Wow that must be a lot of work
Wow I feel for you, friend
Yea id be happy to help out from time to time.
--- But needs to happen with other things.
Quite often seen in GitHub where an attacker can contribute to build trust. With Reddit, mini modding, regular submissions, good comments etc
Defense includes not being shamed or pressured when life seems more important.
Just the quotes:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39909905
Very long page but a lot more in depth. Search for “Jigar Kumar pressured Lasse Collin”
https://securelist.com/xz-backdoor-story-part-2-social-engin...
And an overview:
Its worth any maintainer to be familiar with these methods to build up defences. With a few sock puppet accounts a single person could do it on their spare time. A nation state or criminal full time enterprise could do several attacks.
It's scary and immoral but I find it fascinating too. Like the dark side of the how to win friends books.
Security.
It's definitely never mentioned on reddit because simply saying one of the websites in an offhand comment gets you a sitewide ban and your comment deleted.
If the sub has an inactive or no mod, its as simple as making a post.
So not much of a personal payoff, right? UNLESS you’re the kind of person that thrives on drama, conflict and power trips.
Meaning this actively filters for people that are radioactively toxic
True. There's a reason "discord mod" is an epithet.
Edit: oops, that was the wrong link! I meant to link to the reddit post discussing that article: https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1o1guxj/tho...
I think one of the most telling facts is that pro-Novati poster u/Ok-Donuts has posted numerous comments that are clearly a violation of all norms but seems to be immune to moderation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1o1guxj/tho...
In any case, Novati is not acting like a disinterested moderator.
In the end, these bootcamps charge people thousands of dollars to sell them the dream of getting a high paying job after 3 months of part time work, and that's just not realistic.
In addition, in order to survive and sell to consumers, most bootcamps are 90% sales and marketing, and 10% education. They use their own students to teach the next generation, and increase their job placement rates (if you hire your own grad you can claim that that grad got a job!).
I used to work in the industry, and in theory I think it's great to have alternatives to universities which can be elitest and out-of-date with new tech, but I left because it felt kinda like the used-car market of CS, and I don't think it's a great model overall.
It is very easy to ban someone. Making the ban permanent and combining this with the moderator blocking the person (so they can't send messages), there's no appeal process.
Another part is that for any sub of reasonable volume, trying to actively moderate and shape beyond banning the most egregious actors is difficult. Deleting and locking posts for a finer level of moderation is time consuming. The judgement calls of "when is this going off the rails?" become more snap over time.
With the time consuming nature of actually moderating a sub and the ease of just banning someone - moderation becomes the policy of whoever has the most time. The stereotypical variations of this are the paid social media manager who's job it is to scrub anything positive of a competitor or negative about their brand, or a person who is moderating because of a deep interest in the subject but with strong opinions too.
With multiple active moderators, the most extreme views of each in turn become the overall "moderation philosophy" (and if those views are opposed the oldest one wins).
Combined with the echo chamber nature of the message board, the more and more extreme stances become the dominant stances.
To try to present a consistent approach to moderation (Reddit has gotten burned by inconsistent responses many times in the past) it appears that Reddit.inc is trying to be completely hands off. That in turn means that it takes extreme situations for corporate to get involved - often long after it's been a problem that they've been alerted to. Having let the problem fester for so long, when something is done, it tends to be very heavy handed, lopsided, and generates a significant amount of discontent that spreads elsewhere.
So, you've got a site that hosts thousands of message boards, that inevitably grow more and more partisan to one extreme or the other, are mostly facades for a corporation, or propaganda for a political organization.
It is impressive that it has remained "stable" for as long as it has.
And wealth is extracted out of all that volunteering. Ads and tokens for AI training.
There could just be an appeals system and if one moderator messes up a high enough percentage of the time, they get the boot.
Besides allowing it to happen, Reddit the corporation is not the one doing this. It's private interests of all sorts that are driving down the quality and diversity of discussions for a website that often ranks at the top of google search results.
Is there any evidence behind this claim?
What is particularly specific to reddit is that subs associated with big media titles, companies etc. originally were ran by normal people, fans so to speak but at some point become marketing tools with entrusted mods whose job is to make sure no criticism of any kind - even the slightest is present. Some communities moved elsewhere, some gave up and some pretend everything is as it used to be.
There are niche places on reddit with little moderation, where actual votes people cast on posts are the moderating tool but even there, some hijackers tend to appear. Their MO is to spew dangerous content, make sub locked and then gracefully arrive as saviors who are from that point in control of what's actually posted.
I looked it up it found a pretty clear reason they'd delete it themselves?
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1o0st2o/basedba...
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1o1m9nz/the_mos...
Vibes are not a meaningful comparison.
You can't compare different quantizations(Q4_K_M & Q4_K_XL) and also use a temp of 0.7 and use that for any meaningful comparison.
All difference you notice could be either due to temp randomness or quantization differences even if the original weights are exactly the same.
Also these were likely sourced differently so the quantizers could've used different quantization importance matrizes or process.
The weights are the same, the weights are all that matters.
It is not just this, but things like order of search results (even just what shows up on auto-completion) has toppled election and changed the minds of undecided voters.
My clients (which are most the Gov, Uni, Med, are not happy for it but they got over it. My proposals for funds/contracts suddenly get denied unless I explain what is really happening. This is not only damage to reputation but also to business. I repeat this has to stop. Now the competent Authorities are investigating properly but as always they get off with a fine (which is in Billion btw).The choice for them is Either stop this or pay billions, The world belongs to everyone.
But also: what google shows here is what's being indexed on your website. It shows "porn and prostitution" because at one point that's what your website served. Was sverken.se ever in the hand of shady domain parking services that advertised porn services?
Strangely enough, the Internet Archive only saved the safe-for-work version (records start in Jan 2025, so the misdeed must have occurred before this date) - from a cursory look at the domain registration history, it seems it was expired and unregistered (or parked by someone else) between July and September 2025.
Still not Google's fault or the action of malicious botnets. My suggestion is to try and clear your indexing history for this website through the Google Search Console (https://search.google.com/search-console/)
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 will just give you the opposite of whatever the commonly held opinion. I have had some success in asking for the divergence between academia and public opinion on particular issues.
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.
There may be an opportunity if there are enough known examples of instances like this story for a dataset to be made where a model can be taught to identify the difference between honest opinion and bad faith actors, or more critically identify confidently asserted statements from those supported by reasoning.
Unfortunately I can see models that can identify such falsehoods being poorly received. When a model can say you are wrong and everybody around you says you are right, what are the chances of people actually considering the possibility that the model is, in fact, correct?
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 publications built upon "discoveries" later retracted or shown to be falsified.
How would you build the truth/opinion vector(-s) with impartial objectivity?
> <...> a model can be taught to identify the difference between honest opinion and bad faith actors, or more critically identify confidently asserted statements from those supported by reasoning.
You have a confidently asserted statement {from an industry veteran, backed by nothing but credibility}, and a statement supported by reasoning{, which is in turn supported by... implicit assumptions, verging on wild guesses and exaggerations}. Do you see a reasonable way to somehow embed the context in curly braces in any part of the LLM pipeline without nullifying the need for the LLM itself?
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.
You are sidestepping the issue here. The issue is NOT lack of such database per se, the issue is lack of impartial oracle used to build such database.
> 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 issue is lack of context informing us of the sincerity behind the claim, therefore proposal is to use LLMs to infer that. When presented with difficulties inferring that context from immediate message, your proposal is to build broader context and then feed it to LLM. To do what, spit it back packed in certain language tone? Do you see the tautology here?
Discussion around AIs/LLMs is quickly becoming discussion around Bitcoin at certain points in the hype cycle. You can't solve for external effects internally. An LLM cannot tell truth from opinion, bitcoin network cannot guarantee a transaction actually took place.
The notable aspect here is that oracles predict the future. but all data is from the past. You can build examples from cases where, with the benefit of hindsight you know the truth of the outcome even if the majority consensus was the opposite at the time that the data was created.
Perhaps Bitcoin is a good example, albeit on a different time scale. There are ample examples of arguments about Bitcoin predicting various outcomes, that data is available now. At some point in the future it will be obvious which of those predicted outcomes is false. Any widely believed outcome that turned out to be false is a candidate for the data set. If there is any signal in that data to reveal that it is was going to be false the model has potential to learn it. if there is no signal in that data then on average signalless examples will balance out to have no overall impact.
