation, and since then there was another funding round that presumably diluted their stake).
Above 0 is too much. Could 10% buy you mod spot over a large major subreddit? Maybe get reddit to look the other way for your astroturf campaigns?
Reddit is just as shady with its Overton Window manipulation tactics & strategies as Twitter has been exposed to be. Remember when Ghislaine Maxwell was revealed as a mod of r/Worldnews? I'm convinced any relevant PR company worth its salt has infiltrated moderator teams of every major subreddit. Whats stopping them? Or anyone else for that matter
>in 2005. Condé Nast Publications acquired the site in October 2006. In 2011, Reddit became an independent subsidiary of Condé Nast's parent company, Advance Publications.[11] In October 2014, Reddit raised $50 million in a funding round led by Sam Altman and including investors Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Snoop Dogg, and Jared Leto.[12] Their investment valued the company at $500 million then.[13][14] In July 2017, Reddit raised $200 million for a $1.8 billion valuation, with Advance Publications remaining the majority stakeholder.[15] In February 2019, a $300 million funding round led by Tencent brought the company's valuation to $3 billion.[16] In August 2021, a $700 million funding round led by Fidelity Investments raised that valuation to over $10 billion.[4]
What type of shadowy agenda are entities like Jared Leto or Fidelity Investments trying to advance? Or should we assume that they're acting altruistically because they're not Chinese?
> What type of shadowy agenda are entities like Jared Leto or Fidelity Investments trying to advance? Or should we assume that they're acting altruistically because they're not Chinese?
None, they might just really believe that Reddit might be profitable one day and they want a share of the pie. Snoop Dogg also invested in Klarna, for example.
On the other hand I have lots of reservations about the motivation of the likes of Sam Altman and Peter Thiel in this, Marc Andreesen is not such a wildcard, might be just stupid with money as the latest plays of a16z seems to making them be.
Ehh. Spez being human makes me inclined to trust him a little more. I’m neutral in politics, but editing those comments was objectively funny. Stupid, yes — astonishingly so. But it finally broke the illusion that users own their comments. That’s all it ever was: an illusion.
I don’t trust authority in general. But given the choice between spez and musk, I’d take spez any day. He’s at least not hopped up on drugs running around making crazy decisions.
And in terms of Reddit’s trustworthiness, it makes even less sense that editing comments would be of any consequence. If they detect a hacker and have the logs to prove it, they’d gain nothing by modifying the logs. And if they don’t, they gain nothing by fabricating the logs. So it seems reasonable to conclude that they just don’t have the logs.
Which is also reasonable. When I was hacking into systems at Matasano, it always made me uncomfortable just how undetectable I was. I wasn’t trying particularly hard to conceal myself, but a few well-chosen bash incantations and opening things in vi means all anyone sees is that a vi process is running.
Obviously this is an unpopular opinion, but I think you're right about spez. Editing those comments in his AMA was dumb, but pretty obviously not malicious in the way that's being suggested here. I think a fair analogy would be if he gave a speech in a clown wig, and was then accused of having tried to disguise himself.
