I don't know about this particular case, but, generally... bad actor subreddit moderators have been an occasional thing for well over a decade.<p>And it's also been widely known for that long that Reddit is an influential venue in which to take over a corner -- for marketing or propaganda.<p>What's an equal concern to me is how <i>insufficiently resilient</i> Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.<p>A bad actor mod of a popular subreddit can persist for years, visibly, without people managing either to oust the mod, or to take down the sub's influence.<p>(Subreddit peasants sometimes migrate to a new sub over bad mods, but the old sub usually remains, still with a healthy brand. And still with a lot of members, who (speculating) maybe don't want to possibly miss out on something in the bad old sub, or didn't know what's going on, or the drama they noticed in their feed wasn't worth their effort to do the clicks to unjoin from the sub in question.)
Reddit has a moderation problem, and it's a big one.<p>They've now been asked to appear in front of Congress to address concerns about politically motivated violence being incited through their platform: <a href="https://oversight.house.gov/release/chairman-comer-invites-ceos-of-discord-steam-twitch-and-reddit-to-testify-on-radicalization-of-online-forum-users/" rel="nofollow">https://oversight.house.gov/release/chairman-comer-invites-c...</a><p>Personally I believe I've seen more people in the past few years wish a politically motivated death on somebody else via Reddit, than I have anywhere else in my life.<p>Now if it was "just" the incitements to violence, or if it was "just" the libeling of random businesses, that would be one thing. But the fact that BOTH types of illegal speech are becoming a problem at the same time suggests to me that Reddit's failure to moderate is systemic and total.<p>It is becoming exhausting watching all of these tech companies commit crimes, or enable someone else to do so, and getting off with a slap on the wrist.
Moderation on Reddit has been questionable for a long time and its killing the site. To give some examples:<p>- /r/energy used to ban everyone in favour of nuclear energy<p>- If you post on /r/conservative you can expect to receive a bunch of bans from unrelated (popular) subs. Doesn't matter what you posted, being associated with that subs "taints" your account enough for some moderators.<p>- /r/UnitedKingdom banned me for critizing a government welfare program<p>- /r/assassinscreed banned me for critizing a character in their latest game<p>For me it makes sense that the smaller subreddits should have the freedom to moderate as they want but the larger reddits should aim to at allow opposing viewpoints to prevent echo chambers from forming. Moderation should be focused on quality, not on viewpoints. Obviously it goes without saying that threats of violence and celebration of murder have no place on any platform.<p>The irony is that all this censoring just creates a backlash and further polarisation. If you are only allowed to discuss certain subjects on a "left" space you both create the illusion that the left only cares about a subset of topics and by banning people you create resentment that drives them towards (more welcoming) extreme spaces.<p>There's many factors that form the political preferences and opinions of the younger generation but it would not suprise me if for a subset (young college educated males?) of them Reddit heavily contributes towards increased polarisation.
It sounds like a large part of the problem is how important a subreddit name is to popularity. If a subreddit has a good obvious name it is going to collect members and activity even if the mods are awful. Competing subreddits will struggle to attract new users as they need some different less-obvious name.<p>I wonder if this could be approached in a way that new subreddits didn't have this disadvantage so that they could compete on mod quality and slowly grow / migrate the community.<p>Of course there are advantages to short unique names like readable links. But it seems that this false authority may not be worth the downsides.
/r/AskBrits banned me for pointing out that there are several threads each day about immigration, each tailor made rage bait. Sometimes they’re not even a question.<p>I’ve personally caught a couple of Iranians and Russians brazenly posting such threads at 4am British time (working hours in Tehran) and the moderators did nothing. They simply allow such threads while deleting any thread that goes “is anyone sick of the constant threads about immigration?”<p>These threads generate so much engagement from people of all opinions that it makes the sub appear in people’s feeds as recommended content even if they’re not subscribed to the sub. It gives people the impression that there is only one political subject in the UK that gets any discussion.<p>I don’t know <i>why</i> the moderators of this sub do this, but the effects of their moderation are clear.
On a related note, leaving my gripes with one guy aside, a lot subreddits are also just blatant marketing fronts, with the full blessing of the mods.<p>/u/Turbostrider27 is a shared account between marketing firms. Saying their name in any sub the account is active on will shadow ban your message.
/interestingasfuck banned me for commenting on /asmongold at some point. Not even for the content. Simply for having interacted with /asmongold.
You missed maybe the biggest one, /r/bitcoin, which around 2015 started banning anyone who wanted Bitcoin to actually follow the original design and continue scaling up on-chain transactions. The moderator, some anonymous student (possibly named Michael Marquardt), literally declared anyone who wanted Bitcoin to be used for regular transactions offtopic and banned them on a massive scale.<p>When explaining his actions he said something like, "I've moderated forums before so I know how sustained censorship can change a community". And then he set out to do it.<p>Reddit has been garbage for a long time and people's reliance on it is a huge problem. Abuse of it redirected Bitcoin onto a fundamentally different path (one nobody had agreed to), simply because of the sustained gaslighting and psychological manipulation its format allows.<p>That said, user-driven content moderation sucks everywhere. Wikipedia has the same problem. So does HN to some extent. The future is moderation driven entirely by LLMs with openly published prompts.
Confusingly one-sided post given the point it's seemingly trying to make.
It goes both ways. If you try to post anything remotely criticizing Donald Trump or his government on /r/conservative you'll also get banned. Even if you try to keep it objective.
Fair point, I barely comment on that sub so my experience is limited.<p>I guess the ratio of well moderated subs compared to poorly moderated subs heavily skews towards the poorly moderated. Irrespective of their political viewpoints.
You already suspect this, but your expectations are out of line with the actual game/meta game/propaganda model there.<p>You as a person who uses reddit have a general agreement most likely with the concept of reddiquette, and perhaps go to engage with diverse views, maybe to learn something, maybe to just have an argument. Normal internet forum stuff.<p>However, you are arguing with a vertically integrated propaganda machine that is basically an experimental weapons testing facility for rhetoric.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency</a> but on so steroids, of which those steroids are on various white powders and no this isn't the War on Christmas.
It's less obvious because this machine <i>mimics</i> normal, centrist US culture in ways that slip under the cognitive radar.<p>You could more easily recognize this if it were AI prompts in the style of 1984 or Pravda; but it's more difficult in this case - it is <i>just rational enough</i> to be ridiculous/incredulous; that it seems like debate is a suitable avenue; it aligns to your context enough and while you might not agree; you could see how 1 in 10 people might be misled.<p>As a result, you engage and then one of the following happens:<p>- You make a point so salient they banhammer you because you cannot control the narrative.<p>- Or they mock you, and rally their "side" into feeling superior as a reaction/answer to their side's questioning of "huh, are we the baddies?". Of course not, it's the "loser woke left antifa attack helicopter pronoun'd TROUBLEMAKERS", who are an outgroup and just don't think about it too hard, k? Don't do the hard work of self examination! Just yell at this outsider!<p>As a result you aren't engaging with the centre right you hoped to; and if you even get close you will be removed as a threat, ASAP.<p>The game being played by one participant is "try anything that catches attention, causes fear and lures people to our mindset"; vs your (reasonable, but ultimately mistaken) view that rational debate would correct this and mutual understanding may emerge (and that's a positive; win win social outcome)<p>This isn't your fault, even longtime slightly centrist conservatives end up falling victim to this trap; when they realize their values don't align to the mechanics above, and are surprised when they are turned on by their former allies.<p>Unless you have a firm grounding in human psychology and few qualms about manipulation; it is unlikely that discourse or debate will get you anywhere if based on facts, not feelings.<p>I would firmly encourage you to keep the instinct to engage in discourse; but find social forums where it is a lot harder for a propaganda machine to control the narrative. Will still be tough, but face to face interactions in common spaces can build community.<p>The "other side" of the political spectrum or almost any group is absolutely just as liable to end up in this situation. It is not some "right wing" specific problem, it is a <i>small but powerful group hijacking others to further their own goals</i>, and <i>people protecting their interests by funding the small group</i>.
Not really. There's few places on Reddit where you will be banned for expressing liberal opinions.<p>/r/conservative, a place for conservatives to discuss "from a distinctly conservative point of view", is one of them. It's kind of also in the name.<p>Do they ban conservatives for criticizing Trump? I don't know, perhaps. I'm going to assume many such comments on there will in fact be made by liberals.<p>Meanwhile, I was immediately permabanned from my country subreddit when I expressed a pro-Israel opinion in the comment section of a relevant post. In the Modmail I sent, the "moderator" basically insulted me.
/r/conservative has absolutely nothing to do with conservatives, but everything to do with the cult-of-trump. It's a great place to read up on how completely crazy the world has become, if you had posted any thread there on the onion a decade ago absolutely nobody would have believed it to be possible.
It gets that way when being pro trump gets you banned from r/politics, so all of those who are pro trump take over some other subreddit. It used to be they had their own, but after thedonald was banned they migrated to r/conservative.<p>The more you separate people the more unhinged they become. If you went back and talked about how reddit tried to hide that Biden was demented or that Harris was unpopular so would be a catastrophic election loss that would also have been onion worthy but today its reality.
That subreddit was taken over just like the conservative party in the USA was taken over. If you allow that to happen (both the party <i>and</i> the subreddit) then that's your problem. In other countries Trump would have had to found his own party, he'd still have captured a chunk of the vote but at least the Republicans that once were would not have squandered their identity. Now the house is on fire and it doens't look like there are any mechanisms to stop it from getting much worse.<p>You don't let people like Trump near the levers of power if you want to keep your country in one piece. We have a similar problem here in NL and the <i>only</i> thing that saved us so far is that even the most rabid right winger will have to form a coalition. That still was a dime on its side and we'll see what happens at the next elections but single-issue-parties are less of a problem here, as are strongmen (though, like everywhere else, there is a fraction of the population that just wants to follow some glorious leader).
The election results were 77,302,580 votes against 75,017,613 votes, or 49.8% versus 48.3%.<p>I would not call that unpopular.
/r/conservative is probably the most heavily censored echo chamber on Reddit, yet somehow you only take issue with other subreddits flagging participation.
Could you be as kind as to point out where I'm _only_ taking issue with the moderation of other subreddits?<p>As you can see in my comment I'm merely listing a few examples.
You're listing several examples, including /r/conservative, yet even though this subreddit is widely known (on Reddit) to be a censored echo-chamber, you do not mention this aspect. I find it hard to believe, that this would be a coincidence.
I think the argument here is guilt by association.<p>It's a bit like banning entry into the US because you've visited Russia.<p>It doesn't <i>really</i> matter how Russia runs their own country, you might have even gone there to argue against totalitarian dictatorships.<p>But a US border guard looking at your passport and rejecting your entry based on that alone feels like overreach.<p>How subs choose to moderate their content is roughly speaking sort of fine, as long as there's no organised harassment, sharing of illegal materials (child porn, revenge porn, war materials etc) and threats of violence or death.
>But a US border guard looking at your passport and rejecting your entry based on that alone feels like overreach.<p>This is at least such a common practice, that certain countries issue their entry visas in such a way, that they can be removed from the passport. I'd expect issues entering the US, if I had an Iranian stamp in my passport.
Does r/conservative ban you for posting in some other sub?
