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

larslofgren.com

401–410 of 996 posts

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

#401
post #136

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

The behavior described here, if true, is psychopathic. A chilling read.

[deleted]

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

#402

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…

> 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,…

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.

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

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 fo…

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.

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

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 fo…

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.

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

#405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 fo…

Confusingly one-sided post given the point it's seemingly trying to make.

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

#406
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…

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…

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.

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

#407
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"

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

#408
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bi…

[flagged]

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 ;)

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

#409
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.
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