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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

#731

Post by cyrialize »

jacquesm wrote: post #397

I'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.

I've also just been using reddit for far too long. It's gotten to the point where I sometimes feel like I've seen all of the internet, because I recognize way too many videos/posts/stories/cool facts/etc as ones I have seen before.

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

#733

Post by jibal »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #720
stickfigure wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not credible without evidence.

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

Your testimony isn't credible. You have made plainly false statements here.

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

#734

Post by fwipsy »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #178
fwipsy wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny that you should mention a Reddit-originated conspiracy theory on an article about how Reddit is deteriorating as a source of information. I found this blog post: https://coagulopath.com/ghislaine-maxwell-does-not-have-a-se... which appears to conclusively refute the main evidence above, but I haven't independently verified. If you have stronger evidence than what appears to be copy-pasted AI output, I will re-e…

Thanks. It wasn’t AI btw. I found this interesting comment analyzing the article you shared https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29898523 (it’s also curious that your article speculates about Maxwell’s innocence in taking part in abusing children herself but that’s not directly relevant)

I apologize for accusing you of pasting AI output; I still would have preferred that you edited it down to a more manageable length.

The probability calculation apparently assumes that Ghislaine Maxwell has a Reddit account. Reddit had only about a million users in 2006. There were about a billion people with Internet access in 2006, so the chances of a given Internet user being on Reddit in 2006 are about 1 in 1000.

Regarding stylometry, I agree that the account reads as British (and the user admits that he's worked in the UK during an AMA) but it also reads to me as male, and not in a way that seems affected.

It seems to me that the whole argument basically hinges on /u/hasharin's screenshots being faked. I agree it wouldn't be hard to perfectly counterfeit Reddit screenshots, but it still seems more likely that they're real to me.

Overall I would give maybe 1 in 4 odds on it being true. Fortunately nothing of importance (to me) hinges on finding out the truth about this :)

> article speculates about Maxwell’s innocence

Where does it do that? I don't see it.

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

#735

Post by pixl97 »

grafmax wrote: post #581
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…

Social media should operate under open protocols, including moderation. Choosing moderation should be client-controlled. These companies burn through VC money to build systems with network effects then turn around and effectively extract rent. Rent extraction is economically parasitic and anti-productive. This is exactly the sort of thing the government should address by mandating open protocols.

>Choosing moderation should be client-controlled.

An idea mostly doomed to failure, the vast majority of people (that are viewing the ads paying for the service) don't want do deal with that bullshit.

Moderation is a hard problem. You first have the flood/spam attacks that unless instantly dealt with will bring a service to its knees as there will be hundreds of bad messages for every good message creating an enormous bandwidth and filtering cost for each user.

Then there is a the porn problem. Any place that doesn't instantly block porn will be flooded with porn.

Then there is the flood of off topic bullshit that shows up in any given channel.

And from that point there is 20+ other little things that make people feel welcome and want to come to a channel in the first place.

Simply put anyone could have created and open protocol social media. No one has because it's hard and fraught with problems that your users won't want to deal with.

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

#736

Post by zahlman »

LaurensBER wrote: post #351
safety1st wrote: post #226

Earlier 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 would share my own stories of bans, but they're so ridiculous (including all four of the "strikes" that led to my account ban by the admins) that I wouldn't expect anyone to believe it without evidence, and it all happened many years ago (but I fully expect things are even worse now).

Although I do notice that r/science is apparently down to "only" about 1300 moderators. I'm pretty sure they broke 2000 at some point. (The large majority of those have been around for at least 5 years; it seems that the Reddit UI caps the displayed age, because I recognize names from much more than 5 years ago.)

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

#737

Post by pixl97 »

CSSer wrote: post #186
nebula8804 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't dang a paid employee? If so, incentives are different. Its a day job that he could get fired from if he deviates from his main duties. (dang you are pretty decent don't get fired please).

Heh, according to the other guy he could get fired and replaced with AI because of his ego. For the less than subtle, I wasn't implying that it was good or bad. I was just pointing out the irony of criticizing centralized moderation on a site with centralized moderation. As for whether or not pay makes a difference, I think you probably have a point, but I'm sure there's still wiggle room there.

>just pointing out the irony of criticizing centralized moderation on a site with centralized moderatio

Eh?

HN falls under centralized moderation for sure.

Reddit not quite so much. That's more of 'middle management moderation'.

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

#738

Post by rhines »

nikitaga wrote: post #242
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #11

Earlier 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…

I strongly disagree. But maybe because of a difference of perspective. If you're imagining a Reddit-scale forum, with millions of people with no sense of community and no knowledge of the content they're consuming, then yeah a traditional forum format is awful.

Forums shine as spaces for focused communities, where people have reputations and care about the subject matter. Time-sorted discussions are great because that's what's happening - a discussion in the community. You don't want to read someone's quip first, you want to get the whole context. You don't want there to be upvotes that people try to earn - there's already your reputation in the community. If someone's a troll or gives bad advice or is wrong, they'll get called out, or banned, or simply ignored as everyone knows they aren't respected.

Forums just aren't meant for generic content and it's not because of the UI, it's because the entire concept is not compatible with masses of semi-anonymous users with no commonalities.

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

#739

Post by miki123211 »

LaurensBER wrote: post #351
safety1st wrote: post #226

Earlier 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…

IMO, Reddit's main problem (and this certainly isn't unique to Reddit) is that it is a registry of names.

There can be only one subreddit named r/politics, so whoever gets that name essentially decides how you can talk about politics on Reddit. Same applies to any other subject.

R/fishing will always sound more credible than r/fishing2 or r/2wqy4f. If there's some kind of fishing controversy, and the mods of r/fishing only allow one side to speak, that side gains a lot more credibility. The other side can move somewhere else, but that place won't have the credibility associated with r/fishing.

Reddit can try to fight this, but as long as subreddits have unique and memorable names instead of IDs, this is going to be a problem and require them to get their hands dirty.

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

#740

Post by rhines »

nebula8804 wrote: post #175
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #11

Earlier 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.

This is like the Linux discussion. (No its not the year of Linux no matter how much Windows 11 pisses you off) "Old fashioned forums" absolutely suck for discoverability. You have to waste time digging through posts, most of which are unrelated or just filler. No upvote/downvote and usually a mediocre threading mechanism. While we are on this topic, Discord is the same. IRC like applications are not an easy way to ge…

I'm not sure I agree. If I go to a photography forum, there will be one thread for photos taken with a specific camera. Those threads are easily found and I can browse them to get huge amounts of relevant info if I'm interested in that camera. If I want to find that on Reddit or Discord, god help me. At best I can hope for a specific subreddit or server dedicated to that. But mostly I'll find hundreds of posts or comments mentioning or asking about that camera, all by people I don't know and have no way of judging if they know their stuff.

Discord and Reddit have so much repetition and fragmentation because there's no real organization of content, and people with no expertise often weigh in and even get upvoted because the average user is not particularly knowledgeable and the experts aren't on 24/7 looking for new posts to contribute to. On forums topics are stickier and get bumped when there's activity so experts more often find relevant threads and it's easier to judge reputations on forums.

Granted, badly managed forums are bad. If question threads from new users are mixed in with everything else they can quickly dominate search results. You need to be able to filter, but IME most forums do have pretty decent filters.

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