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

larslofgren.com

241–250 of 996 posts

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

#241
post #150

What about the reverse of this, where the mods seem just a little to enthusiastic about one particular product?

Follow the money.

I don't think I've ever seen this phrase used about a conspiracy that actually happened. It always just ends up that they misread something.

Especially in politics, casual observers assume everything is about money (especially shadowy "corporations") but politicians are almost always legitimately ideological, which is actually worse!

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

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With sources.

[flagged]

So the article shows clearly that your graduates do the same exact thing. Grads from Harvard do it. But that doesn’t mean Harvard is telling them to do it. Job seekers are gonna be job seekers. But for you to basically stalk these grads and collect data on them…when they’re not even YOUR grads?? bonkers man. you have no place being a mod. It’s everything broken about the fucking internet right now.

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

#244
post #84

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 o…

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.

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

#245

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.

>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.

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).

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

#246
post #236

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…

The mods here are paid that's why.

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

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ve…

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.

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

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

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.

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

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#250
post #236

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…

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

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