>The issue is lack of context informing us of the sincerity behind the claim, therefore proposal is to use LLMs to infer that. When presented with difficulties inferring that context from immediate message, your proposal is to build broader context and then feed it to LLM. To do what, spit it back packed in certain language tone? Do you see the tautology here? There is no tautology here. The additional context is the provenance of the document and a combination of data that is clearly quantifiable by automated processes. If you note all of the examples of tagging types I gave, they are all things that can be calculated analytically. Age of code can be determined by looking at git logs, when a model generates output itself it can tag that to say that it was generated by itself. User input can be identified at the user interface and all other data that enters the model can be therefore marked as not coming via the user interface.
I proposed no LLM to do any of this, nor even for the translation of that data into the model. I suggested a model, that may involve a transformer, it may not. That input layer is only a translator to turn that additional context into terms that the LLM knows.
A LLM will have an internal way to represent the notion of code that was part of a successful build. Or that a word is from a peer reviewed scientific paper,or a reddit post, or that it does not know the source. Any information you can analytically determine about a source can be fed into the LLM along with its token if you know how the LLM represents that information in its embedding space.
Turning data we know something about into a structure that is how an existing model would represent the same thing is precisely a task that machine learning can currently solve.
Models are not bad at it. Models are not even trying. As you point out, it is about what is the most common text. It has nothing to do with logic.
They may fail at a lot of logical tasks, but I don't think that is the same as exhibiting no logic.
Getting even slightly respectable performance on the ARC-AGI test set, I think shows that there is at least some logical processing going on. General intelligence is another issue entirely, but there's definitely more than nothing.
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 fraud conspiracy, etc.) that have resulted in quantifiable damage ($9.4M in revenue loss attributed to Reddit attacks,) with what looks like substantial evidence of malice.
Reddit, though protected to some extent by Section 230, can also credibly be sued if (1) they are formally alerted to the mod's behavior, i.e. via a legal letter, and (2) they do nothing despite the fact that the mod's actions appear to be in violation of their Code of Conduct for Moderators. For then matter (2) might become something for a judge or jury to decide.
I'm actually confused as to why Codesmith hasn't sued yet. (?!?) Even if they lose, they win. Being a plaintiff in a civil case can turn the tables and make them feel powerful rather than helpless, and it's often the case that "the process is the punishment" for defendants.
I cringe inside every time I search for something, and the first autocomplete is "mysearchterm reddit"
And Reddit bans are used by powermods to get rid of any rivals. They will pay to bot the report system so your account is instantly perma-banned by Reddit. And Reddit has the most aggressive system of all the social networks for detecting duplicate accounts, so you'll have a hard time ever using the site again.
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.
Speaking for myself I generally will unban if people are nice and express understanding for why they were banned.
First one:
In a programming sub, as there was over 10 years a rather known bug. Typical discussion goes off and using the bug as a example of issues that never get fixed in the language.
Short term sub banned for breaking the rules. The stated "broken rule" was one of those very broad one's where you can hit any discussion with. Appeal the ban, stating that my comments are based on facts. Pointed to the github, the 10 year long discussion. No answer beyond "you are perma banned for breaking the rules".
Got private contacted by one of the main developers of the language, as he noticed my banned status and was unable to get a answer from me.
We gone over the bug in PMs. Bug got assigned to somebody and fixed. Thanks for fixing that 10 year old bug.
That was my first experience with mod overreach. But that did not undo the ban for "being right".
Second one:
In a specific country sub, i noticed there was factual proven misinformation. Corrected the user in a lengthy post, with multiple links to news articles. Short term ban by a mod, for "misinformation".
Appealed the ban, got into a whole discussion with the sub mod. Told him that he is using his own opinion, not the facts. Stated multiple times my news sources from my post (not entertainment news but professional news), inc reuters.
Stated that he is not following the rules by using his person opinion as basis for the temp ban and asked for escalation of the ban review. Asked to show what rule i broke (never got a answer beyond his personal opinions).
Other mod came in, stated that i "attacked the mod" by asking for a escalating of the review, and by accusing the mod of not being neutral (i mean, using personal opinion vs official news websites = your not neutral).
Perma ban ... Kafka lol. As you can guess, never got a answer to what "misinformation" that i broke.
/Insert slap head emoji ...
What did the mods gain? Maybe that short dopamine hit for "winning" by banning somebody. Sounds more like losing if you need to ban based upon your opinion, and not the facts, but hey...
O, made new account, and back on sub. Never got banned again. Did i change my posting behavior. Nowp ... If i see misinformation, i come with receipts (links to actual reputable news articles).
Its like, what do you gain? Its just power tripping people that love to mod. There are good mods out there but a TON of them are just nasty dopamine junkies, that want to "win arguments" with bans.
People do not scale.
What are some examples? In my experience there are numerous other communities of various types for any given interest. Reddit is just kind of a convenient surface level a lot of the time.
Reddit wasn't even that good as a community space in the first place. It was a content aggregator with user-moderated comment sections, and those make for pretty awful communities because on anything remotely controversial you get factions dog piling each other trying to hide each other's posts.
That said, communities are all on discord now, and quite honestly I think it's for the better. It gives moderators a lot more discretion, but balances the scales by making it very easy to create new servers where one can invite like-minded people and grow organically.
HN has problems but moderation being arbitrary isn't really one of them.
They implemented a change recently where users can make their profiles private which seemed like a cool idea to prevent this sort of thing, but in practice it is used almost exclusively by bad actors. Some users suggested the change was made to facilitate government intelligence agencies running influence campaigns on the platform.
I learned a simply truth about social media. When you answer a person in a discussion, are you answering the person or the world?
When you are answering the person, and the person has seen your response by time or counter answer, there really is no need to keep your post alive beyond a few weeks.
By then the topic is already on page 10 and only of interest to google / bots / AI.
Is this a problem for the future? Not really ... if the answer is important like i want the world to keep seeing it, you keep it undeleted.
If you did a product review, keep it alive, but just answer people, or having discussions that have no relevants a year from now, just get rid of them.
But lets be honest, most of our answers are often discussions and not some deep zen state thinking exercises that everybody needs to see years from now.
The world has not gotten better and your faced with a dilemma. Reject social media totally and avoid all the mess of people using your past post history, bots and AI/LLMs eating your data non-stop, or potential profiling. Let alone if governments change...
Or use this trick ... there really is no perfect answer and you do what you feel is good for you.
As someone whose family comes from the more left wing Catholic culture, which is a thing, I sometimes am disappointed when Catholics are thoughtlessly lumped into right wing culture war topics. It feels like this assumption is particularly common in the US vs. other places.
Edit: this comment on such a politically touchy topic lasted almost 40 minutes before getting 2 downvotes, honestly I'm impressed it lasted almost an hour.
Of course as always, the downvote is a signal of communication, and without a reply, all communication I receive is that this is a sensitive topic. If there's anything factually wrong I'll be happy to change it. (And I would consider myself having spent ~~too much~~ enough time on reddit to know which comics are popular and/or get folks banned easily.)
Yes, they can and that's how it's set up. Each community makes their own rules and can choose who participates.
It's not Reddit. It's the sub that made the decision and I'm not sure how it would be possible for Reddit the company to deal with sub level rule complaints and appeals.
Leaving aside everything else wrong with that, that would be trivial to abuse, especially with the help of sockpuppetry but easily enough even without that.
It doesn't matter what you post, just the association with that sub is apparently enough.
If you're at the point where you have been vetted and allowed to post on r/Conservative, you've gone way past mere "association." This isn't like some board game forum where you can just create an account and start posting. r/Conservative (probably with good reason) has a long and very active vetting process before you're allowed to post there, and only posts that conform to their ideology stay up. So getting banned for participating is a little more than just "guilt by association."
If this guy had disclosed his conflict of interest, he would just have been an obsessed crank and even as a moderator, that's his right. But when he didn't, I'd say it was large-scale manipulation, and it's clearly in Reddit's interest to not allow this sort of thing (especially now that they're selling all their data to AI companies).
I'm not sure, as in this case it seems to rise to Defamation + Trade Libel/Commercial Disparagement. So it may go beyond being simply unethical.
If one is squatting on a valuable forum name, then the moderators should be themselves subject to a standard enforced by Reddit.
Of course, most reputable forums have policies and rules but at the end of the day these do not mean much. Who are you going to complain to if you get unjustly banned - the Internet police?
You can always start your own blog/forum/subreddit and post whatever you like.
Maybe because they don’t generate enough income to be able to afford a lawsuit that drags on for years? Or maybe because it is really hard to win defamation lawsuits? Just my speculation.
(I realize that it's absurd and inherently unjust that the legal process is so expensive.)
IMO, even if it just gets the offending poster deleted, it would be money well-spent. The marketing/PR hit is just brutal. I blame Google for this.
