Yea that's my takeaway here. To the point given how u/spez has behaved it wouldn't surprise me if he hired these guys to 'hack' him specifically to smear protests.
/u/spez isn't trying to win a popularity contest, he is trying to maximize his $$$ from the upcoming IPO. Even if it succeeded in smearing protestors, a self-hack isn't going to help him there at all. In fact quite the opposite, since it saddles Reddit investors with more potential liabilities.
I don't necessarily disagree with your logic, but if I was a CEO trying to take a company public I wouldn't loudly and publicly talk about how unprofitable the company was either (on the AMA).
File that under "things that will never happen." Reddit is not going to reverse course. Period. So the data will be released and that will be the end of it.
I think "end of it" refers to this particular situation, not of Reddit as a whole. Reddit may die from the API changes, but it will have nothing to do with this hack.
BlackCat announced it would delete the information if Reddit gives it $4.5 million and reverses API price increases.
Now, unlike Christian Selig asking for $10 million to essentially sell Apollo to Reddit, this actually is a threat. Let's see what Steve Huffman's response to this is...
Seeing this has made me curious, are there any cases like this where a hacker/hacker group has demanded millions of dollars to not leak info, and the company being blackmailed has actually paid out?
I feel like every once and a while you see a headline about hackers “demanding” x amount of money, and it never seems its going to work, but it must have worked at some point for so many people to try it, right?
If nothing of consequence is released, I'll pay a little more credence to the theories that this is an inside job meant to discredit the opposition. If OTOH the data does show a disturbing level of detail being collected on users, and it exposes Reddit's secret shadowbanning and deboosting of folks it doesn't like, it's going to empower the resistance like nothing else that's happened yet. Spez is arguably in the self own business but this would take it to brand new heights.
People HATE that deboosting shit. People HATE the idea that the corps track this data to try and get inside your head and see how you think and act, so they can better influence it to their own ends. And right now, it's no longer really about an app as it is, it's all about meta. This will be gasoline on the fire.
People HATE that deboosting shit. People HATE the idea that the corps track this data to try and get inside your head and see how you think and act, so they can better influence it to their own ends. And right now, it's no longer really about an app as it is, it's all about meta. This will be gasoline on the fire.
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