Funny, since i find that to be the best example of communal remorse and reflection that i can dredge up for reddit. Compare reddit's turnaround to how quickly and thorough redactions take place in establishment in-groups of journalists or business leaders or politicians. The fact that an amorphous group of humans can come to have reddit's institutional memory and remorse is astounding imho. The boston bombing error is known and passed down like folklore from old members to new, keeping similar actions on check.
Feeling remorse about being so wrong is not laudable, it's just normal. The problem is that they got it wrong in the first place.
> The boston bombing error is known and passed down like folklore from old members to new, keeping similar actions on check.
No it's not. The Boston bombing thing was just the most high-profile example in a long line of similar problems. Here's one from before the Boston Bombing:
There's a hilariously sad current bandwagon effect going on about the user Unidan, a "reddit-famous" biologist who, after a petty argument with another user, turned out to have less credentials than he claimed and to have manipulated votes using sockpuppets.
This is possibly the most hated guy on Reddit right now. Not whoever started the whole boston bombing witchhunt. Not someone who actually did anything harmful. Just a guy who got "unfair karma". And unlike with the boston bombing, there is zero self-awareness about how idiotic this whole thing is (and how common it is for anyone remotely popular on that site to manipulate votes in some way). It's a sad display, and I cannot imagine what this would turn into with more concrete monetary incentives.
If you think it's about the karma, you are seriously misinformed.
Voting accomplishes two things - giving/taking meaningless points, and determining where (and if) your posts are ranked on the board.
The problem with Unidan is that he used a botnet to cheat the system. When you're on the new queue or have just commented in a large thread, a single vote or two can be the difference between ending up at the top of the thread (or board) or never being seen at all.
It's not about the points, it's about the fact that the voting system is pretty damned sacred to Reddit. By breaking pretty much one of the only global rules, he cheated people out of a chance to have their own posts/comments seen. We can only speculate as to how long it was going on.
Creating "useful content" is not a valid excuse for usurping community for your own self-aggrandizement. Even HN has a voting ring detector. Why do you think that is?
I'm not saying he doesn't deserve to be banned and what not. I'm saying it is stupid and pathetic that he is despised to the core more than a pedophile strangling kittens would be on that site.
Know any pedo-kitten-stranglers that made the front page via one of the default subreddits? You seem to be very quick to disparage a lot of people who are mad for very understandable reasons.
If by "Recognizes its mistake", you mean "have a majority of people who were not involved talk about how the other guys fucked up using the 'we' pronoun".
It sure is easy to point out your own flaws when you're in someone else's body.
