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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

#721

Post by pixl97 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #310
tiku wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if they do get paid, by a competitor? It's very easy to DM a mod and tell them they will get x amount if they skewer the odds in your favor or blast your biggest competitor.

What makes you think this doesn't happen? I can almost guarantee it does. If I were willing to pay a Reddit mod off and I saw unfavorable coverage for my brand I'd absolutely try to win the mod over by paying them more than the competitor is paying.

What's kind of crazy about this is in many lines of business you must disclose payment for advertisement. Be interesting to make this a civil law case and sue moderators for lack of disclosure.

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

#722

Post by DiggyJohnson »

abustamam wrote: post #708
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.

Out of curiosity, what views? I'm trying to understand if Reddit is just ban happy against conservatives or if basic conservative views are really against reddits TOS

Trans related topics are expressly against TOC and enforced unless a subreddit is ruthless in removing any comments that aren't expressly positive and affirming. There is no room for nuance on this topic. Just giving an example.

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

#723

Post by senkora »

The competitor is Michael Novati, who is known as the originator of the “Coding Machine” archetype of principal engineer at Meta.

TFA gets the Risk board game story from the same article where I first heard of him: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-coding-machin...

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

#724

Post by testdelacc1 »

debtta wrote: post #536
testdelacc1 wrote: post #478

Earlier 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...

Fair question. The answer is that they didn’t bother hiding it. They literally posted in a whole bunch of Iranian subReddits and only Iranian subReddits. On this thread they were claiming they were British. Literally the first post of that kind, completely different to everything they had posted previously.

The clincher was that they deleted their account as soon as I pointed they were Iranian.

I’m going to guess they bought a Reddit account from someone without looking at the past history on the account.

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

#725

Post by noir_lord »

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…

I don't see an issue with it, if you are willing to put in the effort to swim in the cesspool that is /r/conservative you don't get to complain when other people find the smell objectionable.

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

#727

Post by rendall »

rendall wrote: post #596

Everyone take a moment to read and absorb Novati's rebuttal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45524707 Novati makes two relevant points: 1) Article author did not reach out to Novati for comment. 2) Codesmith ran a misguided marketing campaign that ran afoul of Reddit auto-mods. These seem like reasonable responses to me. Are they true? I don't know, but I would like reasonable discussion about it. I really get t…

Or you could just downvote without comment. That's an option.

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

#728

Post by DiggyJohnson »

themodisonHN wrote: post #507
testdelacc1 wrote: post #478

Earlier 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…

On a related note, leaving my gripes with one guy aside, a lot subreddits are also just blatant marketing fronts, with the full blessing of the mods. /u/Turbostrider27 is a shared account between marketing firms. Saying their name in any sub the account is active on will shadow ban your message.

https://www.reddit.com/user/turbostrider27/

That's fascinating. How does an account like this not blatantly violate the TOC for personal or commercial use of Reddit?

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

#730

Post by 2close4comfort »

piltdownman wrote: post #713
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 fuckin…

Agreed, Reddit as a source of truth is the issue. Who in the their right mind would look at Reddit as whole and say that is an open, unbiased community focused on true and accurate information. And as the article and comments in this very thread show how moderation and its application within Reddit are "contaminated" which is a very good way to describe the situation.
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