It's bad enough that one Reddit moderator can wield so much power with such impunity, but /u/spez handing over all of Reddit's data for LLMs to use has now poisoned the chatbots that so many are using in place of search engines.
A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator
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Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator
#632Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the HN guidelines: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith Let's aim to keep HN better and more pleasant to use than Reddit;)
I did explain my reasoning. You coincidentally not mentioning /r/conservatives censorship practices, simply doesn't appear plausible, given the context of your comment and demonstrated knowledge of reddit moderating practices.
I disagree with your assessment, if I remember correctly I posted three times on that sub.
The HN guidelines are there to improve the quality of the conversation, there's not much to further discuss so I'm going to leave it at this.
Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator
#633Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
"Nested comments sorted by upvotes" is, for free and frank discussion, inherently far worse than non-nested in-line comments. With the latter there's no hive-mind effect, no consensus-seeking, no dopamine/approval-chasing. Also, traditional forums tended to encourage longer-form posts (which you can still see in places like Spacebattles), which naturally contained quite a lot of technical detail and pictures, whereas Reddit (and HN) are optimized for very short comments. In Reddit's case, smarmy one-liners, usually.
But the main problem, to repeat for emphasis, is that the upvote/downvote system (even if it's fair and used virtuously, and it usually isn't,) stifles disagreement and debate.
Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator
#634Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was banned from /r/sourdough for asking a question about rye flour, because someone dug into my post history and saw that I had posted a few times on the Catholicism subreddit. Someone's first instinct when reading a completely benign, neutral question was to see if I was on this or that "team".
There used to be bots that would do this automatically, but they seem to have fallen out of favor due to the high rate of false-positives (user from Subreddit A posts in Subreddit B and gets automatically banned by the automoderator on Subreddit A). They implemented a change recently where users can make their profiles private which seemed like a cool idea to prevent this sort of thing, but in practice it is used alm…
Just delete your old comments...
I learned a simply truth about social media. When you answer a person in a discussion, are you answering the person or the world?
When you are answering the person, and the person has seen your response by time or counter answer, there really is no need to keep your post alive beyond a few weeks.
By then the topic is already on page 10 and only of interest to google / bots / AI.
Is this a problem for the future? Not really ... if the answer is important like i want the world to keep seeing it, you keep it undeleted.
If you did a product review, keep it alive, but just answer people, or having discussions that have no relevants a year from now, just get rid of them.
But lets be honest, most of our answers are often discussions and not some deep zen state thinking exercises that everybody needs to see years from now.
The world has not gotten better and your faced with a dilemma. Reject social media totally and avoid all the mess of people using your past post history, bots and AI/LLMs eating your data non-stop, or potential profiling. Let alone if governments change...
Or use this trick ... there really is no perfect answer and you do what you feel is good for you.
Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator
#635I've seen a lot of shady moderation on reddit and it's one reason I quit using it. There is the obvious brigading, mods on powertrips and but also massive probably paid astro turfing campaigns. Reddit has gone downhill substantially in the last five years. HN is not immune either, but at least we dont' have a 'mods on powertrips' problem, in fact the opposite.
Agreed, "mods" binging on their little power is a problem everywhere in society, and in Reddit it's made even worse by the fact they are hiding behind their screen
Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
/r/AskBrits banned me for pointing out that there are several threads each day about immigration, each tailor made rage bait. Sometimes they’re not even a question. I’ve personally caught a couple of Iranians and Russians brazenly posting such threads at 4am British time (working hours in Tehran) and the moderators did nothing. They simply allow such threads while deleting any thread that goes “is anyone sick of the…
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...
> How did you establish the posters were Russian or Iranian, other than by time zone?
To a lot of people, Russian is just a state of mind. It simply means that you disagree with them, or the regime that they support. Also, the mods on reddit are overwhelmingly these people, banning all opposing opinions, or banning people for being Russian, or Iranian, or Chinese, etc...
They think this is legitimate: aaah, so you're Chinese. I knew there was something wrong when you insisted that the Chinese weren't evil thieves hellbent on destroying freedom, by nature. You're not allowed to post in the West.
All governance in the western world has become weak as hell. You only need a few bucks to corrupt anything, unless somebody with a few more bucks is already corrupting it. And certain intelligence agencies have the deepest pockets. Maybe little fiefdoms wasn't the best way to structure the internet? Maybe section 230 would be obviated if there were clear, deliberative processes to allow entire groups to both take action and responsibility for what they allow in their discussions?
Take note about how adhering to parliamentary methods protects private organizations: in most places, having proper rules set up (not EULAs and ToCs) actually has the practical effect of creating law because it sets up obligations to the users as well as obligations from the users. There's no such thing as a benevolent dictator.
Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator
#637The 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, but these are exactly the times when we need the models to work the best.
Suppose models could determine truth and opinion. How would anyone go about training that into the model? Even in unsupervised, adversarial, whatever training scenarios you still need some kind of framework to discern between the two. Academic manuscripts? There are decades of publications built upon "discoveries" later retracted or shown to be falsified.
How would you build the truth/opinion vector(-s) with impartial objectivity?
> a model can be taught to identify the difference between honest opinion and bad faith actors, or more critically identify confidently asserted statements from those supported by reasoning.
You have a confidently asserted statement {from an industry veteran, backed by nothing but credibility}, and a statement supported by reasoning{, which is in turn supported by... implicit assumptions, verging on wild guesses and exaggerations}. Do you see a reasonable way to somehow embed the context in curly braces in any part of the LLM pipeline without nullifying the need for the LLM itself?
Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator
#638I 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.
I don’t see this as a big a problem as you do.
As soon as you solve this, then you have the issue of people you see as good actors being ousted and having their influence taken down. If the bad guys can be silenced then so can the good guys and then it’s just a matter of how we figure out the good guys and the bad guys!
Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator
#639They
Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator
#640Earlier 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…
I got permanently banned from Reddit for participating in a thread debating the death penalty. In which I wrote one comment suggesting we shouldn’t waste a bunch of court costs on mass shooters who are blatantly guilty.
That was considered “instigating violence” lol