Live data from Hacker News

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

larslofgren.com

621–630 of 996 posts

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

#621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I don't have control over that.

You're a moderator.

It's hard to assume good faith about anything you say.

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

#622
post #334

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...

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.

https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/29184583611...

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

#623
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

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.

> 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.

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

#624
post #594

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…

> 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.

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

#625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Critics shouldn't be silenced

a) non sequitur

b) Then you're good with the massive amount of criticism you're receiving.

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

#626
post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

It is hard to tell whether you are serious or whether this is sarcasm.

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

#627

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 pharmaceut…

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.

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

#628
post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

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

#629

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…

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.
Post reply on HN