YouTube is far worse and it isn’t even close.
All that hiding them on Reddit does is pissing other users off because it breaks establish site's norms and expectations.
I got e-mail blasted on my linked e-mail here for a user called u/Loughla on reddit (who has deleted their account now). It's not me. It was never me. But oooohhhh boy did they upset somebody in an anime subreddit.
In other words, angry people absolutely will go the extra mile just for some feeling of vindication or other nonsense.
Massive changes in posting history was a very good sign that an account was a farmed or stolen account.
Makes it a lot easier for reddit to deny their bot problem.
I don't disagree with any of this, but I'll note that in addition, it's also the most reliable place to get a general crowd-sourced opinion on the internet. There are specialist forums for specialist subjects, sure, but nowhere else delivers like Reddit does on a diverse set of topics.
That's some impressive blindness. That's exactly why the OP is stating it's unreliable. It _was_ reliable. Now it's a minefield, because trust->money.
Just like Amazon 5 star reviews. They used to be good probably until about 2012-2015 (if you stretch it). Then it became weaponized because the trust was so high. Anything with strong 5 star reviews sold.
Of course, you can "figure out" if what you're reading is trustworthy, but to blanket state "the most reliable place" - days gone to yesteryear.
Great experience with one step and blown to bits with one small step in a different direction.
There's a variety of these marketing spambots on Reddit, and I'm sure like the toupee effect, there are more subtle ones that I'm not noticing. I think this is existential in the long run for Reddit as a platform, but maybe the owners/employees are happy to milk all the value out and walk away from the husk.
Read about the whale trades and wash trades on Polymarket: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41999743
I'm not convinced wash trading is a huge problem as it's mostly about generating fake volume. The particular linked example is bad too because Trump did end up winning the election.
An example is how volatile their markets are on Fed rate decisions; sometimes you see serious short-term disagreement or contrarianism between individual markets:
https://polymarket.com/event/how-many-fed-rate-cuts-in-2025
Just because reddit is reliable vs its peers != absolutely reliable.
Like Amazon, Yelp, Google any review system will become gamified for money. So just like those platforms every review you read you need to ask "who is the reviewer? do they review other things? how 'realistic' does it read? Are they pushing anything? Is the thing i'm reading affected by money? Were they given a product? were they given a discount/kickback for a review?" etc etc.
You cannot simply look at a review and say oh yeah that's a good review of someone who just wants to help others.
The whole reason this thread exists is exactly because of above. Someone weaponized the trust, your trust, of reddit to bring down a startup - and it worked.
You're replying to a comment where I said I agree with the statement "Reddit should not be considered an authoritative source"
You're trying to walk a line that says reddit not authoritative and yet reliable. In this specific context authoritative also comes to mean reliable. So we're at reddit is not reliable yet reliable?
I'm saying it can't be. The well has been poisoned and it's not safe to pray it didn't mix. That you need to treat reddit with the same skepticism lest you be taken for your money. Perhaps you don't agree, which is fair then we agree-disagree.
That's really not how superlative/comparative adjectives work
Ehhhhh I agree and yet also disagree (it's fun though).
Yes they were ruined by being promoted by algo changes, but do I blame google directly? For me, no.
It's exactly as we stated before, it's because it was so trustworthy. Individual people's personal experience with X or Y many times with good details. That earned a lot of strong backlinks, blogs, etc. The domain became authoritative especially on esoteric searches. Then algo changes came (remember pandas?) and pushed them even further. I mean that's the point of search systems right? Get you to trustworthy information that you're looking for.
Then the money grabbers showed up.
So it's just like Harvey Dent said - either you die a trusted niche community or live long enough to see yourself become weaponized for money. He was so smart, that Harvey Dent.
Why let reddit drag down the credibility of well everyone in their niche by association. Even if it’s only a tiny bit per year, that adds up over time.
Some in fact have but the majority? Probably laziness, but laziness is just misaligned incentive-goals.
Communities have very little incentive to de-reddit. It's actually a huge amount of work and they gain almost nothing directly.
Separately, I was thinking you know HNews is pretty immune to this problem because we don't have a central theme or something, right?
But no, that just means I can't see how I'm being monetized is all. Blind leading the blind.
EDIT: I don't know why I'm getting so many downvotes, nothing I said is controversial at all.
There's a saying, attributed to Max Planck: "science advances one funeral at a time". Sure, there's facts. Avogadro's number is a specific fact and is incontrovertible. But how about gravity? I mean, 9.8 m/s² is it and that's also a specific fact, but then you start looking up into the heavens and what's this dark energy and now there's dark matter and okay so MOND's been disproved?
Facts also have framing. If you pay attention to the incidence of crimes on the nightly news, it feels like society is falling apart, but then you look at the bigger picture and real statistics and things aren't actually that bad?
In the sloppy real world of facts that are messier than 2+2=4, we don't have anything to go on other than what most people around us believe, and because there's only so much time in the day, as humans we emotionally believe whatever we want. There are some crazies who have spreadsheets output facts for them to bet on, and they make a lot of money off of that, but they're a minority.
I think the problem is that people get their incorrect world views from Reddit.
A person from the 1200s is not stupid for believing everything was made from four elements but a person from 2025 would be.
"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing."
I personally found it off topic, the conversation was about using Reddit as a source of truth for product opinions/reviews and it’s unlikely that the absence of a right wing majority is relevant when purchasing a dishwasher.
This gives the appearance to people that hold positions that are out of touch with reality that the coherent narratives are an all-encompassing hegemonic echo chamber that covers the whole site. The incoherent conservative narratives fail to take root among a wider audience since they fall apart when scrutinized. The karma system om reddit's encourages this behavior among neutral subreddit to dunk on people when they say things that are nonsense.
So that's why you only see them being held in specific ideological echo chambers like /r/Conservative where you have mods that censor discussion that debunks or merely calls into doubt the narrative asserted by the moderation team.
Just because an opinion seems to be popular there does not nessisarially mean it won the "marketplace of ideas". It's more like the "warzone of powermods". I think a lot of social media sites go through a phase of controlling discussion to suit powerusers, but this comes at the cost of losing long-term social capital.
I mean we are in the second term of a trump presidency. The climate on reddit is very left wing but in the real world, people are voting right wing (or more likely not at all). Reddit itself is now an echo chamber, and r/Conservative is just the echo chamber within the echo chamber.
Seems like a pretty incoherent conspiracy theory. What a weird thing to believe.
But it was actually a couple days apart; he stopped posting before she went to prison. And he actually posted to some private subs, and was involved in some DMs, after he stopped posting publicly and after she went to prison.
There's really very little evidence other than a vague coincidence of when he left Reddit and when she went to prison, and the name.
And, like, if she were posting anonymously, why would she use that name?
It's basically just completely incoherent. Like many conspiracy theories, they take a lot of other random data points, and if you sift through and cherry pick enough data points you can find others that taken out of context look like coincidences. But that's just because you're cherry picking between two large distributions of data.
These are absurdly strong claims. This isn't an incoherent theory... it's inconclusive, sure. Unprovable? Probably (difficult to imagine what would have to change to find out with certainty one way or the other).
i.e. it's almost impossible for to have been anybody else. The supposed "mod chats" are clearly fabrications met to cover it up.
This is a simply incoherent theory. There's no sense in it. You don't post "anonymously" under your own name.
This goes into far more detail on the individual claims from the original conspiracy theory: https://coagulopath.com/ghislaine-maxwell-does-not-have-a-se...
But it really doesn't take this much detail to realize that this conspiracy theory is incoherent, at a surface level it just makes no sense at all.
The entirety of the "evidence" is standard conspiracy stuff, of making vague generalizations, bad interpretations, cherry picking data, etc.
I can't believe people are this gullible.
When do normal people ever make sense? And she's not exactly normal, she pimped teenage girls to her boyfriend (? whatever he was ?). All usernames leak something about the person who chose them. They're trying to be clever, come up with the perfect joke or pop culture reference. Except for people who aren't that clever, and then it was the third grade class's pet hamster's name with their birthday tacked onto the end. When you say "but she wouldn't do a username based on her own identity"... you're seriously overthinking this. Don't you feel a little silly pretending that she was some supervillain genius who wouldn't ever make such a classic blunder?
>But it really doesn't take this much detail to realize that this conspiracy theory is incoherent
Incoherent in that dozens or hundreds of people all contributed to it in an unorganized fashion over a period of days/weeks on reddit? Sure, 100%. Incoherent as in it makes no sense and doesn't have a shred of plausibility? 0%
>The entirety of the "evidence" is standard conspiracy stuff,
This is just blatant lying at this point. Standard conspiracy stuff is that the Illuminati, working with the Rosicrucians and enslaved sasquatches are blackmailing the CIA to use their mind control satellites on the Spanish royalty in an attempt to foment nuclear war between Gibraltar and Cameroon.
