I don't know about this particular case, but, generally... bad actor subreddit moderators have been an occasional thing for well over a decade.
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.
What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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:
- /r/energy used to ban everyone in favour of nuclear energy
- 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.
- /r/UnitedKingdom banned me for critizing a government welfare program
- /r/assassinscreed banned me for critizing a character in their latest game
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.
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.
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.
> - 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.
You left out the fact that you can’t post to /r/conservative until the moderators there audit your post history and perform an interview with you to confirm your ideology matches theirs.
If someone does pass the test they’re allowed to comment. If they make a comment that disagrees with the message the moderators want to push, their commenting privilege is revoked.
It’s not a real subreddit. It’s a moderator-curated echo chamber. They run it like a propaganda outlet, only allow approved thought from approved commenters, and ban anyone who steps out of line with the mods.
That’s why every thread you view there will have “load more comments” buttons that never load anything: They remove more comments than you’re allowed to see.
If you say anything remotely controversial anywhere on reddit you will be hunted by a moderator of another sub and then targeted for banning.
I pointed out on a sub that the question on the 4473 (form to buy a firearm) asking if you are a drug user is a 5th amendment violation as it asks you to incriminate yourself to exercise a right.
An Ivy league lawyer, moderator of another sub, about a whole year later, found it, declared that it was illegal legal advice, then had my whole account nuked using his legal credentials to scare reddit into getting rid of me.
> You left out the fact that you can’t post to /r/conservative until the moderators there audit your post history and perform an interview with you to confirm your ideology matches theirs.
> If someone does pass the test they’re allowed to comment. If they make a comment that disagrees with the message the moderators want to push, their commenting privilege is revoked.
Be that as it may, i dont see how the solution to /r/conservative being a weird echo chamber, is for other subs to be an anti-/r/conservative echochamber. Seems like both are wrong, and two wrongs dont make a right.
I don't see an issue with it, if you are willing to put in the effort to swim in the cesspool that is /r/conservative you don't get to complain when other people find the smell objectionable.
Lets go down to /r/conservative and throw rocks at them for being dumb was a pretty popular activity for people. For anyone who has been on reddit for any length of time, it should be abundantly obvious why the sub needs extremely heavy moderation. That sub is like having an LGBTQ tent at a redneck festival.
> You left out the fact that you can’t post to /r/conservative until
You present this as if it were somehow evidence that somehow justifies the bans from the other unrelated subs.
There is no morally justifiable reason why having mainstream conservative viewpoints (which is to say, ones held by a very large fraction of the general populace) should bar someone from non-political participation in non-political subreddits.
The bans in fact are another symptom of the same cause: every kind of right-wing enclave on Reddit gets trolled constantly. The generally left-wing userbase does whatever they can to ostracize right-wingers, or perceived right-wingers. Which includes both banning them from other spaces, and mocking them in their own.
> It’s a moderator-curated echo chamber.
This describes every vaguely political or ideological themed subreddit. Except maybe the general r/politics, which might still be "letting the votes decide" if you don't have the "acceptable" views on every issue. I have literally seen subreddits that would ban people for "ableism" for using the word "stupid" to describe an idea or proposal. And that was like a decade ago and it was getting clearly worse year after year.
Could it be that sharing conservative ideas is against Reddit's community guidelines?
There are other subreddits with primarily right or moderate leaning communities and comments in those get deleted all the time with moderator messages saying they risk the entire subreddit getting taken down by Reddit simply for sharing basic conservative views.
Out of curiosity, what views? I'm trying to understand if Reddit is just ban happy against conservatives or if basic conservative views are really against reddits TOS
Trans related topics are expressly against TOC and enforced unless a subreddit is ruthless in removing any comments that aren't expressly positive and affirming. There is no room for nuance on this topic. Just giving an example.
I'm sure you can give us examples of these "basic conservative values" that gets entire subreddits banned off a platform run by a libertarian prepper who admires Elon Musk.
/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.
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?”
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.
I don’t know why the moderators of this sub do this, but the effects of their moderation are clear.
I've often posted on the internet at 4am local time before. How did you establish the posters were Russian or Iranian, other than by time zone? (4am London is working hours for around half the world population.)
Not denying that there are people in these countries who want to cause trouble on the internet. But there are many such people in all countries...
Fair question. The answer is that they didn’t bother hiding it. They literally posted in a whole bunch of Iranian subReddits and only Iranian subReddits. On this thread they were claiming they were British. Literally the first post of that kind, completely different to everything they had posted previously.
The clincher was that they deleted their account as soon as I pointed they were Iranian.
I’m going to guess they bought a Reddit account from someone without looking at the past history on the account.
There are huge influence operations basically on every national sub.
I found one on r/portugal, clearly coordinated network spreading political news of a certain persuasion.
R/donald became famous because the admins turned on national flags for users there revealing a significant percentage was Russian IPs without even a VPN. The Russian users called it “the mark of David” and compared it to Nazism.
Have you got a source for the national flags claim? I'm not sure that is a feature on Reddit. Most subreddits have custom flairs and some will let you choose a flair for your country, but afaik Reddit mods can't autodetect a poster's country of origin.
It's crazy for me that it's not a well-known thing that Russia, Iran, China, North Korea and other countries are fueling the polarization of western politics using bots on EVERY RELEVANT social media. The right wing bots are kind of known, but a lot of people aren't aware of other things (e.g., TENET Media [1]), or that they are fueling left wing circles as well [2].
People believe that these countries would love to do that, but for some reason, they think they are not doing as much as possible.
> There are huge influence operations basically on every national sub.
I believe you. But I've also often been accused of being a bot or working for an intelligence service when posting my own opinion in political discussions, not in coordination with anyone at all, and not pretending to be anything I'm not. I think the people accusing me of this did genuinely believe it too.
Typically people with long reddit histories aren't 'bots', though there are some cases.
What I typically saw was accounts that had a decent sized but very generic history, things like gaming or cooking. Then suddenly the accounts became very politically motivated over one particular thing. Then within a few weeks to a months the accounts were gone.
My assumption these were sold/farmed accounts with reused comments/boring posts that were then used to push a political message when needed.
From the perspective of a mod, the only thing they end up having is the content, and the current patterns of interference they are familiar with.
So if your opinion happens to be in line with whatever narrative someone is trying to spin up, it will end up getting quashed.
Frankly there isn’t any solution to this, and you either end up losing ground to mechanised speech while having a low ban load for humans, or you end up acting on likely mechanized speech, and have a higher number of humans you ban.
The way Reddit is set up, people will select the first option over the second.
> How did you establish the posters were Russian or Iranian, other than by time zone?
To a lot of people, Russian is just a state of mind. It simply means that you disagree with them, or the regime that they support. Also, the mods on reddit are overwhelmingly these people, banning all opposing opinions, or banning people for being Russian, or Iranian, or Chinese, etc...
They think this is legitimate: aaah, so you're Chinese. I knew there was something wrong when you insisted that the Chinese weren't evil thieves hellbent on destroying freedom, by nature. You're not allowed to post in the West.
All governance in the western world has become weak as hell. You only need a few bucks to corrupt anything, unless somebody with a few more bucks is already corrupting it. And certain intelligence agencies have the deepest pockets. Maybe little fiefdoms wasn't the best way to structure the internet? Maybe section 230 would be obviated if there were clear, deliberative processes to allow entire groups to both take action and responsibility for what they allow in their discussions?
Take note about how adhering to parliamentary methods protects private organizations: in most places, having proper rules set up (not EULAs and ToCs) actually has the practical effect of creating law because it sets up obligations to the users as well as obligations from the users. There's no such thing as a benevolent dictator.
To a lot of people, Russian is just a state of mind. It simply means that you disagree with them, or the regime that they support. Also, the mods on reddit are overwhelmingly these people, banning all opposing opinions, or banning people for being Russian, or Iranian, or Chinese, etc...
Pretending that there aren't concerted efforts to exert political influence on Reddit isn't helpful, and comes across as pretty disingenuous.
All governance in the western world has become weak as hell. You only need a few bucks to corrupt anything, unless somebody with a few more bucks is already corrupting it.
Yes, corruption and bribery exist exclusive in "western" governments. Thankfully "eastern" governments are completely immune to these issues.
And I know, "I never said those exact words!" but that at was the obvious intention.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps intentionally using uuids in the URL instead of slugs and improving the recommendation/search algo (e.g take into account the average post length or cited sources in the ranking) would solve this issue. Main challenge might still be that its very hard to move an existing user base if the moderator(s) blocks all posts about other communities.
Perhaps a more democratic moderation system or a system wide rule that disallows moderators from blocking posts about other (competing) subs would work?
I can throw another example /r/lectures was a really cool place were people shared mostly academic lectures. Mod took over, put the sub in approved posts only and is just doing token approves very rarely without any way to reclaim the sub.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think maybe this is a feature rather than a bug.
I know at least a couple of subreddits for specific 'true crime' cases which split into one for people who believed the suspect was guilty and one where everyone believed they were innocent.
The thing is, the split fora were actually much better than pre split. When both sets of people were together every topic degenerated rapidly in exactly the same way:
meticulous_postrr: I just reread the transcript of Fred's sixth interview and noticed that he mentioned seeing a purple t-shirt in the woods. Could this be the shirt that Ahab was wearing at the road house, which looks blue in the security footage?
middled_aged_loner: Nice try, but unless you can explain the severed foot in the ashtray, the blue shirt is irrelevant here.
AhabDidIt: Still trying to shill the 'only two feet' theory, m_a_l? What about what Edgar saw?
curious_n00b: Hi, I love the podcast but I'm not sure about one thing: is the Sylvia mentioned in Dushane's diary the same Sylvia who knew Edgar from volleyball camp?
AhabDidIt: welcome curious. Good question, but you're wasting your time with the diary. The July entries were written in August, by April. See my previous threads /r/TheScarletFred/Ahabs_lies /r/TheScarletFred/Ahabs_lies_2 and /r/TheScarletFred/the_diary_evidence_reexamined
middled_aged_loner: So in your opinion ADI, April apparently knew that Dushane had seen Vanessa on the rollercoaster but didn't mention it to the police on the 1st October? This completely fails to stack up. What about Vanessa's unfinished ice tea? WHAT ABOUT THE SEVERED FOOT?
The split subreddits have better information, better curation and better flow. People who are otherwise in agreement debate precise points carefully and in detail. Both are available on the same internet so anyone who wants to can read both and make up their own mind.
I know we're all supposed to be worried about echo chambers, but sometimes an echo chamber is somewhere a specific conversation can take place which couldn't elsewhere.
No, the biggest one is r/india as it is the subreddit for the largest country in the world with moderators being from an adversarial country and any positive news about the country always being removed while constant critiques and hate allowed
Exactly this. They had full control over both bitcointalk and /r/bitcoin. A few persuasive individuals circumvented the design and censored all discussion against it. It turns out that 51% attacks don't matter if you control social consensus. You control what engineers get to participate. What the project direction is. What views are considered "credible" -- credible enough to be "worth posting." Then with the other hand you wave away opposing ideas and accuse those who disagree with you of your own bad deeds. Eventually, over time the original is replaced and there's no longer anyone around to remember it.
/r/conservative is probably the most heavily censored echo chamber on Reddit, yet somehow you only take issue with other subreddits flagging participation.
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 did explain my reasoning. You coincidentally not mentioning /r/conservatives censorship practices, simply doesn't appear plausible, given the context of your comment and demonstrated knowledge of reddit moderating practices.
> I disagree with your assessment, if I remember correctly I posted three times on that sub.
The sub currently requires moderator approval (specific flair) to comment on most threads.
The parent commenter is correct: It is widely known as one of the most censored subs on Reddit because the mods remove comments from unapproved accounts (those without flair).
Their rules claim that some threads are open for everyone to participate in, which may have been the case in the past when you commented.
However it’s not true for any of the popular threads. They will remove comments from unflaired accounts
This is all state in their rules. It’s not speculation. The parent comment is correct.
How does the moderation in /r/conservatives, a subreddit for conservatives to discuss "from a distinctly conservative point of view", concern a liberal like yourself in any way?
This isn't a subreddit you need to participate in. I think it's more relevant how default subreddits or country subreddits are moderated in a similar way.
It concerns me insofar as the comment I was responding to, mentioned that participation in /r/conservative got him banned in another subreddit, while failing to mention the nature of /r/conservative as a heavily censored echo chamber.
I think the argument here is guilt by association.
It's a bit like banning entry into the US because you've visited Russia.
It doesn't really matter how Russia runs their own country, you might have even gone there to argue against totalitarian dictatorships.
But a US border guard looking at your passport and rejecting your entry based on that alone feels like overreach.
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.
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.
/r/conservative doesn't even allow comments of users without a user flair.
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?
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,[..]
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."
"Strangely" there isn't a single post on their frontpage at the moment, which doesn't require a flair to comment.
Why are you so concerned about participation criteria for the conservative subreddit, one of the only distinctly right wing places on the whole platform?
The way HN and public forums work is that people can ask questions and others can answer. The post you are replying to is an answer to a question. You need to scroll a bit up to see the original question.
Pointing at the moderation of an explicitly conservative place for right wingers as a grievance to illustrate how it is only balanced how conservative opinions are getting banned across mainstream subreddits is fairly disingenuous.
And clearly this has been a discussion on that angle, rather than an answer to the rhetorical question above.
The /r/conservative subreddit is unpopular among actual conservatives because it’s basically a propaganda outlet for the mods.
You can get banned for posting traditional conservative opinions there if they go against the message the mods want to allow, even if it’s conservative.
Don’t be tricked into thinking it’s some conservative safe space. It’s a propaganda outlet for the mods who ban even conservatives if they don’t toe the line and agree with the mods.
I am making a guess based on the opinions presented.
The point here being that it is hardly relevant how a subreddit specifically and explicitely for conservatives is moderated, when we are talking how mainstream subreddits are censoring conservative opinions.
Many grievances appear to be liberals concerning themselves with how /r/conservative is moderated, most likely after being banned for astroturfing there.
/interestingasfuck banned me for commenting on /asmongold at some point. Not even for the content. Simply for having interacted with /asmongold.
Edit: To be clear I wasn't picked on by anyone. It's a bot they run. This is a blanket ban that /interestingasfuck extends to anyone who has commented/posted on /asmongold, or any subreddit they consider to be right wing (by USA standards).
I don't really have a problem with that. The scope of the sub is:
> Appreciation subreddit dedicated to the life and art of Michael Joe Jackson
Criticism of Jackson would be off-topic.
Plus it's not like anybody who is a fan of Jackson doesn't know about those allegations and some of the weird things he did. People who feel the need to say he was weird about kids in that subreddit are probably just trying to troll Jackson fans. It's not going to make the subreddit better for fans who are there to celebrate the art and music of Jackson.
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.
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.
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.
However, you are arguing with a vertically integrated propaganda machine that is basically an experimental weapons testing facility for rhetoric.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency 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 mimics normal, centrist US culture in ways that slip under the cognitive radar.
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 just rational enough 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.
As a result, you engage and then one of the following happens:
- You make a point so salient they banhammer you because you cannot control the narrative.
- 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!
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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 small but powerful group hijacking others to further their own goals, and people protecting their interests by funding the small group.
> a vertically integrated propaganda machine that is basically an experimental weapons testing facility for rhetoric
This is great lol
The specifics always depends on the subreddit, reddit doesn't pay moderators so its the wild west out there. You can find whatever echo-chamber you want honestly. Which subreddit does HN map to? Perhaps a mix of r/neoliberal and r/conservative (you know, healthy centrism /s)
Honestly, HN crowd is very diverse. I would say that it's a normal distribution here. There are some fascists/neonazi, some communists/anarchists and a lot of liberals/conservatives. I know that here is not the place for these kind of conversations, but it's funny how it's way better for that than other social media platforms. It's not perfect, of course, but perfect is not possible in real life.
Not really. There's few places on Reddit where you will be banned for expressing liberal opinions.
/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.
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.
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.
If you think "any thread there" is that absurd, you are clearly not a conservative at all. You are another liberal ranting about /r/conservative, are you not?
It is in my opinion a very weak argument to point at /r/conservative specifically as an example for how the mainstream censorship on Reddit is not overwhelmingly liberal.
It’s not both all the other subs, the point under contention is about that you cannot be critical or reasonably discuss anything proper in r/conservative.
I don’t know if you have been following the sub, I have, and it always follows a similar pattern. If it’s a new topic, some discussion is allowed, but soon everyone needs to toe the party line.
Edit : I encourage free discussion on this point, instead of downvoting.
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.
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 and 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 doesn't look like there are any mechanisms to stop it from getting much worse.
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 only 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).
So, how is it working out for you so far? I find it hard to believe that otherwise intelligent beings can both make claims like this and at the same time observe reality. The USA has in all of its history since the civil war not been this divided. And it is falling off a cliff as we speak.
This is is deeply ignorant historically. The US has cycled through extreme division over and over. There was 100x more civil unrest over Vietnam, civil rights, reconstruction, early labor wars. We've had 4 presidents assassinated, one shot, but survived. There were 2,500 domestic bombings in the 1970s. In 1972 there were 31 plane hijackings - 1 every 12 days.
There is a lot of hot talk, a lot of insular bubbles working themselves into online frenzies, but it is, objectively, a boring, passive time out on the street. No, there is no cliff.
Outside of the USA: talk of invading Canada, Greenland, indiscriminate execution of people on the high seas, a tariff war that seems to be a series of own goals, destabilization of NATO, the burning of 75 years of goodwill.
Inside the USA: military in the cities, half the country is being depicted as 'the enemy' by those in power, an embarrassing cadre of incompetents are in powerful positions and are wrecking the departments they are nominally in charge of, North Korea style adulation of an idiot leader, attacks on judges and members of congress are on the order of the day, teams of masked man snatch people (men, women, children) off the streets and out of their beds, endless violations of the law by the authorities, naked power grabs and abuse of pardons, attacks on the free press, destruction of the machinery of the state are the order of the day.
Those things you mention were bad, but they were still within the framework of the normal functioning of a state, it never looked as though there was a real chance of the USA fracturing or turning on itself no matter how bad they were. But this time it looks very much different. If you can't see that then that's fine with me but 'historical ignorance' is an easy card to play if you have already decided that what's happening right now in the USA is business as usual, and to me it does not look like 'business as usual' at all. This is unprecedented, and it is getting worse every day.
What I think is happening is that the 'flooding the zone' strategy is working so well that people are simply no longer able to keep up with all of the assaults and they hunker down, hoping that it will pass them by. That's a coping mechanism.
Is that actually true? The U.S. was pretty damn divided in the late 60s.
Widescale race riots, Vietnam war protests, a President and Presidential candidate assassinated etc. That said a few cms or so difference and that bullet takes out Trump.
Certainly divided right now just genuinely not sure if it's quite at that level or not.
> That said a few cms or so difference and that bullet takes out Trump.
That could have been reversed. Kennedy could have lived and Trump could have been dead, either way, I was four at the time, my most recent memory from that era is the moon landing. But the depiction of half the nation as the enemy and the active tour of revenge that is happening right now is unprecedented, not even the McCarthy era - or at least, what I know of it - came close.
> Do they ban conservatives for criticizing Trump? I don't know, perhaps
They won’t even allow you to comment there now unless they can interview you, audit your comment history across Reddit, and pre-confirm that you align with the message they want to allow.
Deviating will result in a ban.
Why are you commenting so much to defend a subreddit you admittedly don’t understand?
I got permanently banned from Reddit for participating in a thread debating the death penalty. In which I wrote one comment suggesting we shouldn’t waste a bunch of court costs on mass shooters who are blatantly guilty.
> I got permanently banned from Reddit for ... one comment suggesting we shouldn’t waste a bunch of court costs on mass shooters who are blatantly guilty.
To be fair, that's an objectively degenerate suggestion, which is in opposition to the entire history of accumulated human wisdom.
So I can see why it would be difficult for a mod to imagine it being offered with the intention of contributing positively to an Internet discussion.
Mods are human too, and they get tired of pointless derailments, especially when they see the same pointless derailments repeatedly, and they know where those discussion threads lead.
What they do not know is whether the commenter is 12 years old and has never had a serious history or government class in their life, but might be open to a generous conversation about the reality of the world and human nature, and why legal systems are not built on top of impulsive hysterics...or whether the commenter is just a troll, asymmetrically leveraging a single sentence into dozens of comments and hundreds of justifiably angry forum members.
It's a dilemma. The difficult path can't be chosen every time. The easy path is to moderate the comment out of visibility, but that often turns into a bad-faith back and forth with the commenter about their intentions and ignorances. This is rarely positive ROI for the mod, so it's not surprising that they turn to banning instead.
Could you point out what exactly you find confusingly one-sided? Happy to update the list of examples if it enhances the quality of my post but when writing it I could only draw on personal experience.
>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
That's a pretty hilariously one-sided example, given /r/conservative is one of the most comically moderated subs on Reddit. Like, you were so close with that example, but no, it turns out it's all the other subs that are to blame.
/r/conservative is just a renamed The_Donald. It has essentially nothing to do with conservatism, and anything even remotely critical of the dear leader, where critical can be just asking for clarification or correcting a wrong claim, leads to an immediate permanent ban. I actually thought it was performance art and was echoing the famous, and hilarious, North Korea sub. Turns out it's actually sincere.
As to the rest of your list...yeah, I think we'd need to see examples. When people do the "they banned me just for {x}", they often conveniently leave out a lot of not {x} that actually led to the ban. People are remarkably biased in how they tell these tales.
That's a bit rich to say while complaining about the moderation in /r/conservative specifically.
Per the subreddit description it is a place for conservatives to discuss "from a distinctly conservative point of view".
