Because the power is there and it's tempting to use. Restarting Buzz may not have economic sense for Google, but abusing admin-edit powers has obvious value for the abusers and may be hard to catch if the abuser is not an idiot. "Opportunity makes a thief", and all.
But, realistically, the power is there on any site featuring user contributions - Hacker News, Twitter, Slashdot, etc. etc. Humans are fallible; given infinite time, the same thing will happen on those sites too, and probably worse. If you push someone hard enough (I don't know the full story, but I believe the CEO was provoked) they will lash out and do something stupid unless they are incredibly serene or lack any emotion.
If that possibility is too much of a concern, maybe we need to come up with an alternative - like some kind of decentralised, mass-distributed reddit-like. Actually, wasn't that usenet? Is it too late to get that back?
When people get "pushed hard enough" the usual thing is deleting comments and banning users. That's a known and accepted moderation power. Sure it's abused sometimes, but at least it's not lying and wrongly attributing negative comments to people.
Invisibly editing comments is a very unexpected route to take. I doubt you could push most CEOs to that. They would just delete the comment.
That's a known and accepted moderation power. Sure it's abused sometimes...
That you'd say this is an indication of how far the culture online has fallen. What's now taken as an accepted use of moderation power was once considered abusive.
The power has always been there. The fact that it's taken until now for the CEO to use it suggests that it's not actually ripe for abuse. And the fact that the CEO immediately reverted it, apologized, and is watching the community blow up, serves as even further motivation for not abusing this power again.
Because nobody's even hinted that this has been done before. When someone's comments are edited, that person can see it[1], as can anyone who remembers the comment pre-edit. Add to that the fact that comments that are worth editing (beyond the rather unimportant "fuck u/spez" type of comment) are also presumably highly visible, it would be pretty hard for them to have a history of editing comments without someone having noticed before now.
[1] Modifying Reddit software to let them hide the edit from the comment author would be visible to anyone with source access, meaning it can't be done without the support of all of their developers, and so probably wasn't.