The "this convicted felon fucked around on reddit when she wasn't busy being a degenerate pervert sex monster" isn't standard conspiracy stuff. It's run-of-the-mill no shit sherlock territory. And you're insulting for claiming otherwise.
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.
"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 get to the point for the same reasons.
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.
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 sure, but it's still fundamentally the same unworkable linear format. It's like sticking to magnetic tapes in the age of SSDs.
Even Facebook, one of the dumbest discussion platforms, has nested comments. Terribly implemented of course, but how does the platform designed for the lowest-common-denominator kind of user have more advanced discussion features than forums made for discussion connoisseurs? It is utterly baffling.
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.
But the main problem, to repeat for emphasis, is that the upvote/downvote system (even if it's fair and used virtuously, and it usually isn't,) stifles disagreement and debate.
When I append "reddit" to my google search query, I'm not looking for "disagreement and debate". I'm looking for specific information on non-political topics, such as repairing my car, finding a good product in the sea of garbage, or learning new techniques. Such topics are typically discussed cooperatively rather than adversarially. For this stuff, consensus-seeking is a feature not a bug, and where the consensus appears inadequate, I'm well capable of looking past the top post. Reddit's format is not perfect, but it's better than having to read through a 30-page thread in which most messages are irrelevant to most other messages. Such threads are linear only artificially through a UI that hides the structure of the underlying conversations.
If you don't like the upvotes aspect of reddit, we could settle on the same nested format but without sorting by upvotes. But with forums, we don't even have that.
Reddit's comments aren't one-liners because Reddit's format encourages that, it's because it's the most popular site where everyone goes. If forums were as widely popular, they would see the same people making the same comments there too.
And you wouldn't even need a reason.
In fact, you could ban AND make the whole conversation disappear. And nobody would ever know.
That's a problem.
Considering how quickly they make new accounts, I think you're underestimating banned HN users by quite a margin!
HN moderates mostly transparently, which they do not have to do at all. That demonstrates respect for their participants, or ideals, your pick.
It's still cruel and dehumanizing behavior.
My point (the problem) is that, when you do it this way, trust is right out the window. It looks like a forum but it really isn't. The conversation suffers from a taint.
If your point is "I don't like the law of the jurisdiction and its outcomes," that is a feeling and a choice, but the fact remains. You can either change the law or change the feelings. Again, participation is a choice and optional, and the status quo is unlikely to change.
Ewk is obsessed with the Chinese source material, written by Chan (Chinese for Zen) masters, and believes that the Chinese Chan masters were not Buddhist at all.
Many people who come to the subreddit are interested in meditation. It is a big focus of Japanese Zen as practiced in the west. It is not particularly emphasised in Chan… at least not in the records we have. Some of the most amusing bits on r/zen are watching Ewk lay into some poor suffering sap looking to get some semblance of peace in their life by starting a meditation practice. According to Ewk, meditation is “not zen”.
It’s hard to explain exactly how crazy things are. He’s not wrong about everything. Chan really doesn’t emphasise having a meditation practice. But he also, despite being interested in this for over 20 years and posting nearly full time - literally for 16 hours a day every day for two decades - has never taken a single Chinese lesson. And he has major, major disagreements with the translators of these ancient Chinese texts (because they are Buddhists). So he uses Google translate to prove the translators wrong.
But the old Chan texts are full of violence and masters bashing one another on the head, as Ewk is quick to point out. Maybe he’s onto something. It really is pretty entertaining.
I do actually believe distinguishing the historical Chinese practice of Zen from its western incarnation is a valuable contribution but also see how unnecessarily instigative his comments can be. Perhaps in a different world where his contributions were more validated he could've learned to frame things in a more generative way
Certainly, such people exist though. The picture he's painting of Novati is not something I'd find terribly surprising from an ex-Facebook code boot camp entrepreneur.
If I hadn't taken a look at the subreddit just now I would have thought you were being flippant. What a voluble fellow. So much wisdom must be a terrible burden!
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 of a popular subreddit can persist for years, visibly, without people managing either to oust the mod, or to take down the sub's influence.
(Subreddit peasants sometimes migrate to a new sub over bad mods, but the old sub usually remains, still with a healthy brand. And still with a lot of members, who (speculating) maybe don't want to possibly miss out on something in the bad old sub, or didn't know what's going on, or the drama they noticed in their feed wasn't worth their effort to do the clicks to unjoin from the sub in question.)
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 in my life.
Now if it was "just" the incitements to violence, or if it was "just" the libeling of random businesses, that would be one thing. But the fact that BOTH types of illegal speech are becoming a problem at the same time suggests to me that Reddit's failure to moderate is systemic and total.
It is becoming exhausting watching all of these tech companies commit crimes, or enable someone else to do so, and getting off with a slap on the wrist.
- /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 for critizing a government welfare program
- /r/assassinscreed banned me for critizing a character in their latest game
For me it makes sense that the smaller subreddits should have the freedom to moderate as they want but the larger reddits should aim to at allow opposing viewpoints to prevent echo chambers from forming. Moderation should be focused on quality, not on viewpoints. Obviously it goes without saying that threats of violence and celebration of murder have no place on any platform.
The irony is that all this censoring just creates a backlash and further polarisation. If you are only allowed to discuss certain subjects on a "left" space you both create the illusion that the left only cares about a subset of topics and by banning people you create resentment that drives them towards (more welcoming) extreme spaces.
There's many factors that form the political preferences and opinions of the younger generation but it would not suprise me if for a subset (young college educated males?) of them Reddit heavily contributes towards increased polarisation.
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.
It’s not a real subreddit. It’s a moderator-curated echo chamber. They run it like a propaganda outlet, only allow approved thought from approved commenters, and ban anyone who steps out of line with the mods.
That’s why every thread you view there will have “load more comments” buttons that never load anything: They remove more comments than you’re allowed to see.
I pointed out on a sub that the question on the 4473 (form to buy a firearm) asking if you are a drug user is a 5th amendment violation as it asks you to incriminate yourself to exercise a right.
An Ivy league lawyer, moderator of another sub, about a whole year later, found it, declared that it was illegal legal advice, then had my whole account nuked using his legal credentials to scare reddit into getting rid of me.
> 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 to /r/conservative being a weird echo chamber, is for other subs to be an anti-/r/conservative echochamber. Seems like both are wrong, and two wrongs dont make a right.
Nor am I fan of their voters/supporters.
At this point if you don’t oppose them you implicitly support them, the normal rules no longer apply.
^ The average far-left in a nutshell. You are either with us, or against us. There is no centralist.
To take an apolitical comparison, think about an ordinary crime- a murder, a rape, an arson, etc.
There is some set of people saying "We know that this man murdered these victims. We think that is very bad. We think the murderer should go to prison so that he doesn't murder more people".
Does a neutral centralist say "Yes, the murderer should go to prison" or do they say "I'm remaining central, I don't want to join the side that is condemning the murderer. I think they hate the murderer. I think the murderer should remain free."
My belief is that a neutral centralist agrees to send the murderer to prison. And if someone supports letting the murderer carry on murdering people, then they can reasonably be said to be supporting the murderer rather than claiming to be a centralist on the murder issue.
For example, I don't think it would be logical for someone who literally believes abortion is murder to bother allying with a side that doesn't believe as such unless there is a bigger crime that is being commited that they both can agree on. See, both sides would agree that that compromising with someone condoning murder for the sake of centrism would be fucking stupid. Obviously no side thinks they're condoning murder, they simplly don't agree that the action constitutes murder.
So instead of pointlessly championing centrism for the sake of centrism, it's much more constructive to argue: no, they are not a sex offender, no they are not directly engaging or aiding and abetting corruption, no those foreign allies are not worthy allies because of xyz etc etc.
Then again, I suppose definitions can differ. Maybe you have a set of principles and boundaries. Maybe you're just rooting for or against a sports team.
On the other hand, there are some old jokes hiding in there somewhere.
Since that sub's arbitrary ban behavior is allowed, other subs banning people for similarly arbitrary reasons (like people who have been vetted by its mod circle into being allowed to post there) should be permitted.
To more precisely respond: "A eye for an eye leaves the world blind"
If you think there's a better set of global rules that reddit should adopt, that's a fair observation. But until it does, it's not fair to call out other subs for mirroring the rules of a problem sub. If it can behave that way, so can they. If it can exist as a safe space for MAGAs, the rest of us are free to create a safe space from MAGAs.
