Eh, still think simplest explanation is most likely here, which is that there's no secret motive, but the mods and some users over there are just dumb. I don't mean because they're nontechnical or don't have randomly specific web knowledge (one of them actually does), it's about how they responded to people.
replyNow that the evidence is shared and reproducible, I agree with you. This should be an embarrassing moment for the r/seattle mods, but I somewhat doubt it will be. Glad a more level headed conversation found its way to HN.
replyWhat's to be embarassed? These are busy community moderators, not whitehat hackers. They don't owe anyone a writeup of technical vulnerabilities. They owe the community clear communication of rule changes and most people expect explanation of why rules were changed, and they delivered both.
replyThey did actually made a technical claim, which is fine, but then when someone said this is serious and asked for details, they responded with attitude and defensiveness. The mods don't need to be white-hat hackers, and even if they were, they're still dumb. They could've just said, all we know at the moment is we kept getting redirected to this malware site, so we're blocking this.
replyThe craziest part is the guy asking even apologized, probably cause he was getting downvoted too much and actually cares about appeasing them.
Community moderator is a stressful thankless job, especially on a subreddit with a reasonable amount of (often political) content, PARTICULARLY on one regularly brigaded by trolls and antagonists from a competing subreddit, so I'm going to cut a lot of slack to the unpaid volunteers who put up with a lot of hate directed at them.
reply> This should be an embarrassing moment for the r/seattle mods, but I somewhat doubt it will be.
replyImagine the shame of blocking the spread of malware before attempting to appease somebody that’s falsely accusing of you hysterics.
Every day I wake up and shake my head that another mod on the internet did something without my, the Grand Regent of Online, say so