Explain? How does someone apologise 4 times for misunderstanding something and then turn around and pretend they never apologised behind that persons back and that the initial comment was made maliciously?
CEO of reddit is allowed to mishear things, he is also allowed to apologise and move on once things have been clarified.
What is illegal is to then go and say things that are demostrably false that affect someones reputation or chance of employment. If Christian goes to a single interview, meeting, sales pitch etc and someone even makes the briefest comment about "we don't wanna be blackmailed later", he can take Steve Hauffman all the way in front of a judge. Play the phone tape and collect more money that way than any number of years running Apollo.
The again Steve Hauffman changed someones comment on reddit which is a change in production which I am also sure its on very grey rea of legality, specially when people have their reddit account tied to their person, or business. If Retures europe posted about Ukraine and he changed their comment I am sure that would certainly be illegal, he only gets away because he did it to a private citizen and because the ethics board of reddit didn't fire him on the spot as they should have
>The CEO edited a comment and admitted he edited it, and it was stupid, and he shouldn't have done it.
Only incident we know of. It's overwhelmingly likely that they both had tools built for this and had used them before.
And admitted he edited them? Yeah, after he was called out in front of the entire world.
>The sensible amongst us should be above childish drama like this.
Not sure if trying to rationalise massive fuckups by C-level execs like this is "sensible", nor is ignoring the fact that reddit in all likelihood has ready tools (unless you're saying that it's more likely he had direct access to prod db) for stealthily editing user comments.
He already admitted to changing post titles (in his own words to fix typos and other minor corrections). So he got the hang of modifying prod data with a "good cause" and once he had the know-how he turned around and sued it to edit someone's comment.
Had that not caused a big stir, maybe it would have become his new past time. maybe it has, maybe he goes back 5-6 years to comments you cannot reply to because the threads are locked and adds little jokes there, who knows cause he is now totally untrustworthy on this matter.
> All this is to say that Steve Huffman might not be deliberately lying in this instance.
Huffman has had 26+ days to correct the record. He has done nothing to that end. He made a "potentially career-ending" allegation, which hurt the reputation of the developer of Apollo, Christian Selig.
June 8th: Selig released his side of the story, along with messages which were sent to him from a Reddit employee as well as from moderators engaged in a subsequent call with Reddit:
June 9th (a full 24 hours later): Huffman had the facts, including the recording, which confirmed their mutual understanding. Huffman could have revised his stance there and then. Instead, Huffman doubled down, effectively reiterating the lie through his scare-quote and instead criticized Selig for acting publicly to defend his reputation against Reddit's internal and external slander:
Huffman is the CEO of the Reddit platform and nothing is stopping him from apologizing for making a potentially "potentially career-ending lie" against the developer of Apollo, Christian Selig. He hasn't made a peep on the platform since June 9th.
If it wasn't deliberate, then he's had nearly a month to speak up for the truth. At some point, refusing to correct the record, a lie does become deliberate.
---
Here's TechCrunch's reporting on the situation, if you prefer to hear it from a journalist:
What he did wrong is insert his opinion and possibly pin a comment and edit a title of a topic that has a conflict of interest. That is wrong wrong wrong.
Put it this way. In a court of law he'd be thrown out.
> He posted a transcript of what Steve told moderators.
The part I pasted, right?
> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."
That's not a transcript. That's a sentence devoid of context. We're now two steps removed -- not only do we need to believe Christian, but Christian needs to believe whatever mod sent that to him. Who's the mod? Why is the mod telling Christian anything? Why was Steve talking to mods about Apollo's threat? None of this makes any sense. I don't think anyone has malicious intent here –– bet you $50 that it turns out to be some weird miscommunication. After all, there's zero benefit for Steve to be doing any of those things, and a whole lot of downside. Ins't a miscomm the more plausible theory?
Ironically, if Christian's claims are unsubstantiated, then he's slandering Steve. But Steve slandering Christian to internal employees is precisely what Christian's so angry about. But why would internal employees break ranks and go tell Christian?
There's something more going on here. I'm not sure what.
> He posted a transcript - and recording - of the exact conversation with Steve in which this part of the conversation takes place.