I am getting the feeling that you may in fact not be a conservative. That's fine. You don't need to participate in /r/conservative any more than I need to participate in /r/progressive. It simply does not concern you, and your focus on how a subreddit for conservatives is moderated paints a better picture of why you may have been banned from there.
The problem is default subreddits handing out permabans over political opinions.
To repeat, as you seemed to miss it, the conservative subreddit has little to nothing to do with conservatism the political philosophy. It is an echo chamber for MAGA, and people get banned for actually conservative views if they don't service the agenda/image of Dear Leader.
But ultimately I don't particularly care. I'm not a whiny little baby, and if people need to create such an echo chamber in the service of a child rapist, so be it. That is their prerogative, and all the more power to them. You hilariously replied as if I'm licking my wounds and stomping my feet demanded my voice in that sub, when all I was doing is pointing out that bringing up that extreme example of moderator overreach, but then not using it was a bit comedic.
>The problem is default subreddits handing out permabans over political opinions.
Sounds tough for you. I can see why you are getting banned. But, you know, any sub can ban people for their own policies, even just that they don't like the energy you bring to a sub. There is a bizarre subtext to your comment that is a sort of "/r/conservative is ours, stay away, but also we are entitled to our views in other subs...because, default or something". Pretty telling.
You can see that I am getting banned for no other reason than liberals like yourself disagreeing with my opinions.
I never even participated in /r/conservatives, I am merely pointing out that it is hardly relevant whether /r/conservatives has anything to do with conservatives.
You, and I imagine many other complainers, are obviously disqualified from participating there from the start. That is not a problem.
What is a problem is that many moderators, just like you, seem to think default front page subreddits or country subreddits are a place for liberals only where you should get to ban conservatives.
The entire basis of your argument was that it is for conservatives, so non-conservatives should be banned. And FWIW, I am classically a conservative. An actual conservative, not the cult of personality sort. In this new era suddenly I'm some weird liberal.
>many moderators, just like you
Like me? LOL, I'm not a moderator on Reddit, and can't fathom wasting my time like that. But, eh, people have their own hobbies.
And I've been banned on a number of "liberal" subs like worldnews, because of the aforementioned conservative foundations of my views. And...eh...I sob into my pillow a bit and move on. There are numerous other news subs, and I can make a /r/conservativeworldnews or something and compete for hearts and minds. Whatever.
That is what it says in the subreddit description and name, not my personal opinion of its content.
There are not numerous other mainstream news subs where you would not get banned for conservative opinions. In fact I believe worldnews may be the most conservative leaning one. I know that /r/news is far more left.
You don't think that's a problem with the platform?
Worldnews is only "conservative" in its zealously pro-Israel position. On a number of other topics it is very left-leaning in moderation. On immigration, for instance. As a classic conservative I actually believe in strong borders and that immigrants need to be in service of the citizens of a country and align with its values, which put me at odds with that pro-Israel but also pro-mass migration sub.
Regardless, and to rehash, the foundation of your position was that conservatives have their own place and non-conservatives should be banned on sight to give them their zone. But it isn't a conservative sub, it's a Donald Trump cult subreddit. Which everyone knows at this point -- it certainly isn't a secret -- but again I only brought it up because it was so comedic to mention that sub but not offer as an example of absolutely insane subreddit moderation.
If there is a problem with moderation on reddit, /r/conservative is the perfect example of power tripping moderation and an inability for casual visitors to understand how one-sided the perspective has been curated to be. Again, I only pointed out how hilarious it was to mention that sub, but only to criticize other subs.
>You don't think that's a problem with the platform?
It is a reality on any curated or moderated site (including HN). Every single human on this planet has biases and agendas and conflicts of interest.
Should every sub have a firehose of moderated away comments and or banned users and their reasons? Sure, probably, in the same way that HN has showdead. I mean, there's going to be a lot of heinous stuff among it, but it would make for a fascinating analysis.
EDIT: Every comment I made suddenly got a -4 applied to it, which is kind of funny in the context of this discussion. I am 100% convinced that HN has "super arrow" users, though this has never been disclosed or detailed. But, eh...
All your examples are hand-wavey and and follows a stereotypical right-wing grieviences pattern, while still somehow trying to discuss polarisation in a neutral manner. You also suggest in another comment in this thread that Twitter is somehow a better place, suggesting a pretty significant lack of nuance.
I don't expect to see any, but I'd certainly be curious to see what posts that got you banned or admonished so I can form my own opinion on them.
You seem to focus a lot on the examples that I provided (and my opinion of Twitter?) and not so much on the content of my comment or the general topic of the conversation.
Could you motivate why this is relevant and what your counter point would be? I'm genuinely curious!
I'm just continuing the thread of conversation? And also because figuring out biases is basic critical thinking? Especially relevant in this kinda thread.
Furthermore, I'm sick and tired of self-created right-wing narrative of censorship when they're ever so eager to do it to the fullest possible extent they can with their current powers and societal acceptance. And then we're not just talking about random people being mean to you on Twitter, but government power. All while leaning on a narrative of "We're just doing what you did before" that they've created themselves by endless repetition.
I understand, and while I don't fully agree I do agree that having some insight into biases could be relevant since moderation choices are always subjective.
I would prefer not to link my Reddit account to my HN account furthermore it's common for comments to be deleted at a ban so I'm unable to give you the exact comments but happy to provide insight into any (perceived) biased! I have voted D66 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrats_66) during the last elections, I'll let you do your own assessment of their standpoints.
I understand your frustration about the (perceived) narrative of censorship. But I think we can agree that censorship of _viewpoints_ (no matter who it's coming from) is a bad thing.
Unfortunately that seems to be rather rampant on Reddit and is the main point in my original post. As others have pointed out /r/conservative also seems to suffer from bad moderation so this seems more like an issue with Reddit than something coming from a particular political flank.
> I would prefer not to link my Reddit account to my HN account
Understandable, no worries.
> I have voted D66 [..] during the last elections
I've been seeing sentiments like this before but I don't value them high because what matter is what people do and decide when things becomes hot and their professed principles need to be actually proven.
As an anecdote, and yes, I know it's an extreme example, but it's interesting to me and brings the point home: When listening to an audio book (it's on Audible if interested, recommended!) a while back that compiles a bunch of interviews with defendants of the Nuremberg trials, a surprising amount of them suggested, paraphrasing; "I was actually a liberal before the war!" (and also a strange amount of teachers curiously!).
The audio book sounds interesting, could you share the title?
I understand your point about deciding and acting when things become hot but shouldn't we place political vote(s) above comment(s) on social media? Realistically I would hope that the average voter in Europe does not encounter a "hot" situation where his or her morals will be tested as they were during the second world war.
Yet what we vote for influences real world actions, what we say online might influence one or two opinions slightly.
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.
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).
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.
Last time I logged into Twitter to delete my account, many months post Musk, I was presented immediately with disturbing videos of both people and animals beating beat up in the "For you" tab.
And let's not ignore the owner of the site posting inflammatory/hateful/violent rhetoric.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
But if that's your twitter experience then you have a very well curated feed and on top of that are somehow able to side-step the stuff that Musk pushes really hard.
While Twitter has many issues, I still find value in it and I figured that a counter point to the common narrative would add value to the discussion.
I would love a LLM curated social network where I can drive the content that I see by adjusting the prompt to ensure that only high quality, fact based content is presented to me.
While no doubt not perfect and accounting for LLM biases (at scale) is not trivial this seems doable on a small (personal or small community) scale. Given the low cost of LLMs these days (queries on Flash 2.5 Lite or QWEN usually cost me a fraction of a cent), this might actually be a pretty cool weekend project!
At the end of the day both Reddit and Twitter are American companies and algorithmic feeds for users in the US can end up being significantly different from those in other countries.
Trump, Musk and Kirk are all Americans. The topics of the thread was American congress, Rep. Comey’s and how Musk changed twitter.
Imo, assuming you are not talking about what Arabs or whoever outside of America say about it was reasonable. Especially since your comment seemed to talk about American political environment.
> While Twitter has many problems it does seem to do a reasonable job of not promoting hate and violence towards a large audience.
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.
---------------
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.
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.
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.
> There may be an attempt to coerce these platforms to start moderating in a way that's more favourable to Trump.
That’s the real comedy about this; when we like it censorship is good, when we don’t like it (Covid shutdown, anti vax, Jan 6th) censorship is bad. The double standard is shocking, yet completely normalized.
Besides any attempt to end violent rhetoric has to start with POTUS himself, theater exactly what it is.
I mean, this view of censorship is a little black and white.
Simply put in reality some censorship of some kind or I can simply 'win' by screaming really loud so no one else can even get a word in about their view.
The paradox of tolerance tells us that any view that intolerant of the existence of another person for simply existing should not be allowed as it is a terminal case. Of course electing the most violent and intolerant person we could find means we're going to have a hard time.
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.
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.
>They've now been asked to appear in front of Congress to address concerns about politically motivated violence being incited through their platform
Funny how for the last 30 years of right wing violence/extremists far exceeding left wing nothing was done at all about it, no questions asked. Hush hush, don't talk about gun control or the real causes of these peoples' actions.
But then the year that left wing violence finally exceeds right wing, they all start crying that it's unacceptable and something needs to be done about it.
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.
Anyone who can't see that is blind on the right eye, which is unfortunately a common phenomenon in certain circles nowadays.
How can we know that this or that example of speech is illegal if there are no charges and no trial? This rule by corporate fiat is exactly what we don’t need. It lacks democratic oversight. To say nothing of the way that disingenuous claims of “political violence” is being used to suppress legitimate dissent in our country.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
This all may be well and good but the reality is that Reddit's rules against 'advocating for violence' don't really map out to any laws in the real world.
Like, on Reddit you're technically not allowed to say "Man, I'm so glad that Adolf Hitler guy is dead."
To my knowledge it is not illegal to say something like that (anywhere you want to live anyways)
I think that a world where people are free to talk about how they're glad horrible tyrants are dead is a better world than the one where they aren't free to express those ideas.
You wouldn't want to live in an America where it wasn't legal to condone the death of Osama Bin Laden, would you?
Your best example of a "historically efficient way to solve political problems" is a 4 year civil war that killed more than half a million people and, after all that, still left African Americans as second-class citizens for a century after?
We can theorize about the non-violent path to emancipation, and the speedy path to legal equality.
But it's counterfactual. It took severe violence plus 100 years to get there. Plus another 60 (yikes) to get to where we are today.
That's horrible! But nothing about that reality suggests to me that there was a less-violent or speedier way to get there. Governments are made of people.
Getting there was a worthwhile goal. I don't think there's a "but at what cost?" debate here.
So it sure doesn't feel "efficient", but it might be the "most efficient possible" in the human world.
If you want to go there, all governments and their laws (and thus politics) are predicated on their monopoly on violence, and civil society and the rule of law cannot exist without violence. Therefore all politics is violence and all political problems are also violence problems.
I do not want to go there. I made comment about huge amount of violence slavery in Americas required daily back then. Slavery was violence in amounts completely incomparable to what you are trying to equate with it.
Moreover, that sentiment was literally expressed by slavery opposition back then. Afaik, the sophistry about "any government is violence therefore, it is the same, que" was not all that much thing back then.
> 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.
Capturing moderation of a subreddit has long been a strategy of marketing agencies.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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:
> What experience do you have modding such channels and the reddit community?
> 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.
> 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.
> Lots of concerns here.
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.
- Spend time having to do some really thankless work
- Don't really have a regular work schedule
So what kind of person is going to do it?
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.
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.
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.
There should be a public service campaign telling users something like "Even in the best case scenario, the moderators are weirdos. Most likely they're shills".
People with careers, families, friends and hobbies are mostly not going to spend their limited free time being a digital janitor for an anonymous online community.
People sitting alone in their apartment with nowhere to go and nothing to do and no one to spend time with, however, might find that being a Reddit moderator gives them a hobby, a sense of purpose, and feelings of power, importance or significance that they otherwise never get in real life.
Someone should make a social media site with inverted dynamics- users who only spend a few minutes per day on the site and post once every few weeks should be treated as the influential power users, while the people lurking and scrolling for 10 hours per day are deprioritized.
But what if they do get paid, by a competitor? It's very easy to DM a mod and tell them they will get x amount if they skewer the odds in your favor or blast your biggest competitor.
What makes you think this doesn't happen? I can almost guarantee it does. If I were willing to pay a Reddit mod off and I saw unfavorable coverage for my brand I'd absolutely try to win the mod over by paying them more than the competitor is paying.
What's kind of crazy about this is in many lines of business you must disclose payment for advertisement. Be interesting to make this a civil law case and sue moderators for lack of disclosure.
Reddit being Reddit wasn't a problem until it became a source of truth and subsequently afforded consensus and an unwarranted sheen of credence by Agentic AI. As the author beautifully (albeit somewhat nihilistically) summarises:
"We have to remember that Reddit isn’t just Reddit anymore. The powers that be have decided that Reddit is infallible, a reliable set of training data for LLMs, and should be featured fucking everywhere."
Agreed, Reddit as a source of truth is the issue. Who in the their right mind would look at Reddit as whole and say that is an open, unbiased community focused on true and accurate information. And as the article and comments in this very thread show how moderation and its application within Reddit are "contaminated" which is a very good way to describe the situation.
Social media should operate under open protocols, including moderation. Choosing moderation should be client-controlled.
These companies burn through VC money to build systems with network effects then turn around and effectively extract rent. Rent extraction is economically parasitic and anti-productive. This is exactly the sort of thing the government should address by mandating open protocols.
There's no way to report a malicious sub as far as I can tell. I've been contacted by scammers that look very legit with the green Mod badge that shows in DMs.
We need to separate the web into data, identity, and moderation.
Users need to become aware that they're not using platforms, they are subscribing to moderator control.
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.
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.
Surely bad actors leave a fairly clear data trail. Are there no analytics being used to track this sort of behaviour? Much of the scale of this comes from being able to do it with impunity. If bad actors were exposed, even after the fact, it would be a deterrent to others.
> 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.
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.
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 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:
> “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.
> “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.”
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.
Another discussion about this:
“Six powermods control 118 of the top 500 subreddits”
Ghislaine Maxwell was maybe one of these powerful mods. But it is another contested conspiracy theory.
Evidence pasted:
The Name “Maxwellhill”
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.
Posting Activity Stopped the Day of Her Arrest (actually 2 days before, when she began wrapping her phone in aluminum)
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.
Gaps in Posting Line Up with Real-Life Events
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.
Moderator of Massive Subreddits
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.
The Content
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.
Auto Deletion and Censorship
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?
No Denial from the Account
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.
The poster also uses many British expressions in their writing, and listed British foods as their favorite foods in one post.
Mods of r/WorldNews which is infamously compromised by paid agents demanded her posts be deleted from other subreddits.
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 grand conspiracy theories, which require secret coordination on implausible scales.
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.
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: https://coagulopath.com/ghislaine-maxwell-does-not-have-a-se... 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.
> But it’s not.
> 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.
> Additionally, here’s evidence that /u/maxwellhill made a post inside a private subreddit, nine days after the “Tr45son” one.
> 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?
That's from the link.
I stopped posting to Reddit in December 2015 and haven't been back since. David Bowie died a few days later 10 January 2016. Am I David Bowie?
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.
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.
Thanks. It wasn’t AI btw. I found this interesting comment analyzing the article you shared https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29898523 (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)
You don't have to be a moderator to poison the well.
Post a shitload of bad faith attacks and slander. Not as a root comment. You don't have to actually relate to the parent at all, you're just trying to get your talking points out there. If someone calls you out? Gish gallop never actually addressing their comments. It's another opportunity for you to spew whatever bullshit you want.
If they follow you around and get more engagement/up votes? Block them. Now you are free to continue to post whatever BS you want without any of those pesky fact checkers.
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.
The model only works because of the subject matter filtering 99% of potential users. One good moderator can’t possibly scale to a network the size of Reddit.
Isn't dang a paid employee? If so, incentives are different. Its a day job that he could get fired from if he deviates from his main duties. (dang you are pretty decent don't get fired please).
Heh, according to the other guy he could get fired and replaced with AI because of his ego. For the less than subtle, I wasn't implying that it was good or bad. I was just pointing out the irony of criticizing centralized moderation on a site with centralized moderation.
As for whether or not pay makes a difference, I think you probably have a point, but I'm sure there's still wiggle room there.
There are lots of very large subreddits that are prolific at shadowbanning people -- you might think you're participating in the conversation for quite a while and people just aren't upvoting you or responding to you for whatever reason, and your posts aren't visible at all. /r/worldnews is very free with them, for example.
> What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.
I don’t see this as a big a problem as you do.
As soon as you solve this, then you have the issue of people you see as good actors being ousted and having their influence taken down. If the bad guys can be silenced then so can the good guys and then it’s just a matter of how we figure out the good guys and the bad guys!
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.
I can't say who, because the motherfucker is on this website and will instantly deny it all.
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?
Reddit has problems with moderation being too easy and too difficult.
It is very easy to ban someone. Making the ban permanent and combining this with the moderator blocking the person (so they can't send messages), there's no appeal process.
Another part is that for any sub of reasonable volume, trying to actively moderate and shape beyond banning the most egregious actors is difficult. Deleting and locking posts for a finer level of moderation is time consuming. The judgement calls of "when is this going off the rails?" become more snap over time.
With the time consuming nature of actually moderating a sub and the ease of just banning someone - moderation becomes the policy of whoever has the most time. The stereotypical variations of this are the paid social media manager who's job it is to scrub anything positive of a competitor or negative about their brand, or a person who is moderating because of a deep interest in the subject but with strong opinions too.
With multiple active moderators, the most extreme views of each in turn become the overall "moderation philosophy" (and if those views are opposed the oldest one wins).
Combined with the echo chamber nature of the message board, the more and more extreme stances become the dominant stances.
To try to present a consistent approach to moderation (Reddit has gotten burned by inconsistent responses many times in the past) it appears that Reddit.inc is trying to be completely hands off. That in turn means that it takes extreme situations for corporate to get involved - often long after it's been a problem that they've been alerted to. Having let the problem fester for so long, when something is done, it tends to be very heavy handed, lopsided, and generates a significant amount of discontent that spreads elsewhere.
So, you've got a site that hosts thousands of message boards, that inevitably grow more and more partisan to one extreme or the other, are mostly facades for a corporation, or propaganda for a political organization.
It is impressive that it has remained "stable" for as long as it has.
I think one of the most telling facts is that pro-Novati poster u/Ok-Donuts has posted numerous comments that are clearly a violation of all norms but seems to be immune to moderation.
Such accusations are a dime a dozen and almost always false. (I myself have been accused of being people I'm not.) It's simply a fact that there are people who think alike or who form alliances or kneejerk defenses of someone.
In any case, Novati is not acting like a disinterested moderator.
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.
So not much of a personal payoff, right? UNLESS you’re the kind of person that thrives on drama, conflict and power trips.
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, https://www.reddit.com/r/MattressMod/comments/1c28g7b/recent...
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.
Its worth any maintainer to be familiar with these methods to build up defences. With a few sock puppet accounts a single person could do it on their spare time. A nation state or criminal full time enterprise could do several attacks.
It's scary and immoral but I find it fascinating too. Like the dark side of the how to win friends books.
Apart from getting the existing mod team to hand over to you, you can also petition to the reddit admins. For example, there is a process to replace inactive mods and this could be used to take control of a subreddit with existing users.
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.
it's surprising that this feature remains relatively unknown. the article doesn't seem to be directly aware of it. I recently requested a fairly important subreddit which had been taken over by mods of a competing to sub and locked down to prevent competition, and they gave it to me immediately
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.
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.
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!).
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.
The LLM aspect of this, I think shows both a common weakness and an opportunity.
If you suspect something is a commonly held misconception, frequently asking a LLM about it is close to useless, because the abundance of text repeating the misconception (it is common after all) just makes the model repeat the falsehood. Asking the model to apply a more balanced view quite often triggers an iconoclastic antagonism which will just give you the opposite of whatever the commonly held opinion. I have had some success in asking for the divergence between academia and public opinion on particular issues.
Models are still very bad at determining truth from opinion, but these are exactly the times when we need the models to work the best.
There may be an opportunity if there are enough known examples of instances like this story for a dataset to be made where a model can be taught to identify the difference between honest opinion and bad faith actors, or more critically identify confidently asserted statements from those supported by reasoning.
Unfortunately I can see models that can identify such falsehoods being poorly received. When a model can say you are wrong and everybody around you says you are right, what are the chances of people actually considering the possibility that the model is, in fact, correct?
> Models are still very bad at determining truth from opinion, but these are exactly the times when we need the models to work the best.
Suppose models could determine truth and opinion. How would anyone go about training that into the model? Even in unsupervised, adversarial, whatever training scenarios you still need some kind of framework to discern between the two. Academic manuscripts? There are decades of publications built upon "discoveries" later retracted or shown to be falsified.
How would you build the truth/opinion vector(-s) with impartial objectivity?
> <...> a model can be taught to identify the difference between honest opinion and bad faith actors, or more critically identify confidently asserted statements from those supported by reasoning.
You have a confidently asserted statement {from an industry veteran, backed by nothing but credibility}, and a statement supported by reasoning{, which is in turn supported by... implicit assumptions, verging on wild guesses and exaggerations}. Do you see a reasonable way to somehow embed the context in curly braces in any part of the LLM pipeline without nullifying the need for the LLM itself?
On that I disagree. LLMs are not simple Markov chains.
They may fail at a lot of logical tasks, but I don't think that is the same as exhibiting no logic.
Getting even slightly respectable performance on the ARC-AGI test set, I think shows that there is at least some logical processing going on. General intelligence is another issue entirely, but there's definitely more than nothing.
Based my on following the bootcamp industry for several years, it's a bit of a stretch to attribute Codesmith's decline to one moderator. Thanks to state regulations around for-profit schools, you can actually watch a decline in their graduate outcomes.
