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

larslofgren.com

691–700 of 996 posts

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

#691

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.

This is is deeply ignorant historically. The US has cycled through extreme division over and over. There was 100x more civil unrest over Vietnam, civil rights, reconstruction, early labor wars. We've had 4 presidents assassinated, one shot, but survived. There were 2,500 domestic bombings in the 1970s. In 1972 there were 31 plane hijackings - 1 every 12 days. There is a lot of hot talk, a lot of insular bubbles worki…

Of course man, everything is 'just fine'.

Outside of the USA: talk of invading Canada, Greenland, indiscriminate execution of people on the high seas, a tariff war that seems to be a series of own goals, destabilization of NATO, the burning of 75 years of goodwill.

Inside the USA: military in the cities, half the country is being depicted as 'the enemy' by those in power, an embarrassing cadre of incompetents are in powerful positions and are wrecking the departments they are nominally in charge of, North Korea style adulation of an idiot leader, attacks on judges and members of congress are on the order of the day, teams of masked man snatch people (men, women, children) off the streets and out of their beds, endless violations of the law by the authorities, naked power grabs and abuse of pardons, attacks on the free press, destruction of the machinery of the state are the order of the day.

Those things you mention were bad, but they were still within the framework of the normal functioning of a state, it never looked as though there was a real chance of the USA fracturing or turning on itself no matter how bad they were. But this time it looks very much different. If you can't see that then that's fine with me but 'historical ignorance' is an easy card to play if you have already decided that what's happening right now in the USA is business as usual, and to me it does not look like 'business as usual' at all. This is unprecedented, and it is getting worse every day.

What I think is happening is that the 'flooding the zone' strategy is working so well that people are simply no longer able to keep up with all of the assaults and they hunker down, hoping that it will pass them by. That's a coping mechanism.

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

#692

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.

Is that actually true? The U.S. was pretty damn divided in the late 60s. Widescale race riots, Vietnam war protests, a President and Presidential candidate assassinated etc. That said a few cms or so difference and that bullet takes out Trump. Certainly divided right now just genuinely not sure if it's quite at that level or not.

> That said a few cms or so difference and that bullet takes out Trump.

That could have been reversed. Kennedy could have lived and Trump could have been dead, either way, I was four at the time, my most recent memory from that era is the moon landing. But the depiction of half the nation as the enemy and the active tour of revenge that is happening right now is unprecedented, not even the McCarthy era - or at least, what I know of it - came close.

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

#693
post #573

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.

> There are huge influence operations basically on every national sub. I believe you. But I've also often been accused of being a bot or working for an intelligence service when posting my own opinion in political discussions, not in coordination with anyone at all, and not pretending to be anything I'm not. I think the people accusing me of this did genuinely believe it too.

From the perspective of a mod, the only thing they end up having is the content, and the current patterns of interference they are familiar with.

So if your opinion happens to be in line with whatever narrative someone is trying to spin up, it will end up getting quashed.

Frankly there isn’t any solution to this, and you either end up losing ground to mechanised speech while having a low ban load for humans, or you end up acting on likely mechanized speech, and have a higher number of humans you ban.

The way Reddit is set up, people will select the first option over the second.

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

#694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remind me again how the American slaves were freed?

Your best example of a "historically efficient way to solve political problems" is a 4 year civil war that killed more than half a million people and, after all that, still left African Americans as second-class citizens for a century after? I wonder what an inefficient way would look like.

We can theorize about the non-violent path to emancipation, and the speedy path to legal equality.

But it's counterfactual. It took severe violence plus 100 years to get there. Plus another 60 (yikes) to get to where we are today.

That's horrible! But nothing about that reality suggests to me that there was a less-violent or speedier way to get there. Governments are made of people.

Getting there was a worthwhile goal. I don't think there's a "but at what cost?" debate here.

So it sure doesn't feel "efficient", but it might be the "most efficient possible" in the human world.

Sometimes, progress is measured by funerals.

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

#695
post #589

The discussion at https://larslofgren.com/codesmith-reddit-reputation-attack/ is not going well for Mr. Novati. Edit: oops, that was the wrong link! I meant to link to the reddit post discussing that article: https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1o1guxj/tho... I think one of the most telling facts is that pro-Novati poster u/Ok-Donuts has posted numerous comments that are clearly a violation of all norms…

u/Ok-donuts is clearly his alt. Absolutely pathetic

Such accusations are a dime a dozen and almost always false. (I myself have been accused of being people I'm not.) It's simply a fact that there are people who think alike or who form alliances or kneejerk defenses of someone.

In any case, Novati is not acting like a disinterested moderator.

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

#696

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…

Could it be that sharing conservative ideas is against Reddit's community guidelines? There are other subreddits with primarily right or moderate leaning communities and comments in those get deleted all the time with moderator messages saying they risk the entire subreddit getting taken down by Reddit simply for sharing basic conservative views.

I'm sure you can give us examples of these "basic conservative values" that gets entire subreddits banned off a platform run by a libertarian prepper who admires Elon Musk.

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

#697
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…

Isn't the solution to "fork" the community?

If the moderator is really that bad the new community takes over (yes its more complex than that, but broad strokes).

Its not that different then an open source project with bad maintainers.

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

#698
post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony of your post being downvoted for stating facts (i.e. what personally happened to you).

Some times you can state facts and still be wrong in other ways. Example: If one side says "Hamas dresses as civilians" to excuse killing civilians, they're factually correct and criminal. If someone then goes online and drops "Hamas dresses as civilians" they're factually correct and reinforcing a criminal's defense. Anyway, the morality of IDF behavior is apparant to an impartial behavior by just considering the th…

You The point

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

#699

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…

Could it be that sharing conservative ideas is against Reddit's community guidelines? There are other subreddits with primarily right or moderate leaning communities and comments in those get deleted all the time with moderator messages saying they risk the entire subreddit getting taken down by Reddit simply for sharing basic conservative views.

This is not credible without evidence.

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

#700

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…

> 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 to /r/conservative being a weird echo chamber, is for other subs to be an anti-/r/conservative echochamber. Seems like both are wrong, and two wrongs dont make a right.

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