The thing about morality is its about how you "should" behave not how you "can" behave.
> If it can exist as a safe space for MAGAs, the rest of us are free to create a safe space from MAGAs.
If you think its a-ok when /r/conservative does it, then by all means sure. I mostly object to the hypocrisy here. The original comment found /r/conservative's mod policy objectionable. Either it should be ok for everyone or it should be ok for noone. The part i'm objecting to is the implicit idea that its ok when people you like do something but not ok when people you don't like do it.
As long as you apply your moral views consistently i'm fine with it, regardless of whatever they are.
I should be eating off golden plates and live in a house made of candy, and I shouldn't have to worry about the president's goon squad invading 'liberal antifa cities', or any of the other insane shit that's going on, but life isn't quite living up to my expectations at the moment.
Perhaps when they open up their safe spaces and behave in a civil manner, other communities might take their demands for access more seriously.
All-in-all, if your biggest political concern right now is that you've been banned from a few subreddits because you're a participant in another one, I'm sorry that it's causing you distress. But I'm afraid that your problems aren't ranking very highly on my list of immediate political concerns. When the ship's on fire, I frankly don't care about the poor feng shui of the deck chairs.
When it comes to morality, we can't control how other people act, we can only control what we ourselves do.
Especially when the "retaliation" is aimed at members and not the people implementing the mod policy.
0. "Soft" power from votes, which determines what topics are de facto allowed to be talked about. Mods don't have as much influence here (hence why it's not really "#1"), but they can still influence it by removing certain comments. The psychology of down votes and how it affects communities has been studied for well over a decade so this isn't too crazy
1. "Petty mod abuse", which is probably what many comments remember reddit comments for. You make a tame comment, some lawful evil mod removes your comment, and any discussion over that ruling is met with mutes or bans. This is usually backed by "some" rule, so most of the time they have some point (no matter how stupid)
2. "Soft rules abuse", which is where "off-site" behavior kicks in. Where there's unlisted rules that are enforced, often from behavior not even directly performed in that community. It can also be personal grudges from some sort of supermod, which bans you from multiple subs they moderate over behavior in one of their subs.
3. Then there's "sentiment abuse", where people are moderated less for their behavior and more for whatever the mod feels like that day. Either to forge their own narrative, or from being paid off and following some external party's sentiment. These are almost never listed as rules because they are either too blatantly biased ("do not insult Google" on r/Google wouldn't work out well, even if it is run by Google employees), or simply because the rules change too frequently.
I'd say r/conservative is solidly in tier 3, and even there is a very extreme example. It was interesting seeing how the sub quickly changed on topics like the Epstien files based on whatever spin occurred IRL.
Heck, many other level 3 subs tend to be gaming ones. Ones clearly woth paid off mods who act as a PR wing rather than someone caretaking a community
When almost any community is particular about who it lets in and who it doesn't let in, it can be seen as a reasonable moderator precaution. Heck, some of the very best social spaces I'm a part of are only accessible by knowing people who know people.
But Reddit at it's core is a content aggregator with a comments section, which uses a moderation model driven by a strange mix of authoritarian mods and mob rule. A mod can ban you for any reason, but there's nothing stopping an outside mob from trying to control a narrative by mass voting in a way that mods have little to no control over.
In practice, /r/conservative can't really be considered a functional social space. But this core contradiction at the heart of the Slashdot/HN/Reddit model means that none of them function very well as social spaces either. These days, the actual "community" part of most hobbyist subreddits are on alternative platforms like Discord, and quite frankly I think it's for the better that this is happening.
if it's really persistent they can't. Votes are one of the few mechanisms mods have no control over in their sub.
But in general, mods can remove any post they don't like, even if it gets voted against their wishes, as well as ban any users posting such posts. Do that for a few days and that usually wins out.
The biggest reason why this works is that even though users have fewer recourses against power-tripping mods, it also takes away the moderator's leverage of being the tastemakers of content aggregation that Reddit/HN/Slashdot mods and power users have. Without content aggregation, it's a lot easier for social circles to cleanly split if there are disagreements.
I also think that the fact that Discord servers are opaque works to its benefit. The openness of Reddit leads to a lot of cross-subreddit co-mingling, which invariably leads to drama and conflict. There's a lot less of this happening on Discord - it's not zero, but it's to the extent that posting discord conversations outside of their servers is widely considered "leaking" and Discord actively uses legal avenues to go after dragnet-style log archives.
You present this as if it were somehow evidence that somehow justifies the bans from the other unrelated subs.
There is no morally justifiable reason why having mainstream conservative viewpoints (which is to say, ones held by a very large fraction of the general populace) should bar someone from non-political participation in non-political subreddits.
The bans in fact are another symptom of the same cause: every kind of right-wing enclave on Reddit gets trolled constantly. The generally left-wing userbase does whatever they can to ostracize right-wingers, or perceived right-wingers. Which includes both banning them from other spaces, and mocking them in their own.
> It’s a moderator-curated echo chamber.
This describes every vaguely political or ideological themed subreddit. Except maybe the general r/politics, which might still be "letting the votes decide" if you don't have the "acceptable" views on every issue. I have literally seen subreddits that would ban people for "ableism" for using the word "stupid" to describe an idea or proposal. And that was like a decade ago and it was getting clearly worse year after year.
Rule 1 of site guidelines includes:
>Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.
And given the conservaive mindset as of late in the US against trans people and undocumented workers, you can see the issue you run into.
I do disagree with banning off-sub behavior, though. you can use it to tag users and keep a closer eye on them, but moderators moderate their own space, not the entire site.
I disagree that they have the beliefs you ascribe to them, broadly speaking. Again, we are talking about the mainstream. Views held by a very large fraction of the general populace.
Very well. But their party leader does, and few in the party or even among constituents don't seem to push back on it at all. At the very least, they do not oppose the actions and statements taken and made.
I disagree with this as well, and I specifically disagree that the "actions and statements taken and made" commonly cited to evidence the point actually evidence the point.
And I have been disagreeing about this since the 2015 election campaign. The pull quotes, to me, very obviously did not mean what they were represented as meaning, and I remain convinced of this.
This week alone:
- Trump was ranting about Trans athletes. In the middle of a meeting with Canada.
- we have had 2 inditements of political opponents based on a DM-mistakenly-turned-tweet listing opponents he wanted sued.
- he called democrats a Gnat to take care odd while addressing the generals of the military
- he's mobilizing the national guard, again to invade a city that is not in emergency. When a judge halted this, he tried to sent mobilized CA national guards (which is currently under lawsuit) go Oregon instead. The judge had to summon the DoJ at 7pm on a Sunday to halt this.
- He's also in the process of trying to deploy Texas NG into Illinois. This is on top of a judge needing to tell federal agents to not use force on Chicago journalists. Likely in reaction to the fact that ICE shot a protesting pastor in the face (and yes, that's another lawsuit)
- in midst of a government shutdown, he's trying to plan around laying off 750k federal workers, and not pay any of them as the government has always done.
- and to top it off he wants to call for the arrest of a governor and mayor because they do not want their city invaded.
That's just Trump, just this week. Not talking about RFK's nonsense, Noem's photoshoots, Johnsons attempt to election fraud and blame shifting, and Bondi's embarrassing senate hearing. These are several GOP leaders' consistent behaviors over months. It is the GOP c.2025
And this isn't an unusual week. This entire year's been a firehouse of conflicts that make Watergate seem like a tame kerfuffle. We're well, well, well beyond the idea of "well nothing is happening".
To deny the last 10 months of consistutional crisis is the deny reality. There's really no other way to say it. You're free to disagree with reality but that does not reject it.
Look up any of the nearly 200 EO's, the dozens of court cases against the DoJ, or the hundreds of hours of raw footage out there if you really care about what's happening. Clearly I can't fit that into a HN comment, and I can't make a horse drink even if I could fit it here.
>Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
I have been trying my hardest to explain reasoning rather than simply accumulating evidence. But the entire discussion has been wildly off-topic from the beginning, so I don't see a reason to continue anyway.
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.
Sharing conservative ideas is not against reddit's community guidelines. the sitewide guidelines are pretty simple, actually:
https://redditinc.com/policies/reddit-rules
to summarize:
1. don't harrass people on or off-site, nor promote hate
2. no spam or content manipulation
3. no doxxing nor non-consential sexual material
4. no CSAM or CSAM-adjacent material
5. don't impoersonae others
6. label NSFW content
7. no illegal content
8. don't break reddit on purpose
other conservative subs have historically had issues with rules #2 and #8, so I'm sure Reddit is more sensitive to that. In addition, current conservative leaning subs do tend to have more issues with rule 1, even to this day. I imagine what you are seeing are content being pre-emptively removed to prevent potential harassment that can get the sub banned.