/r/conservative doesn't even allow comments of users without a user flair.<p>They state: "This is designed so that a couple posts per day are almost guaranteed to have conversation which is not hijacked by leftists and other non-conservatives.Who Gets Flair?<p>Only mods can assign User Flair, and User Flair is only for conservatives. Once you have a solid history of comments in /r/Conservative, and have been commenting in the subreddit for at least two weeks,[..]<p>Please understand that this is for conservatives. We do our best to vet you based on your post history on reddit. You will need some post history to qualify - ideally within the subreddit itself. If you do not have a conservative leaning post history you will likely be asked to re-apply when you do."<p>"Strangely" there isn't a single post on their frontpage at the moment, which doesn't require a flair to comment.
I can’t help but notice that Twitter and TikTok didn’t get called for that session. In November 2023, Twitter went from a zero tolerance policy for violent speech to “we may remove or reduce the visibility of violent speech.” Seems really relevant for the topic of the hearings! And yet.<p>I’m thus unwilling to take Rep. Comey’s decision to call Reddit to testify as evidence of anything. Feels more like political theater to me. This doesn’t either condemn or absolve Reddit, it’s just not strong evidence.
While Twitter has many problems it does seem to do a reasonable job of not promoting hate and violence towards a large audience. There's many messages critical of immigrants on my timeline but none calling for violence against them (or any other group that Twitter users dislike).<p>Meanwhile posts about violence against Trump, Musk or celebrating the dead of Kirk did get massive upvotes and visibility on some of the biggest and most popular subs on Reddit.
You're either desensitized or simply don't follow accounts that attract any political issues at all if you say that. Twitter is absolutely, depressingly overridden with genocide apologia and putrid racism.
In general I'm not very interested or concerned with American politics since this is outside of my scope of influence. I cannot say how much that influences my experience but I can confidently say that I have not seen any genocide apologia and putrid racism.<p>The closest that I've seen is conversations about violence rates and nationality (in the context of immigration) but these topics have also been discussed in the liberal left Dutch newspaper (Volkskrant) and conservative center newspaper (Neu Zuricher Zeitung) that I read.<p>My main point would be that Twitter does a better job at not amplifying calls for violence than Reddit. I, obviously, do not have access to internal Twitter data so my assessment is purely anecdotal but nonetheless seems relevant to the conversation.
> You're either desensitized or simply don't follow accounts that attract any political issues at all if you say that.<p>There are some other options too. For instance, there are people who honestly believe that Twitter is now a much better place and feel right at home because they are the ones pushing the genocide apologia and putrid racism themselves.
While I understand your frustration projecting American political biased on this does seem a bit extreme.<p>I'm not an American, nor do I care very much about US politics (outside my sphere of influence). It's hard to discuss exactly what genocide apologia and putrid racism are without a closer definition but I do not see anything on Twitter that's not discussed in the left liberal Dutch newspaper that I read (Volkskrant) or the German conservative center newspaper that I read (NZZ).
Totally not true from what I have seen on twitter or other platforms. And also completely at odds with how political leaders responded to events.<p>Conservatives love to frame themselves as victims ... while most hate, abuse and violence goes consistently from their camp.<p>I get it, needs new excuse to send an army to blue cities.
> While Twitter has many problems it does seem to do a reasonable job of not promoting hate and violence towards a large audience.<p>Whilst I appreciate the Scottish response of "Yer takin the pish noo pal" isn't the most erudite response to what you have written, it is certainly the most appropriate.
“The politically motivated assassination of Charlie Kirk claimed the life of a husband, father, and American patriot. In the wake of this tragedy, and amid other acts of politically motivated violence, Congress has a duty to oversee the online platforms that radicals have used to advance political violence. To prevent future radicalization and violence, the CEOs of Discord, Steam, Twitch, and Reddit must appear before the Oversight Committee and explain what actions they will take to ensure their platforms are not exploited for nefarious purposes,” said Chairman Comer.<p>---------------<p>Reddit absolutely does have a moderator problem, as one would expect for a platform that relies on anonymous volunteers, but this might merely be the pretext for a witch hunt. e.g. The Trump administration may actually attempt to track down users who posted anti-Kirk or anti-Trump memes. It might be something even more though. There may be an attempt to coerce these platforms to start moderating in a way that's more favourable to Trump. Reddit is a hotbed of anti-Trump memes after all.<p>Protest is the bane of authoritarian regimes. That's why the Trump administration moved to lock down colleges so rapidly early this year. However, online social media also has significant capacity for influencing public opinion. This is why so many authoritarian regimes simply cut off internet access for their people. Others (e.g. China) have attempted to censor, manipulate, and control the internet rather than cutting it off.<p>Americans, and the world, should be paying close attention to these hearings. They should also pay attention to any sudden changes in behaviour of these companies. Merely being summoned to a hearing might be enough of a threat to make them give Trump all he asks for.
It's not a moderation problem. It's a design decision fundamental to their platform architecture.
That may be a politically motivated congressional hearing. :-)
There's an article on the reddit blog, still out on archive.org, showing that a huge percentage of the website's traffic comes from... Eglin AFB? in the United States. That base also happens to be home of at least three distinct units that engage in "cyber" stuff.
If those are illegal, where are the prosecutions?<p>In my understanding, libel is a civil tort, and the victim can sue if they think they have been libeled. And wishing someone dead isn't illegal in the US, though it may be elsewhere.
> Personally I believe I've seen more people in the past few years wish a politically motivated death on somebody else via Reddit, than I have anywhere else in my life.<p>What you'll also see is a lot of accounts banned just for saying that they can't wait for say Vladimir Putin to die. I'm sure there are ways in which you could construe that to be 'politically motivated death' but that's just a weak excuse to ban an account ignoring the deeper subtext. Wanting mass murderers to shuffle off their mortal coil is a net positive for the world.
The reason why Reddit is being "investigated" in this way is clearly and without any doubt political and has nothing to do with Reddit's moderation. There are strong anti-free-speech forces in the USA currently, and Reddit is #1 on their target list.<p>Anyone who can't see that is blind on the right eye, which is unfortunately a common phenomenon in certain circles nowadays.
What country are you from? To "<i>wish</i> a politically motivated death" on someone is illegal there?<p>Reddit set itself up as a speakeasy, people speak their minds openly because it appears in some areas to be free of thought policing.<p>Do you think it is wrong to <i>wish</i> a dictator dead? Over the past decades USA has not only wished it, but made it happen, at the cost of many lives.
> What country are you from? To "wish a politically motivated death" on someone is illegal there?<p>It is illegal in most countries, no? Even in USA you aren't allowed to instigate murder.
I didn't think it should be illegal to say "I wish X were dead" unless you have the means to make it happen like a rabid audience with a track record of killing people you wish were dead. Even then, I think there needs to be coordination or a wink nod of some kind that needs to be proven to muzzle free speech.<p>Freedom of speech we don't like is the true litmus test of free speech. It is trivial to say I support free speech when someone says nice things about me.
> Freedom of speech we don't like is the true litmus test of free speech. It is trivial to say I support free speech when someone says nice things about me.<p>People are free to say mean things, they just aren't allowed to encourage violence. There is a difference between saying "I hate how Trump runs the country, he is an idiot" and "Can't someone kill Trump already".<p>I have seen a lot of the second kind on reddit. The first kind gets you arrested in Britain though, they don't have any meaningful free speech there.<p>But as you say what constitutes "encouraging violence" is not entirely clear, but most agrees that encouraging violence shouldn't be protected by free speech laws.
Reddit definitely has not set themselves up that way. Many people got banned just for saying they understand and empathize with Luigi's motivations.
Many people in this forum mistakenly think that violence isn’t a historically efficient way to solve political problems.
> And it's also been widely known for that long that Reddit is an influential venue in which to take over a corner -- for marketing or propaganda.<p>Capturing moderation of a subreddit has long been a strategy of marketing agencies.<p>Even when they can’t take over the actual mod positions, they’ll shower the mods with free product and make them feel like a VIP. I watched this happen from inside one company and I couldn’t believe how easily the marketing team turned a mod into our biggest advocate by sending free products to them from time to time.<p>> A bad actor mod of a popular subreddit can persist for years, visibly, without people managing either to oust the mod, or to take down the sub's influence.<p>In some of the subreddits I followed, the remaining subreddit users felt some relationship with the mods over time and felt they were on the same side. There are subreddits like /r/nootropics where many users don’t realize the mod team has been captured by a supplement company (Nootropics Depot) and that they have a history of deleting some posts critical of Nootropics Depot. You would think this would be grounds for a subreddit riot, yet whenever I check it feels like everyone there is fans of Nootropics Depot and therefore they get a pass. Note that the quality of the science discussed on /r/nootropics is generally terrible and of very poor quality in recent years, which is certainly a related factor. It’s also not hard to find comments in other subreddits from people who were banned from /r/nootropics.<p>I think this happens across a lot of subreddits. Moderators find reasons to ban the dissenters and shape the conversation until the hive mind consensus favors the mods, so any issues aren’t discussed. People who object are banned for different reasons and minor infractions, then get tired of Reddit and move on. What remains is captured by companies pushing their products to an audience who thinks the mods are doing them a favor.
I wonder if it would work a free speech site to allow mods to not include a story in a category/ subreddit, but then just place that story into, say, /r/changemyview/banned. You'd still need sitewide moderation, but you'd always be able to see the way your feed was being edited within that context.
this seems to be happening on city based subs as well where the split is political; creating echo chambers for each side. This feels dangerous as any potential middle ground gets eroded away.
Example?
r/sandiego. The mods are political and territorial. I posted once about the suggestion to create a discord for the sub and they removed my post and DMed me this:<p>> What experience do you have modding such channels and the reddit community?<p>> Managing city subs are among the most difficult on the site... these are not single topic communities and discord is not organized in the same way so that bad actors can creep in and cause problems without being back lined to the site.<p>> There's more to this than people saying they're interested. It's also what kind of interest and what is being said and done that has to be in support of the sub and not a backdoor community that leeches activity from the sub / site and forwards it to something off site.<p>> Lots of concerns here.<p>Basically, we will not have the same kind of absolute power there that we have here, and we can't risk it becoming a rival community. This was to the innocent suggestion/question as to why there wasn't one already.
/r/Seattle and /r/SeattleWA.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/54ie2t/seattle_wars_the_mod_strikes_back/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/54ie2t/seat...</a>
Think about a Reddit mod's incentives.<p>They:<p>- Don't get paid<p>- Spend time having to do some really thankless work<p>- Don't really have a regular work schedule<p>So what kind of person is going to do it?<p>Someone who is willing to do the work for no pay. For smaller subreddits and areas where the work of moderation isn't that heavy, you'll find passionate individuals.<p>Mods that moderate more time consuming content or the power mods modding many subs are chasing some other incentive. For some that means explicitly monetizing their time by pushing products and companies who pay them. For others it's the ideological satisfaction of pushing viewpoints they want pushed and suppressing viewpoints they want suppressed. For some it's prestige. For most it's probably some mix of all three.<p>What's absent is any incentive to surface organic, human content. That's merely a side effect of what mods do, not their main job.
Reddit employees are also moderators that also directly influence public opinion and encourage witch hunts.<p>It’s a systemic Reddit-the-company issue. Google “Ethan Klein vs Reddit” if you want to go down a recent rabbit hole
A few years ago a NPR (National Public Radio) reporter called Reddit "...a Frankenstein's monster even they can't control."
