So far Spez's legacy includes, in no particular order:
Changing other peoples' comments
Starting a war with the 3rd party app devs who made reddit the easily accessible platform it is (browsing reddit on the toilet wasn't nearly as common before the first apps came out, and all of the first ones were 3rd party)
Being a moderator on the jailbait subreddit, a community for sharing sexually suggestive pictures of underage teenage girls
Forcing new moderation teams on communities whose moderation he didn't agree with
Straight up lying about the 3rd party apps and their developers every step of the way
Way to go, Steve Huffman! You had a community of volunteers build your platform for you and now you're taking it all away from them. I'm sure this won't backfire.
The statement from r/watchredditdie when they closed the sub really put things in perspective for me.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have gone so far as to renege on their promise of listing Aaron Swartz among Reddit, Inc’s founders. Such an egregious breach of contract - only performed once their agreed-upon co-founder no longer walked the earth - could only be carried out by immoral individuals acting in fundamental bad faith. In this way and so many others, Reddit is dead.
spez is also a doomsday prepper who dreams about living as some sort of lord in a post-apocalyptic feudal society
“Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.”
I have spent a lot of time with very rich people over the years for work and they will certainly bite it incredibly early in the apocalypse. If someone is born into wealth, they are almost always fundamentally inept in basic ways. The longer someone stays rich, the more inept and abstracted from the world they become. They are entirely ensconced in a bubble of their own making. Money opens so many doors and protects them from so many just basic consequences of living that they entirely forget that those obstacles exist.
They are also just constantly, constantly being glad-handed and yessir'ed into an excessive amount of confidence. They know it too, but they can't really trust anyone so they just make friends with people who they know would steal the wallet off their corpse but happen to be nicer about it than the other ones who would also do it because they have nowhere else to turn. Other rich people aren't trustworthy to them either because they are only either more or less rich, above or below them.
It'll go down pretty much how it did in the last third of the movie Triangle of Sadness. They are building bunkers that their handlers and others will actually live in. Not to mention that anyone that knows they were a potential engineer, actively or passively, of the downfall of man will have someone to take it out on right in front of them.
He has mistaken having a lot of money for having leadership talent or any useful skill that would be valuable in a situation where infrastructure has completely collapsed and fiat currency is worthless. He is not physically strong, he doesn't inspire people to follow him, he doesn't know how to find and prepare food, how to source water, how to build shelter, how to make fire...
He knows nothing at all that would make him useful as anything beyond "that guy who digs graves" until he eventually dies from the physical exertion that his candy ass has never actually had to deal with.
Pff, as if they'd risk getting banned from the former front page of the internet! Cuz, ya know, that'll still be super relevant in a post-apocalyptic scenario... 🙃
He was forcefully added as a mod on the subreddit. Reddit used to have a system which allowed you to make someone mod without requiring them to accept.
When people add you as a mod, you can still leave. He never did. That subreddit in particular was known to have the blessing of the reddit admins to operate and eventually made 'subreddit of the month'. Then a news org picked up that reddit was hosting this content and then they shut it down.
They were well aware of what was going on. Andrewsmith is right, there is some plausible deniability there, but with the everything else we know about Steve Huffman, I'm not so sure I can agree with his assessment that it was forced upon him.
He let Ghislain Maxwell mod a bunch of subs until she eventually went to jail. It was common knowledge that its was her account but no problem from the pedo reddit admins
It was never proven that the account was hers and it was literally just users automatically claiming that account was Ghislaine Maxwell because that account stopped posting around the same time she got arrested. Nothing bugs me more than that myth being parroted as if it was proven fact.
While it's certainly better than actively moderating a community...
Is being the admin of a website that actively hosts jailbait and required a massive media outrage to finally remove it that much better? I get free speech and all, but I mean, the subreddit straight up catalogued which pictures were "fap material" and encouraged people (including parents) to take candid photos of the children around them.
A community like that wouldn't last a millisecond in a server I host.
It's not like it was a small sub either, IIRC. I'm not going to google jailbait to find the stories, but it must've been a few hundred thousand subscribers I think. At a time when the big subs had a few mill at most.
Even though it was ethically very bad, it was legal. And Reddit had a policy of not removing content, unless it was illegal or doxxing.
The fact is that they wanted to follow the same principles as the government, and allow complete freedom of speech. And if you are following freedom of speech, the ethicality of content is irrelevant.
Reddit never approved of r/jailbait. They simply allowed it.
Is your comment threatening him? Why are you blackmailing him, man? How is he going to work together with you now that you've so aggressively threatened him?
Why is your comment so badly coded? I can't help you optimize your comment, Google didn't help me write mine.
The statement from r/watchredditdie when they closed the sub really put things in perspective for me.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have gone so far as to renege on their promise of listing Aaron Swartz among Reddit, Inc’s founders. Such an egregious breach of contract - only performed once their agreed-upon co-founder no longer walked the earth - could only be carried out by immoral individuals acting in fundamental bad faith. In this way and so many others, Reddit is dead.
Yes. I believe it was people on the donald subreddit, which could be seen as funny, because most sane people (myself included) don't agree with them politically, but it's still a huge misuse of admin powers and proof that he has no integrity. Can't let other peoples' rights be violated if we want to keep our own.
Yeah he changed one comment saying: "Fuck u/spez" by replacing "spez" with one of the r/the_donald mods. This was also done silently so no * to indicate the comment had been edited.
At the time, there was a lot of popular sentiment, on reddit itself, that the internet should be free and it should allowed to continue so long as it was legal.
He actually moderated jailbait? I always assumed he was the type of person to have an alt for it, but to actually use his real account? What a scumbag.