They claimed that 90% of graduates were employed in the field in 2021. That number dropped to 70% by 2022. It dropped to 42% by 2023. That's where their reporting stops.
Keep in mind that every bootcamp plays games with their job numbers. Some hire their own graduates, which boosts numbers. Some disqualify students from being counted, claiming that they're not really job seeking. So I wouldn't take Codesmith's numbers at face value unless you do a deep dive into their methodology, but the downward trend is revealing.
In the article, Codesmith hand-waves about a "slowdown in the bootcamp market." That's certainly one way of saying, "Most of our graduates don't get jobs." Perhaps if Novati hadn't criticized Codesmith, they could have kept signing students up, even if they failed to deliver. Or their decline in signups would have happened anyway. I think people outside of tech are more aware today that code bootcamps are generally a grift.
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.
I've also just been using reddit for far too long. It's gotten to the point where I sometimes feel like I've seen all of the internet, because I recognize way too many videos/posts/stories/cool facts/etc as ones I have seen before.
Agreed, "mods" binging on their little power is a problem everywhere in society, and in Reddit it's made even worse by the fact they are hiding behind their screen
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 : https://medium.com/@klaudibregu/hugstonone-empowering-users-...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 (https://search.google.com/search-console/)
My website never served any of that. You got to stop using this very well known techniques by associating further names (knowing perfectly that HN comments get indexed very fast).
The domain in question Sverken.se was always used for science or respectable business.
Please refrain mentioning otherwise as I repeat, at any point my company website did such thing. Whoever keep associating them further is doing so by malicious intentions.
you're seeing ghosts. the person you're replying to is trying to help you. if your website is serving the title "Domina eskort : hitta prostituerade på nätet" in Google then that's something you should be able to very simply fix
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.
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.
Yes, I understand that. I don’t think the sverken guy does. You have to wonder why Google is
prioritising porn and prostitution search results for him…
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.
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.
Stop gaslighting yourself via llms. You are pretty close to a delusion. I looked at the history of those supposed super models. It's literally all made up vibe llm bullshit and the people that told you so on reddit and huggingface took the time to actual proof it to you. You might be the first example of AI psychosis that I've seen in the wild. Wild.
And that's the problem with this interweb lark, made worse by aggregators who's algorithms can be gamed, and now we have stochastic LLMs adding to the remix, how do we know what is true?
The narrative related here is frighteningly believable, and, no doubt, so were all the reddit posts.
The difference between the narrative described by this narrative, and the narrative related in the narrative, is that one is death by a thousand cuts, the other either a well deserved take-down or an undeserved attempt at one.
I can't tell the difference, but reddit should be able to.
So this is really about whether reddit sees it's reputation as an asset to be monetized in the short-term, or invested in for the long-term. This is the classic tension between the brand manager and the brand guardian, maximize the cashflow or maximize the balance sheet value, and tells you almost everything important about a company's core culture.
How reddit handles this, it could be argued, will define reddit going forwards.
Sadly, Reddit has become a disease upon "normal" society.
Also, sadly, is that it is extremely addictive; it is my version of YouTube shorts or TikTok (which I do not use). It is so easy to say "I'm just going to browse for a few minutes", and have it turn into MUCH longer than a few minutes. Those darn cute cat videos!!!
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.
As an extreme example of this, the Iran subreddit is 100% run by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Any opinion wavering from official state messaging is moderated out of existence. Reddit seems to happily tolerate this kind of thing across its platform on many levels.
Same is the case with many of the groups relating to India. Some of these groups are clearly run by proxies of the Indian govt and shutdown any criticism of India or the government.
This isn't limited to reddit - normal forums and discord also suffer from mods with overgrown egos who treat maintaining the order as personal fight of good versus evil where they're of course the omnipotent gods of truth you can't argue with.
What is particularly specific to reddit is that subs associated with big media titles, companies etc. originally were ran by normal people, fans so to speak but at some point become marketing tools with entrusted mods whose job is to make sure no criticism of any kind - even the slightest is present. Some communities moved elsewhere, some gave up and some pretend everything is as it used to be.
There are niche places on reddit with little moderation, where actual votes people cast on posts are the moderating tool but even there, some hijackers tend to appear. Their MO is to spew dangerous content, make sub locked and then gracefully arrive as saviors who are from that point in control of what's actually posted.
It's not just moderation, it's the site admins themselves. I used to moderate a fairly large subreddit in my spare time years ago but the site admins not only did little to support you but would actively work against you at times as well. Just became completely not worth it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is it? I didn't notice any real issues besides crypto scam bots spamming comments with their conversations. Or do we count "influencers" peddling sponsored junk?
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.
It’s not a bad thing. People on there, if you piss them off in a discussion, will go find your old posts and downvote them and in some rare cases harass you by replying or worse put two and two together to doxx you.
Not sure what you mean. They can still do all that even if the profile is set to private. It doesn't hide your posts and comments from Google. They are hoovered up just the same.
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.
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.
> It’s highly unusual to have some sort of judicial process.
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.
Really depends on who the mods are. I got two bans on reddit:
First one:
In a programming sub, as there was over 10 years a rather known bug. Typical discussion goes off and using the bug as a example of issues that never get fixed in the language.
Short term sub banned for breaking the rules. The stated "broken rule" was one of those very broad one's where you can hit any discussion with. Appeal the ban, stating that my comments are based on facts. Pointed to the github, the 10 year long discussion. No answer beyond "you are perma banned for breaking the rules".
Got private contacted by one of the main developers of the language, as he noticed my banned status and was unable to get a answer from me.
We gone over the bug in PMs. Bug got assigned to somebody and fixed. Thanks for fixing that 10 year old bug.
That was my first experience with mod overreach. But that did not undo the ban for "being right".
Second one:
In a specific country sub, i noticed there was factual proven misinformation. Corrected the user in a lengthy post, with multiple links to news articles. Short term ban by a mod, for "misinformation".
Appealed the ban, got into a whole discussion with the sub mod. Told him that he is using his own opinion, not the facts. Stated multiple times my news sources from my post (not entertainment news but professional news), inc reuters.
Stated that he is not following the rules by using his person opinion as basis for the temp ban and asked for escalation of the ban review. Asked to show what rule i broke (never got a answer beyond his personal opinions).
Other mod came in, stated that i "attacked the mod" by asking for a escalating of the review, and by accusing the mod of not being neutral (i mean, using personal opinion vs official news websites = your not neutral).
Perma ban ... Kafka lol. As you can guess, never got a answer to what "misinformation" that i broke.
/Insert slap head emoji ...
What did the mods gain? Maybe that short dopamine hit for "winning" by banning somebody. Sounds more like losing if you need to ban based upon your opinion, and not the facts, but hey...
O, made new account, and back on sub. Never got banned again. Did i change my posting behavior. Nowp ... If i see misinformation, i come with receipts (links to actual reputable news articles).
Its like, what do you gain? Its just power tripping people that love to mod. There are good mods out there but a TON of them are just nasty dopamine junkies, that want to "win arguments" with bans.
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 more need of a judicial process 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).
But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics)
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.
> But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics) so you're either there or nowhere.
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.
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.
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.
HN has problems but moderation being arbitrary isn't really one of them.
Yes, it does. Partly at least. It documents what rules/guidelines were violated, when and how often. In terms of transparency that's miles above reddit. I have also seen dang and Tomhow (?) repeatedly call out users for violating the guidelines - they do it openly and react to discussions. Again, miles above reddit. They edit headlines when the original titles are misleading and comment openly on it. Transparency. I haven't been here for long but the traceability of moderation on this site is laudable, so is their restraint when it comes to commenting on topics/users - and I should know: I have moderated a software forum for over 10 years and had my fair share of temptations.
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/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).
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.
I learned a simply truth about social media. When you answer a person in a discussion, are you answering the person or the world?
When you are answering the person, and the person has seen your response by time or counter answer, there really is no need to keep your post alive beyond a few weeks.
By then the topic is already on page 10 and only of interest to google / bots / AI.
Is this a problem for the future? Not really ... if the answer is important like i want the world to keep seeing it, you keep it undeleted.
If you did a product review, keep it alive, but just answer people, or having discussions that have no relevants a year from now, just get rid of them.
But lets be honest, most of our answers are often discussions and not some deep zen state thinking exercises that everybody needs to see years from now.
The world has not gotten better and your faced with a dilemma. Reject social media totally and avoid all the mess of people using your past post history, bots and AI/LLMs eating your data non-stop, or potential profiling. Let alone if governments change...
Or use this trick ... there really is no perfect answer and you do what you feel is good for you.
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.)
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.
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.)
Yes, they can and that's how it's set up. Each community makes their own rules and can choose who participates.
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.
Leaving aside everything else wrong with that, that would be trivial to abuse, especially 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.
That's pretty crazy. I've been on reddit since its inception and have never been banned from pics despite having posted on all kinds of unsavory subreddits over the decades.
If I cared about it. I might want to find a set of subs which when you simultaneously post in will result in largest number of bans. Would be interesting experiment. Exactly how many posts you need to get banned from largest number of sub-reddits...
Reddit does have global rules about deceptive content manipulation (e.g. voting rings, bot farms etc.)
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
(I realize that it's absurd and inherently unjust that the legal process is so expensive.)
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.
> 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.
I don't disagree with any of this, but I'll note that in addition, 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Argh, there isn't one - is the message we're trying to get you to accept.
Just because reddit is reliable vs its peers != absolutely reliable.
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.
You cannot simply look at a review and say oh yeah that's a good review of someone who just wants to help others.
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.
With the phrase "the most reliable" which is a phrase to mean the subject you're describing is inherently reliable. Meaning you can read the reviews on reddit differently than amazon, yelp, and the rest. If reddit reviews can't be read differently vs others, why "most reliable"?
You're trying to walk a line that says reddit not authoritative and yet reliable. In this specific context authoritative also comes to mean reliable. So we're at reddit is not reliable yet reliable?
I'm saying it can't be. The well has been poisoned and it's not safe to pray it didn't mix. That you need to treat reddit with the same skepticism lest you be taken for your money. Perhaps you don't agree, which is fair then we agree-disagree.
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.
Yes the incentive alignment is what I was referring to when I mentioned that prediction markets have their own issues.
I'm not convinced wash trading is a huge problem as it's mostly about generating fake volume. The particular linked example is bad too because Trump did end up winning the election.
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
Ehhhhh I agree and yet also disagree (it's fun though).
Yes they were ruined by being promoted by algo changes, but do I blame google directly? For me, no.
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.
Then the money grabbers showed up.
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.
So then why haven’t the higher credibility people in each niche set up an alternative?
Why let reddit drag down the credibility of well everyone in their niche by association. Even if it’s only a tiny bit per year, that adds up over time.
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.
EDIT: I don't know why I'm getting so many downvotes, nothing I said is controversial at all.
You're proving my point. At least in the US half of the country is right wing. If you want an accurate crowd-sourced opinion you need to take that into account, regardless of your own beliefs.
But facts in real life are rarely that isolated and provably correct or not. Something like Tylenol vs autism or Covid lab leak theory is hugely emotionally charged and people get bogged down in details and then questioning the experts and the expertise and then there's always the discussion of what even are experts. It's horribly exhausting and hey, what do you think about the ice wall theory? Facts in the real world are fuzzy and dependent on the bubble you inhabit. Does chocolate cause acne or heartburn or gout? Is a glass of wine bad for you? This is the Internet, so someone can chime in with a list of studies on the latest facts about whichever of those, but the question you have you ask yourself, is in what way does it matter how correct someone actually is? If I say the store is closed because it's going to snow, and I'm the store owner, and I'm totally wrong about that, it doesn't matter that I'm totally wrong because as the store owner, my store is closed. I look like an idiot tomorrow when it hasn't snowed, but me looking like an idiot doesn't open the store for you to buy what you need.
There's a saying, attributed to Max Planck: "science advances one funeral at a time". Sure, there's facts. Avogadro's number is a specific fact and is incontrovertible. But how about gravity? I mean, 9.8 m/s² is it and that's also a specific fact, but then you start looking up into the heavens and what's this dark energy and now there's dark matter and okay so MOND's been disproved?
Facts also have framing. If you pay attention to the incidence of crimes on the nightly news, it feels like society is falling apart, but then you look at the bigger picture and real statistics and things aren't actually that bad?
In the sloppy real world of facts that are messier than 2+2=4, we don't have anything to go on other than what most people around us believe, and because there's only so much time in the day, as humans we emotionally believe whatever we want. There are some crazies who have spreadsheets output facts for them to bet on, and they make a lot of money off of that, but they're a minority.
It's possible for the majority opinion to be wrong and contradict hard facts that are grounded in reality. For a couple thousand of years the opinion was that the universe was composed of 4-5 elements (earth, water, air, fire, and maybe ether).
That is not true. Labels aren’t for normies. There’s a reason a lot of center-right people love Bernie. And it’s not because of your incorrect use of political labels.
Your comment was balanced and respectful and yet the reply was denigrating. "All right wing, or simply non-left wing opinions are conspiracies" is the implication. This site is very left wing also.
"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing."
No but it puts you on higher ground to discuss differences of opinion like adults instead of trading insults and treating each opposing side as an out group
>EDIT: I don't know why I'm getting so many downvotes, nothing I said is controversial at all.
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.
It wasn't off-topic. His response was to this statement: "the most reliable place to get a general crowd-sourced opinion on the internet" - on which his statement was perfectly correct if he just sticks to Western forums.
Ok: "any forum where there isn't a direct motive for product/service recommendation or ideological bias (and absent the moderator having a bias or strong opinion on that topic)".
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.
This gives the appearance 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.
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.
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.
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' 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.
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.
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.
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.
"Nested comments sorted by upvotes" is, for free and frank discussion, inherently far worse than non-nested in-line comments. With the latter there's no hive-mind effect, no consensus-seeking, no dopamine/approval-chasing. Also, traditional forums tended to encourage longer-form posts (which you can still see in places like Spacebattles), which naturally contained quite a lot of technical detail and pictures, whereas Reddit (and HN) are optimized for very short comments. In Reddit's case, smarmy one-liners, usually.
But the main problem, to repeat for emphasis, is that the upvote/downvote system (even if it's fair and used virtuously, and it usually isn't,) stifles disagreement and debate.
This is like the Linux discussion. (No its not the year of Linux no matter how much Windows 11 pisses you off)
"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.
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.
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.
Yes, the mod stopped posting publicly around the time she went to prison. That seems to have been the catalyst for the conspiracy theory.
But it was actually a couple days apart; he stopped posting before she went to prison. And he actually posted to some private subs, and was involved in some DMs, after he stopped posting publicly and after she went to prison.
There's really very little evidence other than a vague coincidence of when he left Reddit and when she went to prison, and the name.
And, like, if she were posting anonymously, why would she use that name?
It's basically just completely incoherent. Like many conspiracy theories, they take a lot of other random data points, and if you sift through and cherry pick enough data points you can find others that taken out of context look like coincidences. But that's just because you're cherry picking between two large distributions of data.
>It's basically just completely incoherent. Like many conspiracy theories,
These are absurdly strong claims. This isn't an incoherent theory... it's inconclusive, sure. Unprovable? Probably (difficult to imagine what would have to change to find out with certainty one way or the other).
It's incoherent. It simply makes no sense at all that Ghislaine Maxwell, a wealthy socialite, would post a bunch of stuff on Reddit for years to accumulate meaningless internet points, under something based on her own name, while somehow also trying to be anonymous.
This is a simply incoherent theory. There's no sense in it. You don't post "anonymously" under your own name.
It’s really not that hard to believe, rich people get bored and use the internet too you know. They’re just not that special and I find this narrative about how it couldn’t possibly be her really weird and deferential. We only need 33bits to deanonymise people on the internet, count the bits.
There's no need to respond to counter-evidence that can't be independently verified. The people claiming that (Reddit corporate, basically) have an interest in distancing themselves from her.
It's bad enough that one Reddit moderator can wield so much power with such impunity, but /u/spez handing over all of Reddit's data for LLMs to use has now poisoned the chatbots that so many are using in place of search engines.
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.
I feel like it was this way 10 years ago. Once r/TheDonald successfully gamed the system everyday I think people with interest took notice. Now you can be in a niche sub reddit that averages 40 comments on a post. Then a post that could be adjacent to some hot U.S. political wedge topic gets mentioned and there are 300 comments from users who never take part in the discussion. Even something very general like "students are protesting tuition hikes" the small city I live in gets posted and it gets flooded by people who never comment. If you hit a hot topic like Israel / Palestine, the Ukraine war you see it as well.
Reddit, Fackbook, Twitter, TikTok etc are the places where people get their information and form their options. That why the the wealthy and powerful are buying them outright, or paying to push their influence into every aspect of the conversation. Poisoning the well or "Flooding the zone with shit".
Reddit became what Digg was with MrBabyMan. Or actually something worse.
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.
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.
All of this for three customers? It doesn't add up and there are some missing pieces in the story.
It's widely agreed in your sub that you over post, are overly critical of CS, fail to moderate your friends (or possibly socks) like u/Ok-Donuts, and are generally a bad moderator and should step down.
Also you have failed to refute anything in the OP.
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.
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...
Then I can open up those people's LinkedIns and note down how they represent themselves.
Is that weird? I don't think so but you can decide, but it's not stalking and harassing.
If that's stalking then the guy who wrote the post was stalking the hell out of me.
P.S. - quit saying there are some missing pieces in the story 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.S. - Get a media consultant. Seriously, you suck at this.
> Get a media consultant. Seriously, you suck at this
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 not 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.
Codesmith and other affected should probably sue Michael for defamation, harassment and other charges, and try to get like $500 million in reparations.
I wonder what makes a platform like HN work, but not the others.
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:
Wikipedia
Quora
Stackoverflow (surprise, surprise!)
Reddit
..
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.
Getting paid means the mod has been vetted, is (presumably) being supervised in some way or reporting to someone, and thus is expected to adhere to some standard or protocol (however loose it might be). Getting paid comes with rules of the job and that alone makes paid moderation far more structured and with more potential for effectiveness than unpaid moderation.
I've asked myself this many times. It warrants a study.
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.
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.
All of this for what? Shareholder value? So Silicon Valley elites can get rich and force their shit ideas on everyone?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Downvoting prevents other people from seeing his comments. You need to upvote to make sure everybody sees "his own words", as he put it. That's for the common good.
> Any time you attempt to defend yourself in the main subreddit, posts get deleted. Or you’re accused of running a Reddit bot army.
Not sure what's the story from the other side, but...
One strategy to counter this could be buying ads on Reddit to expose this, with evidence to show of course. And if possible, place the ad right on the offending subreddit.
And don't forget, if you have enough evidence to show, you can always sue. So, do both at the same time and keep them busy.
Some times you can state facts and still be wrong in other ways.
Example:
If one side says "Hamas dresses as civilians" to excuse killing civilians, they're factually correct and criminal.
If someone then goes online and drops "Hamas dresses as civilians" they're factually correct and reinforcing a criminal's defense.
Anyway, the morality of IDF behavior is apparant to an impartial behavior by just considering the thought experiment that IDF doesn't killing Israeli civilians "just in case" they're Hamas in disguise. They only kill Palestinian civilians "just in case" they're Hamas.
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
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.
Many folks end up in r/zen after reading books like “Zen Mind, Beginners Mind” written by Japanese Zen Buddhists.
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.
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”.
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.
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 not 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.
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 "No Longer Weird: frequently recurring stories that have been retired from circulation: ... violence breaks out at peace conference ...".
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!
This really makes me mad. Codesmith was clearly a top tier bootcamp. I joined several of their public sessions when i was looking for a bootcamp and they were fantastic.
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?
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.
AI is as biased as humans are, perhaps even more so because it lacks actual reasoning capabilities.
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.
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.
I’ve no idea whether the allegations in this piece are true.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
When you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail and all that.
If this would happen to me I would go nuclear. I would probably not retaliate until there's evidence like the author listed. But when I do, I would duck and cover.
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.
TBH I don't think the goal is petty. I think there's a lot of money involved. That moderator runs a company in the space. Seems more about lining their pockets than revenge.
Power. Spending 5 hours a day spamming and commenting is extremely easy compared to actually doing something positive for society.
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.
Yeah. The mod of Seattle would ban anyone and everyone for the littlest things. Iirc, he was early on Reddit and had created the sub, and as the community grew his abuse got worse until there was a mass migration.
> The powers that be have decided that Reddit is infallible, a reliable set of training data for LLMs, and should be featured fucking everywhere.
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.
It was only a matter of time. Reddit has become a cesspool.
So the moderator of this Reddit group, has a company who directly competes with Bootcamps. What are Reddit policies on moderators competing commercial interests?
Could one person moderate r/azure while working for aws ?
Thinking of actually being moderator. Who outside industry would want to moderate such place? Probably for free... And I mean who would be such actually independent person.
Yeah, I don't doubt this story for a minute. Wish we could pin this thread to the top of Hacker News for an entire year, its that important. In the old days if you were rich you would just buy a paper or radio station. Now you become a Reddit mod... Crazy statement, but many use it to crowd-source info on products. That's powerful if you control it.
Forum dictators who are on your side can seem like a pretty nice thing, and the forum dictator of the canonical subreddit gets to curate a community that is on his side by design while everyone else is left to scramble for themselves in the wilderness.
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.
I would not underestimate how badly people make things part of their identity and see attacks against those things as attack against them. So it might be just moderators being overinvested in something on personal level.
Of course there will always be a mixture of things. Some of these people attacking could just be insecure people trying to justify their life choices through strangers (ton of those across the internet) but it is at such a scale and consistency that the stakes seem higher than that.
Very interesting that this got downvoted. Shouldn't even be controversial on HN. There might be an actual cult around this drug and not just a moderator issue.