This is how the entire internet functions.<p>We need to separate the web into data, identity, and moderation.<p>Users need to become aware that they're not using platforms, they are subscribing to moderator control.<p>Somebody owns ycombinator.com, can decide what is discussed, and if they ban you - us peasants can't tweak who is a moderating / recover your identity and data.<p>I'm convinced we'll get there eventually, but it starts with recognizing that the only thing special about Reddit is its multi-level-unpaid-moderator-marketing.
> A bad actor mod of a popular subreddit can persist for years, visibly, without people managing either to oust the mod, or to take down the sub's influence.<p>This happens because the regular users have no power. I remember seeing some article that said a small number of mods control most of the popular subreddits. Many of them put their own bias into the system by banning users, banning sources, deleting content based on ideology, shadow banning, etc.<p>The other issue is as these mods linger for a while, they drive away or ban everyone who might disagree with them. So then the “community” ends up not actually disagreeing with the authoritarian mod. Reddit ends up not being resilient because it doesn’t want to be. Everyone else, is gone.
When the mods of major subs are also mods for over a hundred other subs, you have to doubt how much actual moderating they are actually doing in their holier-than-thou positions.
It's also why expressing certain views is effectively forbidden across most of the site. These moderators have far too much control over the conversation.
I think Reddit gives them some automation tools so it's not all hands on moderation.
Is there a source for this?
I don’t know if you can still see them without an account but even a few years ago this was well-known and you could verify it yourself by looking at the moderator list of almost any default subreddit; we’re talking about less than a few hundred users. There was no limit to how many subreddits you could moderate for most of Reddit’s history so in the early days a few users created as many subreddits as they could. A bunch of these moderators effectively shut down Reddit over changes to the API a couple of years ago. Steve Huffman compared the system to a landed gentry:<p>> “If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders,” he said.<p>> “And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
See this Reddit discussion:<p>“The same 5 people moderates 500 of the most popular subreddits”<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/gjl27j/the_same_5_people_moderates_500_of_the_most/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/gjl27j/the_...</a><p>It appears the original post they are discussing was removed. Seems like Reddit banned the original user who collected this data and deleted their posts.<p>Another discussion about this:<p>“Six powermods control 118 of the top 500 subreddits”<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/gkkfg5/updated_and_sanitized_six_powermods_control_118/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/gkkfg5/upda...</a>
Now I want to see a soap opera/reality show about the lives of Reddit Oligarchs!
Ghislaine Maxwell was maybe one of these powerful mods. But it is another contested conspiracy theory.<p>Evidence pasted:<p>The Name “Maxwellhill”<p>The username directly references “Maxwell,” which is not a common surname. Ghislaine Maxwell grew up at Headington Hill Hall, which was nicknamed “Maxwell Hill” after her father, Robert Maxwell, bought it. This isn’t a vague reference it’s oddly specific and personal. It’s like someone using “EpsteinIsland” as a username and claiming it’s just coincidence.<p>Posting Activity Stopped the Day of Her Arrest (actually 2 days before, when she began wrapping her phone in aluminum)<p>u/maxwellhill posted almost every day for 14 years and was one of Reddit’s most active users. Then, with no warning, all posting stopped after June 30, 2020. Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested on July 2, 2020. The timing is exact. This wasn’t a slow fade or gradual disinterest. It looks like someone was physically unable to post.<p>Gaps in Posting Line Up with Real-Life Events<p>There were other suspicious posting gaps during major events in Maxwell’s life. Notably, during her mother’s death in 2013 and during the 2011 Kleiner Perkins party, where she was confirmed to be present by former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao. That party shows Reddit leadership at the time was at least aware of her.<p>Moderator of Massive Subreddits<p>The account was a lead mod of r/worldnews, r/technology, r/politics, r/science, r/europe, r/upliftingnews, r/celebrities, and more. These are major subs that help shape Reddit’s front page and influence global discourse. Whoever had access to this account had immense control. Even after years of inactivity, Reddit auto added the account back as a moderator in 2024. That suggests the system still treats it like an active, important account.<p>The Content<p>Maxwellhill posted repeatedly about age of consent laws, often citing obscure countries. They also posted articles defending the legality of child exploitation material and criticized what they called “overzealous” child protection laws. These aren’t normal discussion points for the average Redditor. It reads like someone obsessed with legal gray areas surrounding child abuse.<p>Auto Deletion and Censorship<p>Mentions of “u/maxwellhill” have been automatically removed from comments in multiple subs. The Daily Dot reported on suspicious deletion behavior tied to the account. Posts about this user “vanished mysteriously,” raising real concerns about censorship. Who or what is protecting the account?<p>No Denial from the Account<p>If u/maxwellhill is just some random power user, where are they? Why haven’t they logged in to say anything? No posts, no comments, no denials. Nothing for five years. After 14 years of near daily activity, complete silence in the face of serious allegations is suspicious on its own.<p>The poster also uses many British expressions in their writing, and listed British foods as their favorite foods in one post.<p>Mods of r/WorldNews which is infamously compromised by paid agents demanded her posts be deleted from other subreddits.<p>The name matches Maxwell’s family estate. The account vanishes the day she’s arrested. It posted about topics deeply aligned with her known behavior. It held mod control over huge parts of Reddit. It still does. And yet it hasn’t said a word in five years. If this isn’t her, it’s someone with eerily similar patterns, priorities, and timing.
It's best if you reserve the term "conspiracy theory" for <i>grand</i> conspiracy theories, which require secret coordination on implausible scales.<p>The theory here is merely that an influential socialite (what Maxwell was regularly described as before her arrest) was a reddit addict powermod, that some people running reddit were aware of her identity - not necessarily knowing anything about Maxwell's wider social network or the activities she was convicted of.<p>Nothing here is especially implausible. It may or may not be correct, but it's not a grand conspiracy theory, just a theory of everyday shady non-public coordination. It's no more a conspiracy theory than it it's a conspiracy theory that some people in your town sell drugs (yes, they do, and technically they have to engage in "criminal conspiracy" to do so, but we don't call people conspiracy theorists for believing it happens).
Funny that you should mention a Reddit-originated conspiracy theory on an article about how Reddit is deteriorating as a source of information. I found this blog post: <a href="https://coagulopath.com/ghislaine-maxwell-does-not-have-a-secret-reddit-account/" rel="nofollow">https://coagulopath.com/ghislaine-maxwell-does-not-have-a-se...</a> which appears to conclusively refute the main evidence above, but I haven't independently verified. If you have stronger evidence than what appears to be copy-pasted AI output, I will re-evaluate.
Your link actually don't touch upon what I found most compelling: That /u/maxwellhill stopped positing two days before her arrest and haven't posted again since then.
> If this was true, it would be the strongest piece of evidence so far.<p>> But it’s not.<p>> I’m sorry to tell you this, but /u/maxwellhill did post after the 2nd of July. Just not in public. He continued to perform moderator duties, interact with staff members, and answer private messages. Here’s a conversation between /u/hasharin and /u/maxwellhill that happened on the 9th.<p>> Additionally, here’s evidence that /u/maxwellhill made a post inside a private subreddit, nine days after the “Tr45son” one.<p>> This seems pretty bad for the theory. With Ghislaine Maxwell in jail awaiting charges, /u/maxwellhill is casually swapping PMs with reddit moderators and spitballing around policy ideas. How could they be the same person?<p>That's from the link.<p>I stopped posting to Reddit in December 2015 and haven't been back since. David Bowie died a few days later 10 January 2016. <i>Am I David Bowie?</i>
I've gotta wonder how often this happens in the general case: a prolific user and mod of large subreddits stops posting abruptly without notice. How many users are as active as maxwellhill was with similar seniority? Maybe a few thousand? In a given year, how many of them abandon Reddit suddenly? It seems like some scraping and basic analytics could yield an answer, and then we'd know the posterior.<p>Don't know if maxwellhill was ghislaine, but whoever he was, I think some big life event caused him to leave, and that it wasn't voluntary.
Except it does
Thanks. It wasn’t AI btw. I found this interesting comment analyzing the article you shared <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29898523">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29898523</a> (it’s also curious that your article speculates about Maxwell’s innocence in taking part in abusing children herself but that’s not directly relevant)
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Dang. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UX5ahM24o8A" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UX5ahM24o8A</a>
New account just to say I know this feeling very well. Tech-parallel sub has a moderator that does literally nothing other than shittalk a specific group once every 2 weeks. People have mentioned lack of moderation effort.<p>I can't say who, because the motherfucker is on this website and will instantly deny it all.
> have been an occasional thing for about a decade.<p>I'd estimate way higher. <i>Most</i> moderators of meaningful subreddits are corrupt. <i>Occasionally</i> one makes it visible.
Reddit has a serious abusive moderator issue. I suspect they will all be demoted to "VIP community member" soon enough and have that entire layer handled by AI. There's just too much ego involved for a human to do a job like that.
Not cool you calling users “peasants”, they can’t do anything. Have you posted on Reddit, like, with actual personal opinion? You will quickly find out that it’s a moderator’s walled garden of opinions and your posts removed without explanation and notification. and complaining does not do anything.
I think you have it inversed. As I read it, the parent calling the users 'peasants' was to highlight precisely what you're saying. The users have no power, yes? As peasants didn't?
That literally sounds like being a medieval peasant. Or a US tv show host.
Used to moderator a decent sized sub for a decent stint. Learned a fair bit from it. Eventually decided to step back because it’s a raw deal - all interactions are antagonistic, the torrent of confrontations is essentially endless, it’s not seen or appreciated by users and obviously not paid.<p>So not much of a personal payoff, right? UNLESS you’re the kind of person that thrives on drama, conflict and power trips.<p>Meaning this actively filters for people that are radioactively toxic
That's common. A marketing company took over r/mattress in order to get rid of any unfavorable reviews and pump up any bed in box mattress company as long as these companies pay to that market company. For more, <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/MattressMod/comments/1c28g7b/recent_events_on_rmattress/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/MattressMod/comments/1c28g7b/recent...</a>
A happy(ish) ending: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Mattress/comments/1l81nn6/and_were_back/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Mattress/comments/1l81nn6/and_were_...</a>
I'm not interested in doing this at all, but how does a person take over a subreddit? That sounds like a very difficult thing to do.
"Hi I noticed you weren't that online as recently as you were are you ok?"<p>Wow that must be a lot of work<p>Wow I feel for you, friend<p>Yea id be happy to help out from time to time.<p>---
But needs to happen with other things.<p>Quite often seen in GitHub where an attacker can contribute to build trust. With Reddit, mini modding, regular submissions, good comments etc<p>Defense includes not being shamed or pressured when life seems more important.
This was <i>exactly</i> the playbook that led to the xz backdoor.<p>Just the quotes:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39909905">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39909905</a><p>Very long page but a lot more in depth. Search for “Jigar Kumar pressured Lasse Collin”<p><a href="https://securelist.com/xz-backdoor-story-part-2-social-engineering/112476/" rel="nofollow">https://securelist.com/xz-backdoor-story-part-2-social-engin...</a><p>And an overview:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor</a>
The simplest thing is probably just to ask for it. I'm sure if you went now and asked to be moderator for a hundred different mid-sized subs, you'd get yes from a few. If you "seem trustworthy", probably more than a few.
But can any mod remove other mods? How does that work in reddit?
Mods aren't set in stone, they tend to be active for a few years and then give up. Once that happens and you notice the current mods not posting anything for a period of time, you can simply file a request to side-wide admins to take over that sub, as giving it to anyone else is better than leaving it completely unmoderated.
Probably in the same way as Jia Tan took over the xz.