Mods from there have absolute power, as long as they follow the above guidelines. As we know, the rules can be as petty as they want. Their only limit is that they can't ban someone who's never participated in a sub (so they can't pre-rmotively ban someone for existing)
Mods bots do ban you for participating in other subs. I was banned from a handful for posting in /r/JoeRogan
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.
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.
For the irony-cherry on top, repeating what he says is also often against r/conservative guidelines - they'll happily ban you for it, because a lot of the things Trump says are also really fucking stupid and contradictory, and his supporters don't like to be reminded that the emperor's naked.
(That said, I do agree with you on nuance)
And of course content creators / news aggregators know this so they purposely strip all nuance out of their reporting.
>Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.
is against TOC. You can talk about trans issues and offer reservations. You cannot say "trans people are a mental illness" or "trans are not people". That is clearly promoting hate and has nothing of substance to discuss.
For a more explicit and current example, you can say "I don't think female-affirming trans athletes should be allowed to compete in female oriented divisions of sport. Their testosterone output makes for an unfair advantadge".
That might STILL be removed, not because that comment breaks the rules, but because reddit seems to have a serious problem on the issue and it always devolves to "we need to take men out of women's sports" and then some long chain of people denying trans people of their identity. That's promoting hate. Especially since that is not too far off from what the U.S. president argues.
To be clear: your position is that refusing to see other people as they see themselves, in one specific aspect, is inherently hateful?
That's likely the crux of our disagreement in the other subthread, then.
Either that or you imagine that "denying identity" refers to something else, but I've only ever seen it used in cases that boil down to that. This often gets described as "denying existence", which from my observations conservatives just think is absurd. The entire point is that "identity" refers to self-image, while "existence" refers to what is externally observable.
Yes. That tends to fall under "hate speech":
>public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation
Denying existence or identity will fall under that curtain either way. That seems to be the interpretation Reddit uses, so your account or community will be banned for breaking its rules, regardless of your interpretation. Both dehumanize, and dehumanization is a one way ticket to denying someone as worthy of the rights humans enjoy.
These are different things (which was most of the point),
> will fall under that curtain either way
... but I fail to see how in either case.
> Both dehumanize
I don't see this, either.
Again, the actual act we refer to is:
> refusing to see other people as they see themselves, in one specific aspect
Is there any other aspect of how people see themselves which would lead you to the same conclusion? For example, if I consider myself physically attractive, and others disagree, are they hating me?
You're free to argue with thr reddit admins on how. It's not my call.
But as a hint, it's pretty easy to deny existence when you dehumanize someone. If you can't see that, you may need to read more history.
This has the logic backwards, and is also playing semantic games with the meaning of "deny existence". We're talking about a claim that someone already does not exist (which is why people think it's absurd: they're often actively having a conversation with the person they're falsely accused of believing not to exist), not the act of causing someone to cease to exist (an imprecise, colloquial way of referring to murder).
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 constant threads about immigration?”
These threads generate so much engagement from people of all opinions that it makes the sub appear in people’s feeds as recommended content even if they’re not subscribed to the sub. It gives people the impression that there is only one political subject in the UK that gets any discussion.
I don’t know why the moderators of this sub do this, but the effects of their moderation are clear.
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...
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.
Please tell us why an account with a history of posting on Iranian subs was masquerading as a British person, getting British people riled up at 4am BST? And why did they delete the account immediately after this was pointed out?
State sponsored doesn’t necessarily mean they’re highly competent.
Years before he was President, in 1989, Trump himself took out four full-page newspaper ads in all four major NYC newspapers of the time calling for the deaths of the Central Park Five and broader use of the death penalty in general. The railroaded teenagers were later exonerated, thankfully without first being killed by the government. That’s just a small example of the kind of influence money can have on public discourse, well before everyone had a smartphone in their pocket.
I found one on r/portugal, clearly coordinated network spreading political news of a certain persuasion.
R/donald became famous because the admins turned on national flags for users there revealing a significant percentage was Russian IPs without even a VPN. The Russian users called it “the mark of David” and compared it to Nazism.
There were also investigations showing Russian activity in The Donald. But somehow the flag story is something I seem to have dreamed into this story. Doesn’t seem have happened (even though I have oddly specific memories about it).
That said I have no idea if what GP said is true or not
There were also investigations showing Russian activity in The Donald. But somehow the flag story is something I seem to have dreamed into this story. Doesn’t seem have happened (even though I have oddly specific memories about it).
People believe that these countries would love to do that, but for some reason, they think they are not doing as much as possible.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19802
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/06/25/scottish-ind...
Part of me hopes that some amount of resources are being invested by someone in our government to analyze and assess this, but maybe that is overly optimistic.
Then Musk bought X and turned the game around.
I believe you. But I've also often been accused of being a bot or working for an intelligence service when posting my own opinion in political discussions, not in coordination with anyone at all, and not pretending to be anything I'm not. I think the people accusing me of this did genuinely believe it too.
What I typically saw was accounts that had a decent sized but very generic history, things like gaming or cooking. Then suddenly the accounts became very politically motivated over one particular thing. Then within a few weeks to a months the accounts were gone.
My assumption these were sold/farmed accounts with reused comments/boring posts that were then used to push a political message when needed.
So if your opinion happens to be in line with whatever narrative someone is trying to spin up, it will end up getting quashed.
Frankly there isn’t any solution to this, and you either end up losing ground to mechanised speech while having a low ban load for humans, or you end up acting on likely mechanized speech, and have a higher number of humans you ban.
The way Reddit is set up, people will select the first option over the second.
There were also investigations showing Russian activity in The Donald. But somehow the flag story is something I seem to have dreamed into this story. Doesn’t seem have happened (even though I have oddly specific memories about it).
To a lot of people, Russian is just a state of mind. It simply means that you disagree with them, or the regime that they support. Also, the mods on reddit are overwhelmingly these people, banning all opposing opinions, or banning people for being Russian, or Iranian, or Chinese, etc...
They think this is legitimate: aaah, so you're Chinese. I knew there was something wrong when you insisted that the Chinese weren't evil thieves hellbent on destroying freedom, by nature. You're not allowed to post in the West.
All governance in the western world has become weak as hell. You only need a few bucks to corrupt anything, unless somebody with a few more bucks is already corrupting it. And certain intelligence agencies have the deepest pockets. Maybe little fiefdoms wasn't the best way to structure the internet? Maybe section 230 would be obviated if there were clear, deliberative processes to allow entire groups to both take action and responsibility for what they allow in their discussions?
Take note about how adhering to parliamentary methods protects private organizations: in most places, having proper rules set up (not EULAs and ToCs) actually has the practical effect of creating law because it sets up obligations to the users as well as obligations from the users. There's no such thing as a benevolent dictator.
Pretending that there aren't concerted efforts to exert political influence on Reddit isn't helpful, and comes across as pretty disingenuous.
All governance in the western world has become weak as hell. You only need a few bucks to corrupt anything, unless somebody with a few more bucks is already corrupting it.
Yes, corruption and bribery exist exclusive in "western" governments. Thankfully "eastern" governments are completely immune to these issues.
And I know, "I never said those exact words!" but that at was the obvious intention.
/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.
That's fascinating. How does an account like this not blatantly violate the TOC for personal or commercial use of Reddit?
Why do you think r/hailcorporate was killed?
I wonder if this could be approached in a way that new subreddits didn't have this disadvantage so that they could compete on mod quality and slowly grow / migrate the community.
Of course there are advantages to short unique names like readable links. But it seems that this false authority may not be worth the downsides.
Perhaps intentionally using uuids in the URL instead of slugs and improving the recommendation/search algo (e.g take into account the average post length or cited sources in the ranking) would solve this issue. Main challenge might still be that its very hard to move an existing user base if the moderator(s) blocks all posts about other communities.
Perhaps a more democratic moderation system or a system wide rule that disallows moderators from blocking posts about other (competing) subs would work?
One other option sites like scored.co do is they allow subs to use their own url (like their Trump sub is called patriots.win). The site admins have kind of given up on the site though so I'm not sure if you can still do it, but it seemed like a clever idea.
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.)
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.
When explaining his actions he said something like, "I've moderated forums before so I know how sustained censorship can change a community". And then he set out to do it.