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.
2. Influencer Paige Lorenze is a mod of nycinfluencer snark and she prolifically deletes all unflattering threads and specifically all photos of her from before her numerous plastic surgeries:
Also happens on YouTube. Mr Beast’s team deleted all comments on his videos (of which there were thousands) that mentioned or linked to those videos exposing alleged fraud by the Mr Beast group.
Err...I know I'm one of the olds and probably shouldn't be allowed to comment, but isn't the whole point of these sites to allow one to present and enforce a carefully curated public image, often completely divorced from reality?
I’m curious why you know about these cases off-hand.
I have the impression that there’s a certain type of user that likes to be a gadfly in communities to devoted to not particularly relevant or famous personalities.
My significant other follows influencers thus I heard about the Paige Lorenze controversy/lore.
I wouldn't say either of them is "not particularly relevant" as D4vd is super popular among GenZ on tiktok and has 30 million listeners and 4 million followers. Paige isn't as big but she is a well-known WAG dating some tennis bro and has a successful clothing brand that sells to the genZ crowd.
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.
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.
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.
No, it was 2018, but of those students, more than 50% are now/still in tech.
Edit: Well, that said, I still mentored recently, and the numbers for the one bootcamp I mentored for are about 50% over the last couple of years, which honestly seems pretty good considering the state of things, but that bootcamp has also skipped a couple of cohorts because of market conditions.
It is most definitely less rosy now, but I think the "the student is the main driver of success" aspect is still correct, IMO.
“The Story of Codesmith: How a Competitor Crippled a $23.5M Bootcamp By Becoming a Reddit Moderator”
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.
It's interesting if you are into those kinds of bots and interactions. If it was in my wheelhouse, I'd look. Otherwise, there's no reason to expect that content unless someone else points it out.
1) Article author did not reach out to Novati for comment.
2) Codesmith ran a misguided marketing campaign that ran afoul of Reddit auto-mods.
These seem like reasonable responses to me. Are they true? I don't know, but I would like reasonable discussion about it.
I really get the impulse to vent when reading about something so outrageous, and in a way this kerfuffle represents the arbitrary unfairness of power leveraged from the shadows, but is that happening here?
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.
You're right, and thanks for the note - gave me a chance to reflect. I think what I mean is more along the lines that while a right to reply would have been polite, it isn't required of a blogger, and wouldn't change the substance of the post much, which is largely about a pattern of behaviour rather than specifics. Michael's attempts to dismiss/discredit the post based on a process which generally only applies to the press is what sits badly with me.
Thank you for acknowledging! Most people I know don't have the guts to. Keep doing this!
Also, I was defending Michael, because I'm not a fan of witch-hunts. I truly believe the article is exaggerated, even if there are bits of truth. The author himself is a master affiliate marketer, it's a grey area to say the least. It wouldn't be difficult for me to "spin" some things he's done in a bad way, and make a 10 page article out of it, but that would be wrong.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Yet they market themselves as similar outcomes to elite grad schools and it's very reasonable to challenge them on their hyperbolic marketing.
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..."
Even though you have counter claims, you moderating the forum 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.
Yes there are two sides to every story, but in no universe should you be the mod of that subreddit.
Even if we accept all your claims at face value, your behaviour in your capacity as the moderator of that subreddit was still immoral. However you feel about it, being a moderator is a voluntary responsibility which comes with an expectation of impartiality and service at the expense of, not in furtherance of, your personal goals.
At best, if everything you say is true, what you are doing is akin to proudly volunteering as a firefighter so that you can slow-walk the response if a fire is ever reported at the NXIVM HQ. Your crusade against NXIVM may be righteous, and it might even be universally considered a net good if its HQ were to burn down, but it would still raise a lot of eyebrows if it came out that you intended to use your position in that fashion.
edit: To be clear, I sympathise with your claim that you are being subjected to a one-sided hit, and am starting to feel uneasy with the dogpiling atmosphere that is building in this subthread. However, it is understandable to me why this is happening - fundamentally, Reddit has become a town square that is really not engineered correctly to be one. In a town square, people want to choose their leaders, but subreddits are by design "storefronts", in which leaders (moderators) choose their people. This tension is resolved by a very unpleasant jerry-rigged substitute for democratic control: the one way you can "vote out" a moderator (who has the backing or indifference of everyone above him) is to apply psychological pressure, or other harm (such as the reputational damage your company is no doubt taking as we speak), until they crack and resign. This is sort of democratic because larger fractions of the "electorate" can achieve it more easily, but even turning up to such a "vote" that you ultimately lose entails social violence.
It doesn't seem like you are willing to resign, nor to put your moderator status up for a community vote (if that could even be made fair, after you presumably banned a lot of would-be voters, and conversely could accuse the other side of botting/brigading). What other options do those who do not want the town square to be moderated by you have?
To be clear I agree with a lot of what you wrote here so this is just a small nit:
> What other options do those who do not want the town square to be moderated by you have?
Start and visit a new subreddit. This is an important bit that gets covered up by metaphors like "landed gentry" and "peasants". Don't like it? Vote with your digital feet. It doesn't come with any of the baggage and complication that an equivalent real life move would have. Just stop going there and go somewhere else. Yes it would be nice if folks were awesome and tried to be awesome. The reality is they aren't and subreddits are property owned by the mods. Luckily, you don't have to be there.
>> I'm the co-founder of an interview prep mentorship platform [...] my company's services so there is a small amount of overlap on the most experienced end of Codesmith and the least experienced end of Formation. <<
> 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.
Everything I can find online, including your post on reddit about the outage, says the outage was for 4 days. Not 3 weeks.
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.
do you think maybe they could have kept it up if they didn't layoff 80% of their staff because of your modding? reddit is essentially google results at this point, don't act coy.
Friend, take a look at how you're phrasing things. If we boil down your statement to just the facts we see:
* Industry wide layoffs are happening.
* This company had a layoff.
* This company did not tell their workers they were being laid off in advance.
But that's not how you phrased it. You dismissed concerns about your biases by saying there are industry wide layoffs, and then in the exact next sentence castigated codesmith for having a layoff. Those statements don't align, that everyone is having layoffs and it's no big deal, and codesmith is having layoffs and it's a big deal.
Futher you add charged language about no notice, which is perfectly standard, and an assertion you can't possibly know, about codesmith having "the most dedicated staff". That's just not something you have context to state and its only purpose is to inflame and paint the worst possible picture.
In the words of Ron Swanson: Son, people can see you
If their entire marketing strategy is Reddit. They deserve to die. They are failed company. If they were really good they would not need to astroturf reddit. Their students would be their best promoters and they would have line out of the door.
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.
a judge would def consider the extreme nature that’s occurred here. the number of posts is astounding, and the SEO damage could be monetarily accounted for.
A comment about them is still a post about them. This comment I'm writing, for example, is _also_ a post about what an unethical person you are and how your inability to understand or apologise for your behaviour says EVERYTHING we need to know about you.
Or would you say I didn't post what an unethical person you are, I only commented about it?
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?
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.
I could tell that all your code would be in private repo's before i even opened it. Zero open source contributions, and probably pushing comments so he can get a green every 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
You showed me yours, I'll show you 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).
I’m retired, and work on code all day, most days. I’m just a wee 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.
Here’s a fun GitHub tool[1].
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.
> Numerous other bootcamps have shut down. Codesmith's decline is predominantly an industry problem.
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?
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.
I compared the statement 'do this because it changed my life and the life of many others' to the type of language used in cult documentaries on HBO. I stand by that opinion.
Codesmith is not a sex cult. I can't believe I'm writing that sentence.
There were any number of less pejorative comparisons you could have made if that was all you wanted to say. I regularly see grandiose claims of life-changing benefits on everything ranging from mildly pointless and overpriced meditation retreats down to Toastmasters, and yet you chose the one entity whose main claim to publicity were things that got its leader-guru sentenced to 120 years in a max security prison.
> I compared the statement 'do this because it changed my life and the life of many others' to the type of language used in cult documentaries on HBO. I stand by that opinion.
This is ludicrous ... it's also the type of language used by all sorts of people in all sorts of situations. Mentioning a cult is the least charitable thing that can be said.
It's fine to participate in the thread and present your version of events, but we need you to observe the guidelines, which ask us to avoid fulmination and using capitalisation for emphasis.
> Both sides of the story need to be heard before making a judgement.
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?
I recommended a bunch of people go to Codesmith until February 2024, when the first signs of collapsed started.
Would posting to 20,000 people telling them that I was using multiple Slack aliases to 'steal students' from Codesmith's community - which was entirely and utterly false in every aspect of that statement - count under this definition?
Are you planning to write something up about it? It would be interesting to hear the other side that you’re hinting at.
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.
I might. I have hordes of documents. It's a really sad situation and very sad that he characterized this this way without even talking to me whatsoever.
Funny enough, one of my attorneys taught me a lesson a long time ago around this. Simplified, she said "only and idiot claims to have lots of documents" to support their action. Sure, it's the easy/lazy way to try and intimidate people with the lowest amount of knowledge about how things work. But anyone with the slightest clue knows 1) talk is cheap, 2) you don't need a lot of docs, you just need the one that matters, and 3) if you claim to have documents, you'll eventually have to produce them, and if you can't, you look like an idiot.
Maybe put another way...don't let your mouth write checks your body can't cash.
> Simplified, she said "only and idiot claims to have lots of documents" to support their action.
As our lawyer told us: "It does not matter what is said, what matters is what your can proof in court".
That life lesson has helped out multiple times in life, against people who made grand claims, and threatening legal action. But they all vanished when we pointed out some of our evidence. Its funny how fast opposing council tell their clients to drop it when evidence shows up.
What is the expression, the louder the bark, the lesser the bite? People who have proof, do not need to bark around on social media platform. They simply sue and get big fat settlements.
I believe the phrase that applies here is "put up or shut up". If you have hordes of documents to draw on as primary sources, then it should be pretty simple (but perhaps time consuming) to write a rebuttal.
just gonna guess here. Were you “invited” because you had signed up with Codesmith under an alias and then received a standard event invite? because it doesn’t sound like anyone at Codesmith would be personally inviting you.
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.
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.
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?
To be clear i'm a completely random guy with no skin in the game, just looking for answers.
[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.
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...
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Thanks for that. I've been through the guidelines a dozen times. Following them is really the best possible way to have genuinely interesting and constructive dialogue. My last account got banned so i've been trying to do better. It's amazing how much some good faith conversation can get you, i feel in the time i've been here it's helped me develop better patterns of thought and argument techniques, i would say the most important lesson i've learned is to debate in good faith as much as possible and being honest with yourself about what you know and don't know. Most of the users on this thread are just looking to shut michael down, and expressing their opinion that he's an awful person... It's really very tiresome and boring. I have enough confidence in people here that they can hear what he has to say and make their own judgement.
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.
“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.
I don't know about this particular case, but, generally... bad actor subreddit moderators have been an occasional thing for well over a decade.
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.
What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.
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.
(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.
They've now been asked to appear in front of Congress to address concerns about politically motivated violence being incited through their platform: https://oversight.house.gov/release/chairman-comer-invites-c...
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.
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.
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:
- /r/energy used to ban everyone in favour of nuclear energy
- 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.
- /r/UnitedKingdom banned me for critizing a government welfare program
- /r/assassinscreed banned me for critizing a character in their latest game
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.
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.
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.
> - 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.
You left out the fact that you can’t post to /r/conservative until the moderators there audit your post history and perform an interview with you to confirm your ideology matches theirs.
If someone does pass the test they’re allowed to comment. If they make a comment that disagrees with the message the moderators want to push, their commenting privilege is revoked.
It’s not a real subreddit. It’s a moderator-curated echo chamber. They run it like a propaganda outlet, only allow approved thought from approved commenters, and ban anyone who steps out of line with the mods.
That’s why every thread you view there will have “load more comments” buttons that never load anything: They remove more comments than you’re allowed to see.
If you say anything remotely controversial anywhere on reddit you will be hunted by a moderator of another sub and then targeted for banning.
I pointed out on a sub that the question on the 4473 (form to buy a firearm) asking if you are a drug user is a 5th amendment violation as it asks you to incriminate yourself to exercise a right.
An Ivy league lawyer, moderator of another sub, about a whole year later, found it, declared that it was illegal legal advice, then had my whole account nuked using his legal credentials to scare reddit into getting rid of me.
> You left out the fact that you can’t post to /r/conservative until the moderators there audit your post history and perform an interview with you to confirm your ideology matches theirs.
> If someone does pass the test they’re allowed to comment. If they make a comment that disagrees with the message the moderators want to push, their commenting privilege is revoked.
Be that as it may, i dont see how the solution to /r/conservative being a weird echo chamber, is for other subs to be an anti-/r/conservative echochamber. Seems like both are wrong, and two wrongs dont make a right.
I don't see an issue with it, if you are willing to put in the effort to swim in the cesspool that is /r/conservative you don't get to complain when other people find the smell objectionable.
Lets go down to /r/conservative and throw rocks at them for being dumb was a pretty popular activity for people. For anyone who has been on reddit for any length of time, it should be abundantly obvious why the sub needs extremely heavy moderation. That sub is like having an LGBTQ tent at a redneck festival.
> You left out the fact that you can’t post to /r/conservative until
You present this as if it were somehow evidence that somehow justifies the bans from the other unrelated subs.
There is no morally justifiable reason why having mainstream conservative viewpoints (which is to say, ones held by a very large fraction of the general populace) should bar someone from non-political participation in non-political subreddits.
The bans in fact are another symptom of the same cause: every kind of right-wing enclave on Reddit gets trolled constantly. The generally left-wing userbase does whatever they can to ostracize right-wingers, or perceived right-wingers. Which includes both banning them from other spaces, and mocking them in their own.
> It’s a moderator-curated echo chamber.
This describes every vaguely political or ideological themed subreddit. Except maybe the general r/politics, which might still be "letting the votes decide" if you don't have the "acceptable" views on every issue. I have literally seen subreddits that would ban people for "ableism" for using the word "stupid" to describe an idea or proposal. And that was like a decade ago and it was getting clearly worse year after year.
Could it be that sharing conservative ideas is against Reddit's community guidelines?
There are other subreddits with primarily right or moderate leaning communities and comments in those get deleted all the time with moderator messages saying they risk the entire subreddit getting taken down by Reddit simply for sharing basic conservative views.
This is not credible without evidence.
I can testify this is credible. You can prove this by trying it out yourself.
Your testimony isn't credible. You have made plainly false statements here.
Out of curiosity, what views? I'm trying to understand if Reddit is just ban happy against conservatives or if basic conservative views are really against reddits TOS
Trans related topics are expressly against TOC and enforced unless a subreddit is ruthless in removing any comments that aren't expressly positive and affirming. There is no room for nuance on this topic. Just giving an example.
I'm sure you can give us examples of these "basic conservative values" that gets entire subreddits banned off a platform run by a libertarian prepper who admires Elon Musk.
/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.
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?”
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.
I don’t know why the moderators of this sub do this, but the effects of their moderation are clear.
I've often posted on the internet at 4am local time before. How did you establish the posters were Russian or Iranian, other than by time zone? (4am London is working hours for around half the world population.)
Not denying that there are people in these countries who want to cause trouble on the internet. But there are many such people in all countries...
Fair question. The answer is that they didn’t bother hiding it. They literally posted in a whole bunch of Iranian subReddits and only Iranian subReddits. On this thread they were claiming they were British. Literally the first post of that kind, completely different to everything they had posted previously.
The clincher was that they deleted their account as soon as I pointed they were Iranian.
I’m going to guess they bought a Reddit account from someone without looking at the past history on the account.
There are huge influence operations basically on every national sub.
I found one on r/portugal, clearly coordinated network spreading political news of a certain persuasion.
R/donald became famous because the admins turned on national flags for users there revealing a significant percentage was Russian IPs without even a VPN. The Russian users called it “the mark of David” and compared it to Nazism.
Have you got a source for the national flags claim? I'm not sure that is a feature on Reddit. Most subreddits have custom flairs and some will let you choose a flair for your country, but afaik Reddit mods can't autodetect a poster's country of origin.
mods definitely can't, but admins probably can. GP said admins.
That said I have no idea if what GP said is true or not
I’ve never heard of Reddit revealing the nationality of members of any sub. Do you have a source for this?
It's crazy for me that it's not a well-known thing that Russia, Iran, China, North Korea and other countries are fueling the polarization of western politics using bots on EVERY RELEVANT social media. The right wing bots are kind of known, but a lot of people aren't aware of other things (e.g., TENET Media [1]), or that they are fueling left wing circles as well [2].
People believe that these countries would love to do that, but for some reason, they think they are not doing as much as possible.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19802
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/06/25/scottish-ind...
> There are huge influence operations basically on every national sub.
I believe you. But I've also often been accused of being a bot or working for an intelligence service when posting my own opinion in political discussions, not in coordination with anyone at all, and not pretending to be anything I'm not. I think the people accusing me of this did genuinely believe it too.
Typically people with long reddit histories aren't 'bots', though there are some cases.
What I typically saw was accounts that had a decent sized but very generic history, things like gaming or cooking. Then suddenly the accounts became very politically motivated over one particular thing. Then within a few weeks to a months the accounts were gone.
My assumption these were sold/farmed accounts with reused comments/boring posts that were then used to push a political message when needed.
From the perspective of a mod, the only thing they end up having is the content, and the current patterns of interference they are familiar with.
So if your opinion happens to be in line with whatever narrative someone is trying to spin up, it will end up getting quashed.
Frankly there isn’t any solution to this, and you either end up losing ground to mechanised speech while having a low ban load for humans, or you end up acting on likely mechanized speech, and have a higher number of humans you ban.
The way Reddit is set up, people will select the first option over the second.
> How did you establish the posters were Russian or Iranian, other than by time zone?
To a lot of people, Russian is just a state of mind. It simply means that you disagree with them, or the regime that they support. Also, the mods on reddit are overwhelmingly these people, banning all opposing opinions, or banning people for being Russian, or Iranian, or Chinese, etc...
They think this is legitimate: aaah, so you're Chinese. I knew there was something wrong when you insisted that the Chinese weren't evil thieves hellbent on destroying freedom, by nature. You're not allowed to post in the West.
All governance in the western world has become weak as hell. You only need a few bucks to corrupt anything, unless somebody with a few more bucks is already corrupting it. And certain intelligence agencies have the deepest pockets. Maybe little fiefdoms wasn't the best way to structure the internet? Maybe section 230 would be obviated if there were clear, deliberative processes to allow entire groups to both take action and responsibility for what they allow in their discussions?
Take note about how adhering to parliamentary methods protects private organizations: in most places, having proper rules set up (not EULAs and ToCs) actually has the practical effect of creating law because it sets up obligations to the users as well as obligations from the users. There's no such thing as a benevolent dictator.
To a lot of people, Russian is just a state of mind. It simply means that you disagree with them, or the regime that they support. Also, the mods on reddit are overwhelmingly these people, banning all opposing opinions, or banning people for being Russian, or Iranian, or Chinese, etc...
Pretending that there aren't concerted efforts to exert political influence on Reddit isn't helpful, and comes across as pretty disingenuous.
All governance in the western world has become weak as hell. You only need a few bucks to corrupt anything, unless somebody with a few more bucks is already corrupting it.
Yes, corruption and bribery exist exclusive in "western" governments. Thankfully "eastern" governments are completely immune to these issues.
And I know, "I never said those exact words!" but that at was the obvious intention.
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.
/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.
https://www.reddit.com/user/turbostrider27/
That's fascinating. How does an account like this not blatantly violate the TOC for personal or commercial use of Reddit?
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.
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.
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.
That's an interesting idea!
Perhaps intentionally using uuids in the URL instead of slugs and improving the recommendation/search algo (e.g take into account the average post length or cited sources in the ranking) would solve this issue. Main challenge might still be that its very hard to move an existing user base if the moderator(s) blocks all posts about other communities.
Perhaps a more democratic moderation system or a system wide rule that disallows moderators from blocking posts about other (competing) subs would work?
These are good technical suggestions. The social problem is that ragebait => more money for Reddit.
I can throw another example /r/lectures was a really cool place were people shared mostly academic lectures. Mod took over, put the sub in approved posts only and is just doing token approves very rarely without any way to reclaim the sub.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think maybe this is a feature rather than a bug.
I know at least a couple of subreddits for specific 'true crime' cases which split into one for people who believed the suspect was guilty and one where everyone believed they were innocent.
The thing is, the split fora were actually much better than pre split. When both sets of people were together every topic degenerated rapidly in exactly the same way:
The split subreddits have better information, better curation and better flow. People who are otherwise in agreement debate precise points carefully and in detail. Both are available on the same internet so anyone who wants to can read both and make up their own mind.I know we're all supposed to be worried about echo chambers, but sometimes an echo chamber is somewhere a specific conversation can take place which couldn't elsewhere.
Where can I read more about this case? I need to look into this 'only two feet' theory.
I see your point. It just looks like people who can’t be civil to each other.
No, the biggest one is r/india as it is the subreddit for the largest country in the world with moderators being from an adversarial country and any positive news about the country always being removed while constant critiques and hate allowed
Exactly this. They had full control over both bitcointalk and /r/bitcoin. A few persuasive individuals circumvented the design and censored all discussion against it. It turns out that 51% attacks don't matter if you control social consensus. You control what engineers get to participate. What the project direction is. What views are considered "credible" -- credible enough to be "worth posting." Then with the other hand you wave away opposing ideas and accuse those who disagree with you of your own bad deeds. Eventually, over time the original is replaced and there's no longer anyone around to remember it.
/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?
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.