This is has to stop right now as it has gone on long enough. Reddit, Google, ProductHunt, Youtube and friends are continuously using their dirty, unethical even illegal techniques driven by profit.
I have experienced all myself and I can confirm that the writer is 100% correct.
He forgot to mention though that all this is driven by the same agenda, the same people that want to control the narrative.
I Wrote about it too : <a href="https://medium.com/@klaudibregu/hugstonone-empowering-users-one-workflow-at-a-time-58d614a654bf" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@klaudibregu/hugstonone-empowering-users-...</a>
Now OpenAI joined the agenda and they are playing dirty very hard also. Yesterday Huggingface Deleted the account of a talented User @BasedBase which was creative in open weights (threatening the big techs).
The same boot army discredit and reported his work in Huggingface and Reddit till all his accounts were off.
They have done the same to me personally since ever started with Hugston.com and HugstonOne.
Just Try to google my Company name "Sverken" (that was associated with Hugston.com) It comes out Porn and prostitution services. Even though this is illegal and screw our reputation Google thinks that this is legit and wont take down the information. Instead they decided to put it in the first page ranking first.
I have made some calculations and HugstonOne it is indeed very threatening to big techs.
If Our Local AI App takes away only 0.0001% of users from proprietary model websites OpenAI, that is a huge amount of money. And that is just one of them.
They have tried everything possible to shut us up, to suppress and undermine our work, to discredit us in abusive ways, but they wont succeed.
Thank you for speaking up, hope many other do as well. I really wish you get on your feet soon and the best of luck.
Competition is for losers!
If I google ‘sverken hugston’ I don’t get any porn or prostitution results. Nor if I google just ‘sverken’.
Made this one for you: <a href="https://vimeo.com/1125804680" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/1125804680</a><p>My clients (which are most the Gov, Uni, Med, are not happy for it but they got over it.
My proposals for funds/contracts suddenly get denied unless I explain what is really happening. This is not only damage to reputation but also to business.
I repeat this has to stop.
Now the competent Authorities are investigating properly but as always they get off with a fine (which is in Billion btw).The choice for them is Either stop this or pay billions, The world belongs to everyone.
I can replicate by googling "sverken.se"<p>But also: what google shows here is what's being indexed on your website. It shows "porn and prostitution" because at one point that's what your website served. Was sverken.se ever in the hand of shady domain parking services that advertised porn services?<p>Strangely enough, the Internet Archive only saved the safe-for-work version (records start in Jan 2025, so the misdeed must have occurred before this date) - from a cursory look at the domain registration history, it seems it was expired and unregistered (or parked by someone else) between July and September 2025.<p>Still not Google's fault or the action of malicious botnets. My suggestion is to try and clear your indexing history for this website through the Google Search Console (<a href="https://search.google.com/search-console/" rel="nofollow">https://search.google.com/search-console/</a>)
You have to get Google is very bubbled and that is the main issue here. Who gets to make the rules on what results you see first.<p>It is not just this, but things like order of search results (even just what shows up on auto-completion) has toppled election and changed the minds of undecided voters.
> Yesterday Huggingface Deleted the account of a talented User @BasedBase which was creative in open weights (threatening the big techs).<p>I looked it up it found a pretty clear reason they'd delete it themselves?<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1o0st2o/basedbaseqwen3coder30ba3binstruct480bdistillv2_is/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1o0st2o/basedba...</a>
That´s is incorrect, I demonstrated how all that is not true. The models were 100% distill and very powerful. Hard facts<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/1125658282" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/1125658282</a><p><a href="https://vimeo.com/1125657672" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/1125657672</a><p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1o1m9nz/the_most_hilarious_delete_i_have_ever_seen/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1o1m9nz/the_mos...</a>
You're just wrong.<p>Vibes are not a meaningful comparison.<p>You can't compare different quantizations(Q4_K_M & Q4_K_XL) and also use a temp of 0.7 and use that for any meaningful comparison.<p>All difference you notice could be either due to temp randomness or quantization differences even if the original weights are exactly the same.<p>Also these were likely sourced differently so the quantizers could've used different quantization importance matrizes or process.<p>The weights are the same, the weights are all that matters.
Nonsense, there is a big difference of tokens generated in the output. I know my stuff, and I can recognize Deepseek reasoning and Qwen thinking. Also I explained how agentic is working in the models making it very different. The quantization is irrelevant to tokens generated and agentic behavior in a model. Say what you want, you or anyone else can´t change the facts.
Ofc everything related to it will be deleted. Now they deleted my post as well, this is just getting out of hand.
The facts are not very hard...
What do you mean the facts are not very hard. If you understand just a bit of LLM you will clearly identify a Distill LLM. All the point is to delete the user because he had created some incredible models beating The best proprietary models out there. The pretext was that he was a fraud and his models were not a distill but a copy.
Therefor I show clearly that he was framed and his work deserves credit. I still have the models and scripts for all the procedure. I am not interested to argue further, but it is clearly visible to me. The post in HN also is well voted and most importantly commented, meaning that users have a lot to say about it.
> Sorry, this post has been removed by the moderators of r/LocalLLaMA.
FWIW, there are similar top-of-google and top-of-reddit results for all bootcamps. Try googling 'lambda school', 'hyperiondev', 'coding temple', 'le wagon' along with 'reddit', 'review' 'legit' or anything similar (or often that's not even needed.<p>In the end, these bootcamps charge people thousands of dollars to sell them the dream of getting a high paying job after 3 months of part time work, and that's just not realistic.<p>In addition, in order to survive and sell to consumers, most bootcamps are 90% sales and marketing, and 10% education. They use their own students to teach the next generation, and increase their job placement rates (if you hire your own grad you can claim that that grad got a job!).<p>I used to work in the industry, and in theory I think it's great to have alternatives to universities which can be elitest and out-of-date with new tech, but I left because it felt kinda like the used-car market of CS, and I don't think it's a great model overall.
I've seen a lot of shady moderation on reddit and it's one reason I quit using it. There is the obvious brigading, mods on powertrips and but also massive probably paid astro turfing campaigns. Reddit has gone downhill substantially in the last five years. HN is not immune either, but at least we dont' have a 'mods on powertrips' problem, in fact the opposite.
Moderators are the reason why I stopped using Reddit years ago.
Every idiot can become a moderator, and there seem to be no rules for them.
Suppressing free speech and banning everyone that doesn't share their opinion seems to be ok for them.
Reddit has a huge moderation issue. Mods run the place like their fiefdoms with no regard to being fair. There should be a way of flagging reddit users and especially mods if they are seen to have a clear conflict of interest (as is the case with Michael Novati) and Reddit should not allow them to run groups where they are openly harassing their competitors.
Pretty shocking that someone whose business is being actively attacked on a subreddit, one that is not only relevant to them but is one of the biggest drivers of student interest and a major recruiting tool, has no recourse in this situation. A lot of people mentioning the legal angle don’t realize what a nightmare that kind of litigation would be. It’s frankly outrageous that Reddit doesn’t take the time to investigate such a flagrant conflict of interest and just chooses not to respond at all. I understand not wanting to police every subreddit but now you’re talking about potentially millions in losses for a business. All because of one unhinged asshole who’s trying to promote his own competing business. If this doesn’t turn into a lawsuit hopefully it makes enough noise for Reddit to pay attention and help resolve the issue.
Im not shocked at all. Not only do I think they were knowingly letting this kind of thing happen for years, I think they were actively participating in such sketchy practices for profit. Which easily explains how reddit could "lose" money for years and years but continuously be given more and more funding and increasingly hosting more and more content on their own servers. If they were actually losing money, they wouldn't have started hosting images and then later videos on their own servers while pushing people away from 3rd party hosts.
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Why on earth should your brand new account be considered trustworthy when it comes to commenting on either party?
It’s weird to refer to yourself by your own surname, dude.
I suspect this is true for almost every somewhat relevant subreddit. Everything has been captured, someone has taken control of the politburo and is defining the message. I've been using the site since 2008 and within the last couple of years it feels like you cannot post anything unless you know someone.
Reddit should not be considered an authoritative source. Period. At this point it's the most astroturfed place on the internet. Accounts are bought and sold like cheap commodities. It's inherently unreliable.<p>That said, in this instance Codesmith actually has an unusually strong defamation case. That Reddit mod is not anonymous, and has made solid claims (about nepotism with fabricated details, accusations of resume fraud conspiracy, etc.) that have resulted in quantifiable damage ($9.4M in revenue loss attributed to Reddit attacks,) with what looks like substantial evidence of malice.<p>Reddit, though protected to some extent by Section 230, can also credibly be sued if (1) they are formally alerted to the mod's behavior, i.e. via a legal letter, and (2) they do nothing despite the fact that the mod's actions appear to be in violation of their Code of Conduct for Moderators. For then matter (2) might become something for a judge or jury to decide.<p>I'm actually confused as to why Codesmith hasn't sued yet. (?!?) Even if they lose, they win. Being a plaintiff in a civil case can turn the tables and make them feel powerful rather than helpless, and it's often the case that "the process is the punishment" for defendants.
> Reddit should not be considered an authoritative source. Period.<p>I cringe inside every time I search for something, and the first autocomplete is "mysearchterm reddit"
The problem is that the alternative is usually only sites created only to chase affiliate revenue. At least on Reddit, there’s a _chance_ I’m reading something from someone genuinely sharing their opinion.
name one dataset used for AI that doesn't include Reddit
These days, all the results that AREN'T from reddit are AI slop.
And according to TFA, the AI slop results are also from Reddit!
Still preferable to the disinformation in that cesspit.
> At this point it's the most astroturfed place on the internet.<p>YouTube is far worse and it isn’t even close.
I've seen users with NSFW profiles leaving (relatively more) inane comments and their profile is private, so their posts and comments are not shown. I dread the day we can no longer evaluate users behind the comments.
Reddit moderation is also completely broken. Mods can ban anyone for any reason and do ban people for very stupid reasons with absolutely no recourse. It is so bad I have completely stopped posting on Reddit.
Reddit itself bans and shadowbans for no good reason on a very regular basis. And their appeal system generally does not work.<p>And Reddit bans are used by powermods to get rid of any rivals. They will pay to bot the report system so your account is instantly perma-banned by Reddit. And Reddit has the most aggressive system of all the social networks for detecting duplicate accounts, so you'll have a hard time ever using the site again.
Most online communities work that way. It’s highly unusual to have some sort of judicial process.
> It’s highly unusual to have some sort of judicial process.<p>Every forum I ever used prior to Reddit had a ban appeal process, as did most game servers. For a few games reading the ban appeals could be more fun than playing the actual game. This was usually moderators making executive decisions based on a user-submitted form, but it was better than nothing.
Most older forums had an element of self-selection... people don't hang out where they're not wanted. But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics) so you're either there or nowhere. This forces to some extent people who would gravitate away from each other, and personalities go overboard. There's <i>more need of a judicial process</i> there, than there would be elsewhere. And that was before everything became politically polarized. Now that you could be perfectly happy talking to someone about X, you still end up hating their guts because they love/hate Trump/Obama and it slips out (over a long enough timespan).<p>People do not scale.
> But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics) so you're either there or nowhere.<p>Reddit wasn't even that good as a community space in the first place. It was a content aggregator with user-moderated comment sections, and those make for pretty awful communities because on anything remotely controversial you get factions dog piling each other trying to hide each other's posts.<p>That said, communities are all on discord now, and quite honestly I think it's for the better. It gives moderators a lot more discretion, but balances the scales by making it very easy to create new servers where one can invite like-minded people and grow organically.
