Reddit, Sears, Grills That Cook Babies... And The Streisand Effect

from the have-at-it dept

Adam sends in a link to a Reddit story where it comes out that someone (not entirely sure who) decided to push Reddit to take down an earlier story. Apparently Sears.com had some oddity in how content on its e-commerce site was displayed, and with a little URL-hacking some folks were able to create a Sears.com e-commerce page for a barbecue grill designed to cook babies: Pretty amusing, and obviously something that Sears wasn't all that happy about. Sears's explanation for what happened doesn't quite make much sense, but what would you expect?

We discovered earlier today that someone visiting our site had defaced a limited number of product pages

It wasn't so much "defacing" from the sound of it, as it was a bug in the way the site was set up, but, what doesn't make much sense is that someone then forced Reddit to remove its original thread discussing Sears' URL hackability. It's not at all clear who specifically got Reddit to take down the thread, though an admin admits that he was told to take it down. The obvious list of culprits, of course, would be Sears and Conde Nast (owners of Reddit).

Still, it should come as no surprise that the Reddit community doesn't take kindly to the idea that someone (whoever it might be) can dictate that a Reddit thread get deleted when it's not spam. So, now they've been pumping up this particular story about Reddit pulling down the thread, giving the whole story much more attention. Wouldn't it just have been better to fix the URL-hackability and let things be?

Filed Under: reddit, streisand effect, url hacking
Companies: conde nast, sears