From the HN guidelines:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith
Let's aim to keep HN better and more pleasant to use than Reddit;)
I did explain my reasoning. You coincidentally not mentioning /r/conservatives censorship practices, simply doesn't appear plausible, given the context of your comment and demonstrated knowledge of reddit moderating practices.
I disagree with your assessment, if I remember correctly I posted three times on that sub.
The HN guidelines are there to improve the quality of the conversation, there's not much to further discuss so I'm going to leave it at this.
> I disagree with your assessment, if I remember correctly I posted three times on that sub.
The sub currently requires moderator approval (specific flair) to comment on most threads.
The parent commenter is correct: It is widely known as one of the most censored subs on Reddit because the mods remove comments from unapproved accounts (those without flair).
Their rules claim that some threads are open for everyone to participate in, which may have been the case in the past when you commented.
However it’s not true for any of the popular threads. They will remove comments from unflaired accounts
This is all state in their rules. It’s not speculation. The parent comment is correct.
That's a very weak argument in my opinion.
How does the moderation in /r/conservatives, a subreddit for conservatives to discuss "from a distinctly conservative point of view", concern a liberal like yourself in any way?
This isn't a subreddit you need to participate in. I think it's more relevant how default subreddits or country subreddits are moderated in a similar way.
It concerns me insofar as the comment I was responding to, mentioned that participation in /r/conservative got him banned in another subreddit, while failing to mention the nature of /r/conservative as a heavily censored echo chamber.
The /r/conservative mods are pushing far-right and conspiracy theory positions, not textbook conservative ideology.
Even actual conservatives don’t like it. It’s like a propaganda operation where only approved think is allowed.
I think the argument here is guilt by association.
It's a bit like banning entry into the US because you've visited Russia.
It doesn't really matter how Russia runs their own country, you might have even gone there to argue against totalitarian dictatorships.
But a US border guard looking at your passport and rejecting your entry based on that alone feels like overreach.
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.
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.
And in some places it's one of the few reasons to get a second passport issued.
Does r/conservative ban you for posting in some other sub?
/r/conservative doesn't even allow comments of users without a user flair.
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?
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,[..]
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."
"Strangely" there isn't a single post on their frontpage at the moment, which doesn't require a flair to comment.
You're not a conservative.
Why are you so concerned about participation criteria for the conservative subreddit, one of the only distinctly right wing places on the whole platform?
The way HN and public forums work is that people can ask questions and others can answer. The post you are replying to is an answer to a question. You need to scroll a bit up to see the original question.
Pointing at the moderation of an explicitly conservative place for right wingers as a grievance to illustrate how it is only balanced how conservative opinions are getting banned across mainstream subreddits is fairly disingenuous.
And clearly this has been a discussion on that angle, rather than an answer to the rhetorical question above.
>And clearly this has been a discussion on that angle, rather than an answer to the rhetorical question above.
How do you know the question was rhetorical?
The /r/conservative subreddit is unpopular among actual conservatives because it’s basically a propaganda outlet for the mods.
You can get banned for posting traditional conservative opinions there if they go against the message the mods want to allow, even if it’s conservative.
Don’t be tricked into thinking it’s some conservative safe space. It’s a propaganda outlet for the mods who ban even conservatives if they don’t toe the line and agree with the mods.
How do you know their beliefs?
You read what they said. How do you not know?
I am making a guess based on the opinions presented.
The point here being that it is hardly relevant how a subreddit specifically and explicitely for conservatives is moderated, when we are talking how mainstream subreddits are censoring conservative opinions.
Many grievances appear to be liberals concerning themselves with how /r/conservative is moderated, most likely after being banned for astroturfing there.
/interestingasfuck banned me for commenting on /asmongold at some point. Not even for the content. Simply for having interacted with /asmongold.
Edit: To be clear I wasn't picked on by anyone. It's a bot they run. This is a blanket ban that /interestingasfuck extends to anyone who has commented/posted on /asmongold, or any subreddit they consider to be right wing (by USA standards).
Try suggesting on /r/MichaelJackson that he was maybe a little weird about kids, instant ban
I don't really have a problem with that. The scope of the sub is:
> Appreciation subreddit dedicated to the life and art of Michael Joe Jackson
Criticism of Jackson would be off-topic.
Plus it's not like anybody who is a fan of Jackson doesn't know about those allegations and some of the weird things he did. People who feel the need to say he was weird about kids in that subreddit are probably just trying to troll Jackson fans. It's not going to make the subreddit better for fans who are there to celebrate the art and music of Jackson.
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.
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.
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.
However, you are arguing with a vertically integrated propaganda machine that is basically an experimental weapons testing facility for rhetoric.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency 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 mimics normal, centrist US culture in ways that slip under the cognitive radar.
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 just rational enough 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.
As a result, you engage and then one of the following happens:
- You make a point so salient they banhammer you because you cannot control the narrative.
- 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!
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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 small but powerful group hijacking others to further their own goals, and people protecting their interests by funding the small group.
> a vertically integrated propaganda machine that is basically an experimental weapons testing facility for rhetoric
This is great lol
The specifics always depends on the subreddit, reddit doesn't pay moderators so its the wild west out there. You can find whatever echo-chamber you want honestly. Which subreddit does HN map to? Perhaps a mix of r/neoliberal and r/conservative (you know, healthy centrism /s)
Honestly, HN crowd is very diverse. I would say that it's a normal distribution here. There are some fascists/neonazi, some communists/anarchists and a lot of liberals/conservatives. I know that here is not the place for these kind of conversations, but it's funny how it's way better for that than other social media platforms. It's not perfect, of course, but perfect is not possible in real life.
Not really. There's few places on Reddit where you will be banned for expressing liberal opinions.
/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.
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.
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.
Your country sub sounds cool
/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.
If you think "any thread there" is that absurd, you are clearly not a conservative at all. You are another liberal ranting about /r/conservative, are you not?
It is in my opinion a very weak argument to point at /r/conservative specifically as an example for how the mainstream censorship on Reddit is not overwhelmingly liberal.
You are making a straw man fallacy.
It’s not both all the other subs, the point under contention is about that you cannot be critical or reasonably discuss anything proper in r/conservative.
I don’t know if you have been following the sub, I have, and it always follows a similar pattern. If it’s a new topic, some discussion is allowed, but soon everyone needs to toe the party line.
Edit : I encourage free discussion on this point, instead of downvoting.
No, I'm not a conservative. But I know some and they are not represented by the MAGA cultists.
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.
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 and 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 doesn't look like there are any mechanisms to stop it from getting much worse.
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 only 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).
Keeping the country in one piece is exactly why Trump won, the alternative was falling off the cliff.
So, how is it working out for you so far? I find it hard to believe that otherwise intelligent beings can both make claims like this and at the same time observe reality. The USA has in all of its history since the civil war not been this divided. And it is falling off a cliff as we speak.
This is is deeply ignorant historically. The US has cycled through extreme division over and over. There was 100x more civil unrest over Vietnam, civil rights, reconstruction, early labor wars. We've had 4 presidents assassinated, one shot, but survived. There were 2,500 domestic bombings in the 1970s. In 1972 there were 31 plane hijackings - 1 every 12 days.
There is a lot of hot talk, a lot of insular bubbles working themselves into online frenzies, but it is, objectively, a boring, passive time out on the street. No, there is no cliff.
Of course man, everything is 'just fine'.
Outside of the USA: talk of invading Canada, Greenland, indiscriminate execution of people on the high seas, a tariff war that seems to be a series of own goals, destabilization of NATO, the burning of 75 years of goodwill.
Inside the USA: military in the cities, half the country is being depicted as 'the enemy' by those in power, an embarrassing cadre of incompetents are in powerful positions and are wrecking the departments they are nominally in charge of, North Korea style adulation of an idiot leader, attacks on judges and members of congress are on the order of the day, teams of masked man snatch people (men, women, children) off the streets and out of their beds, endless violations of the law by the authorities, naked power grabs and abuse of pardons, attacks on the free press, destruction of the machinery of the state are the order of the day.
Those things you mention were bad, but they were still within the framework of the normal functioning of a state, it never looked as though there was a real chance of the USA fracturing or turning on itself no matter how bad they were. But this time it looks very much different. If you can't see that then that's fine with me but 'historical ignorance' is an easy card to play if you have already decided that what's happening right now in the USA is business as usual, and to me it does not look like 'business as usual' at all. This is unprecedented, and it is getting worse every day.
What I think is happening is that the 'flooding the zone' strategy is working so well that people are simply no longer able to keep up with all of the assaults and they hunker down, hoping that it will pass them by. That's a coping mechanism.
Is that actually true? The U.S. was pretty damn divided in the late 60s.
Widescale race riots, Vietnam war protests, a President and Presidential candidate assassinated etc. That said a few cms or so difference and that bullet takes out Trump.
Certainly divided right now just genuinely not sure if it's quite at that level or not.
> That said a few cms or so difference and that bullet takes out Trump.
That could have been reversed. Kennedy could have lived and Trump could have been dead, either way, I was four at the time, my most recent memory from that era is the moon landing. But the depiction of half the nation as the enemy and the active tour of revenge that is happening right now is unprecedented, not even the McCarthy era - or at least, what I know of it - came close.
The election results were 77,302,580 votes against 75,017,613 votes, or 49.8% versus 48.3%.
I would not call that unpopular.
> Do they ban conservatives for criticizing Trump? I don't know, perhaps
They won’t even allow you to comment there now unless they can interview you, audit your comment history across Reddit, and pre-confirm that you align with the message they want to allow.
Deviating will result in a ban.
Why are you commenting so much to defend a subreddit you admittedly don’t understand?
I got permanently banned from Reddit for participating in a thread debating the death penalty. In which I wrote one comment suggesting we shouldn’t waste a bunch of court costs on mass shooters who are blatantly guilty.
That was considered “instigating violence” lol
> I got permanently banned from Reddit for ... one comment suggesting we shouldn’t waste a bunch of court costs on mass shooters who are blatantly guilty.
To be fair, that's an objectively degenerate suggestion, which is in opposition to the entire history of accumulated human wisdom.
So I can see why it would be difficult for a mod to imagine it being offered with the intention of contributing positively to an Internet discussion.
Mods are human too, and they get tired of pointless derailments, especially when they see the same pointless derailments repeatedly, and they know where those discussion threads lead.
What they do not know is whether the commenter is 12 years old and has never had a serious history or government class in their life, but might be open to a generous conversation about the reality of the world and human nature, and why legal systems are not built on top of impulsive hysterics...or whether the commenter is just a troll, asymmetrically leveraging a single sentence into dozens of comments and hundreds of justifiably angry forum members.
It's a dilemma. The difficult path can't be chosen every time. The easy path is to moderate the comment out of visibility, but that often turns into a bad-faith back and forth with the commenter about their intentions and ignorances. This is rarely positive ROI for the mod, so it's not surprising that they turn to banning instead.
Confusingly one-sided post given the point it's seemingly trying to make.
Could you point out what exactly you find confusingly one-sided? Happy to update the list of examples if it enhances the quality of my post but when writing it I could only draw on personal experience.
>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
That's a pretty hilariously one-sided example, given /r/conservative is one of the most comically moderated subs on Reddit. Like, you were so close with that example, but no, it turns out it's all the other subs that are to blame.
/r/conservative is just a renamed The_Donald. It has essentially nothing to do with conservatism, and anything even remotely critical of the dear leader, where critical can be just asking for clarification or correcting a wrong claim, leads to an immediate permanent ban. I actually thought it was performance art and was echoing the famous, and hilarious, North Korea sub. Turns out it's actually sincere.
As to the rest of your list...yeah, I think we'd need to see examples. When people do the "they banned me just for {x}", they often conveniently leave out a lot of not {x} that actually led to the ban. People are remarkably biased in how they tell these tales.
That's a bit rich to say while complaining about the moderation in /r/conservative specifically.
Per the subreddit description it is a place for conservatives to discuss "from a distinctly conservative point of view".
I am getting the feeling that you may in fact not be a conservative. That's fine. You don't need to participate in /r/conservative any more than I need to participate in /r/progressive. It simply does not concern you, and your focus on how a subreddit for conservatives is moderated paints a better picture of why you may have been banned from there.
The problem is default subreddits handing out permabans over political opinions.
To repeat, as you seemed to miss it, the conservative subreddit has little to nothing to do with conservatism the political philosophy. It is an echo chamber for MAGA, and people get banned for actually conservative views if they don't service the agenda/image of Dear Leader.
But ultimately I don't particularly care. I'm not a whiny little baby, and if people need to create such an echo chamber in the service of a child rapist, so be it. That is their prerogative, and all the more power to them. You hilariously replied as if I'm licking my wounds and stomping my feet demanded my voice in that sub, when all I was doing is pointing out that bringing up that extreme example of moderator overreach, but then not using it was a bit comedic.
>The problem is default subreddits handing out permabans over political opinions.
Sounds tough for you. I can see why you are getting banned. But, you know, any sub can ban people for their own policies, even just that they don't like the energy you bring to a sub. There is a bizarre subtext to your comment that is a sort of "/r/conservative is ours, stay away, but also we are entitled to our views in other subs...because, default or something". Pretty telling.
You can see that I am getting banned for no other reason than liberals like yourself disagreeing with my opinions.
I never even participated in /r/conservatives, I am merely pointing out that it is hardly relevant whether /r/conservatives has anything to do with conservatives.
You, and I imagine many other complainers, are obviously disqualified from participating there from the start. That is not a problem.
What is a problem is that many moderators, just like you, seem to think default front page subreddits or country subreddits are a place for liberals only where you should get to ban conservatives.
>it is hardly relevant
The entire basis of your argument was that it is for conservatives, so non-conservatives should be banned. And FWIW, I am classically a conservative. An actual conservative, not the cult of personality sort. In this new era suddenly I'm some weird liberal.
>many moderators, just like you
Like me? LOL, I'm not a moderator on Reddit, and can't fathom wasting my time like that. But, eh, people have their own hobbies.
And I've been banned on a number of "liberal" subs like worldnews, because of the aforementioned conservative foundations of my views. And...eh...I sob into my pillow a bit and move on. There are numerous other news subs, and I can make a /r/conservativeworldnews or something and compete for hearts and minds. Whatever.
That is what it says in the subreddit description and name, not my personal opinion of its content.
There are not numerous other mainstream news subs where you would not get banned for conservative opinions. In fact I believe worldnews may be the most conservative leaning one. I know that /r/news is far more left.
You don't think that's a problem with the platform?
Worldnews is only "conservative" in its zealously pro-Israel position. On a number of other topics it is very left-leaning in moderation. On immigration, for instance. As a classic conservative I actually believe in strong borders and that immigrants need to be in service of the citizens of a country and align with its values, which put me at odds with that pro-Israel but also pro-mass migration sub.
Regardless, and to rehash, the foundation of your position was that conservatives have their own place and non-conservatives should be banned on sight to give them their zone. But it isn't a conservative sub, it's a Donald Trump cult subreddit. Which everyone knows at this point -- it certainly isn't a secret -- but again I only brought it up because it was so comedic to mention that sub but not offer as an example of absolutely insane subreddit moderation.
If there is a problem with moderation on reddit, /r/conservative is the perfect example of power tripping moderation and an inability for casual visitors to understand how one-sided the perspective has been curated to be. Again, I only pointed out how hilarious it was to mention that sub, but only to criticize other subs.
>You don't think that's a problem with the platform?
It is a reality on any curated or moderated site (including HN). Every single human on this planet has biases and agendas and conflicts of interest.
Should every sub have a firehose of moderated away comments and or banned users and their reasons? Sure, probably, in the same way that HN has showdead. I mean, there's going to be a lot of heinous stuff among it, but it would make for a fascinating analysis.
EDIT: Every comment I made suddenly got a -4 applied to it, which is kind of funny in the context of this discussion. I am 100% convinced that HN has "super arrow" users, though this has never been disclosed or detailed. But, eh...
All your examples are hand-wavey and and follows a stereotypical right-wing grieviences pattern, while still somehow trying to discuss polarisation in a neutral manner. You also suggest in another comment in this thread that Twitter is somehow a better place, suggesting a pretty significant lack of nuance.
I don't expect to see any, but I'd certainly be curious to see what posts that got you banned or admonished so I can form my own opinion on them.
You seem to focus a lot on the examples that I provided (and my opinion of Twitter?) and not so much on the content of my comment or the general topic of the conversation.
Could you motivate why this is relevant and what your counter point would be? I'm genuinely curious!
I'm just continuing the thread of conversation? And also because figuring out biases is basic critical thinking? Especially relevant in this kinda thread.
Furthermore, I'm sick and tired of self-created right-wing narrative of censorship when they're ever so eager to do it to the fullest possible extent they can with their current powers and societal acceptance. And then we're not just talking about random people being mean to you on Twitter, but government power. All while leaning on a narrative of "We're just doing what you did before" that they've created themselves by endless repetition.
I understand, and while I don't fully agree I do agree that having some insight into biases could be relevant since moderation choices are always subjective.
I would prefer not to link my Reddit account to my HN account furthermore it's common for comments to be deleted at a ban so I'm unable to give you the exact comments but happy to provide insight into any (perceived) biased! I have voted D66 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrats_66) during the last elections, I'll let you do your own assessment of their standpoints.
I understand your frustration about the (perceived) narrative of censorship. But I think we can agree that censorship of _viewpoints_ (no matter who it's coming from) is a bad thing.
Unfortunately that seems to be rather rampant on Reddit and is the main point in my original post. As others have pointed out /r/conservative also seems to suffer from bad moderation so this seems more like an issue with Reddit than something coming from a particular political flank.
Hope this answers your concerns!
> I would prefer not to link my Reddit account to my HN account
Understandable, no worries.
> I have voted D66 [..] during the last elections
I've been seeing sentiments like this before but I don't value them high because what matter is what people do and decide when things becomes hot and their professed principles need to be actually proven.
As an anecdote, and yes, I know it's an extreme example, but it's interesting to me and brings the point home: When listening to an audio book (it's on Audible if interested, recommended!) a while back that compiles a bunch of interviews with defendants of the Nuremberg trials, a surprising amount of them suggested, paraphrasing; "I was actually a liberal before the war!" (and also a strange amount of teachers curiously!).
The audio book sounds interesting, could you share the title?
I understand your point about deciding and acting when things become hot but shouldn't we place political vote(s) above comment(s) on social media? Realistically I would hope that the average voter in Europe does not encounter a "hot" situation where his or her morals will be tested as they were during the second world war.
Yet what we vote for influences real world actions, what we say online might influence one or two opinions slightly.
Personally learning that tons of Nazis started as liberals isn't even the least bit surprising.
The right-wing is playing the victim card for all it is worth and has done so for close to a hundred years now.
Exactly. It's very predictable.
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.
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).
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.
Last time I logged into Twitter to delete my account, many months post Musk, I was presented immediately with disturbing videos of both people and animals beating beat up in the "For you" tab.
And let's not ignore the owner of the site posting inflammatory/hateful/violent rhetoric.
Twitter is absolutely full of calls for violence, i genuinely don't know how you can use the platform and not see any of it
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
No worries, I know your background.
But if that's your twitter experience then you have a very well curated feed and on top of that are somehow able to side-step the stuff that Musk pushes really hard.
No worries.
While Twitter has many issues, I still find value in it and I figured that a counter point to the common narrative would add value to the discussion.
I would love a LLM curated social network where I can drive the content that I see by adjusting the prompt to ensure that only high quality, fact based content is presented to me.
While no doubt not perfect and accounting for LLM biases (at scale) is not trivial this seems doable on a small (personal or small community) scale. Given the low cost of LLMs these days (queries on Flash 2.5 Lite or QWEN usually cost me a fraction of a cent), this might actually be a pretty cool weekend project!
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.
Conservatives love to frame themselves as victims ... while most hate, abuse and violence goes consistently from their camp.
I get it, needs new excuse to send an army to blue cities.
While I understand your frustration I would like to point out that I'm not American.
Other countries do exist and they also use Reddit and Twitter (despite the US politics spam we have to suffer through ;))
At the end of the day both Reddit and Twitter are American companies and algorithmic feeds for users in the US can end up being significantly different from those in other countries.
Trump, Musk and Kirk are all Americans. The topics of the thread was American congress, Rep. Comey’s and how Musk changed twitter.
Imo, assuming you are not talking about what Arabs or whoever outside of America say about it was reasonable. Especially since your comment seemed to talk about American political environment.
> While Twitter has many problems it does seem to do a reasonable job of not promoting hate and violence towards a large audience.
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.
I only have a single Twitter account and can only share what I'm seeing on my timeline.
You might be having a different experience, these timeline are after all personalised ;)
“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.
---------------
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.
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.
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.
> There may be an attempt to coerce these platforms to start moderating in a way that's more favourable to Trump.
That’s the real comedy about this; when we like it censorship is good, when we don’t like it (Covid shutdown, anti vax, Jan 6th) censorship is bad. The double standard is shocking, yet completely normalized.
Besides any attempt to end violent rhetoric has to start with POTUS himself, theater exactly what it is.
I mean, this view of censorship is a little black and white.
Simply put in reality some censorship of some kind or I can simply 'win' by screaming really loud so no one else can even get a word in about their view.
The paradox of tolerance tells us that any view that intolerant of the existence of another person for simply existing should not be allowed as it is a terminal case. Of course electing the most violent and intolerant person we could find means we're going to have a hard time.
If those are illegal, where are the prosecutions?
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.
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.
That may be a politically motivated congressional hearing. :-)
You mean there's another kind?
It's not a moderation problem. It's a design decision fundamental to their platform architecture.
>They've now been asked to appear in front of Congress to address concerns about politically motivated violence being incited through their platform
Funny how for the last 30 years of right wing violence/extremists far exceeding left wing nothing was done at all about it, no questions asked. Hush hush, don't talk about gun control or the real causes of these peoples' actions.
