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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

#781

Post by LexiMax »

Aurornis wrote: post #644
LaurensBER wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> - 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…

> 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.

When almost any community is particular about who it lets in and who it doesn't let in, it can be seen as a reasonable moderator precaution. Heck, some of the very best social spaces I'm a part of are only accessible by knowing people who know people.

But Reddit at it's core is a content aggregator with a comments section, which uses a moderation model driven by a strange mix of authoritarian mods and mob rule. A mod can ban you for any reason, but there's nothing stopping an outside mob from trying to control a narrative by mass voting in a way that mods have little to no control over.

In practice, /r/conservative can't really be considered a functional social space. But this core contradiction at the heart of the Slashdot/HN/Reddit model means that none of them function very well as social spaces either. These days, the actual "community" part of most hobbyist subreddits are on alternative platforms like Discord, and quite frankly I think it's for the better that this is happening.

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

#782

Post by tencentshill »

karlkloss wrote: post #417

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.

The constitution for the Nation of Reddit makes all speech legally protected, after all.

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

#783

Post by bryceneal »

neilv wrote: 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…

I'm equally confused at just how bad Reddit is at identifying and removing bad actors to the point that I'm convinced it must be an intentional.

I'm not sure if the reason may be as simple as the desire to pump their user numbers for earnings, or if it's something more egregious than that. It's not clear to me how a company owned by the public which relies on advertisers for revenue has been able to carry on for so long being a propaganda farm for foreign agents and marketing bots.

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

#784

Post by [deleted] »

neilv wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#785

Post by darksaints »

michaelnovati wrote: post #349

I'm going to focus on the MODERATION ACCUSATION first since that seems to be the main issue. What moderating r/codingbootcamp actually looks like: I don't own the sub - I report to the owner who asked me to help after I'd been one of the most active and helpful contributors. The coding bootcamp industry is absolutely infested with astroturfing. Brand new accounts, manufactured conversations, fake testimonials. It's c…

You're seriously gonna Streisand yourself with your defenses here. Nothing but narcissistic defense mechanisms on display.

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

#786

Post by random9749832 »

random9749832 wrote: post #627
random9749832 wrote: post #485

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.

Yup, I have now observed this a few times go up and down a couple of times. Very strange behaviour surrounding this without any negative response. Society is cooked.

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

#787

Post by krapp »

watwut wrote: post #604
krapp wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Slavery was just as much a matter of politics as it was violence. Separating the two as if to imply that violence can't or doesn't solve political problems is a specious argument. American politics has normalized a degree of violence in the last few months that would have been unthinkable, and the degree of violence doesn't change the nature of what politics is, only what it permits.

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

#788

Post by vkou »

neilv wrote: 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…

> What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.

It's more or less an open marketplace, with only a few high-level rules.

Why would it be resilient to these kinds of attacks? Human society as a whole isn't - if it were, I wouldn't have a job.

> 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.

So, kind of like how bad companies persist in dominant market positions?

Bad actors put in a lot more effort to protect themselves than people with lives and jobs have to take them down. Anyone can bitch about Wells Fargo and Comcast, and 'tyrranical' mods, but at the end of the day, most people aren't switching their ISP or going to a forked community.

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

#789

Post by bryceneal »

tuesdaynight wrote: post #570
kranke155 wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

I suspect the scope and scale of these operations are at least 1-2 orders of magnitude larger than most people think. I also strongly suspect such operations are not limited only to the governments you listed here. If the public was able to quantify the scope then maybe they would be more outraged.

Part of me hopes that some amount of resources are being invested by someone in our government to analyze and assess this, but maybe that is overly optimistic.

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

#790

Post by vkou »

bawolff wrote: post #700
Aurornis wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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…

> 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 t…

Parent poster isn't saying that r/conservative should be banned for that behavior.

Since that sub's arbitrary ban behavior is allowed, other subs banning people for similarly arbitrary reasons (like people who have been vetted by its mod circle into being allowed to post there) should be permitted.

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