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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

#911

Post by pbhjpbhj »

AngryData wrote: post #326
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What country are you from? To " wish a politically motivated death" on someone is illegal there? Reddit set itself up as a speakeasy, people speak their minds openly because it appears in some areas to be free of thought policing. Do you think it is wrong to wish a dictator dead? Over the past decades USA has not only wished it, but made it happen, at the cost of many lives.

Reddit definitely has not set themselves up that way. Many people got banned just for saying they understand and empathize with Luigi's motivations.

Historically, before they banned a lot of subreddits. Arguably, to become more attractive to advertisers. I think that was when Voat was set up, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voat (c.2015).

There was a lot of unsavoury content (probably a lot of illegal content), Reddit was more like a -chan site to my recollection. Then it was cleaned up somewhat for the sell off to Conde Nast.

So Reddit (past tense) set themselves up as place for any user content (?), but have moved away from that progressively over the last, what, 15 years.

Maybe it wasn't a conscious thing, maybe it was a startup thing ... Alex O' might yet correct me.

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

#912

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Jensson wrote: post #316
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What country are you from? To " wish a politically motivated death" on someone is illegal there? Reddit set itself up as a speakeasy, people speak their minds openly because it appears in some areas to be free of thought policing. Do you think it is wrong to wish a dictator dead? Over the past decades USA has not only wished it, but made it happen, at the cost of many lives.

> What country are you from? To "wish a politically motivated death" on someone is illegal there? It is illegal in most countries, no? Even in USA you aren't allowed to instigate murder.

Saying, and indeed wishing, "who will rid me of this troublesome pr..esident", for example, is not anything like "instigating murder". In most democracies people are allowed to think, and express their thoughts. Making plans, or taking other actions relating to those thoughts, that's when things become might become criminal.

Indeed, freedom of conscience is usually considered a human right.

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

#913

Post by npteljes »

cap11235 wrote: post #867
cestith wrote: post #849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People forget there are certain special interest groups and even individuals that have more resources to back such a campaign than many nation states. One such individual regularly promises his followers to change the results of his own LLM to match their beliefs, regardless of original training data.

[flagged]

He alluded to Elon Musk.

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

#914

Post by mike_hearn »

newyankee wrote: post #665
mike_hearn wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed maybe the biggest one, /r/bitcoin, which around 2015 started banning anyone who wanted Bitcoin to actually follow the original design and continue scaling up on-chain transactions. The moderator, some anonymous student (possibly named Michael Marquardt), literally declared anyone who wanted Bitcoin to be used for regular transactions offtopic and banned them on a massive scale. When explaining his actions…

No, the biggest one is r/india as it is the subreddit for the largest country in the world with moderators being from an adversarial country and any positive news about the country always being removed while constant critiques and hate allowed

Wow, OK. You're saying the mods are from Pakistan? Or which country do the mods come from?

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

#915

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

That's really stupid. Anyone spending more than an hour reading reddit comments knows that reddit comments are not some bastion of truth.

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

#916

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

This is honestly why I think a non-free platform is the best way to run in the modern era. Especially with the advent of LLM's. It can even be as cheap as a dollar, and that will solve so many issues at once. (note, it can be higher than $1 if needed. SomethingAwful had the infamous "ten bux" for this process).

- spam is now too expensive to bother. Free x infinite is free. $1 now means spam costs thousands to try and uphold. Not worth low effort content

- Rule enforcement is much more tenable now because ban evasion has a cost. Is someone really going to pay $1 each time to try and post some porn or whatever else? 99.9% won't. That will give a feedback look where the community overall should get easier to moderate as it grows, not harder

- Needing to pay menas you also have a community that at least skews in the adult age. Kids don't/won't have easy access to a credit card for even a $1 payment.

The main problem is still the same as free platforms, though: network effects are very strong. Adding more hoops will make adoption harder, and that's arguably the hardest part of a new platofrm.

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

#917

Post by npteljes »

GJim wrote: post #420
jokoon wrote: post #369

I'm french I was banned from the France subreddit for saying Hamas fighters dress as civilians. The problem of Reddit goes beyond astroturfing. It's a judge jury executioner problem. Moderation is the most expensive problem of online platforms.

The irony of your post being downvoted for stating facts (i.e. what personally happened to you).

It's not a fact, but a first-hand recount of a first-hand experience. The bias of a person of themselves affects that on at least two levels: first, on how they perceive their own deed, second, on how they recount the perception of that deed.

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

#918

Post by npteljes »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #854

"And since Reddit is considered the default source of all human knowledge now, [Reddit threads pop to the top of Google.]" I hope this is sarcasm

Just hyperbole. Obviously reddit is not the default source of all human knowledge, but many times, it's the one place to get critical information from - as in, it's mostly the only place where negative information have a chance to be not suppressed.

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

#920

Post by raincom »

idk1 wrote: post #334
raincom wrote: post #183

That's common. A marketing company took over r/mattress in order to get rid of any unfavorable reviews and pump up any bed in box mattress company as long as these companies pay to that market company. For more, https://www.reddit.com/r/MattressMod/comments/1c28g7b/recent...

I'm not interested in doing this at all, but how does a person take over a subreddit? That sounds like a very difficult thing to do.

People offer money to buy your reddit handle, assuming you are a mod of a reddit they want to control.
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