But then the year that left wing violence finally exceeds right wing, they all start crying that it's unacceptable and something needs to be done about it.
Source: https://www.csis.org/analysis/left-wing-terrorism-and-politi... "So far, 2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right."
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.
Anyone who can't see that is blind on the right eye, which is unfortunately a common phenomenon in certain circles nowadays.
How can we know that this or that example of speech is illegal if there are no charges and no trial? This rule by corporate fiat is exactly what we don’t need. It lacks democratic oversight. To say nothing of the way that disingenuous claims of “political violence” is being used to suppress legitimate dissent in our country.
Worth noting the heavy irony in talking about James Comer taking on bad-faith moderation, though.
> 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.
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.
What country are you from? To "wish a politically motivated death" on someone is illegal there?
Reddit set itself up as a speakeasy, people speak their minds openly because it appears in some areas to be free of thought policing.
Do you think it is wrong to wish 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?
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
the second case isn’t illegal in the USA because it’s not a specific credible threat.
This all may be well and good but the reality is that Reddit's rules against 'advocating for violence' don't really map out to any laws in the real world.
Like, on Reddit you're technically not allowed to say "Man, I'm so glad that Adolf Hitler guy is dead."
To my knowledge it is not illegal to say something like that (anywhere you want to live anyways)
I think that a world where people are free to talk about how they're glad horrible tyrants are dead is a better world than the one where they aren't free to express those ideas.
You wouldn't want to live in an America where it wasn't legal to condone the death of Osama Bin Laden, would you?
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.
Well at least we can all agree violence is efficient way to create political problems
Remind me again how the American slaves were freed?
Your best example of a "historically efficient way to solve political problems" is a 4 year civil war that killed more than half a million people and, after all that, still left African Americans as second-class citizens for a century after?
I wonder what an inefficient way would look like.
We can theorize about the non-violent path to emancipation, and the speedy path to legal equality.
But it's counterfactual. It took severe violence plus 100 years to get there. Plus another 60 (yikes) to get to where we are today.
That's horrible! But nothing about that reality suggests to me that there was a less-violent or speedier way to get there. Governments are made of people.
Getting there was a worthwhile goal. I don't think there's a "but at what cost?" debate here.
So it sure doesn't feel "efficient", but it might be the "most efficient possible" in the human world.
Sometimes, progress is measured by funerals.
Go learn how weekends were created
Neville Chamberlain is a perfect example.
Slavery was violence. It can't exist without considerable violence and involved violence.
So, we can say that it was violence problem that got solved by violence. Not just political problem.
If you want to go there, all governments and their laws (and thus politics) are predicated on their monopoly on violence, and civil society and the rule of law cannot exist without violence. Therefore all politics is violence and all political problems are also violence problems.
I do not want to go there. I made comment about huge amount of violence slavery in Americas required daily back then. Slavery was violence in amounts completely incomparable to what you are trying to equate with it.
Moreover, that sentiment was literally expressed by slavery opposition back then. Afaik, the sophistry about "any government is violence therefore, it is the same, que" was not all that much thing back then.
by creating new problems
And many others think that violence is the only 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.
Capturing moderation of a subreddit has long been a strategy of marketing agencies.
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.
> 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.
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.
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:
> What experience do you have modding such channels and the reddit community?
> 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.
> 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.
> Lots of concerns here.
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.
You can just do it yourself if you want. You don’t have to listen to them.
Those should be 4 motivational bullet points right there.
/r/Seattle and /r/SeattleWA.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/54ie2t/seat...
Think about a Reddit mod's incentives.
They:
- Don't get paid
- Spend time having to do some really thankless work
- Don't really have a regular work schedule
So what kind of person is going to do it?
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.
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.
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.
There should be a public service campaign telling users something like "Even in the best case scenario, the moderators are weirdos. Most likely they're shills".
People with careers, families, friends and hobbies are mostly not going to spend their limited free time being a digital janitor for an anonymous online community.
People sitting alone in their apartment with nowhere to go and nothing to do and no one to spend time with, however, might find that being a Reddit moderator gives them a hobby, a sense of purpose, and feelings of power, importance or significance that they otherwise never get in real life.
Someone should make a social media site with inverted dynamics- users who only spend a few minutes per day on the site and post once every few weeks should be treated as the influential power users, while the people lurking and scrolling for 10 hours per day are deprioritized.
But what if they do get paid, by a competitor? It's very easy to DM a mod and tell them they will get x amount if they skewer the odds in your favor or blast your biggest competitor.
What makes you think this doesn't happen? I can almost guarantee it does. If I were willing to pay a Reddit mod off and I saw unfavorable coverage for my brand I'd absolutely try to win the mod over by paying them more than the competitor is paying.
What's kind of crazy about this is in many lines of business you must disclose payment for advertisement. Be interesting to make this a civil law case and sue moderators for lack of disclosure.
Reddit being Reddit wasn't a problem until it became a source of truth and subsequently afforded consensus and an unwarranted sheen of credence by Agentic AI. As the author beautifully (albeit somewhat nihilistically) summarises:
"We have to remember that Reddit isn’t just Reddit anymore. The powers that be have decided that Reddit is infallible, a reliable set of training data for LLMs, and should be featured fucking everywhere."
Agreed, Reddit as a source of truth is the issue. Who in the their right mind would look at Reddit as whole and say that is an open, unbiased community focused on true and accurate information. And as the article and comments in this very thread show how moderation and its application within Reddit are "contaminated" which is a very good way to describe the situation.
Social media should operate under open protocols, including moderation. Choosing moderation should be client-controlled.
These companies burn through VC money to build systems with network effects then turn around and effectively extract rent. Rent extraction is economically parasitic and anti-productive. This is exactly the sort of thing the government should address by mandating open protocols.
Reddit has an easy way to choose moderation, just stop going to the reddits that are poorly moderated.
Isn't the solution to "fork" the community?
If the moderator is really that bad the new community takes over (yes its more complex than that, but broad strokes).
Its not that different then an open source project with bad maintainers.
Reddit employees are also moderators that also directly influence public opinion and encourage witch hunts.
It’s a systemic Reddit-the-company issue. Google “Ethan Klein vs Reddit” if you want to go down a recent rabbit hole
There's no way to report a malicious sub as far as I can tell. I've been contacted by scammers that look very legit with the green Mod badge that shows in DMs.
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.
We need to separate the web into data, identity, and moderation.
Users need to become aware that they're not using platforms, they are subscribing to moderator control.
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.
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.
Surely bad actors leave a fairly clear data trail. Are there no analytics being used to track this sort of behaviour? Much of the scale of this comes from being able to do it with impunity. If bad actors were exposed, even after the fact, it would be a deterrent to others.
> 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.
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.
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:
> “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.
> “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:
“The same 5 people moderates 500 of the most popular subreddits”
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/gjl27j/the_...
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.
Another discussion about this:
“Six powermods control 118 of the top 500 subreddits”
https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/gkkfg5/upda...
Now I want to see a soap opera/reality show about the lives of Reddit Oligarchs!
Dang. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UX5ahM24o8A
Ghislaine Maxwell was maybe one of these powerful mods. But it is another contested conspiracy theory.
Evidence pasted:
The Name “Maxwellhill”
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.
Posting Activity Stopped the Day of Her Arrest (actually 2 days before, when she began wrapping her phone in aluminum)
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.
Gaps in Posting Line Up with Real-Life Events
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.
Moderator of Massive Subreddits
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.
The Content
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.
Auto Deletion and Censorship
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?
No Denial from the Account
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.
The poster also uses many British expressions in their writing, and listed British foods as their favorite foods in one post.
Mods of r/WorldNews which is infamously compromised by paid agents demanded her posts be deleted from other subreddits.
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 grand conspiracy theories, which require secret coordination on implausible scales.
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.
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).
Ok!
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: https://coagulopath.com/ghislaine-maxwell-does-not-have-a-se... 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.
> But it’s not.
> 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.
> Additionally, here’s evidence that /u/maxwellhill made a post inside a private subreddit, nine days after the “Tr45son” one.
> 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?
That's from the link.
I stopped posting to Reddit in December 2015 and haven't been back since. David Bowie died a few days later 10 January 2016. Am I David Bowie?
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.
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29898523 (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)
You don't have to be a moderator to poison the well.
Post a shitload of bad faith attacks and slander. Not as a root comment. You don't have to actually relate to the parent at all, you're just trying to get your talking points out there. If someone calls you out? Gish gallop never actually addressing their comments. It's another opportunity for you to spew whatever bullshit you want.
If they follow you around and get more engagement/up votes? Block them. Now you are free to continue to post whatever BS you want without any of those pesky fact checkers.
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.
Friendly reminder that you are on a forum with essentially one benevolent moderator.
The model only works because of the subject matter filtering 99% of potential users. One good moderator can’t possibly scale to a network the size of Reddit.
Subject matter and UX. HN has to remain its 2005 era minimally functional self to keep people out.
Two, I think? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43558671
Isn't dang a paid employee? If so, incentives are different. Its a day job that he could get fired from if he deviates from his main duties. (dang you are pretty decent don't get fired please).
Heh, according to the other guy he could get fired and replaced with AI because of his ego. For the less than subtle, I wasn't implying that it was good or bad. I was just pointing out the irony of criticizing centralized moderation on a site with centralized moderation.
As for whether or not pay makes a difference, I think you probably have a point, but I'm sure there's still wiggle room there.
There are lots of very large subreddits that are prolific at shadowbanning people -- you might think you're participating in the conversation for quite a while and people just aren't upvoting you or responding to you for whatever reason, and your posts aren't visible at all. /r/worldnews is very free with them, for example.
> What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.
I don’t see this as a big a problem as you do.
As soon as you solve this, then you have the issue of people you see as good actors being ousted and having their influence taken down. If the bad guys can be silenced then so can the good guys and then it’s just a matter of how we figure out the good guys and the bad guys!
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.
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.
I'd estimate way higher. Most moderators of meaningful subreddits are corrupt. Occasionally one makes it visible.
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.
Reddit has problems with moderation being too easy and too difficult.
It is very easy to ban someone. Making the ban permanent and combining this with the moderator blocking the person (so they can't send messages), there's no appeal process.
Another part is that for any sub of reasonable volume, trying to actively moderate and shape beyond banning the most egregious actors is difficult. Deleting and locking posts for a finer level of moderation is time consuming. The judgement calls of "when is this going off the rails?" become more snap over time.
With the time consuming nature of actually moderating a sub and the ease of just banning someone - moderation becomes the policy of whoever has the most time. The stereotypical variations of this are the paid social media manager who's job it is to scrub anything positive of a competitor or negative about their brand, or a person who is moderating because of a deep interest in the subject but with strong opinions too.
With multiple active moderators, the most extreme views of each in turn become the overall "moderation philosophy" (and if those views are opposed the oldest one wins).
Combined with the echo chamber nature of the message board, the more and more extreme stances become the dominant stances.
To try to present a consistent approach to moderation (Reddit has gotten burned by inconsistent responses many times in the past) it appears that Reddit.inc is trying to be completely hands off. That in turn means that it takes extreme situations for corporate to get involved - often long after it's been a problem that they've been alerted to. Having let the problem fester for so long, when something is done, it tends to be very heavy handed, lopsided, and generates a significant amount of discontent that spreads elsewhere.
So, you've got a site that hosts thousands of message boards, that inevitably grow more and more partisan to one extreme or the other, are mostly facades for a corporation, or propaganda for a political organization.
It is impressive that it has remained "stable" for as long as it has.
Subreddits = volunteering.
And wealth is extracted out of all that volunteering. Ads and tokens for AI training.
The discussion at https://larslofgren.com/codesmith-reddit-reputation-attack/ is not going well for Mr. Novati.
Edit: oops, that was the wrong link! I meant to link to the reddit post discussing that article: https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1o1guxj/tho...
I think one of the most telling facts is that pro-Novati poster u/Ok-Donuts has posted numerous comments that are clearly a violation of all norms but seems to be immune to moderation.
Were there replies to the comment you linked? Because I don't see any now.
I meant to link to the post, not Novati's comment, but they are close together:
https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1o1guxj/tho...
u/Ok-donuts is clearly his alt. Absolutely pathetic
Such accusations are a dime a dozen and almost always false. (I myself have been accused of being people I'm not.) It's simply a fact that there are people who think alike or who form alliances or kneejerk defenses of someone.
In any case, Novati is not acting like a disinterested moderator.
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.
So not much of a personal payoff, right? UNLESS you’re the kind of person that thrives on drama, conflict and power trips.
Meaning this actively filters for people that are radioactively toxic
Samesies. I even had to switch to using a different pseudonym once I started receiving death threats :)
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, https://www.reddit.com/r/MattressMod/comments/1c28g7b/recent...
A happy(ish) ending: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mattress/comments/1l81nn6/and_were_...
This is a second order effect of Google weighting Reddit heavily in Search.
And a third-order effect of every other link being SEO garbage or AI slop
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?"
Wow that must be a lot of work
Wow I feel for you, friend
Yea id be happy to help out from time to time.
--- But needs to happen with other things.
Quite often seen in GitHub where an attacker can contribute to build trust. With Reddit, mini modding, regular submissions, good comments etc
Defense includes not being shamed or pressured when life seems more important.
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.
This was exactly the playbook that led to the xz backdoor.
Just the quotes:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39909905
Very long page but a lot more in depth. Search for “Jigar Kumar pressured Lasse Collin”
https://securelist.com/xz-backdoor-story-part-2-social-engin...
And an overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
Yes, I had that in mind too.
Its worth any maintainer to be familiar with these methods to build up defences. With a few sock puppet accounts a single person could do it on their spare time. A nation state or criminal full time enterprise could do several attacks.
It's scary and immoral but I find it fascinating too. Like the dark side of the how to win friends books.
Security.
But can any mod remove other mods? How does that work in reddit?
Seniority. Older mods can remove younger mods.
So just try to buy or steal the most senior mod's account and then you have the mod for yourself? Ouch.
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/ - see the sidebar.
If the sub has an inactive or no mod, its as simple as making a post.
Apart from getting the existing mod team to hand over to you, you can also petition to the reddit admins. For example, there is a process to replace inactive mods and this could be used to take control of a subreddit with existing users.
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/29184583611...
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.
it's surprising that this feature remains relatively unknown. the article doesn't seem to be directly aware of it. I recently requested a fairly important subreddit which had been taken over by mods of a competing to sub and locked down to prevent competition, and they gave it to me immediately
Probably in the same way as Jia Tan took over the xz.
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.
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.
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!).
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.
The LLM aspect of this, I think shows both a common weakness and an opportunity.
If you suspect something is a commonly held misconception, frequently asking a LLM about it is close to useless, because the abundance of text repeating the misconception (it is common after all) just makes the model repeat the falsehood. Asking the model to apply a more balanced view quite often triggers an iconoclastic antagonism which will just give you the opposite of whatever the commonly held opinion. I have had some success in asking for the divergence between academia and public opinion on particular issues.
Models are still very bad at determining truth from opinion, but these are exactly the times when we need the models to work the best.
There may be an opportunity if there are enough known examples of instances like this story for a dataset to be made where a model can be taught to identify the difference between honest opinion and bad faith actors, or more critically identify confidently asserted statements from those supported by reasoning.
Unfortunately I can see models that can identify such falsehoods being poorly received. When a model can say you are wrong and everybody around you says you are right, what are the chances of people actually considering the possibility that the model is, in fact, correct?
> Models are still very bad at determining truth from opinion, but these are exactly the times when we need the models to work the best.
Suppose models could determine truth and opinion. How would anyone go about training that into the model? Even in unsupervised, adversarial, whatever training scenarios you still need some kind of framework to discern between the two. Academic manuscripts? There are decades of publications built upon "discoveries" later retracted or shown to be falsified.
How would you build the truth/opinion vector(-s) with impartial objectivity?
> <...> a model can be taught to identify the difference between honest opinion and bad faith actors, or more critically identify confidently asserted statements from those supported by reasoning.
You have a confidently asserted statement {from an industry veteran, backed by nothing but credibility}, and a statement supported by reasoning{, which is in turn supported by... implicit assumptions, verging on wild guesses and exaggerations}. Do you see a reasonable way to somehow embed the context in curly braces in any part of the LLM pipeline without nullifying the need for the LLM itself?
> Models are still very bad at determining truth from opinion
Models are not bad at it. Models are not even trying. As you point out, it is about what is the most common text. It has nothing to do with logic.
On that I disagree. LLMs are not simple Markov chains.
They may fail at a lot of logical tasks, but I don't think that is the same as exhibiting no logic.
Getting even slightly respectable performance on the ARC-AGI test set, I think shows that there is at least some logical processing going on. General intelligence is another issue entirely, but there's definitely more than nothing.
The competitor is Michael Novati, who is known as the originator of the “Coding Machine” archetype of principal engineer at Meta.
TFA gets the Risk board game story from the same article where I first heard of him: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-coding-machin...
Based my on following the bootcamp industry for several years, it's a bit of a stretch to attribute Codesmith's decline to one moderator. Thanks to state regulations around for-profit schools, you can actually watch a decline in their graduate outcomes.
https://www.codesmith.io/regulatory-information
They claimed that 90% of graduates were employed in the field in 2021. That number dropped to 70% by 2022. It dropped to 42% by 2023. That's where their reporting stops.
Keep in mind that every bootcamp plays games with their job numbers. Some hire their own graduates, which boosts numbers. Some disqualify students from being counted, claiming that they're not really job seeking. So I wouldn't take Codesmith's numbers at face value unless you do a deep dive into their methodology, but the downward trend is revealing.
In the article, Codesmith hand-waves about a "slowdown in the bootcamp market." That's certainly one way of saying, "Most of our graduates don't get jobs." Perhaps if Novati hadn't criticized Codesmith, they could have kept signing students up, even if they failed to deliver. Or their decline in signups would have happened anyway. I think people outside of tech are more aware today that code bootcamps are generally a grift.
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.
I've also just been using reddit for far too long. It's gotten to the point where I sometimes feel like I've seen all of the internet, because I recognize way too many videos/posts/stories/cool facts/etc as ones I have seen before.
I quit Reddit too. The posts and comments here are definitely much higher quality but the constant changing of titles by mods here drives me insane.
reddit has recently allowed users to hide their posts and comments from the profile, which has made astro-turfing a lot harder to detect
It's been going on since forever and I find it insane that they still haven't done anything to curb it
There could just be an appeals system and if one moderator messes up a high enough percentage of the time, they get the boot.
Agreed, "mods" binging on their little power is a problem everywhere in society, and in Reddit it's made even worse by the fact they are hiding behind their screen
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 : https://medium.com/@klaudibregu/hugstonone-empowering-users-... 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.
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: https://vimeo.com/1125804680
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"
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?
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.
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 (https://search.google.com/search-console/)
My website never served any of that. You got to stop using this very well known techniques by associating further names (knowing perfectly that HN comments get indexed very fast). The domain in question Sverken.se was always used for science or respectable business. Please refrain mentioning otherwise as I repeat, at any point my company website did such thing. Whoever keep associating them further is doing so by malicious intentions.
you're seeing ghosts. the person you're replying to is trying to help you. if your website is serving the title "Domina eskort : hitta prostituerade på nätet" in Google then that's something you should be able to very simply fix
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.
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.
Yes, I understand that. I don’t think the sverken guy does. You have to wonder why Google is prioritising porn and prostitution search results for him…
Competition is for losers!
> Yesterday Huggingface Deleted the account of a talented User @BasedBase which was creative in open weights (threatening the big techs).
I looked it up it found a pretty clear reason they'd delete it themselves?
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1o0st2o/basedba...
That´s is incorrect, I demonstrated how all that is not true. The models were 100% distill and very powerful. Hard facts
https://vimeo.com/1125658282
https://vimeo.com/1125657672
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1o1m9nz/the_mos...
You're just wrong.
Vibes are not a meaningful comparison.
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.
All difference you notice could be either due to temp randomness or quantization differences even if the original weights are exactly the same.
Also these were likely sourced differently so the quantizers could've used different quantization importance matrizes or process.
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.
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.
Stop gaslighting yourself via llms. You are pretty close to a delusion. I looked at the history of those supposed super models. It's literally all made up vibe llm bullshit and the people that told you so on reddit and huggingface took the time to actual proof it to you. You might be the first example of AI psychosis that I've seen in the wild. Wild.
> Sorry, this post has been removed by the moderators of r/LocalLLaMA.
That's some deep dark shit, if it's true...
And that's the problem with this interweb lark, made worse by aggregators who's algorithms can be gamed, and now we have stochastic LLMs adding to the remix, how do we know what is true?
The narrative related here is frighteningly believable, and, no doubt, so were all the reddit posts.
The difference between the narrative described by this narrative, and the narrative related in the narrative, is that one is death by a thousand cuts, the other either a well deserved take-down or an undeserved attempt at one.
I can't tell the difference, but reddit should be able to.
So this is really about whether reddit sees it's reputation as an asset to be monetized in the short-term, or invested in for the long-term. This is the classic tension between the brand manager and the brand guardian, maximize the cashflow or maximize the balance sheet value, and tells you almost everything important about a company's core culture.
How reddit handles this, it could be argued, will define reddit going forwards.
I watch with baited breath...
Sadly, Reddit has become a disease upon "normal" society.
Also, sadly, is that it is extremely addictive; it is my version of YouTube shorts or TikTok (which I do not use). It is so easy to say "I'm just going to browse for a few minutes", and have it turn into MUCH longer than a few minutes. Those darn cute cat videos!!!
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 moderation is the most undemocratic process to ever masquerade as a democratic process.
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.
As an extreme example of this, the Iran subreddit is 100% run by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Any opinion wavering from official state messaging is moderated out of existence. Reddit seems to happily tolerate this kind of thing across its platform on many levels.