Reddit has been garbage for a long time and people's reliance on it is a huge problem. Abuse of it redirected Bitcoin onto a fundamentally different path (one nobody had agreed to), simply because of the sustained gaslighting and psychological manipulation its format allows.
That said, user-driven content moderation sucks everywhere. Wikipedia has the same problem. So does HN to some extent. The future is moderation driven entirely by LLMs with openly published prompts.
I know at least a couple of subreddits for specific 'true crime' cases which split into one for people who believed the suspect was guilty and one where everyone believed they were innocent.
The thing is, the split fora were actually much better than pre split. When both sets of people were together every topic degenerated rapidly in exactly the same way:
meticulous_postrr: I just reread the transcript of Fred's sixth interview and noticed that he mentioned seeing a purple t-shirt in the woods. Could this be the shirt that Ahab was wearing at the road house, which looks blue in the security footage?
middled_aged_loner: Nice try, but unless you can explain the severed foot in the ashtray, the blue shirt is irrelevant here.
AhabDidIt: Still trying to shill the 'only two feet' theory, m_a_l? What about what Edgar saw?
curious_n00b: Hi, I love the podcast but I'm not sure about one thing: is the Sylvia mentioned in Dushane's diary the same Sylvia who knew Edgar from volleyball camp?
AhabDidIt: welcome curious. Good question, but you're wasting your time with the diary. The July entries were written in August, by April. See my previous threads /r/TheScarletFred/Ahabs_lies /r/TheScarletFred/Ahabs_lies_2 and /r/TheScarletFred/the_diary_evidence_reexamined
middled_aged_loner: So in your opinion ADI, April apparently knew that Dushane had seen Vanessa on the rollercoaster but didn't mention it to the police on the 1st October? This completely fails to stack up. What about Vanessa's unfinished ice tea? WHAT ABOUT THE SEVERED FOOT?
I know we're all supposed to be worried about echo chambers, but sometimes an echo chamber is somewhere a specific conversation can take place which couldn't elsewhere.
As you can see in my comment I'm merely listing a few examples.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith
Let's aim to keep HN better and more pleasant to use than Reddit;)
The HN guidelines are there to improve the quality of the conversation, there's not much to further discuss so I'm going to leave it at this.
The sub currently requires moderator approval (specific flair) to comment on most threads.
The parent commenter is correct: It is widely known as one of the most censored subs on Reddit because the mods remove comments from unapproved accounts (those without flair).
Their rules claim that some threads are open for everyone to participate in, which may have been the case in the past when you commented.
However it’s not true for any of the popular threads. They will remove comments from unflaired accounts
This is all state in their rules. It’s not speculation. The parent comment is correct.
How does the moderation in /r/conservatives, a subreddit for conservatives to discuss "from a distinctly conservative point of view", concern a liberal like yourself in any way?
This isn't a subreddit you need to participate in. I think it's more relevant how default subreddits or country subreddits are moderated in a similar way.
Even actual conservatives don’t like it. It’s like a propaganda operation where only approved think is allowed.
It's a bit like banning entry into the US because you've visited Russia.
It doesn't really matter how Russia runs their own country, you might have even gone there to argue against totalitarian dictatorships.
But a US border guard looking at your passport and rejecting your entry based on that alone feels like overreach.
How subs choose to moderate their content is roughly speaking sort of fine, as long as there's no organised harassment, sharing of illegal materials (child porn, revenge porn, war materials etc) and threats of violence or death.
This is at least such a common practice, that certain countries issue their entry visas in such a way, that they can be removed from the passport. I'd expect issues entering the US, if I had an Iranian stamp in my passport.
They state: "This is designed so that a couple posts per day are almost guaranteed to have conversation which is not hijacked by leftists and other non-conservatives.Who Gets Flair?
Only mods can assign User Flair, and User Flair is only for conservatives. Once you have a solid history of comments in /r/Conservative, and have been commenting in the subreddit for at least two weeks,[..]
Please understand that this is for conservatives. We do our best to vet you based on your post history on reddit. You will need some post history to qualify - ideally within the subreddit itself. If you do not have a conservative leaning post history you will likely be asked to re-apply when you do."
"Strangely" there isn't a single post on their frontpage at the moment, which doesn't require a flair to comment.
Why are you so concerned about participation criteria for the conservative subreddit, one of the only distinctly right wing places on the whole platform?
And clearly this has been a discussion on that angle, rather than an answer to the rhetorical question above.
Which, to be fair, is not unlike how the GOP has been operating over the last few years.
You can get banned for posting traditional conservative opinions there if they go against the message the mods want to allow, even if it’s conservative.
Don’t be tricked into thinking it’s some conservative safe space. It’s a propaganda outlet for the mods who ban even conservatives if they don’t toe the line and agree with the mods.
The user raises concern that a right leaning forum has right leaning filters but fails to mention you see that with some left leaning forums. Based on the shock this person has never visited a left subreddit. Does that mean he is right leaning? Or does this person seek out a right subreddit because they are doing research?
I would guess research because the shock tells us he doesn't visit these places often and he doesn't visit more conservative places lile truth social because they censor at a higher rate.
There is my reasoning. You're challenge is to disprove this.
Saying "you are not a conservative" (not you but the comment you chose to defend) when you can't possibly know that is a ridiculous argument to make.
I gave my best answer with logical points. What is yours? This is a process law enforcement goes through when moving from unknown to known. I like my theory but I am open to others that may conflict.
I read all the same comments you did, and i didn't reach any particular conclusion about the person's politics. Your case is incredibly contrived, imo. A conservative who attempts to use a conservative forum and has a bad experience would have every right to talk about it. Why wouldn't they?
The point here being that it is hardly relevant how a subreddit specifically and explicitely for conservatives is moderated, when we are talking how mainstream subreddits are censoring conservative opinions.
Many grievances appear to be liberals concerning themselves with how /r/conservative is moderated, most likely after being banned for astroturfing there.
Edit: To be clear I wasn't picked on by anyone. It's a bot they run. This is a blanket ban that /interestingasfuck extends to anyone who has commented/posted on /asmongold, or any subreddit they consider to be right wing (by USA standards).
I guess the ratio of well moderated subs compared to poorly moderated subs heavily skews towards the poorly moderated. Irrespective of their political viewpoints.
You as a person who uses reddit have a general agreement most likely with the concept of reddiquette, and perhaps go to engage with diverse views, maybe to learn something, maybe to just have an argument. Normal internet forum stuff.
However, you are arguing with a vertically integrated propaganda machine that is basically an experimental weapons testing facility for rhetoric.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency but on so steroids, of which those steroids are on various white powders and no this isn't the War on Christmas. It's less obvious because this machine mimics normal, centrist US culture in ways that slip under the cognitive radar.
You could more easily recognize this if it were AI prompts in the style of 1984 or Pravda; but it's more difficult in this case - it is just rational enough to be ridiculous/incredulous; that it seems like debate is a suitable avenue; it aligns to your context enough and while you might not agree; you could see how 1 in 10 people might be misled.
As a result, you engage and then one of the following happens:
- You make a point so salient they banhammer you because you cannot control the narrative.
- Or they mock you, and rally their "side" into feeling superior as a reaction/answer to their side's questioning of "huh, are we the baddies?". Of course not, it's the "loser woke left antifa attack helicopter pronoun'd TROUBLEMAKERS", who are an outgroup and just don't think about it too hard, k? Don't do the hard work of self examination! Just yell at this outsider!
As a result you aren't engaging with the centre right you hoped to; and if you even get close you will be removed as a threat, ASAP.
The game being played by one participant is "try anything that catches attention, causes fear and lures people to our mindset"; vs your (reasonable, but ultimately mistaken) view that rational debate would correct this and mutual understanding may emerge (and that's a positive; win win social outcome)
This isn't your fault, even longtime slightly centrist conservatives end up falling victim to this trap; when they realize their values don't align to the mechanics above, and are surprised when they are turned on by their former allies.
Unless you have a firm grounding in human psychology and few qualms about manipulation; it is unlikely that discourse or debate will get you anywhere if based on facts, not feelings.
I would firmly encourage you to keep the instinct to engage in discourse; but find social forums where it is a lot harder for a propaganda machine to control the narrative. Will still be tough, but face to face interactions in common spaces can build community.
The "other side" of the political spectrum or almost any group is absolutely just as liable to end up in this situation. It is not some "right wing" specific problem, it is a small but powerful group hijacking others to further their own goals, and people protecting their interests by funding the small group.
