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

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

#771

Post by mallowdram »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #668
jacquesm wrote: post #579

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…

The anocracy variable is at the highest level since the first Civil War. Technically the system is blinking red, and the lack of street fighting is not an indication of Civil War, it's law-abiding discourse that separates polities from power access that determines Civil War.

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

#772

Post by UltraSane »

rjbwork wrote: post #279
lurk2 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s highly unusual to have some sort of judicial process. Every forum I ever used prior to Reddit had a ban appeal process, as did most game servers. For a few games reading the ban appeals could be more fun than playing the actual game. This was usually moderators making executive decisions based on a user-submitted form, but it was better than nothing.

Reddit also has a ban appeals process. But it's the same people you're appealing to - the mods. Speaking for myself I generally will unban if people are nice and express understanding for why they were banned.

I was banned from r/comics for saying a comic wasn't funny. Mod refused to unban me. Reddit mods are almost always complete jerks about banning.

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

#773

Post by aprdm »

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…

Yep. For example anyone can own /r/canada, which seems like a legit Canadian representation for anyone searching about Canada.

And then make it a very opinionated/hatred/political avenue. Maybe of a right wing group.

Not saying it has happened, or that it looks like that. But it can happen very easily.

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

#774

Post by [deleted] »

michaelnovati wrote: post #28

I'm Michael and this was about me. This person never reached out for comment and is missing half the story. I'm happy to fill people in on the rest if this person or someone else wants to hear. I agree with one or two of the characterizations but the majority I don't and there is a lot more to this story than it seems... RE: INDUSTRY. Rithm School (their main competitor) shut down. Hack Reactor is down to single digi…

[deleted]

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

#775

Post by array_key_first »

observationist wrote: post #758
stickfigure wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Commenting conservative things is not against community guidelines. However, most conservative comments are against community guidelines.

For example, supporting Trump is fine. Repeating what Trump says might be against community guidelines. Not because being a trump supporter is against the rules, but because trump sometimes says blatantly racist things, and that IS against the rules.

It's simple to be both conservative and not rude, nasty, racist, sexist, etc. Many influential conservative voices struggle with this. So they get banned, and, by value of following their lead, their followers.

Another example, on a bigger scale. Trump can be upset about losing an election. That's allowed. But Trump cannot advocate people go cause violence because of it. That's not allowed, and we had days in court because of that.

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

#776

Post by RegnisGnaw »

SilverElfin wrote: post #323
fancyswimtime wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this seems to be happening on city based subs as well where the split is political; creating echo chambers for each side. This feels dangerous as any potential middle ground gets eroded away.

Example?

r/Toronto and r/Toronto_Ontario

r/CanadaPublicServants vs r/CanadaPublicServants2 (banned) vs r/CanadaPublicServants3

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

#777

Post by Lerc »

friendzis wrote: post #637
Lerc wrote: post #594

The LLM aspect of this, I think shows both a common weakness and an opportunity. If you suspect something is a commonly held misconception, frequently asking a LLM about it is close to useless, because the abundance of text repeating the misconception (it is common after all) just makes the model repeat the falsehood. Asking the model to apply a more balanced view quite often triggers an iconoclastic antagonism which…

> Models are still very bad at determining truth from opinion, but these are exactly the times when we need the models to work the best. Suppose models could determine truth and opinion. How would anyone go about training that into the model? Even in unsupervised, adversarial, whatever training scenarios you still need some kind of framework to discern between the two. Academic manuscripts? There are decades of publi…

That's why I stated this case as an opportunity. To be able to do this you would need to have a set of examples where sometimes the dominant narrative is incorrect. This article represents one of those cases. Identifying more would be hard work and objectivity would be difficult, but I think possible.

Addressing your final point, I think there is scope for doing that. Having a provenance aspect to embeddings would do that, I suspect existing LLMs infer this information quite well already but I think there might be a possibility to go a little further at inference time by instead of a straight text to token embedding to have a richer input processing model that takes text plus other known context data to produce an embedding holding that extra data. The input processing model would have to be trained to convert the text plus context into a vector containing that info in a form the model already understands.

I think this would be useful in a number of other areas as well, firstly being able to distinctly tag model generated output so it doesn't confuse itself. Tagging individual tokens from code to say how long this code has been in the project, if it comes from a version that lints correctly, compiles, is used in production etc. Not to mention tagging prompts from the user as prompts and filtering that same tagging out of all non-prompts so that prompt injection is much harder to do.

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

#778

Post by DengistKhan »

docmars wrote: post #654
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…

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.

https://i.redd.it/cw47uodbkhh61.jpg

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

#780

Post by mrguyorama »

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…

>I wonder what makes a platform like HN work, but not the others.

Does HN work? We are not allowed to discuss all kinds of things. There are vague and unpublished rules about how things are ranked and how the front page is managed.

Did you know that HN accounts owned by people who have been selected by YC are "special" and can see each other highlighted orange?

How many flags does it take to kill a discussion?

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