That's the point -- all that he's posted is a transcript where Steve says mea culpa. Then he posted some other person's two-sentence "transcript" of Steve badmouthing him. But it's not a transcript; it's weird.
>I don't understand how it could be considered just for someone to be punished for making an honest mistake in their testimony.
His job is to run the company and take responsibility for it. If he doesn't know something illegal is going on, he is still at fault for not learning about it
The evidence is that he was pushed out of the CEO position, and received a monetary settlement lol.
A person would have to be extremely stupid to think that if someone got pushed out of a CEO position, that it is somehow impossible that the company/ceo would be incentivized to not talk about.
There is quite obviously a financial incentive here. I am not sure how someone could deny the existence of this financial incentive.
This is standard stuff. It is completely reasonable that either of them would not want the bad publicity from that, and that there are financial incentives to not admit that he was pushed out of the CEO position.
Executives get pushed out of positions, without companies or the executives admitting to it, or lying and saying that they left voluntarily.
> Saying I'm not allowed to compare him to other CEOs is ridiculous
You can compare him to other CEO but you have to justify why the comparison is valid.
You didn't do that.
If you want to directly claim that Sam did something illegal you need to show or say that.
Instead, what you did, is just point to someone else who did something illegal, and then criticize that other person, while vaguely implying that the criticism applies to Sam.
But the criticism doesn't apply to Sam, because you didn't demonstrate that Sam did anything illegal.
> GP’s comment should be taken into context: the CEO is not just a cool dude, he does stupid stuff like rewriting in DB user comments making fun of him.
Huffman has repeatedly demonstrated poor judgement. Using your admin privileges to edit comments for personal reasons is the kind of thing one would expect from some power tripping admin on some small, privately run forum, but not from the CEO of a multibillion Dollar company that operates one of the largest sites on the Internet. That incident alone should have been reason enough for him to either step down or get fired. In fact, his predecessor as CEO Ellen Pao even commented that she would have fired him for this.
>Reddit employees have the ability to edit messages with no audit trail and no governance.
How did you come to this conclusion? It is entirely possible that there was an audit trail and governance, spez simply ignored the governance, and he would have been fired after an examination of the audit trail if he was anyone else but the co-founder/CEO.
> Sorry, but is this guest the Queen of England or the Pope?
Irrelevant. You make a commitment to someone, you keep it or make alternate arrangements.
> Did the mods pay for his/her way to New York?
Completely irrelevant, as this is about how the company treated a guest.
> As the GP said, this is an overreaction -- the mods act as if insulting one celebrity means that IAMA, a subreddit that was originally populated by regular reddit users, has been inconvertibly sullied.
I would argue that it has been. To what degree, and whether it materially affects the sub, remains to be seen.
> Or that they, the mods themselves, spent their lives savings to fly that celebrity into town.
No, they aren't. Not even close.
> I'm not saying that the celebrity deserved to be snubbed
No, but you are implying that it is a trivial occurrence.
> but non-conspiracy-shit happens, and firing/rehirings can be a chaotic process that yes, sometimes lasts longer than a couple of days.
I know shit happens. I almost used that phrase myself above. However, there is a proper response to shit happening. In this case there should have been some sort of alternative arrangement made for the person coming in, even if it was just a managed delay to figure something out. You do not just turn someone who came to town to see someone at your organization out on the street on their own.
Explain? How does someone apologise 4 times for misunderstanding something and then turn around and pretend they never apologised behind that persons back and that the initial comment was made maliciously?
CEO of reddit is allowed to mishear things, he is also allowed to apologise and move on once things have been clarified.
What is illegal is to then go and say things that are demostrably false that affect someones reputation or chance of employment. If Christian goes to a single interview, meeting, sales pitch etc and someone even makes the briefest comment about "we don't wanna be blackmailed later", he can take Steve Hauffman all the way in front of a judge. Play the phone tape and collect more money that way than any number of years running Apollo.
The again Steve Hauffman changed someones comment on reddit which is a change in production which I am also sure its on very grey rea of legality, specially when people have their reddit account tied to their person, or business. If Retures europe posted about Ukraine and he changed their comment I am sure that would certainly be illegal, he only gets away because he did it to a private citizen and because the ethics board of reddit didn't fire him on the spot as they should have
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