Same is the case with many of the groups relating to India. Some of these groups are clearly run by proxies of the Indian govt and shutdown any criticism of India or the government.
This isn't limited to reddit - normal forums and discord also suffer from mods with overgrown egos who treat maintaining the order as personal fight of good versus evil where they're of course the omnipotent gods of truth you can't argue with.
What is particularly specific to reddit is that subs associated with big media titles, companies etc. originally were ran by normal people, fans so to speak but at some point become marketing tools with entrusted mods whose job is to make sure no criticism of any kind - even the slightest is present. Some communities moved elsewhere, some gave up and some pretend everything is as it used to be.
There are niche places on reddit with little moderation, where actual votes people cast on posts are the moderating tool but even there, some hijackers tend to appear. Their MO is to spew dangerous content, make sub locked and then gracefully arrive as saviors who are from that point in control of what's actually posted.
It's not just moderation, it's the site admins themselves. I used to moderate a fairly large subreddit in my spare time years ago but the site admins not only did little to support you but would actively work against you at times as well. Just became completely not worth it.
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.
Not really. Most bootcamps are trash. Legal recourse would only be available if he said stuff that wasnt true
tortious interference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
It's slop all the way down.
Still preferable to the disinformation in that cesspit.
name one dataset used for AI that doesn't include Reddit
> At this point it's the most astroturfed place on the internet.
YouTube is far worse and it isn’t even close.
Is it? I didn't notice any real issues besides crypto scam bots spamming comments with their conversations. Or do we count "influencers" peddling sponsored junk?
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.
You can now just outright hide your profile/history even without NSFW content. Its a really good feature for everyone involved.
Comment and post history is still trivial to find through a basic google query.
All that hiding them on Reddit does is pissing other users off because it breaks establish site's norms and expectations.
True, the only option is to not use the site entirely.
It’s not a bad thing. People on there, if you piss them off in a discussion, will go find your old posts and downvote them and in some rare cases harass you by replying or worse put two and two together to doxx you.
Not sure what you mean. They can still do all that even if the profile is set to private. It doesn't hide your posts and comments from Google. They are hoovered up just the same.
It’s slightly harder is what I mean. Takes more effort than clicking on profile and going thru 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.
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.
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.
Reddit also has a ban appeals process. But it's the same people you're appealing to - the mods.
Speaking for myself I generally will unban if people are nice and express understanding for why they were banned.
Really depends on who the mods are. I got two bans on reddit:
First one:
In a programming sub, as there was over 10 years a rather known bug. Typical discussion goes off and using the bug as a example of issues that never get fixed in the language.
Short term sub banned for breaking the rules. The stated "broken rule" was one of those very broad one's where you can hit any discussion with. Appeal the ban, stating that my comments are based on facts. Pointed to the github, the 10 year long discussion. No answer beyond "you are perma banned for breaking the rules".
Got private contacted by one of the main developers of the language, as he noticed my banned status and was unable to get a answer from me.
We gone over the bug in PMs. Bug got assigned to somebody and fixed. Thanks for fixing that 10 year old bug.
That was my first experience with mod overreach. But that did not undo the ban for "being right".
Second one:
In a specific country sub, i noticed there was factual proven misinformation. Corrected the user in a lengthy post, with multiple links to news articles. Short term ban by a mod, for "misinformation".
Appealed the ban, got into a whole discussion with the sub mod. Told him that he is using his own opinion, not the facts. Stated multiple times my news sources from my post (not entertainment news but professional news), inc reuters.
Stated that he is not following the rules by using his person opinion as basis for the temp ban and asked for escalation of the ban review. Asked to show what rule i broke (never got a answer beyond his personal opinions).
Other mod came in, stated that i "attacked the mod" by asking for a escalating of the review, and by accusing the mod of not being neutral (i mean, using personal opinion vs official news websites = your not neutral).
Perma ban ... Kafka lol. As you can guess, never got a answer to what "misinformation" that i broke.
/Insert slap head emoji ...
What did the mods gain? Maybe that short dopamine hit for "winning" by banning somebody. Sounds more like losing if you need to ban based upon your opinion, and not the facts, but hey...
O, made new account, and back on sub. Never got banned again. Did i change my posting behavior. Nowp ... If i see misinformation, i come with receipts (links to actual reputable news articles).
Its like, what do you gain? Its just power tripping people that love to mod. There are good mods out there but a TON of them are just nasty dopamine junkies, that want to "win arguments" with bans.
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 more need of a judicial process 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).
People do not scale.
But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics)
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.
> But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics) so you're either there or nowhere.
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.
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.
Reddit always was a flawed place
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.
HN has problems but moderation being arbitrary isn't really one of them.
What you mention has nothing to do with their capabilities.
Yes, it does. Partly at least. It documents what rules/guidelines were violated, when and how often. In terms of transparency that's miles above reddit. I have also seen dang and Tomhow (?) repeatedly call out users for violating the guidelines - they do it openly and react to discussions. Again, miles above reddit. They edit headlines when the original titles are misleading and comment openly on it. Transparency. I haven't been here for long but the traceability of moderation on this site is laudable, so is their restraint when it comes to commenting on topics/users - and I should know: I have moderated a software forum for over 10 years and had my fair share of temptations.
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).
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.
Just delete your old comments...
I learned a simply truth about social media. When you answer a person in a discussion, are you answering the person or the world?
When you are answering the person, and the person has seen your response by time or counter answer, there really is no need to keep your post alive beyond a few weeks.
By then the topic is already on page 10 and only of interest to google / bots / AI.
Is this a problem for the future? Not really ... if the answer is important like i want the world to keep seeing it, you keep it undeleted.
If you did a product review, keep it alive, but just answer people, or having discussions that have no relevants a year from now, just get rid of them.
But lets be honest, most of our answers are often discussions and not some deep zen state thinking exercises that everybody needs to see years from now.
The world has not gotten better and your faced with a dilemma. Reject social media totally and avoid all the mess of people using your past post history, bots and AI/LLMs eating your data non-stop, or potential profiling. Let alone if governments change...
Or use this trick ... there really is no perfect answer and you do what you feel is good for you.
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.)
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.
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.)
>Mods can ban anyone for any reason
Yes, they can and that's how it's set up. Each community makes their own rules and can choose who participates.
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.
Leaving aside everything else wrong with that, that would be trivial to abuse, especially 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.
That's pretty crazy. I've been on reddit since its inception and have never been banned from pics despite having posted on all kinds of unsavory subreddits over the decades.
Try posting in /r/conservative, I replied to a comment there once and received a bunch of bans from other subs shortly afterwards.
It doesn't matter what you post, just the association with that sub is apparently enough.
Ironically enough, I'm banned from /r/conservative for years for posting innocuous shit. It's probably the most ban-happy place on that site.
If I cared about it. I might want to find a set of subs which when you simultaneously post in will result in largest number of bans. Would be interesting experiment. Exactly how many posts you need to get banned from largest number of sub-reddits...
I don't think I post in anywhere unsavory... they ban from very savory subs they don't like. e.g., if you post in r/redditachievements you are cooked.
Reddit does have global rules about deceptive content manipulation (e.g. voting rings, bot farms etc.)
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).
> 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'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.
If one is squatting on a valuable forum name, then the moderators should be themselves subject to a standard enforced by Reddit.
that's a feature not a bug.
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.
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?
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.
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.
With each passing day, it feels like we see more evidence for the "America is run by lawyers" assertion.
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.
(I realize that it's absurd and inherently unjust that the legal process is so expensive.)
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.
That's $3M down but what's the likely upside? Is it a net gain?
> 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.
I don't disagree with any of this, but I'll note that in addition, 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just because reddit is reliable vs its peers != absolutely reliable.
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.
You cannot simply look at a review and say oh yeah that's a good review of someone who just wants to help others.
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.
> is the message we're trying to get you to accept
You're replying to a comment where I said I agree with the statement "Reddit should not be considered an authoritative source"
With the phrase "the most reliable" which is a phrase to mean the subject you're describing is inherently reliable. Meaning you can read the reviews on reddit differently than amazon, yelp, and the rest. If reddit reviews can't be read differently vs others, why "most reliable"?
You're trying to walk a line that says reddit not authoritative and yet reliable. In this specific context authoritative also comes to mean reliable. So we're at reddit is not reliable yet reliable?
I'm saying it can't be. The well has been poisoned and it's not safe to pray it didn't mix. That you need to treat reddit with the same skepticism lest you be taken for your money. Perhaps you don't agree, which is fair then we agree-disagree.
> "the most reliable" which is a phrase to mean the subject you're describing is inherently reliable
That's really not how superlative/comparative adjectives work
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.
Read about the whale trades and wash trades on Polymarket: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41999743
Yes the incentive alignment is what I was referring to when I mentioned that prediction markets have their own issues.
I'm not convinced wash trading is a huge problem as it's mostly about generating fake volume. The particular linked example is bad too because Trump did end up winning the election.
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
Ehhhhh I agree and yet also disagree (it's fun though).
Yes they were ruined by being promoted by algo changes, but do I blame google directly? For me, no.
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.
Then the money grabbers showed up.
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.
So then why haven’t the higher credibility people in each niche set up an alternative?
Why let reddit drag down the credibility of well everyone in their niche by association. Even if it’s only a tiny bit per year, that adds up over time.
Beyond my pay grade but I'll take a stab (meaning I'm talking out of my ass).
Some in fact have but the majority? Probably laziness, but laziness is just misaligned incentive-goals.
Communities have very little incentive to de-reddit. It's actually a huge amount of work and they gain almost nothing directly.
Separately, I was thinking you know HNews is pretty immune to this problem because we don't have a central theme or something, right?
But no, that just means I can't see how I'm being monetized is all. Blind leading the blind.
Stack Exchange Network has more niche networks that are higher quality than the subreddits now.
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.
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.
[flagged]
You're proving my point. At least in the US half of the country is right wing. If you want an accurate crowd-sourced opinion you need to take that into account, regardless of your own beliefs.
90% of people might believe 2+2=5, but that doesn’t make them correct. Facts aren’t a majority rules scenario.
But facts in real life are rarely that isolated and provably correct or not. Something like Tylenol vs autism or Covid lab leak theory is hugely emotionally charged and people get bogged down in details and then questioning the experts and the expertise and then there's always the discussion of what even are experts. It's horribly exhausting and hey, what do you think about the ice wall theory? Facts in the real world are fuzzy and dependent on the bubble you inhabit. Does chocolate cause acne or heartburn or gout? Is a glass of wine bad for you? This is the Internet, so someone can chime in with a list of studies on the latest facts about whichever of those, but the question you have you ask yourself, is in what way does it matter how correct someone actually is? If I say the store is closed because it's going to snow, and I'm the store owner, and I'm totally wrong about that, it doesn't matter that I'm totally wrong because as the store owner, my store is closed. I look like an idiot tomorrow when it hasn't snowed, but me looking like an idiot doesn't open the store for you to buy what you need.
There's a saying, attributed to Max Planck: "science advances one funeral at a time". Sure, there's facts. Avogadro's number is a specific fact and is incontrovertible. But how about gravity? I mean, 9.8 m/s² is it and that's also a specific fact, but then you start looking up into the heavens and what's this dark energy and now there's dark matter and okay so MOND's been disproved?
Facts also have framing. If you pay attention to the incidence of crimes on the nightly news, it feels like society is falling apart, but then you look at the bigger picture and real statistics and things aren't actually that bad?
In the sloppy real world of facts that are messier than 2+2=4, we don't have anything to go on other than what most people around us believe, and because there's only so much time in the day, as humans we emotionally believe whatever we want. There are some crazies who have spreadsheets output facts for them to bet on, and they make a lot of money off of that, but they're a minority.
When is any discussion a simple fact? If it was, you could just list it on a static website.
I think the problem is that people get their incorrect world views from Reddit.
The comment was specifically about "opinions" not "facts".
It's possible for the majority opinion to be wrong and contradict hard facts that are grounded in reality. For a couple thousand of years the opinion was that the universe was composed of 4-5 elements (earth, water, air, fire, and maybe ether).
During those thousands of years was there information showing the majority was incorrect?
Yes, they could see chemical reactions happening around them all the time, they just didn't understand what what they were looking at.
That is not true. Labels aren’t for normies. There’s a reason a lot of center-right people love Bernie. And it’s not because of your incorrect use of political labels.
If I need an accurate crowd sourced opinion about the Dyson v14 Portable Vacuum I need to take politics into account?
Reddit is far from left wing, liberal maybe, but not left wing.
Yes exactly. Actual left wing communities get banned on Reddit (like Chapo Trap House did a while back and when I started visited it a lot less)
Your comment was balanced and respectful and yet the reply was denigrating. "All right wing, or simply non-left wing opinions are conspiracies" is the implication. This site is very left wing also.
Being balanced and respectful doesn't make you correct.
But it leads to something more important.
"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing."
No but it puts you on higher ground to discuss differences of opinion like adults instead of trading insults and treating each opposing side as an out group
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.
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.
It wasn't off-topic. His response was to this statement: "the most reliable place to get a general crowd-sourced opinion on the internet" - on which his statement was perfectly correct if he just sticks to Western forums.
Ok: "any forum where there isn't a direct motive for product/service recommendation or ideological bias (and absent the moderator having a bias or strong opinion on that topic)".
Yes, in a larger context of conversation about bootcamps opinions being manipulated.
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.
This gives the appearance 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.
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.
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.
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' 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.
And there are still lots of blogs. Not all of them are SEO blogspam. And there's always libgen...
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.
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.
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.
"Nested comments sorted by upvotes" is, for free and frank discussion, inherently far worse than non-nested in-line comments. With the latter there's no hive-mind effect, no consensus-seeking, no dopamine/approval-chasing. Also, traditional forums tended to encourage longer-form posts (which you can still see in places like Spacebattles), which naturally contained quite a lot of technical detail and pictures, whereas Reddit (and HN) are optimized for very short comments. In Reddit's case, smarmy one-liners, usually.
But the main problem, to repeat for emphasis, is that the upvote/downvote system (even if it's fair and used virtuously, and it usually isn't,) stifles disagreement and debate.
This is like the Linux discussion. (No its not the year of Linux no matter how much Windows 11 pisses you off)
"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.
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.
https://archive.ph/qpfED
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.
Seems like a pretty incoherent conspiracy theory. What a weird thing to believe.
Did the mod stop when she went to prison?
Yes, the mod stopped posting publicly around the time she went to prison. That seems to have been the catalyst for the conspiracy theory.
But it was actually a couple days apart; he stopped posting before she went to prison. And he actually posted to some private subs, and was involved in some DMs, after he stopped posting publicly and after she went to prison.
There's really very little evidence other than a vague coincidence of when he left Reddit and when she went to prison, and the name.
And, like, if she were posting anonymously, why would she use that name?
It's basically just completely incoherent. Like many conspiracy theories, they take a lot of other random data points, and if you sift through and cherry pick enough data points you can find others that taken out of context look like coincidences. But that's just because you're cherry picking between two large distributions of data.
>It's basically just completely incoherent. Like many conspiracy theories,
These are absurdly strong claims. This isn't an incoherent theory... it's inconclusive, sure. Unprovable? Probably (difficult to imagine what would have to change to find out with certainty one way or the other).
It's incoherent. It simply makes no sense at all that Ghislaine Maxwell, a wealthy socialite, would post a bunch of stuff on Reddit for years to accumulate meaningless internet points, under something based on her own name, while somehow also trying to be anonymous.
This is a simply incoherent theory. There's no sense in it. You don't post "anonymously" under your own name.
This goes into far more detail on the individual claims from the original conspiracy theory: https://coagulopath.com/ghislaine-maxwell-does-not-have-a-se...
But it really doesn't take this much detail to realize that this conspiracy theory is incoherent, at a surface level it just makes no sense at all.
The entirety of the "evidence" is standard conspiracy stuff, of making vague generalizations, bad interpretations, cherry picking data, etc.
I can't believe people are this gullible.
It’s really not that hard to believe, rich people get bored and use the internet too you know. They’re just not that special and I find this narrative about how it couldn’t possibly be her really weird and deferential. We only need 33bits to deanonymise people on the internet, count the bits.
Precisely, but the coincidences that line up are on the side on improbable she was not the mod. (See link in OP)
i.e. it's almost impossible for to have been anybody else. The supposed "mod chats" are clearly fabrications met to cover it up.
There's no need to respond to counter-evidence that can't be independently verified. The people claiming that (Reddit corporate, basically) have an interest in distancing themselves from her.
Who is out there launching new Reddit alternatives that could catch on?
It's bad enough that one Reddit moderator can wield so much power with such impunity, but /u/spez handing over all of Reddit's data for LLMs to use has now poisoned the chatbots that so many are using in place of search engines.
For historical: https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
Nothing new, but sad a great incubator went down. There really isn't a solution for this, is there?
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.
I feel like it was this way 10 years ago. Once r/TheDonald successfully gamed the system everyday I think people with interest took notice. Now you can be in a niche sub reddit that averages 40 comments on a post. Then a post that could be adjacent to some hot U.S. political wedge topic gets mentioned and there are 300 comments from users who never take part in the discussion. Even something very general like "students are protesting tuition hikes" the small city I live in gets posted and it gets flooded by people who never comment. If you hit a hot topic like Israel / Palestine, the Ukraine war you see it as well.
Reddit, Fackbook, Twitter, TikTok etc are the places where people get their information and form their options. That why the the wealthy and powerful are buying them outright, or paying to push their influence into every aspect of the conversation. Poisoning the well or "Flooding the zone with shit".
Reddit became what Digg was with MrBabyMan. Or actually something worse.
What about the reverse of this, where the mods seem just a little to enthusiastic about one particular product?
Astroturfing?
Follow the money.
I agree with other commenters - it's not always about money. Sometimes a customer just had a good experience with a product, and it catches.
Marketers love this sort of organic promotion. That doesn't make it less authentic.
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.
Especially in politics, casual observers assume everything is about money (especially shadowy "corporations") but politicians are almost always legitimately ideological, which is actually worse!
Would love to read some examples! The most offensive things I know about that spring to mind have all been about either money or saving face.
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.
All of this for three customers? It doesn't add up and there are some missing pieces in the story.
It's widely agreed in your sub that you over post, are overly critical of CS, fail to moderate your friends (or possibly socks) like u/Ok-Donuts, and are generally a bad moderator and should step down.
Also you have failed to refute anything in the OP.
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.
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...
Then I can open up those people's LinkedIns and note down how they represent themselves.
Is that weird? I don't think so but you can decide, but it's not stalking and harassing.
If that's stalking then the guy who wrote the post was stalking the hell out of me.
It's extremely weird ... and is stalking and harassing.
> If that's stalking then the guy who wrote the post was stalking the hell out of me.
Utterly bogus tu quoque argument.
I know of THREE people
Well That Settles It. /sarcasm
P.S. - quit saying there are some missing pieces in the story 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.S. - Get a media consultant. Seriously, you suck at this.
> Get a media consultant. Seriously, you suck at this
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 not 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.
Codesmith and other affected should probably sue Michael for defamation, harassment and other charges, and try to get like $500 million in reparations.
I wonder what makes a platform like HN work, but not the others.
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:
Wikipedia
Quora
Stackoverflow (surprise, surprise!)
Reddit
..
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.
What an insanely hard job, done with far more grace and far fewer mistakes than I could possibly pull off.
Thank you for this corner of the internet, dang (and a couple others).
Edit: mobile typos
The mods here are paid that's why.
But getting paid doesn't guarantee being neutral. I think it's more about the principle and vision than just the pay.
Getting paid means the mod has been vetted, is (presumably) being supervised in some way or reporting to someone, and thus is expected to adhere to some standard or protocol (however loose it might be). Getting paid comes with rules of the job and that alone makes paid moderation far more structured and with more potential for effectiveness than unpaid moderation.
"He who pays the piper calls the tune."
So if the boss wants good moderation as Ycombinator does, fine.
If not, you get X.
I think we just got lucky it happened to be dang.
I've asked myself this many times. It warrants a study.
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.
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.
All of this for what? Shareholder value? So Silicon Valley elites can get rich and force their shit ideas on everyone?
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.
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.
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.
What is the suggestion for filtering out the grifters from these places on the internet that have become super valuable?
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.
Why didn't the author sue? Feels like this is a case where if what he says is true then that's what litigation is for, no?
The author is not a party to the case but an investigative blogger.
Lawsuits can be very expensive. Even if you win.
I’ve given up on recovering tens of thousands of dollars in the past because it would likely ruin me to pursue it.
But in this case there's a multi million dollar company on the line, it seems appropriate.
> And I believe that’s why Michael is doing what he’s doing. He wins when Codesmith loses.
Yes.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45522396
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.
LOL He show his github profile, private, and it has a link to the competitor. To me this reinforces the linked article.
Nice competitor you have there, would be a shame if someone did the same to it.
It truely is a car crash.
It seems like he can't stop and will end up in court at some point.
Reading it, seems like the downvotes are deserved.
Downvoting prevents other people from seeing his comments. You need to upvote to make sure everybody sees "his own words", as he put it. That's for the common good.
> Any time you attempt to defend yourself in the main subreddit, posts get deleted. Or you’re accused of running a Reddit bot army.
Not sure what's the story from the other side, but...
One strategy to counter this could be buying ads on Reddit to expose this, with evidence to show of course. And if possible, place the ad right on the offending subreddit.
And don't forget, if you have enough evidence to show, you can always sue. So, do both at the same time and keep them busy.
What an unhinged individual
I'm french
I was banned from the France subreddit for saying Hamas fighters dress as civilians.
The problem of Reddit goes beyond astroturfing.
It's a judge jury executioner problem.
Moderation is the most expensive problem of online platforms.
The irony of your post being downvoted for stating facts (i.e. what personally happened to you).