<i>But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics) </i><p>What are some examples? In my experience there are numerous other communities of various types for any given interest. Reddit is just kind of a convenient surface level a lot of the time.
Is it any different here? Is this not the standard setup for all forums and considered perfectly right and normal?
Dang and the other moderators here are incredibly scrupulous. If you browse with show dead on, and find an account that is posting regularly but banned, and go back through their history, you'll almost always find multiple warnings and a public statement about their banning.<p>HN has problems but moderation being arbitrary isn't really one of them.
It's the anonymity and odd changes in who is moderating that makes it feel different.
Standard setup to me would be consistently opinionated person, or team with some central directive (and hopefully oversight).
I was banned from /r/comics for saying a comic wasn't funny. Hacker news doesn't ban anyone for such stupid reasons.
I was banned from /r/sourdough for asking a question about rye flour, because someone dug into my post history and saw that I had posted a few times on the Catholicism subreddit. Someone's first instinct when reading a completely benign, neutral question was to see if I was on this or that "team".
There used to be bots that would do this automatically, but they seem to have fallen out of favor due to the high rate of false-positives (user from Subreddit A posts in Subreddit B and gets automatically banned by the automoderator on Subreddit A).<p>They implemented a change recently where users can make their profiles private which seemed like a cool idea to prevent this sort of thing, but in practice it is used almost exclusively by bad actors. Some users suggested the change was made to facilitate government intelligence agencies running influence campaigns on the platform.
Oh the automatic banning from subs for posting in another sub is particularly annoying. And often they won't even say what sub? This is amazingly lazy because it doesn't take into account if you posted in /r/conservative that Trump is a moron and got banned for it, you will still get banned form dozens of other subs.
Let me guess: it was a Pizza Cake Comics post? (Context, she's made posts about how women are always paranoid about men and men minimize/make fun of that and she says she's not anti men as she has a son herself. All this (edit: plus lots of commenters and mod drama) in the span of a single comic btw.)<p>Edit: this comment on such a politically touchy topic lasted almost 40 minutes before getting 2 downvotes, honestly I'm impressed it lasted almost an hour.<p>Of course as always, the downvote is a signal of communication, and without a reply, all communication I receive is that this is a sensitive topic. If there's anything factually wrong I'll be happy to change it. (And I would consider myself having spent ~~too much~~ enough time on reddit to know which comics are popular and/or get folks banned easily.)
that's a feature not a bug.
>Mods can ban anyone for any reason<p>Yes, they can and that's how it's set up. Each community makes their own rules and can choose who participates.<p>It's not Reddit. It's the sub that made the decision and I'm not sure how it would be possible for Reddit the company to deal with sub level rule complaints and appeals.
I think it would be better if Reddit took more ownership. In other words, instead of hosting a platform where anyone can claim a subreddit as their little domain, and then it’s theirs forever, Reddit could say that the subreddits belong to the people that use them. For example, perhaps they could institute some sort of system where members of a subreddit could vote out moderators who abuse their power.
> For example, perhaps they could institute some sort of system where members of a subreddit could vote out moderators who abuse their power.<p>Leaving aside everything else wrong with that, that would be trivial to abuse, <i>especially</i> with the help of sockpuppetry but easily enough even without that.
There are some big wins that they've never taken care of, despite spez talking big about fixing them, e.g.: stop allowing mods to pre-emptively ban you. I don't know anyone who uses Reddit that isn't banned from r/pics simply because they posted somewhere else on Reddit. The list of subs they ban for is huge.
Reddit does have global rules about deceptive content manipulation (e.g. voting rings, bot farms etc.)<p>If this guy had disclosed his conflict of interest, he would just have been an obsessed crank and even as a moderator, that's his right. But when he didn't, I'd say it was large-scale manipulation, and it's clearly in Reddit's interest to not allow this sort of thing (especially now that they're selling all their data to AI companies).
> <i>If this guy had disclosed his conflict of interest, he would just have been an obsessed crank and even as a moderator, that's his right.</i><p>I'm not sure, as in this case it seems to rise to Defamation + Trade Libel/Commercial Disparagement. So it may go beyond being simply unethical.
I think the reason it feels offensive is that subreddits of common names feel like they should be more democratically managed or held to a high standard. Instead it’s a bunch of fiefdoms and if you create an alternate subreddit with a poor name it just won’t get readers. Codebootcamp2 or whatever is doomed from the start because of the importance of names.
Sure, but there are really NO RULES. And frankly they can do whatever they want as long as they use only a UUID for the forum name.<p>If one is squatting on a valuable forum name, then the moderators should be themselves subject to a standard enforced by Reddit.
I have some bad news for you about news.ycombinator.com or any other web forum. Unless you actually own the web site you can be prevented from posting on a whim.<p>Of course, most reputable forums have policies and rules but at the end of the day these do not mean much. Who are you going to complain to if you get unjustly banned - the Internet police?<p>You can always start your own blog/forum/subreddit and post whatever you like.
> I'm actually confused as to why Codesmith hasn't sued yet.<p>Maybe because they don’t generate enough income to be able to afford a lawsuit that drags on for years? Or maybe because it is really hard to win defamation lawsuits? Just my speculation.
There's really no way it costs them more than $3M, and many civil cases cost way less. They've already lost more than what I'd consider a reasonable upper bound. Besides, they're not a very small business, so they ought to have set aside money for legal events, and they might even have insurance to cover it.<p>(I realize that it's absurd and inherently unjust that the legal process is so expensive.)<p>IMO, even if it just gets the offending poster deleted, it would be money well-spent. The marketing/PR hit is just brutal. I blame Google for this.
With each passing day, it feels like we see more evidence for the "America is run by lawyers" assertion.
It' not but it often is the most useful and sometimes only source of information. If i need to lok up some very specific thing what are my options? An SEO optimized blog post, often about a similar but adjacent topic, or a forum of guys. At least with a forum there should in theory be more diversity of opinion.
Most topics still have old-fashioned forums, they're just even harder to find these days.<p>And there are still lots of blogs. Not all of them are SEO blogspam. And there's always libgen...<p>Reddit is pretty much the last place I'd go for reliable information, especially if we're talking about anything that's a commercial product.
The authenticity of old fashioned forums is often outweighed by their poor UX and in general terrible ergonomics. It's no wonder that so few people want to use them anymore. Reddit's "nested, collapsible comments sorted by upvotes" format is simply superior.<p>20 years after Reddit started, the best that the forums can offer is perhaps discourse.org, which is barely any better than traditional forums – sleeker UI for sure, but it's still fundamentally the same unworkable linear format. It's like sticking to magnetic tapes in the age of SSDs.<p>Even Facebook, one of the dumbest discussion platforms, has nested comments. Terribly implemented of course, but how does the platform designed for the lowest-common-denominator kind of user have more advanced discussion features than forums made for discussion connoisseurs? It is utterly baffling.
This is like the Linux discussion. (No its not the year of Linux no matter how much Windows 11 pisses you off)<p>"Old fashioned forums" absolutely suck for discoverability. You have to waste time digging through posts, most of which are unrelated or just filler. No upvote/downvote and usually a mediocre threading mechanism. While we are on this topic, Discord is the same. IRC like applications are not an easy way to get to the point for the same reasons.
> Reddit should not be considered an authoritative source. Period. At this point it's the most astroturfed place on the internet. Accounts are bought and sold like cheap commodities. It's inherently unreliable.<p>I don't disagree with any of this, but I'll note that in addition, it's also <i>the</i> most reliable place to get a general crowd-sourced opinion on the internet. There are specialist forums for specialist subjects, sure, but nowhere else delivers like Reddit does on a diverse set of topics.
> it's also the most reliable place to get a general crowd-sourced opinion on the internet. There are specialist forums for specialist subjects, sure, but nowhere else delivers like Reddit does on a diverse set of topics.<p>That's some impressive blindness. That's exactly why the OP is stating it's unreliable. It _was_ reliable. Now it's a minefield, because trust->money.<p>Just like Amazon 5 star reviews. They used to be good probably until about 2012-2015 (if you stretch it). Then it became weaponized because the trust was so high. Anything with strong 5 star reviews sold.<p>Of course, you can "figure out" if what you're reading is trustworthy, but to blanket state "the most reliable place" - days gone to yesteryear.
I think you're both correct and I think your analogy about Reddit being a minefield is perfected if we imagine that it's a minefield in a beautiful place.<p>Great experience with one step and blown to bits with one small step in a different direction.
Agreed. Every now and then I search the name of my employer on Reddit, which pulls up a bunch of plausible looking comments that recommend a variety of tools. Then if you look at the comment closely, it doesn't make any sense. And if you look at the account, they only makes comments that mention an assortment of companies + one specific one that they're really shilling.<p>There's a variety of these marketing spambots on Reddit, and I'm sure like the toupee effect, there are more subtle ones that I'm not noticing. I think this is existential in the long run for Reddit as a platform, but maybe the owners/employees are happy to milk all the value out and walk away from the husk.
So you’re going to be able to tell me what _is_ the most reliable place to get a general crowd-sourced opinion then?
Argh, there isn't one - is the message we're trying to get you to accept.<p>Just because reddit is reliable vs its peers != absolutely reliable.<p>Like Amazon, Yelp, Google any review system will become gamified for money. So just like those platforms every review you read you need to ask "who is the reviewer? do they review other things? how 'realistic' does it read? Are they pushing anything? Is the thing i'm reading affected by money? Were they given a product? were they given a discount/kickback for a review?" etc etc.<p>You cannot simply look at a review and say oh yeah that's a good review of someone who just wants to help others.<p>The whole reason this thread exists is exactly because of above. Someone weaponized the trust, your trust, of reddit to bring down a startup - and it worked.
I don't think there is one. Prediction Markets are probably the closest and even those have problems. But at least incentives in a prediction market aim for the truth rather than an entertaining experience.
No, incentives aim for whatever gives a return - not an objective neutral verdict-of-the-crowd.
It requires a regulator to be active.<p>Read about the whale trades and wash trades on Polymarket: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41999743">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41999743</a>
Reddit was knowingly ruined by google. Once google pushed reddit to the top of search results, they created massive incentives to game reddit and fill it with disguised advertising and/or slop.
> Reddit was knowingly ruined by google. Once google pushed reddit to the top of search results<p>Ehhhhh I agree and yet also disagree (it's fun though).<p>Yes they were ruined by being promoted by algo changes, but do I blame google directly? For me, no.<p>It's exactly as we stated before, it's because it was so trustworthy. Individual people's personal experience with X or Y many times with good details. That earned a lot of strong backlinks, blogs, etc. The domain became authoritative especially on esoteric searches. Then algo changes came (remember pandas?) and pushed them even further. I mean that's the point of search systems right? Get you to trustworthy information that you're looking for.<p>Then the money grabbers showed up.<p>So it's just like Harvey Dent said - either you die a trusted niche community or live long enough to see yourself become weaponized for money. He was so smart, that Harvey Dent.
Something can be most reliable without being reliable at all. I could call Reddit the place with most marbles in multiple piles of crap. Doesn't mean it still is not mostly pile of crap.
This isn't true. It leans extremely heavily left-wing so you won't get an accurate crowd-source opinion that disagrees with left-wing politics. There are pockets of conservative views but it's generally heavily left wing and you will get banned from many subreddits if you espouse any views to the opposite.<p>EDIT: I don't know why I'm getting so many downvotes, nothing I said is controversial at all.
