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A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

larslofgren.com

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Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#151

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

ceejayoz wrote: post #12
UltraSane wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most online communities work that way. It’s highly unusual to have some sort of judicial process.

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.

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#152

Post by jrowen »

analog8374 wrote: post #98
toomuchtodo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a problem, you are owned nothing by participating in an online forum. Your participation is a privilege, not a right. You are free to participate elsewhere. HN moderates mostly transparently, which they do not have to do at all. That demonstrates respect for their participants, or ideals, your pick.

"if you don't like it then you can leave" (to paraphrase) evades my point. My point (the problem) is that, when you do it this way, trust is right out the window. It looks like a forum but it really isn't. The conversation suffers from a taint.

Every publishing platform in existence is owned by someone with a God-like authority. What alternative is there? Can you give an example of a "real" forum?

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#153

Post by anigbrowl »

throwaway8902 wrote: post #108
Slow_Hand wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 partic…

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!

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#155

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

lambda wrote: post #119
hyperhello wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

>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).

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#156

Post by fwipsy »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #122
SilverElfin wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 base…

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 lik…

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.

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#157

Post by michaelnovati »

simianwords wrote: post #74
michaelnovati wrote: post #28

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 digi…

I would really like to hear both sides to the story. But from the data it seems like you have been obsessively commenting on the subreddit about codesmith for more than a full year. And almost 80% have been negative. This looks unhinged because you are a moderator of the subreddit. What's the other side to this?

I was being threatened by anonymous Reddit accounts a few weeks ago so I made some defensive PR docs but I need to sleep on it to decide what to do.

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.

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#158

Post by kjs3 »

baobun wrote: post #55

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

Reading it, seems like the downvotes are deserved.

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#159

Post by michaelnovati »

sunshowers wrote: post #104
michaelnovati wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Hi Michael. We overlapped significantly at Facebook and chatted a few times (I was on the source control team from 2012-2018ish, part of which was the migration to Mercurial). Correct me if I'm wrong, but you wrote some posts about how you wanted something like git rebase -i, right? I know your heart is in the right place, and have a great deal of respect for you. I think being the most active moderator of a coding b…

Hi. I don't run a bootcamp. I recommended people go to Codesmith too and there's a lot more to this story. It's missing half the context.

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#160

Post by fragmede »

ceejayoz wrote: post #19
blindriver wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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