Some times you can state facts and still be wrong in other ways.
Example:
If one side says "Hamas dresses as civilians" to excuse killing civilians, they're factually correct and criminal.
If someone then goes online and drops "Hamas dresses as civilians" they're factually correct and reinforcing a criminal's defense.
Anyway, the morality of IDF behavior is apparant to an impartial behavior by just considering the thought experiment that IDF doesn't killing Israeli civilians "just in case" they're Hamas in disguise. They only kill Palestinian civilians "just in case" they're Hamas.
And Hamas only targeted civilians on October 7th and didn’t even try to go after soldiers, so by your logic they are even worse.
I’m really supposed to take people that celebrated October 7th in good faith when they celebrate Jewish civilians getting killed.
You <-------> The point
Not all facts are on topic.
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
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.
Following or observing?
Machiavellian?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiavellianism_(psychology)
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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 not 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.
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.
I wonder if this is the same person behind a series of accounts and similar opinions in the taosim subreddit.
You're reminding me of the old 'News of the Weird' (RIP) category "No Longer Weird: frequently recurring stories that have been retired from circulation: ... violence breaks out at peace conference ...".
16 hours a day every day for two decades
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.
A chilling read.
Con artist?
This really makes me mad. Codesmith was clearly a top tier bootcamp. I joined several of their public sessions when i was looking for a bootcamp and they were fantastic.
Is Lars now the contact person for Reddit malfeasance?
Honest question because I just don't know: Is Reddit shielded by Section 230 for comments made by moderators?
I would say moderation is by definition editorial, but I have learned to not confuse logic with the law.
Moderators don't work for Reddit, though?
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?
It was getting boring after the payroll industry's corporate episonage.
Thanks god. We have a new drama. I can keep my reduced TV time for a while longer.
Reddit is better than TV? Who knew?!?
> payroll industry's corporate episonage.
Huh? I can’t imagine a company like ADP having drama.
Keep up man. It's Rippling vs. Deel.
Reddit moderation is a crap
A similar story happens to Chinese company, Xiaomi vs Huawei
Turns out you only need dozens of Internet accounts to smear a Fortune 500 company.
did they sue?
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.
AI is as biased as humans are, perhaps even more so because it lacks actual reasoning capabilities.
> [AI] lacks actual reasoning capabilities.
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.
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
https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/do-language-mo...
The big advantage of LLMs is that we can test on the biases and attempt to correct them.
We'll never get it 100% right but having something more sensible and neutral than the average Reddit mod is not a high bar ;)
> to avoid bias inherent to human actors.
Do you understand how AI tools are trained?
I’ve no idea whether the allegations in this piece are true.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
When you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail and all that.
If this would happen to me I would go nuclear. I would probably not retaliate until there's evidence like the author listed. But when I do, I would duck and cover.
yeah, relatable, community based organizations spawn a lot of parasocial relationships and one loud detractor trolling you can kill the whole thing
when you try to respond, even with lawyers, it just looks immature because the comments levied are immature
no recommendation, let the org die and rebrand I guess
Site isn’t loading. Hug of death?
Here's an archive link: https://archive.is/w0izj
Very strange that this happened after said michael novati commented here.
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.
TBH I don't think the goal is petty. I think there's a lot of money involved. That moderator runs a company in the space. Seems more about lining their pockets than revenge.
Power. Spending 5 hours a day spamming and commenting is extremely easy compared to actually doing something positive for society.
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.
Were any of you around for the r/Seattle move to r/seattlewa That dude was crazy
What’s the background on that? Mod abuse?
Yeah. The mod of Seattle would ban anyone and everyone for the littlest things. Iirc, he was early on Reddit and had created the sub, and as the community grew his abuse got worse until there was a mass migration.
Apparently it was more complicated than I remember https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/s/6PxOpe0LRs
> The powers that be have decided that Reddit is infallible, a reliable set of training data for LLMs, and should be featured fucking everywhere.
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.
It was only a matter of time. Reddit has become a cesspool.
Why have they not sued him? Like isn't this slander?
So the moderator of this Reddit group, has a company who directly competes with Bootcamps. What are Reddit policies on moderators competing commercial interests?
Could one person moderate r/azure while working for aws ?
Thinking of actually being moderator. Who outside industry would want to moderate such place? Probably for free... And I mean who would be such actually independent person.
The semantic web tried to fix this problem but it never caught on.
That initiative was so ahead of its time.
They
That sounds bad and unfair... so... the victim is a coding bootcamp. Oh well, anyway, next post.
Honestly, why not name the competitor?
They do - formation.dev
Yeah, I don't doubt this story for a minute. Wish we could pin this thread to the top of Hacker News for an entire year, its that important. In the old days if you were rich you would just buy a paper or radio station. Now you become a Reddit mod... Crazy statement, but many use it to crowd-source info on products. That's powerful if you control it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1o1guxj/tho...
I wonder how long this will stay up.
If you read the thread, the amount of fake accounts supporting the moderator is just insulting to me as a reader. Just bizarre.
Forum dictator is a messed up thing. Why is everybody so ok with it? Is it Stockholm Syndrome?
Forum dictators who are on your side can seem like a pretty nice thing, and the forum dictator of the canonical subreddit gets to curate a community that is on his side by design while everyone else is left to scramble for themselves in the wilderness.
Well I don't own the sub, so you should talk to the actual forum dictator who does stay on top of things and I have to answer to.
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.
I would not underestimate how badly people make things part of their identity and see attacks against those things as attack against them. So it might be just moderators being overinvested in something on personal level.
Of course there will always be a mixture of things. Some of these people attacking could just be insecure people trying to justify their life choices through strangers (ton of those across the internet) but it is at such a scale and consistency that the stakes seem higher than that.
Very interesting that this got downvoted. Shouldn't even be controversial on HN. There might be an actual cult around this drug and not just a moderator issue.
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.
And yet Reddit still lives on. Somehow.
I have a 14 year old account on Reddit (and it's my second account) and I honestly don't enjoy using the site anymore.
At this point it's a zombie, it might look somewhat like the good old Reddit that we all enjoyed but the light inside has long gone out.
This has been happening in anthropic subreddits.
Two other recent examples:
1. The singer D4vd is sole mod of his fan subdeddit and deletes every post about the the dead body recently found in the trunk of his Tesla:
https://www.tvfandomlounge.com/singer-d4vd-apparently-deleti...
2. Influencer Paige Lorenze is a mod of nycinfluencer snark and she prolifically deletes all unflattering threads and specifically all photos of her from before her numerous plastic surgeries:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nycinfluencersnarking/comments/1e63...
Also happens on YouTube. Mr Beast’s team deleted all comments on his videos (of which there were thousands) that mentioned or linked to those videos exposing alleged fraud by the Mr Beast group.
That’s different. That’s your own video. Having control of your own video makes some sense. The Reddit stuff is not directly analogous.
Err...I know I'm one of the olds and probably shouldn't be allowed to comment, but isn't the whole point of these sites to allow one to present and enforce a carefully curated public image, often completely divorced from reality?
I’m curious why you know about these cases off-hand.
I have the impression that there’s a certain type of user that likes to be a gadfly in communities to devoted to not particularly relevant or famous personalities.
I saw the article about D4vd when it was popular enough to hit the front page- https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/1nnlqan/singer_d4vd_...
The criminal case is an open investigation and also has been in the news lately: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/details-emerge-homicide-...
My significant other follows influencers thus I heard about the Paige Lorenze controversy/lore.
I wouldn't say either of them is "not particularly relevant" as D4vd is super popular among GenZ on tiktok and has 30 million listeners and 4 million followers. Paige isn't as big but she is a well-known WAG dating some tennis bro and has a successful clothing brand that sells to the genZ crowd.
oh man, you are lucky your competitors don't have a downvote button on hackernews
a simple lawsuit will fix this. reddit has lots of money
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.
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.
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.
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.
Did you teach in 2021? That kind of ratio seems unthinkable now. Hope I'm wrong though!
No, it was 2018, but of those students, more than 50% are now/still in tech.
Edit: Well, that said, I still mentored recently, and the numbers for the one bootcamp I mentored for are about 50% over the last couple of years, which honestly seems pretty good considering the state of things, but that bootcamp has also skipped a couple of cohorts because of market conditions.
It is most definitely less rosy now, but I think the "the student is the main driver of success" aspect is still correct, IMO.
Can we get a tldr since the site is down?
Here's an archive link: https://archive.is/w0izj
Please post an archive link
https://archive.is/w0izj
Full title:
“The Story of Codesmith: How a Competitor Crippled a $23.5M Bootcamp By Becoming a Reddit Moderator”
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.
Tell us more about why you find that interesting? Simply saying it “is” hasn’t provided any new information for us beyond the article itself.
It's interesting if you are into those kinds of bots and interactions. If it was in my wheelhouse, I'd look. Otherwise, there's no reason to expect that content unless someone else points it out.
If your business success depends on Reddit, Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, ChatGPT, maybe you are not doing the right thing.
Ideally you shouldn't depend heavily on things that are outside of your control.
Have you built a business?
Everyone take a moment to read and absorb Novati's rebuttal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45524707
Novati makes two relevant points:
1) Article author did not reach out to Novati for comment.
2) Codesmith ran a misguided marketing campaign that ran afoul of Reddit auto-mods.
These seem like reasonable responses to me. Are they true? I don't know, but I would like reasonable discussion about it.
I really get the impulse to vent when reading about something so outrageous, and in a way this kerfuffle represents the arbitrary unfairness of power leveraged from the shadows, but is that happening here?
Or you could just downvote without comment. That's an option.
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.
> someone mind actually giving a detailed history of the timeline outside of the two main parties?
You have that in TFA? Author is an outsider to the drama.
The author talked to numerous Codesmith staff and their cherry picked information provided for the article.
I got no request for comment, no interviews, sitting on a treasure trove of my own documents the guy should look at.
So yeah. I would love an actually neutral party to put together a timeline after talking to both sides fairly.
This expectation that someone should approach you for comment (and the suggestion that the fact they haven’t matters for neutrality) is misguided.
Huh? This is a strange take.
You're right, and thanks for the note - gave me a chance to reflect. I think what I mean is more along the lines that while a right to reply would have been polite, it isn't required of a blogger, and wouldn't change the substance of the post much, which is largely about a pattern of behaviour rather than specifics. Michael's attempts to dismiss/discredit the post based on a process which generally only applies to the press is what sits badly with me.
Thank you for acknowledging! Most people I know don't have the guts to. Keep doing this!
Also, I was defending Michael, because I'm not a fan of witch-hunts. I truly believe the article is exaggerated, even if there are bits of truth. The author himself is a master affiliate marketer, it's a grey area to say the least. It wouldn't be difficult for me to "spin" some things he's done in a bad way, and make a 10 page article out of it, but that would be wrong.
So why the sneaky shitposting and stalking over such a long period of time? Just release the documents and let people decide.
I call bullshit on the "treasure trove".
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"
Yeah Codesmith is trash and I am seriously wondering if this thread itself is being swarmed by their PR people.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Yet they market themselves as similar outcomes to elite grad schools and it's very reasonable to challenge them on their hyperbolic marketing.
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..."
Even though you have counter claims, you moderating the forum 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.
Yes there are two sides to every story, but in no universe should you be the mod of that subreddit.
This is not my industry, no. Had the author reached out for comment they could publish my claims. More interested in a hit piece than the truth.
Even if we accept all your claims at face value, your behaviour in your capacity as the moderator of that subreddit was still immoral. However you feel about it, being a moderator is a voluntary responsibility which comes with an expectation of impartiality and service at the expense of, not in furtherance of, your personal goals.
At best, if everything you say is true, what you are doing is akin to proudly volunteering as a firefighter so that you can slow-walk the response if a fire is ever reported at the NXIVM HQ. Your crusade against NXIVM may be righteous, and it might even be universally considered a net good if its HQ were to burn down, but it would still raise a lot of eyebrows if it came out that you intended to use your position in that fashion.
edit: To be clear, I sympathise with your claim that you are being subjected to a one-sided hit, and am starting to feel uneasy with the dogpiling atmosphere that is building in this subthread. However, it is understandable to me why this is happening - fundamentally, Reddit has become a town square that is really not engineered correctly to be one. In a town square, people want to choose their leaders, but subreddits are by design "storefronts", in which leaders (moderators) choose their people. This tension is resolved by a very unpleasant jerry-rigged substitute for democratic control: the one way you can "vote out" a moderator (who has the backing or indifference of everyone above him) is to apply psychological pressure, or other harm (such as the reputational damage your company is no doubt taking as we speak), until they crack and resign. This is sort of democratic because larger fractions of the "electorate" can achieve it more easily, but even turning up to such a "vote" that you ultimately lose entails social violence.
It doesn't seem like you are willing to resign, nor to put your moderator status up for a community vote (if that could even be made fair, after you presumably banned a lot of would-be voters, and conversely could accuse the other side of botting/brigading). What other options do those who do not want the town square to be moderated by you have?
To be clear I agree with a lot of what you wrote here so this is just a small nit:
> What other options do those who do not want the town square to be moderated by you have?
Start and visit a new subreddit. This is an important bit that gets covered up by metaphors like "landed gentry" and "peasants". Don't like it? Vote with your digital feet. It doesn't come with any of the baggage and complication that an equivalent real life move would have. Just stop going there and go somewhere else. Yes it would be nice if folks were awesome and tried to be awesome. The reality is they aren't and subreddits are property owned by the mods. Luckily, you don't have to be there.
Your own words:
>> I'm the co-founder of an interview prep mentorship platform [...] my company's services so there is a small amount of overlap on the most experienced end of Codesmith and the least experienced end of Formation. <<
https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/ana...
A "hit piece" can be the truth and that one is.
Do you deny that you work for the competitor? If you don't deny that, then it IS your industry.
> 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.
Everything I can find online, including your post on reddit about the outage, says the outage was for 4 days. Not 3 weeks.
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.
It was 3 weeks.
You provide no evidence and fail to respond to the criticism at the end ... which is bad behavior, among a great deal of other bad behavior.
do you think maybe they could have kept it up if they didn't layoff 80% of their staff because of your modding? reddit is essentially google results at this point, don't act coy.
That's not correct. Their closest competitor entirely shut down for example, and the industry is the main factor responsible for their decline.
They laid off their Future Code (a completely funded program by the city of NY) overnight with no warning - some of the most dedicated staff.
Friend, take a look at how you're phrasing things. If we boil down your statement to just the facts we see:
* Industry wide layoffs are happening.
* This company had a layoff.
* This company did not tell their workers they were being laid off in advance.
But that's not how you phrased it. You dismissed concerns about your biases by saying there are industry wide layoffs, and then in the exact next sentence castigated codesmith for having a layoff. Those statements don't align, that everyone is having layoffs and it's no big deal, and codesmith is having layoffs and it's a big deal.
Futher you add charged language about no notice, which is perfectly standard, and an assertion you can't possibly know, about codesmith having "the most dedicated staff". That's just not something you have context to state and its only purpose is to inflame and paint the worst possible picture.
In the words of Ron Swanson: Son, people can see you
the fact that you’re so entitled as to describe and assess their staff like you’re an insider who actually works there. That’s crazy. and creepy AF
So you don't accept any responsibility in their downfall?
If their entire marketing strategy is Reddit. They deserve to die. They are failed company. If they were really good they would not need to astroturf reddit. Their students would be their best promoters and they would have line out of the door.
Nothing you said here is true or informed, starting with the first sentence, which gets things totally backwards.
No
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.
a judge would def consider the extreme nature that’s occurred here. the number of posts is astounding, and the SEO damage could be monetarily accounted for.
FWIW those posts that show up in search are not my posts and I don't have control over that.
I don't "post" that much about Codesmith. I comment a lot about them.
A comment about them is still a post about them. This comment I'm writing, for example, is _also_ a post about what an unethical person you are and how your inability to understand or apologise for your behaviour says EVERYTHING we need to know about you. Or would you say I didn't post what an unethical person you are, I only commented about it?
Semantics.
Question still stands, why are you writing (posting or commenting) this almost every day.
I can't imagine being so obsessed by something for that long that I comment on it almost every day.
> I don't have control over that.
You're a moderator.
It's hard to assume good faith about anything you say.
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 heard this has actually been going on for 3 years
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.
This is what I do all day: https://github.com/mnovati
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.
I could tell that all your code would be in private repo's before i even opened it. Zero open source contributions, and probably pushing comments so he can get a green every 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
Based on my experience working with Novati (a long time ago) that level of output is par for the course. So I would take it at face value.
It's real code.
Well that proves it!
> This is what I do all day: https://github.com/mnovati
You showed me yours, I'll show you 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).
I’m retired, and work on code all day, most days. I’m just a wee 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.
Here’s a fun GitHub tool[1].
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.
[0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#github-stuff
[1] https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti
What does showing your github do with writing about writing negative posts about a company almost every single day ?
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.
You’re trying to defend yourself, but you still can’t stop yourself from casting shade on Codesmith multiple times in this very comment.
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.
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?
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.
I compared the statement 'do this because it changed my life and the life of many others' to the type of language used in cult documentaries on HBO. I stand by that opinion.
Codesmith is not a sex cult. I can't believe I'm writing that sentence.
There were any number of less pejorative comparisons you could have made if that was all you wanted to say. I regularly see grandiose claims of life-changing benefits on everything ranging from mildly pointless and overpriced meditation retreats down to Toastmasters, and yet you chose the one entity whose main claim to publicity were things that got its leader-guru sentenced to 120 years in a max security prison.
> I compared the statement 'do this because it changed my life and the life of many others' to the type of language used in cult documentaries on HBO. I stand by that opinion.
This is ludicrous ... it's also the type of language used by all sorts of people in all sorts of situations. Mentioning a cult is the least charitable thing that can be said.
> I compared the statement 'do this because it changed my life and the life of many others' to the type of language used in cult documentaries on HBO
why did you make that comparison?
[flagged]
It's fine to participate in the thread and present your version of events, but we need you to observe the guidelines, which ask us to avoid fulmination and using capitalisation for emphasis.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Thanks for letting me know that, I didn't know
What happened in 2024 that changed your mind?
This: https://web.archive.org/web/20240418095904/https://www.codes...
I paused my recommendation to wait to see if they did what they said they would do. In my opinion they did not, so I then removed my recommendation.
You should have never started moderating that subreddit because of the conflict of interest, it is completely unacceptable.
Oh you are gonna taste your own medicine here. Welcome.
He's not losing millions of dollars by being here. A taste of his own medicine should be given in court.
You don’t know when to stop, do you?
> Both sides of the story need to be heard before making a judgement.
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?
I recommended a bunch of people go to Codesmith until February 2024, when the first signs of collapsed started.
I hope he sues you.
https://www.google.com/search?q=intentional+interference+wit...
Would posting to 20,000 people telling them that I was using multiple Slack aliases to 'steal students' from Codesmith's community - which was entirely and utterly false in every aspect of that statement - count under this definition?
Are you planning to write something up about it? It would be interesting to hear the other side that you’re hinting at.
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.
Lofgren is a critic of Reddit moderation. It's extremely unlikely that he was paid for his blog entry, and he's not affiliated with anyone involved.
I might. I have hordes of documents. It's a really sad situation and very sad that he characterized this this way without even talking to me whatsoever.
I have hordes of documents.
Funny enough, one of my attorneys taught me a lesson a long time ago around this. Simplified, she said "only and idiot claims to have lots of documents" to support their action. Sure, it's the easy/lazy way to try and intimidate people with the lowest amount of knowledge about how things work. But anyone with the slightest clue knows 1) talk is cheap, 2) you don't need a lot of docs, you just need the one that matters, and 3) if you claim to have documents, you'll eventually have to produce them, and if you can't, you look like an idiot.
Maybe put another way...don't let your mouth write checks your body can't cash.
> Simplified, she said "only and idiot claims to have lots of documents" to support their action.
As our lawyer told us: "It does not matter what is said, what matters is what your can proof in court".
That life lesson has helped out multiple times in life, against people who made grand claims, and threatening legal action. But they all vanished when we pointed out some of our evidence. Its funny how fast opposing council tell their clients to drop it when evidence shows up.
What is the expression, the louder the bark, the lesser the bite? People who have proof, do not need to bark around on social media platform. They simply sue and get big fat settlements.
I believe the phrase that applies here is "put up or shut up". If you have hordes of documents to draw on as primary sources, then it should be pretty simple (but perhaps time consuming) to write a rebuttal.
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I don't see any links to those hordes of documents in this response. Could you please provide some, like you claim to have?
just gonna guess here. Were you “invited” because you had signed up with Codesmith under an alias and then received a standard event invite? because it doesn’t sound like anyone at Codesmith would be personally inviting you.
Yeah by Eric Kirsten via Email
Is it a hit piece? It’s well argued and comes with sources, which is more than you’ve offered.
I commented on the moderation piece first and not the rest yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=45524707&goto=item%3Fi...
I have the concept of a plan. /s
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.
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.
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?
To be clear i'm a completely random guy with no skin in the game, just looking for answers.
[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.
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...
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Thanks for that. I've been through the guidelines a dozen times. Following them is really the best possible way to have genuinely interesting and constructive dialogue. My last account got banned so i've been trying to do better. It's amazing how much some good faith conversation can get you, i feel in the time i've been here it's helped me develop better patterns of thought and argument techniques, i would say the most important lesson i've learned is to debate in good faith as much as possible and being honest with yourself about what you know and don't know. Most of the users on this thread are just looking to shut michael down, and expressing their opinion that he's an awful person... It's really very tiresome and boring. I have enough confidence in people here that they can hear what he has to say and make their own judgement.
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.
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.
Were you a moderator for them as well?
Great, then give us more to the story.
With sources.
“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, https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=45524707&goto=item%3Fi...