There are plenty of non political conversations on Reddit, it's a really big site.
Why on earth would you crowd-source your political views?
If by leftwing you mean neoliberal, maybe. The bans ive gotten over the years for posting leftwing views and ideals tells me it isn't leftwing at all.
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Reddit is not left-wing. Could you define left-wing?
>EDIT: I don't know why I'm getting so many downvotes, nothing I said is controversial at all.<p>I personally found it off topic, the conversation was about using Reddit as a source of truth for product opinions/reviews and it’s unlikely that the absence of a right wing majority is relevant when purchasing a dishwasher.
The issue you're gesturing at is that "left" positions tend to be in touch with reality and coherent with each other. Whereas conservative positions tend to be out of touch with reality and often contradict each other.<p>This gives the <i>appearance</i> to people that hold positions that are out of touch with reality that the coherent narratives are an all-encompassing hegemonic echo chamber that covers the whole site. The incoherent conservative narratives fail to take root among a wider audience since they fall apart when scrutinized. The karma system om reddit's encourages this behavior among neutral subreddit to dunk on people when they say things that are nonsense.<p>So that's why you only see them being held in specific ideological echo chambers like /r/Conservative where you have mods that censor discussion that debunks or merely calls into doubt the narrative asserted by the moderation team.
Regardless of the positions held, I think that moderators and admins have a lot of control over the discussion on reddit, and a lot of subreddits and users just get banned for no good reason. There is a selection bias at play.<p>Just because an opinion seems to be popular there does not nessisarially mean it won the "marketplace of ideas". It's more like the "warzone of powermods". I think a lot of social media sites go through a phase of controlling discussion to suit powerusers, but this comes at the cost of losing long-term social capital.<p>I mean we are in the second term of a trump presidency. The climate on reddit is very left wing but in the real world, people are voting right wing (or more likely not at all). Reddit itself is now an echo chamber, and r/Conservative is just the echo chamber within the echo chamber.
It's a sure bet you are a reddit mod, simping for Mangione, the Boston bomber and the likes.
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It doesn't matter, people will still use it as source and now it's boosted by OpenAI and Google. Even Ghislaine Maxwell being a powermod didn't kill it. It's a key information warfare weapon and it's heavily promoted up and defended.<p><a href="https://archive.ph/qpfED" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/qpfED</a>
The upcoming lawsuits around “we demand you remove [training data ruled to be libelous or IP infringing] from the model weights” are going to be fascinating.
TIL that there's a conspiracy theory that Ghislaine Maxwell is the same person as power mod MaxwellHill.<p>Seems like a pretty incoherent conspiracy theory. What a weird thing to believe.
Honest question because I just don't know: Is Reddit shielded by Section 230 for comments made by moderators?<p>I would say moderation is by definition editorial, but I have learned to not confuse logic with the law.
tortious interference<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference</a><p>Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of torts, occurs when one person intentionally damages someone else's contractual or business relationships with a third party, causing economic harm.
What about the reverse of this, where the mods seem just a little to enthusiastic about one particular product?
Astroturfing?
Follow the money.
I don't think I've ever seen this phrase used about a conspiracy that actually happened. It always just ends up that they misread something.<p>Especially in politics, casual observers assume everything is about money (especially shadowy "corporations") but politicians are almost always legitimately ideological, which is actually worse!
Agreed, try to figure out how I benefit in any way from Codesmith's decline. Not theoretical, but hard facts. I know of THREE people that considered going to Codesmith and went to Formation instead. One of them I tried very hard to convince to go to Codesmith and she instead got a job on her own and then came to Formation.<p>All of this for three customers? It doesn't add up and there are some missing pieces in the story.
Here’s why i think you do it— it’s because if Codesmith can do what it says it does, which it clearly can from everything I see, and which would make them a direct competitor to Formation, then you and Formation benefit by either, a) talking them out of Codesmith indirectly by bashing Codesmith relentlessly on reddit and creating a haze of doubt, or more likely maybe— b) you create self doubt for Codesmith grads so that they’ll then feel like they need Formation somehow. In other words, your near daily posts on reddit help turn Codesmith grads in a sales funnel for formation. Either way, it’s gross behavior.
Why did you obsessively stalk and harass people? Very, very weird behavior.
Stalking is a serious allegation.<p>If you want to publish your projects everywhere under the sun in public and ask for them to be 'stared on Github', giving people a script to instantly vote 50 claps on Medium, etc...<p>Then I can open up those people's LinkedIns and note down how they represent themselves.<p>Is that weird? I don't think so but you can decide, but it's not stalking and harassing.<p>If that's stalking then the guy who wrote the post was stalking the hell out of me.
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<i>I know of THREE people</i><p>Well That Settles It. /sarcasm<p>P.S. - quit saying <i>there are some missing pieces in the story</i> until you are going to fill in the rest of the story. You keep saying it, and you are pegging to 11 the bullshit meter of people (like me) who never heard of you or your company (which I won't get near with a 10m pole next time training budget is on the table) or the companies you clearly tried targeted.<p>P.P.S. - Get a media consultant. Seriously, you suck at this.
> Get a media consultant. Seriously, you suck at this<p>Well the author thinks I'm a mastermind marketer ... maybe I'm not and I'm just a person frustrated with a company that I pointed out problems to for years, they did nothing about them, and those same problems caused their implosion.
The article was fascinating, but the part I didn't see was... what was the motive? Assuming the article paints an accurate picture of what was going on... why was it going on? Is it solely because he runs a company in the same competitive space?
Yes, he owns a competitor with his wife, formation.dev, so there is a clear incentive.
> And I believe that’s why Michael is doing what he’s doing. He wins when Codesmith loses.<p>Yes.
I wonder what makes a platform like HN work, but not the others.<p>In almost every other platform moderators are just sad, angry little entitled narcissists who love exerting control over others. This has been proven time and again across multiple platforms:<p>Wikipedia<p>Quora<p>Stackoverflow (surprise, surprise!)<p>Reddit<p>..<p>And basically anything else that depends on those so called moderators for fairness and equality. It would be interesting to experiment using an LLM with explicit set of hard guidelines (like outlined in the Reddit's code of conduct) and see how it behaves. Sure, LLM's are biased due to their training sources, but I'm curious to see if they will be as biased as human moderators. We need the HN formula for the rest of the platforms (I know HN doesn't use AI) with or without AI.
Dang. Dang makes this work.<p>What an insanely hard job, done with far more grace and far fewer mistakes than I could possibly pull off.<p>Thank you for this corner of the internet, dang (and a couple others).<p>Edit: mobile typos
The mods here are paid that's why.
I've asked myself this many times. It warrants a study.<p>I have managed large sites where I had to recruit mods. I would recruit the most popular and lovely users to be mods, and universally I would be forced to ban them within about 6 months. The power would go to their heads and every one of them would turn into a fascist dictator just banning anyone who spoke out of turn and deleting any content they didn't like.
For historical: <a href="https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm" rel="nofollow">https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm</a><p>Nothing new, but sad a great incubator went down. There really isn't a solution for this, is there?
I’ve no idea whether the allegations in this piece are true.<p>But what is noteworthy is that the author of the article has also - on the same blog - written a bunch of content about how Reddit is used for spamming search results.<p>That includes one piece with detailed step by step instructions for how to spam Reddit apparently because Google and Reddit have poisoned the well of SEO.<p>“Why I’m Sharing Secret Tips on How to Manipulate Reddit: Shouldn’t I keep this all to myself? […] Because fuck Google that’s why… Reddit used to be a reliable source… Google torched all that.”<p>Make of that what you will - but the author seems to waging a one man campaign targeting what he identifies as dodgy Reddit moderation practices.<p>When you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail and all that.
A similar story happens to Chinese company, Xiaomi vs Huawei<p>Turns out you only need dozens of Internet accounts to smear a Fortune 500 company.
It seems clear that this dude is engaged in a vendetta, but I feel like a larger issue lurking in the background is the whole swirling mist of Google, Reddit, and mod policies.<p>In the first place it's troubling that Google ever had so much power, and that AI search tools do now. The idea that a business can succeed or fail based on what appears on the first screen when someone types your business name into a little box is insane. It's just another indication to me that these large gatekeepers need to be shattered, simply in order to create more independent avenues of potential research.<p>In the second place, the centralization of forum-like content under Reddit likewise gives Reddit undue influence. There's a lot of good stuff on Reddit but it would be better for all that good stuff to be on a lot of separate sites.<p>And then there's the question of Reddit mod policies. The policy cited in the article falls into the same trap we see with laws on political corruption and the like. It says what you can <i>not</i> do, and narrowly circumscribes it in terms of "exchange" for "compensation", which focuses only on direct quid pro quo kinds of abuse of power. I think we should push for a much greater level of integrity, more like: "In your moderation, you must put the impartial furtherance of the good of the community ahead of your personal interests." I think there would be very little doubt that this moderator's actions fall afoul of such a policy.
I wonder - if there are evidences of such behaviour (and there are because they've been shown in this article), why can't the company sue the moderator?
This whole thing feels like a neat encapsulated example of how horrible the "Internet" has become. A bad actor with vested interest taking over a part of a website (Reddit) that is then used as a source of record (Google, LLMs), and bam, completely fabricated overviews of a brand/company are now all you see when you use the predominant search engine, because there are no alternatives.<p>All of this for what? Shareholder value? So Silicon Valley elites can get rich and force their shit ideas on everyone?<p>If you don't see this for what it is, and that is just pure rot of the major services that people use and rely on for their information needs, then you might be beyond helping. Everyone should be pissed that this is what the internet has become.
Most people have only interacted with a late stage of the internet already sewed up into walled gardens.<p>I don't know if it will work but it would be nice to show folks what the alternatives might be, examples of your ideal internet, instead of insult a generation of folks who don't know what a forum or a bulletin board or a blogroll is.<p>The stuff you miss is still out there. You can do good by sharing it with those who don't know what they are missing.
Since it's getting downvoted hard and might be missed, FYI Michael is in the house. I encourage y'all to read the whole article before engaging.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45522396">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45522396</a>
It truely is a car crash.<p>It seems like he can't stop and will end up in court at some point.
Almost always when someone shows up I upvote to thank and encourage them, but that's really hard to do in this case because he's doing exactly the behavior outlined in the article.
Reading it, seems like the downvotes are deserved.
Michael reminds me of a fellow named ewk, from the zen subreddit. In his obsessive energy and poisonous tactics. It really is a thing to see. A type. There must be a name for it
Machiavellian?<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiavellianism_(psychology)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiavellianism_(psychology)</a>
Wow, very surprised to see someone mention ewk on HN of all places. So surprised in fact that I created an account to respond to you! I’ve been following him on the zen subreddit for over 10 years now, off and on. He really is an absolute sight to behold. And I’m sure there is a name for it.
What's the story there? I'm curious to know how such behavior manifests in Zen Buddhism, of all things.
