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It was a single time, and in a way that was an obvious joke (literally just regex to switch his name with mods' names). It's not exactly heinous, what he did.


> It was a single time

That we know of that he admitted.


He's been remarkably open every time he's changed user content (once with a post in 200...7? I think, and the single time he edited comments).

I don't like reddit, and I don't like spez for other reasons (downgraded from Lisp to Python), but what he did was literally just a harmless joke. All reddit posts and comments are publicly archived by services like pushshift; we'd know if they had a habit of doing this.


> He's been remarkably open every time he's changed user content

I have no stake in this story, but how could you, or anyone, possibly know that?


As he mentioned in his comment, there are plenty of reddit thread archivers, especially on popular subreddits.

But I also have no stakes here.


Everything on reddit is archived roughly as soon as it's posted. Any manipulation can therefore be spotted just by looking at an archive.


> remarkably open every time he's changed user content

Are you sarcastic? This is logically a very useless statement due to the nature of trust. Once trust was broken it’s hard to obtain because does clearly lied about other things, why should he be trusted now that he’s been caught.

“I’ve been remarkably open about all the extra marital affairs where I’ve been caught, please trust there are no others.”

“I’ve been remarkably open about all the robberies where I was convicted, please trust that there are no others.”

Etc etc.

I would feel foolish even presenting any unsound logic and can’t even think of a situation where it would be relevant to trust. Officiated lie detector? Sodium pentathol administered by an adversarial government? Testimony under oath?


The trust was never broken. He neither denied nor tried to hide that he changed the post. No one caught him, he did it in broad daylight.

If you have extra marital sex right in front of your spouse, that is no indication that you are hiding secret affairs.

If you walk into a police station and tell them you robbed the bank across the street, there is no reason to believe you have secretly robbed many others.


Everything on reddit is archived roughly as soon as it's posted. Any manipulation can therefore be spotted just by looking at an archive.


And who is reviewing the archives for everything, all the time, looking for diffs?


A handful of services automatically show diffs. reddit only really deletes stuff, it doesn't care about changing them.


You’re saying he was open about it in all the cases that are public. Kind of like the NSA has been open about all its tools that we know about.


Everything on reddit is archived roughly as soon as it's posted. Any manipulation can therefore be spotted just by looking at an archive.




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