[astrange]

He was correct to do this, because it was funny. Any true longtime forum poster would recognize this. (Conversely, if it wasn't funny, he should've done it differently.)

Although doing Lowtax things may lead to turning into Lowtax, which is probably bad.

I can certainly tell you it's not a serious problem, because it'd be illegal if it was. All serious problems with websites are revenue issues or legal issues.

[aerio]

It wasn't funny, and he didn't make any jokes. He edited "fuck spez" comments to remove spez and substitute other mods.

Fuck r/the_donald - but that's just blatant admin power misuse to deflect criticism. Very topical with all the "fuck u/spez" comments going around these days.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...

[astrange]

Admin abuse is inherently funny. It's like slapstick. It was funny on SA when the users paid to sign up in the first place, and it can only be more so when they're not even paying customers.

Should've made it a wordfilter though. Those are more participatory.

(You won't take this advice, which is why I've run a large popular internet forum before and you haven't.)

[joenot443]

> Admin abuse is inherently funny

I think you're a very small minority in that opinion, my friend. Perhaps leadership decisions like that are why you refer to your forum in the past tense now?

[randomdata]

You will never be able to perfectly tickle everyone's funny bone with a given joke, but most everyone agrees that the role of forums is to offer a funny experience, and a good admin will play a significant role in making that happen. One does not spend their preciously scarce free time on an Internet forum if there is nothing funny about it.

[HWR_14]

I don't usually go on forums to look for funny things. I'm there because people talk about things I'm interested in.

> One does not spend their preciously scarce free time on an Internet forum if there is nothing funny about it.

By your own metrics, HN is often a failure and you should not (or do not) spend time here.

[randomdata]

In what way is HN failing? HN is an excellent source of humour. Even this very comment I am replying to contains a fair amount of hilarity.

[astrange]

There's nothing past tense about it, but sometimes you change jobs, you know.

[Algent]

I completely agree, when he did that is was pretty funny (but a little pathetic he didn't dare to ban these users or this sub, either for money or political reasons).

Users reacted poorly and "shocked" site wide somehow that an admin could exerts admin right and edit database which as a sysadmin made me laugh a lot because I get occasional similar ones from our users when we do admin stuff.

[tazjin]

"funny but a little pathetic" fits a lot of Lowtax shenanigans very well, so it seems reasonable.

[perihelions]

It's not funny when the victim isn't in on the joke and is distressed by it.

(Sure, the victim was (probably) a highly unsympathetic and stupid person. What justification is that? It's schoolyard-bully sociology to attack unsympathetic weirdos. Most bullies grow out of it and live with regrets. But 'spez is a fucking adult! What's he doing lurking in the worst subreddits of (his own) website, searching for prey to gaslight? What's the character of a grown-ass man who does that?)

[astrange]

No, whether the user is sympathetic or not isn't important, and I don't think there's anything noble about punishing users you don't like. It's just a misconception about what's important in internet forums. If you're a random free account you sometimes get nobly sacrificed (via admin abuse) for the entertainment of the masses and thus benefit society as a whole.

Basically, it's PvP. This is pretty obvious from the design; you post and people reply to you, which they mostly use to argue with you. An example of a product designed for people to be nice to each other is Discourse, which isn't much like HN or reddit.

People do have human rights, which is why I said what matters is if it's illegal or not. Putting slanderous posts under their name would be a real issue - if you think this happened go ahead and sue him - but the most common one would be doxxing: posting your IP and personal info from the admin console. Which he's probably got access to.

[circo]

If you base your social conduct entirely on what's legal and illegal, you'll become a pariah very fast.

Spez is the perfect example of this. His editing of the comments cemented his reputation as corrupt and stupid, and from then on everything he communicated towards the community received a much stronger backlash than it otherwise would have, regardless of how unpopular the decision actually was.

[astrange]

This is confusing "the community" with "overly engaged parts of the community".

Normal reddit users don't know any inside baseball facts about the site. The normal users are those people who post the same basic "women, what's the sexiest sex you ever sexed?" questions on askreddit once a week.

Of course, their site design makes this a problem since it relies on mods, who are specifically that kind of person since they do it for free.

[phpisthebest]

>>I can certainly tell you it's not a serious problem, because it'd be illegal if it was

that seems to be a very poor reasoning. If your honest contention that all things that are a problem are illegal (thus one can assume then also that you 100% agree with all laws on the books as well) seems then we have no societal problems, and the government and laws work perfectly... Thus no need to elections, or changes to those laws.

[astrange]

No, but certainly if you think something is a problem you should lobby to make future instances of it illegal. If you don't, it's basically not worth the time of an admin/CEO to care what you think, because they have so much else going on.

A common theme on social media is that a group of people care about something and want to ban it, but instead of changing the law, instead they self-enforce their pseudo-laws by yelling at people who violate them. Complaining about the mods being an example, another being fanartists who have a ton of rules about "sourcing your art reposts"/not tracing, another being that 2014 period where everyone went around GitHub projects trying to shame the owners for not having a code of conduct.

This might be because they're anarchists and don't want to call the figurative cops, but usually it's because they're a minority and there isn't actually popular support for it.

[phpisthebest]

wow.. I dont even know really were to begin to unpack this.

So you position is that totalitarianism to the extreme is the only way? That everything, every action, every social convention, every interaction between two people should be under the purview of some law or regulation.

I am not a big fan of codes of conduct, as such I damn sure do not want the government creating a law around code of conduct. If some open source project wants to enact a stupid CoC I want the freedom to fork that project and replace with either a CoC free project or a competing one with a different CoC.

government is not empowered, nor should it be empowered to government what social media ban's, or the conduct of developers interacting with each other on a open source project

[astrange]

If you are upset about an interaction between a CEO of a company and a customer of the company, as in this thread, then yes that is the kind of thing we have laws for.

In the other examples there are other levels of "government" that have "regulations" that are more official than nothing that you could lobby. You could get GitHub to change the ToS to require CoC, or Twitter to ban certain kinds of things artists don't like, rather than just be personally mean to other users on the site about it.