Many folks end up in r/zen after reading books like “Zen Mind, Beginners Mind” written by Japanese Zen Buddhists.<p>Ewk is obsessed with the Chinese source material, written by Chan (Chinese for Zen) masters, and believes that the Chinese Chan masters were not Buddhist at all.<p>Many people who come to the subreddit are interested in meditation. It is a big focus of Japanese Zen as practiced in the west. It is not particularly emphasised in Chan… at least not in the records we have. Some of the most amusing bits on r/zen are watching Ewk lay into some poor suffering sap looking to get some semblance of peace in their life by starting a meditation practice. According to Ewk, meditation is “not zen”.<p>It’s hard to explain exactly how crazy things are. He’s not wrong about everything. Chan really doesn’t emphasise having a meditation practice. But he also, despite being interested in this for over 20 years and posting nearly full time - literally for 16 hours a day every day for two decades - has never taken a single Chinese lesson. And he has major, major disagreements with the translators of these ancient Chinese texts (because they are Buddhists). So he uses Google translate to prove the translators wrong.<p>But the old Chan texts are full of violence and masters bashing one another on the head, as Ewk is quick to point out. Maybe he’s onto something. It really is pretty entertaining.
You're missing the bit where he has never studied under a Buddhist master and actively refuses to. Both Chan and Zen are traditions that are characterised by the belief that written works are always flawed and can't contain the actual teachings and if you want to learn you should find someone who already knows.
What you are describing sounds like the behaviour of someone who is passionate, righteous and perhaps obsessed. That is not the case in the case of Michael Novati according to Lars Lofgren's post. He is claiming that Novati's Reddit posts are entirely driven by profit motives, not to do with the truth or passion for the code bootcamp space.
No, I think you misread the post. The story about backstabbing Zuckerberg in a Risk game and boasting about it in his blog, I believe the author included especially to show that it's <i>not</i> just about the profit motive. It's far more about rivalry and crushing your opponents, he's basically saying. Clearly, spending so much time in a forum trash talking a rival (without disclosure) isn't a good investment of time, if profit is the sole motive.<p>Certainly, such people exist though. The picture he's painting of Novati is not something I'd find terribly surprising from an ex-Facebook code boot camp entrepreneur.
You're reminding me of the old 'News of the Weird' (RIP) category "<i>No Longer Weird: frequently recurring stories that have been retired from circulation: ... violence breaks out at peace conference ...</i>".
<i>16 hours a day every day for two decades</i><p>If I hadn't taken a look at the subreddit just now I would have thought you were being flippant. What a voluble fellow. So much wisdom must be a terrible burden!
The behavior described here, if true, is psychopathic.<p>A chilling read.
Con artist?
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It was getting boring after the payroll industry's corporate episonage.<p>Thanks god. We have a new drama. I can keep my reduced TV time for a while longer.
There is a popular subreddit for people with hair loss ("tressless" with almost 500k members) and anyone who recommends the drug Finasteride (banned in Sweden and full of bad side effects e.g. depression, erectile dysfunction, muscle atrophy) gets upvoted and anyone who recommends against it gets their post removed from the front page of the subreddit and a squad of people attacking you. It is obvious some pharmaceutical company is behind this.
Reddit moderation is a crap
I'm french<p>I was banned from the France subreddit for saying Hamas fighters dress as civilians.<p>The problem of Reddit goes beyond astroturfing.<p>It's a judge jury executioner problem.<p>Moderation is the most expensive problem of online platforms.
I shudder at the thought of "striving to become a Reddit moderator."
So much effort to achieve such a petty political goal. What sort of person does this?
I cannot comprehend people who would spend their life doing that... Out of all the things a person could do. Do Reddit moderators get a kick out of manipulating people's beliefs and banning people discussing niche topics? I don't get it.
Power. Spending 5 hours a day spamming and commenting is extremely easy compared to actually doing something positive for society.<p>I think everyone here has demonstrated how a mod is objectively lying or wrong and gotten banned for it. From their point of view, they won. For a loser, winning online arguments is the best feeling in the world.
Resonates. IMO, if it pays a fixed salary, that's one thing. Makes sense. But as some means of gaining power over others; or for kickbacks, it's pathetic.
This is oddly a case to signify there is value in an AI moderation tools - to avoid bias inherent to human actors.
The AI moderation tools are trained on the Reddit data that is actively being sabotaged by a competitor. If an AI were to take up moderation now, mentioning this specific bootcamp would probably get you warned or banned because of how bad it is according to the training data.<p>AI is as biased as humans are, perhaps even more so because it lacks actual reasoning capabilities.
> [AI] lacks actual reasoning capabilities.<p>Evals are showing reasoning (by which I mean multi-step problem solving, planning, etc) is improving over time in LLMs. We don't have to agree on metaphysics to see this; I'm referring to the measurable end result.<p>Why? Some combination of longer context windows, better architectures, hybrid systems, and so on. There is more research about how and where reasoning happens (inside the transformer, during the chain of thought, perhaps during a tool call).
Getting rid of bias in LLM training is a major research problem and anecdotally e.g., to my surprise, Gemini infers gender of the user depending on the prompt/what the question is about; by extension it’ll have many other assumptions about race, nationality, political views, etc.
They still have bias. Not sure its necessarily worse but there is bias inherent to LLMs<p><a href="https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/do-language-models-favor-their-home-countries-asymmetric-propagation-of-positive-misinformation-and-foreign-influence-audits/" rel="nofollow">https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/do-language-mo...</a>
Why have they not sued him? Like isn't this slander?
Honestly, why not name the competitor?
yeah, relatable, community based organizations spawn a lot of parasocial relationships and one loud detractor trolling you can kill the whole thing<p>when you try to respond, even with lawyers, it just looks immature because the comments levied are immature<p>no recommendation, let the org die and rebrand I guess
Site isn’t loading. Hug of death?
Here's an archive link: <a href="https://archive.is/w0izj" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/w0izj</a>
Very strange that this happened after said michael novati commented here.
Considering coding boot camps are borderline snake oil I'm struggling to take any of this seriously.
I don't think they're as bad as snake oil.<p>I taught at one for a year and a good number of my students (it was above 50% last time I took a pulse) had life-changing career switches.<p>I think what people don't realize is that the student is really the difference maker, and that it really takes a lot of effort, dedication, and interest to succeed.<p>I think it's possible some of these folks could have "self-taught" their way to the same technical proficiency, but it would've taken longer, and they wouldn't have had as much of a professional network of alums, sponsors, etc upon completion.
So the moderator of this Reddit group, has a company who directly competes with Bootcamps. What are Reddit policies on moderators competing commercial interests?<p>Could one person moderate r/azure while working for aws ?
That sounds bad and unfair... so... the victim is a coding bootcamp. Oh well, anyway, next post.
> The powers that be have decided that Reddit is infallible, a reliable set of training data for LLMs, and should be featured fucking everywhere.<p>This is the line. Remember google bombs? Remember Wikipedia vandalism for company promotion? These were the early search engine hacking. And now we have LLM hacking.<p>It was only a matter of time. Reddit has become a cesspool.
Were any of you around for the r/Seattle move to r/seattlewa That dude was crazy
oh man, you are lucky your competitors don't have a downvote button on hackernews
The semantic web tried to fix this problem but it never caught on.<p>That initiative was so ahead of its time.
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1o1guxj/thoughts_on_this_blog_post_alleging_harassment/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1o1guxj/tho...</a><p>I wonder how long this will stay up.
I'm permabanned on Reddit for saying stuff that the mods didn't like on /r/games on multiple accounts. That website is beyond gone and it's depressing, because it was my favorite site. But the mod situation is seriously out of control. I used to buy Reddit Gold (when that was still a thing) so I found it to be incredibly stupid that this source of revenue was shut off.<p>And yet Reddit still lives on. Somehow.
Forum dictator is a messed up thing. Why is everybody so ok with it? Is it Stockholm Syndrome?
This has been happening in anthropic subreddits.
If your business success depends on Reddit, Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, ChatGPT, maybe you are not doing the right thing.<p>Ideally you shouldn't depend heavily on things that are outside of your control.
a simple lawsuit will fix this. reddit has lots of money
Full title:<p>“The Story of Codesmith: How a Competitor Crippled a $23.5M Bootcamp By Becoming a Reddit Moderator”<p>An interesting part of this article is LLM chatbots regurgitating what seems to be defamatory comments by a rogue moderator who took over the coding boot camp subreddit. Google also seems to surface this person’s comments in search results.
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Can we get a tldr since the site is down?
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Please post an archive link
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These accusations could all have been avoided by not moderating a community in which you stand to have a direct reputational gain.<p>You inserted yourself in to this situation. There is an easy path out of it.
Oh wow, I checked the actual /r/codesmith links you posted. They all seem fake. Most replies are from users who are either deleted, or new accounts with a single comment. Note: I am not saying the founder of Codesmith did this, or that these are fake 100%. Just suspicious.<p>And the fact that you used your real name when being a mod gives you strong credibility. You weren't looking to hide your involvement, since you weren't doing anything wrong, in your opinion. This is unlike the "fake" mods who will have multiple levels of indirection, with fake post histories, etc. Astroturfing / shilling 101 is never use your real name.<p>And overall, if what you're saying is correct, the author owes you an apology. And so does the HN crowd. HN, although a good crowd in general, is super-susceptible to "witch hunts". I don't like witch hunts + character assassinations. So that's why I'm defending you.<p>P.s. It's ironic that Lars, the author, is a master affiliate marketer + growth hacker. He's started an affiliate company that did $7 million in revenue. I don't say he is an unethical person. But from what I know about this field, it's almost always on the grey line (and he's also admitted to this). See his video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QnwHAnJwv-k" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QnwHAnJwv-k</a>. And this is just what is public, if we were to "dig up" some of his stuff, it is possible one could spin it to make him look bad. My point is, he shouldn't exaggerate things to make you look bad. And the same warning applies to me or anyone.
Oh, one more thing. All of these "bootcamp" companies are known to be bad, and HN knows this. Perhaps "Codesmith" is better, I can believe that. I did a quick search, and it does seem like it's above the pack. I'm not trying to knock down Codesmith, the founder Will seems genuine. but it's still very plausible it has some of the same "badness" of bootcamps, at least according to Michael. And one might ask, why did Michael focus on Codesmith? The answer is two-fold. 1) he targeted other bootcamps as well 2) and Codesmith claimed explicitly they were unlike other bootcamps, and Michael was on a personal "jihad" to make sure they were called out.
Thanks for your side.<p>I hate fake reviews by competitors. But I read the article myself, and it seems exaggerated. It did read like a hit piece, and did feel ironic. This was before I even read your response.<p>I don't know who's saying the truth, but it's never too late to better one's self. So that's the advice to myself and you.
I comment a lot about them and I have gotten annoyed every now and then when my tone was not professional, but most of critical comments about Codesmith center on The fact that their website has a giant banner saying from zero to mid-level engineer and I think that that's misleading and setting people up for failure in the software industry regardless of their outcomes or their talent. I'm open to hearing all sides of this, but it's a very reasonable opinion to have and state.<p><a href="https://www.codesmith.io/is-codesmith-worth-it" rel="nofollow">https://www.codesmith.io/is-codesmith-worth-it</a>
someone mind actually giving a detailed history of the timeline outside of the two main parties? this has those inklings of wordpress drama where not a lot of people are not invested enough and that obviously works to an advantage of sorts.
Too much swearing in that article for me to take it more than a rant. I couldn't finish it.
