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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

#711

Post by Goronmon »

pessimizer wrote: post #636
debtta wrote: 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...

> 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…

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...

Pretending that there aren't concerted efforts to exert political influence on Reddit isn't helpful, and comes across as pretty disingenuous.

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.

Yes, corruption and bribery exist exclusive in "western" governments. Thankfully "eastern" governments are completely immune to these issues.

And I know, "I never said those exact words!" but that at was the obvious intention.

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

#712

Post by pyuser583 »

kjs3 wrote: post #150
pyuser583 wrote: post #64

What about the reverse of this, where the mods seem just a little to enthusiastic about one particular product?

Follow the money.

I agree with other commenters - it's not always about money. Sometimes a customer just had a good experience with a product, and it catches.

Marketers love this sort of organic promotion. That doesn't make it less authentic.

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

#713

Post by piltdownman »

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…

Reddit being Reddit wasn't a problem until it became a source of truth and subsequently afforded consensus and an unwarranted sheen of credence by Agentic AI. As the author beautifully (albeit somewhat nihilistically) summarises:

"We have to remember that Reddit isn’t just Reddit anymore. The powers that be have decided that Reddit is infallible, a reliable set of training data for LLMs, and should be featured fucking everywhere."

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

#715

Post by zahlman »

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…

> You left out the fact that you can’t post to /r/conservative until

You present this as if it were somehow evidence that somehow justifies the bans from the other unrelated subs.

There is no morally justifiable reason why having mainstream conservative viewpoints (which is to say, ones held by a very large fraction of the general populace) should bar someone from non-political participation in non-political subreddits.

The bans in fact are another symptom of the same cause: every kind of right-wing enclave on Reddit gets trolled constantly. The generally left-wing userbase does whatever they can to ostracize right-wingers, or perceived right-wingers. Which includes both banning them from other spaces, and mocking them in their own.

> It’s a moderator-curated echo chamber.

This describes every vaguely political or ideological themed subreddit. Except maybe the general r/politics, which might still be "letting the votes decide" if you don't have the "acceptable" views on every issue. I have literally seen subreddits that would ban people for "ableism" for using the word "stupid" to describe an idea or proposal. And that was like a decade ago and it was getting clearly worse year after year.

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

#716

Post by dmoy »

PanoptesYC wrote: post #628
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.

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.

mods definitely can't, but admins probably can. GP said admins.

That said I have no idea if what GP said is true or not

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

#717

Post by pixl97 »

le-mark wrote: post #568
beloch wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The politically motivated assassination of Charlie Kirk claimed the life of a husband, father, and American patriot. In the wake of this tragedy, and amid other acts of politically motivated violence, Congress has a duty to oversee the online platforms that radicals have used to advance political violence. To prevent future radicalization and violence, the CEOs of Discord, Steam, Twitch, and Reddit must appear befor…

> There may be an attempt to coerce these platforms to start moderating in a way that's more favourable to Trump. That’s the real comedy about this; when we like it censorship is good, when we don’t like it (Covid shutdown, anti vax, Jan 6th) censorship is bad. The double standard is shocking, yet completely normalized. Besides any attempt to end violent rhetoric has to start with POTUS himself, theater exactly what…

I mean, this view of censorship is a little black and white.

Simply put in reality some censorship of some kind or I can simply 'win' by screaming really loud so no one else can even get a word in about their view.

The paradox of tolerance tells us that any view that intolerant of the existence of another person for simply existing should not be allowed as it is a terminal case. Of course electing the most violent and intolerant person we could find means we're going to have a hard time.

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

#719

Post by burnerRhodov2 »

michaelnovati wrote: post #157
simianwords wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would really like to hear both sides to the story. But from the data it seems like you have been obsessively commenting on the subreddit about codesmith for more than a full year. And almost 80% have been negative. This looks unhinged because you are a moderator of the subreddit. What's the other side to this?

I was being threatened by anonymous Reddit accounts a few weeks ago so I made some defensive PR docs but I need to sleep on it to decide what to do. This is what I do all day: https://github.com/mnovati But yeah two sides to every story and if this has been going on for years, "1000 posts", there's clearly more to the story, and it's irresponsible to not reach out for comment if you are going to try to summarize that…

I could tell that all your code would be in private repo's before i even opened it. Zero open source contributions, and probably pushing comments so he can get a green every day.

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

#720

Post by DiggyJohnson »

stickfigure wrote: post #699
docmars wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can testify this is credible. You can prove this by trying it out yourself.
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