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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

#751

Post by mrguyorama »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #728
themodisonHN wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Reddit wants to make money, which requires keeping advertisers happy.

Why do you think r/hailcorporate was killed?

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

#752

Post by sowbug »

michaelnovati wrote: post #166
sowbug wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.google.com/search?q=intentional+interference+wit...

Would posting to 20,000 people telling them that I was using multiple Slack aliases to 'steal students' from Codesmith's community - which was entirely and utterly false in every aspect of that statement - count under this definition?

If you believe that happened, your belief provides a motive for many of the actions that the linked article attributes to you. This makes the overall story easier for us readers to understand.

To that extent, it might be relevant. But you'd want to consult a lawyer about it.

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

#753

Post by grafmax »

pixl97 wrote: post #735
grafmax wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enormou…

That’s an issue of the front-end not the backend. The backend is where an open protocol is needed to break the parasitism of the social media companies. Whether users deal with spam depends on the moderation policies applied by this or that specific front-end.

Think of it as a filter. Reddit is a filter on a walled-in social network. What you post there isn’t visible on any other social network and vice versa. But because of that lock-in you are limited to whatever crappy moderation one specific front-end sticks you with, with no alternative if you still want to interact with that social network.

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

#754

Post by permo-w »

lurk2 wrote: post #202
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #3

Reddit should not be considered an authoritative source. Period. At this point it's the most astroturfed place on the internet. Accounts are bought and sold like cheap commodities. It's inherently unreliable. That said, in this instance Codesmith actually has an unusually strong defamation case. That Reddit mod is not anonymous, and has made solid claims (about nepotism with fabricated details, accusations of resume…

> At this point it's the most astroturfed place on the internet. YouTube is far worse and it isn’t even close.

it's easier to tell on Youtube

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

#755

Post by jonathanstrange »

zahlman wrote: post #741
jonathanstrange wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why Reddit is being "investigated" in this way is clearly and without any doubt political and has nothing to do with Reddit's moderation. There are strong anti-free-speech forces in the USA currently, and Reddit is #1 on their target list. Anyone who can't see that is blind on the right eye, which is unfortunately a common phenomenon in certain circles nowadays.

Many years ago, I looked at front-page threads on r/socialism and found blatant, undeniable calls to political violence all over the place. It was way worse than anything I'd ever seen on r/TheDonald. My reports to the admins went ignored, as far as I could tell.

Bullshit anecdotal evidence. I'm on Reddit every day for the past 10 years and have never seen any call to violence. That's my anecdote.

By the way, the US government doesn't just want to regulate Reddit, they would like to take it over and and coerce it into becoming a political propaganda instrument, just like they are doing right now with TikTok. That's why officials use phrases like "deep, dark internet, Reddit culture" and that's why there are congressional hearings. Wikipedia is on their target list, too.

N.B.: This is about government censorship, intimidation, and takeovers of media companies and it's not as if the US government keep their anti-free-speech agenda a secret, they talk about this publicly all the time. I'm perfectly fine with private companies regulating and heavily moderating their forums (e.g. banning r/The_Donald, which was mental btw).

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

#756

Post by zahlman »

neya wrote: post #236

I wonder what makes a platform like HN work, but not the others. In almost every other platform moderators are just sad, angry little entitled narcissists who love exerting control over others. This has been proven time and again across multiple platforms: Wikipedia Quora Stackoverflow (surprise, surprise!) Reddit .. And basically anything else that depends on those so called moderators for fairness and equality. It…

The overwhelming majority of question closures on Stack Overflow are not done by moderators. And they are done according to clear guidelines that are openly and publicly discussed on the meta site, which have reasons behind them that have been discussed over many years and refined according to the community's consensus about the purpose of the site.

The overwhelming majority of people coming to Stack Overflow are expecting the site to provide something that it explicitly is not trying to provide. The site in fact exists specifically because of frustration with traditional forums where people did get the UX they expect from Stack Overflow (i.e.: individualized volunteer consultation and troubleshooting).

Asking a question on Stack Overflow is not about making your code work — no matter how much users might want their code to work, or want Stack Overflow to function that way. By design.

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

#757

Post by permo-w »

swarnie wrote: post #383
eps wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comment and post history is still trivial to find through a basic google query. All that hiding them on Reddit does is pissing other users off because it breaks establish site's norms and expectations.

True, the only option is to not use the site entirely.

the problem here is that in an inversion of the usual roles, Google has locked us into reddit's ecosystem by placing it highly in search results, killing off all the dedicated forums, meaning that some answers to some questions are only available there, simply by user quantity. I literally have reddit IP-blocked on my laptop using my hosts file and I still have to copy a reddit link into TOR once or twice a day to get at some useful information

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

#758

Post by observationist »

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.

The evidence gets deleted. Go talk with any of the mods or former mods for right of center-left discussion forums - any deviation or disagreement with far left narratives is asking for conflict. Anything that risks brigading or attention by one of the larger leftist subs will get nuked because those smaller communities can't expend the hours needed to deal with the flood of hate and harassment they get.

If you find that not credible, you haven't been paying attention - reddit is a leftist cesspit echo chamber, and the only way any dissenting viewpoints survive is through having an absurd level of micromanaging and moderator involvement, like r/conservative, or being so small as to fly under the radar and not attract notice.

Centralizing forums to reddit was one of the worst things to ever happen to the internet, in retrospect. We should have stayed diverse and decentralized, and leaned into federation style community links, and made it easier for people to navigate and surface interesting unique communities, independent of the arbitrary politicization and ideological nonsense that infects reddit.

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

#759

Post by asveikau »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #705
twibs_io wrote: post #204

Pretty shocking that someone whose business is being actively attacked on a subreddit, one that is not only relevant to them but is one of the biggest drivers of student interest and a major recruiting tool, has no recourse in this situation. A lot of people mentioning the legal angle don’t realize what a nightmare that kind of litigation would be. It’s frankly outrageous that Reddit doesn’t take the time to investig…

Not really. Most bootcamps are trash. Legal recourse would only be available if he said stuff that wasnt true

Under you assumptions, a really facile conclusion to make would be that Novati is trashing one boot camp to promote his own trash boot camp.

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

#760

Post by asveikau »

nubinetwork wrote: post #187
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #3

Reddit should not be considered an authoritative source. Period. At this point it's the most astroturfed place on the internet. Accounts are bought and sold like cheap commodities. It's inherently unreliable. That said, in this instance Codesmith actually has an unusually strong defamation case. That Reddit mod is not anonymous, and has made solid claims (about nepotism with fabricated details, accusations of resume…

> Reddit should not be considered an authoritative source. Period. I cringe inside every time I search for something, and the first autocomplete is "mysearchterm reddit"

For certain types of searches it isn't a bad idea. Sometimes you want to include unverified testimonials, hearsay and gossip in results. It doesn't necessarily mean that you lose track of how unreliable the source is.
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