Regardless of Michael's issues with Codesmith, I will say as someone who looked into bootcamps before, Codesmith is infamous for having people misrepresent their job experience to get swe jobs (even getting hired as seniors!). This is also why they used to have some of the highest job salary outcomes. I'm not going to link anything but this can be confirmed by just searching "Codesmith" in Linkedin and seeing how many Codesmith bootcampers are "senior" software engineers on "open source" codesmith "companies"
I'm Michael and this was about me. This person never reached out for comment and is missing half the story. I'm happy to fill people in on the rest if this person or someone else wants to hear.<p>I agree with one or two of the characterizations but the majority I don't and there is a lot more to this story than it seems...<p>RE: INDUSTRY. Rithm School (their main competitor) shut down. Hack Reactor is down to single digit cohorts allegedly. Launch School is slowing down from 3 cohorts a year to 2. Numerous other bootcamps have shut down. Codesmith's decline is predominantly an industry problem.<p>RE: CODESMITH. For starters as an example, Codesmith's website, email, and entire AWS account was down for 3 weeks because they got locked out from not updating their credit card and then losing the root password and their 2-factor was a phone number. This is unacceptable.<p>Yet they market themselves as similar outcomes to elite grad schools and it's very reasonable to challenge them on their hyperbolic marketing.<p>Both sides of the story need to be heard before making a judgement.
If you really cared, this should have started with: "I am stepping down as the moderator..."<p>Even though you have counter claims, you moderating <i>the forum</i> for your industry is problematic. You also seem keen to chime in about a competitor when you should be impartial and allow users to discuss their experiences alone.<p>Yes there are two sides to every story, but in no universe should you be the mod of that subreddit.
> RE: CODESMITH. For starters as an example, Codesmith's website, email, and entire AWS account was down for 3 weeks because they got locked out from not updating their credit card and then losing the root password and their 2-factor was a phone number. This is unacceptable.<p>Everything I can find online, including your post on reddit about the outage, says the outage was for 4 days. Not 3 weeks.<p>I'll also note that your post on reddit about the outage was phrased as if you were a student impacted by the outage, going so far as to say it was your "final straw" even though you don't have skin in the game other than as a competitor.
I would really like to hear both sides to the story. But from the data it seems like you have been obsessively commenting on the subreddit about codesmith for more than a full year. And almost 80% have been negative. This looks unhinged because you are a moderator of the subreddit. What's the other side to this?
I was being threatened by anonymous Reddit accounts a few weeks ago so I made some defensive PR docs but I need to sleep on it to decide what to do.<p>This is what I do all day: <a href="https://github.com/mnovati" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mnovati</a><p>But yeah two sides to every story and if this has been going on for years, "1000 posts", there's clearly more to the story, and it's irresponsible to not reach out for comment if you are going to try to summarize that.
What does showing your github do with writing about writing negative posts about a company almost every single day ?
Is that what you do all day? Its trivially easy to make a profile look like yours, its a lot harder to actually have an average of 28 commits a day every day for a year with zero days off. Not for weekends, not for vacations, not for sickness. All in completely private repositories
Huh. You showed me yours. Here’s mine[0]. It’s all organic. A pretty significant part of that is open-source, or source-available, so it’s easy to verify. I think I may only have two or three private repos (but one of them is where I do a lot of work).<p>I’m retired, and work on code all day, most days. I’m just a <i>wee</i> bit obsessive, being “on the spectrum.” I average about 1,900 checkins per year. Some of the days that I do the most work, have 1 or zero checkins. I will sometimes shitcan a whole day’s worth of work, if I find myself in a rabbithole.<p>Here’s a fun GitHub tool[1].<p>I have no opinion on the article, or the responses, other than there’s a lot of ugly going on, and it isn’t really making my life any richer, reading it.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#github-stuff" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#github-stuff</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti</a>
A github with no public work isn't really a flex.
I just don’t see how a GitHub link is supposed to answer the question. We all have day jobs too.
Even if codesmith _was_ objectively bad, I am still wondering _why_ do you spend _so much time_ shittalking that company on every fucking occasion? Reddit, HN, LinkedIn. You are putting way too much energy into that, way more than the average person would objectively care. Makes me wonder.
You’re trying to defend yourself, but you still can’t stop yourself from casting shade on Codesmith multiple times in this very comment.<p>You have just proved that Lars is spot on with his analysis that you are an obsessive stalker.
You’re doing the same thing here that the article is accusing you of doing on Reddit.
> Numerous other bootcamps have shut down. Codesmith's decline is predominantly an industry problem.<p>In that case can you share the user stats for the sub? Because if coding boot camp as an industry is dying the growth of the sub should have also slowed down or plateaued, right?
Your post does not really do much to dispel the negative picture that the opening article paints of you. You say their decline is "predominantly an industry problem". Is this also the case for your own company, Formation? You went on the record comparing Codesmith to a sex cult and accusing it of deceiving and exploiting its students and evidently consider criticising them to be a mission worth years of near-daily dedication, and the only example you have to offer to justify this in a thread where people question your motives for this is... some random anecdote about them having an IT fuckup?<p>This doesn't read as if you have a coherent case that Codesmith is bad to an extent that justifies your single-minded effort to spread this message, but as either an attempt to throw more FUD at the wall in the hope that something sticks even in this forum, or an indication that you are not quite well.
Oh you are gonna taste your own medicine here. Welcome.
You don’t know when to stop, do you?
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Hi Michael. We overlapped significantly at Facebook and chatted a few times (I was on the source control team from 2012-2018ish, part of which was the migration to Mercurial). Correct me if I'm wrong, but you wrote some posts about how you wanted something like git rebase -i, right?<p>I know your heart is in the right place, and have a great deal of respect for you. I think being the most active moderator of a coding bootcamp subreddit while also running one is probably not the best use of your time, right? Even though I know you're being honest, just the appearance of a conflict of interest can be an issue. Why not find someone else to take over the reins, someone who isn't actively involved in the industry?
One thing is a critic based on verifiable facts. Another thing is defending yourself. A third one is coming up with bad things nobody can verify. Your post mixes these things
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I haven't verified the numbers, but I'll take them as correct for now. I can understand wanting to make such an analysis if you had skin in the game, and cautioning people, if you were a student who was disappointed or similar.<p>However by your own admission you're a co founder of a "interview prep mentorship platform" (which you claim is not a bootcamp) - fine, I can admit they are slightly different - though this <i>does</i> feel like splitting hairs semantically.<p>What I <i>don't</i> understand is, how is your position as a mod on such a subreddit not a massive conflict of interest? You have no reason to dissuade people from another company unless it hurts your business (I'm guessing you or someone in your family didn't lose time or money on codesmith).<p>Ergo, if you can, please do tell me why your activity isn't financially motivated, and therefore tortious interference. I see no other reason for a person to obsessively track another company in detail (baring a few health conditions I wouldn't want to wish on anyone.)
This is some fourth thing...<p>What does anything there have to do with any of the questions people in this thread are asking you?<p>I don't see anything there that adds anything to the story except solidifying the picture of you as an obsessive stalker. It certainly doesn't help your case.<p>In case I overlooked some key detail, please point it out.
Dramatic much?
> Both sides of the story need to be heard before making a judgement.<p>Your side begins and ends at being a reddit moderator for an industry subreddit while working in said industry as a CTO. Anything you say or do in this position should rightfully be assumed to be biased.
Do they though? Being a reddit mod for a sub that covers an industry you have a vested interest in with no other mods with similar backgrounds really does sound like a well traffic'd and successful bully pulpit.
My company works with a lot of bootcamp grads later on in their careers so wouldn't I have an interest in promoting bootcamps so more people go and create more customers down the road?<p>I recommended a bunch of people go to Codesmith until February 2024, when the first signs of collapsed started.
I hope he sues you.
Are you planning to write something up about it? It would be interesting to hear the other side that you’re hinting at.<p>It’s also not clear to me if the person who wrote this article was paid for it or if they’re somehow affiliated with someone involved. It says they’re a “Fractional VP of Content”. I’m curious if you know more.
No doubt the industry suffered due to a market downturn, but your continuous posts and attacks worsened the situation for that company. Based on your Reddit activity, it appears to have been driven by a personal vendetta. If they pursue a defamation case, the evidence could strongly work against you. The overwhelming proof he presented of your actions toward the company would be difficult to defend. I honestly can’t understand why anyone would risk their own reputation—and that of their family—for dishonest gain. Most people are civil in such cases, but not everyone is if they conclude that evil was done. Scary situation to be in.
Hello. It's nice to be able to interact directly with the subject of the article, so thanks for coming on. It's a shame you're being downvoted, because it would definitely be interesting to hear your perspective. This can't be a pleasant experience for you.<p>I have a couple of questions for you. Firstly the article really didn't hold back about you in a way that you don't usually see. But he makes very specific and verifiable claims. The owner blames the market for 40% of their decline and you for another 40%. You have made over 400 negative comments about the company over the last couple of years. You run the subreddit as a bad faith mod, and you run a rival company so you have an interest in the decline of codesmith. Those are some of the accusations laid against you by the article.<p>I would be interested in hearing what you have to say about them. Obviously i don't expect you to say anything that might create legal issues for yourself. But you have opinions that youre not shy of expressing. The article was perhaps not wholly neutral so maybe you can clarify your side of the story. Do you have a specific problem with codesmith? why do you care so much about them? Is it because they are competitiors? Do you take such an active role on reddit in order to promote your own interests, outside of creating and maintaining a better community?<p>To be clear i'm a completely random guy with no skin in the game, just looking for answers.<p>[edit to reply: There is no plausible scenario that my life will depend on the answer. Literally the only reason i'm on here is for casual chit chat. Frankly, this might be life changing for some people, but i'm really not too invested in the story so i don't mind opening some dialogue in good faith from my end.]
This is a wonderfully mature and constructive comment.<p>I appreciate this is off-topic, but I really wanted to highlight/praise what you'd written. It came across to me as very "HN" and the guidelines appear to corroborate this...<p>> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
You should be able to identify badfaith because your life depends on it. Otherwise you will drown in a pit of bothsides. Bad way to go.<p>Next we should hear from the counter party is from a court filing. Not here. This is well past having a chill chat on hackernews.
Yeah I'll I'm going to say for now is that if all your competitors (that I spoke positively about) are shutting down and shrinking and laying people off... there's more to the story. A sad story about an industry dying that should be told.
There’s a pattern to the way you communicate, where you always end things at a cliffhanger.
Great, then give us more to the story.
With sources.
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I'm sorry, what does anything there have to do with any of the claims people in this thread are asking you to back up?<p>I don't see anything there that adds anything to the story except solidifying the picture of you as an obsessive stalker. It certainly doesn't help your case.<p>In case I overlooked some key detail, please point it out.
So the article shows clearly that your graduates do the same exact thing. Grads from Harvard do it. But that doesn’t mean Harvard is telling them to do it. Job seekers are gonna be job seekers. But for you to basically stalk these grads and collect data on them…when they’re not even YOUR grads?? bonkers man. you have no place being a mod. It’s everything broken about the fucking internet right now.
Were you a moderator for them as well?
“it’s a sad story” is such an “aw shucks”, condescending sorta bullshit thing to say. I’ve read your posts where you claimed to be bullied as a kid (which i’m obviously sorry for if true), but to then channel that into becoming the bully yourself? That’s 1000% on you, Michael.
You keep saying that there’s more to the story but then won’t say what that ‘more’ is. If the article is truly not a truthful accounting of events, you have the opportunity here to set the record straight. That you are not doing that only reinforces everything the article is claiming.
Michael for what it's worth I went to Codesmith back in 2016 lol and even then Will was a lil greasy with his marketing! LOL
I commented on the moderation stuff only to start, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=45524707&goto=item%3Fid%3D45521920%2345524707">https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=45524707&goto=item%3Fi...</a>
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