This is great lol
The specifics always depends on the subreddit, reddit doesn't pay moderators so its the wild west out there. You can find whatever echo-chamber you want honestly. Which subreddit does HN map to? Perhaps a mix of r/neoliberal and r/conservative (you know, healthy centrism /s)
/r/conservative, a place for conservatives to discuss "from a distinctly conservative point of view", is one of them. It's kind of also in the name.
Do they ban conservatives for criticizing Trump? I don't know, perhaps. I'm going to assume many such comments on there will in fact be made by liberals.
Meanwhile, I was immediately permabanned from my country subreddit when I expressed a pro-Israel opinion in the comment section of a relevant post. In the Modmail I sent, the "moderator" basically insulted me.
They won’t even allow you to comment there now unless they can interview you, audit your comment history across Reddit, and pre-confirm that you align with the message they want to allow.
Deviating will result in a ban.
Why are you commenting so much to defend a subreddit you admittedly don’t understand?
It is in my opinion a very weak argument to point at /r/conservative specifically as an example for how the mainstream censorship on Reddit is not overwhelmingly liberal.
It’s not both all the other subs, the point under contention is about that you cannot be critical or reasonably discuss anything proper in r/conservative.
I don’t know if you have been following the sub, I have, and it always follows a similar pattern. If it’s a new topic, some discussion is allowed, but soon everyone needs to toe the party line.
Edit : I encourage free discussion on this point, instead of downvoting.
The more you separate people the more unhinged they become. If you went back and talked about how reddit tried to hide that Biden was demented or that Harris was unpopular so would be a catastrophic election loss that would also have been onion worthy but today its reality.
I would not call that unpopular.
You don't let people like Trump near the levers of power if you want to keep your country in one piece. We have a similar problem here in NL and the only thing that saved us so far is that even the most rabid right winger will have to form a coalition. That still was a dime on its side and we'll see what happens at the next elections but single-issue-parties are less of a problem here, as are strongmen (though, like everywhere else, there is a fraction of the population that just wants to follow some glorious leader).
There is a lot of hot talk, a lot of insular bubbles working themselves into online frenzies, but it is, objectively, a boring, passive time out on the street. No, there is no cliff.
Outside of the USA: talk of invading Canada, Greenland, indiscriminate execution of people on the high seas, a tariff war that seems to be a series of own goals, destabilization of NATO, the burning of 75 years of goodwill.
Inside the USA: military in the cities, half the country is being depicted as 'the enemy' by those in power, an embarrassing cadre of incompetents are in powerful positions and are wrecking the departments they are nominally in charge of, North Korea style adulation of an idiot leader, attacks on judges and members of congress are on the order of the day, teams of masked man snatch people (men, women, children) off the streets and out of their beds, endless violations of the law by the authorities, naked power grabs and abuse of pardons, attacks on the free press, destruction of the machinery of the state are the order of the day.
Those things you mention were bad, but they were still within the framework of the normal functioning of a state, it never looked as though there was a real chance of the USA fracturing or turning on itself no matter how bad they were. But this time it looks very much different. If you can't see that then that's fine with me but 'historical ignorance' is an easy card to play if you have already decided that what's happening right now in the USA is business as usual, and to me it does not look like 'business as usual' at all. This is unprecedented, and it is getting worse every day.
What I think is happening is that the 'flooding the zone' strategy is working so well that people are simply no longer able to keep up with all of the assaults and they hunker down, hoping that it will pass them by. That's a coping mechanism.
George HW Bush deployed national guard to cities to deal with unrest, Lyndon Johnson deployed the national guard multiple times to deal with unrest, Eisenhower didn't just deploy the National Guard, he sent in the 101st Airborne - the real army. The current deployments are small and peaceful in comparison.
The rest of the world - so outside of your bubble - hears that talk and is getting seriously worries. Not just about the leadership of the USA, but about the USA as a whole.
> George HW Bush deployed national guard to cities to deal with unrest,
But not on a pretext, though, arguably, he did start a major war on a pretext, so there's that.
> Lyndon Johnson deployed the national guard multiple times to deal with unrest, Eisenhower didn't just deploy the National Guard, he sent in the 101st Airborne - the real army. The current deployments are small and peaceful in comparison.
But they are on a pretext and that is what should worry you. The commander-in-chief has gone nuts to the point that he is inventing reasons to send the military into cities that do not want them.
But if you want to choose to ignore all that and pretend that everything is just a-ok, be my guest. We'll see how your comment ages.
Propaganda, Anxiety, none of it is real. Parent is right, its made up outrage and the US and world is better now than ever.
The only thing that is extreme is the hate spewed by both sides.
Widescale race riots, Vietnam war protests, a President and Presidential candidate assassinated etc. That said a few cms or so difference and that bullet takes out Trump.
Certainly divided right now just genuinely not sure if it's quite at that level or not.
That could have been reversed. Kennedy could have lived and Trump could have been dead, either way, I was four at the time, my most recent memory from that era is the moon landing. But the depiction of half the nation as the enemy and the active tour of revenge that is happening right now is unprecedented, not even the McCarthy era - or at least, what I know of it - came close.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/right-wing-extremist-v...
>Based on our own research and a review of related work, we can confidently say that most domestic terrorists in the U.S. are politically on the right, and right-wing attacks account for the vast majority of fatalities from domestic terrorism.
Of course this reply isn't for you.If you're spreading this level of rhetoric nothing is going to change your mind. Instead it's information for others.
> Appreciation subreddit dedicated to the life and art of Michael Joe Jackson
Criticism of Jackson would be off-topic.
Plus it's not like anybody who is a fan of Jackson doesn't know about those allegations and some of the weird things he did. People who feel the need to say he was weird about kids in that subreddit are probably just trying to troll Jackson fans. It's not going to make the subreddit better for fans who are there to celebrate the art and music of Jackson.
That was considered “instigating violence” lol
"We should just execute them and save money" is instigating violence.
If you aren't willing to spend resources because it's "obvious" to you, you do not care about Justice.
Cops always think they got the right guy, and they are regularly blatantly wrong, including for people on death row.
That's why we have trials, with independent judges, juries and rules.
Remember when the Boston marathon bombing happened, and Reddit users identified dozens of different people as obviously, and definitely, the bombers (https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/reddit-regre...)? Remember when the LAPD opened fire on multiple random civilians who they thought might be Christopher Dorner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Dorner_shootings_a...) remember when the DC sniper was active and the tip line received thousands of calls from people claiming to have 100% certainty that they saw the sniper, then describe people of conflicting races, ages and physical descriptions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks)
We have trials so that we make sure we put the bad guys in prison, not random innocent people who were misidentified. They're for the benefit of everyone else, not for the criminal.
You should be a Reddit mod lol
This is an "objectively sane" comment that got a lot of upvotes actually
Any suggestion to remove due process or the rule of law from governance is objectively degenerate and retrogressive.
No matter who you are, you do not want to live in that world.
That's a pretty hilariously one-sided example, given /r/conservative is one of the most comically moderated subs on Reddit. Like, you were so close with that example, but no, it turns out it's all the other subs that are to blame.
/r/conservative is just a renamed The_Donald. It has essentially nothing to do with conservatism, and anything even remotely critical of the dear leader, where critical can be just asking for clarification or correcting a wrong claim, leads to an immediate permanent ban. I actually thought it was performance art and was echoing the famous, and hilarious, North Korea sub. Turns out it's actually sincere.
As to the rest of your list...yeah, I think we'd need to see examples. When people do the "they banned me just for {x}", they often conveniently leave out a lot of not {x} that actually led to the ban. People are remarkably biased in how they tell these tales.
Per the subreddit description it is a place for conservatives to discuss "from a distinctly conservative point of view".
I am getting the feeling that you may in fact not be a conservative. That's fine. You don't need to participate in /r/conservative any more than I need to participate in /r/progressive. It simply does not concern you, and your focus on how a subreddit for conservatives is moderated paints a better picture of why you may have been banned from there.
The problem is default subreddits handing out permabans over political opinions.
But ultimately I don't particularly care. I'm not a whiny little baby, and if people need to create such an echo chamber in the service of a child rapist, so be it. That is their prerogative, and all the more power to them. You hilariously replied as if I'm licking my wounds and stomping my feet demanded my voice in that sub, when all I was doing is pointing out that bringing up that extreme example of moderator overreach, but then not using it was a bit comedic.
>The problem is default subreddits handing out permabans over political opinions.
Sounds tough for you. I can see why you are getting banned. But, you know, any sub can ban people for their own policies, even just that they don't like the energy you bring to a sub. There is a bizarre subtext to your comment that is a sort of "/r/conservative is ours, stay away, but also we are entitled to our views in other subs...because, default or something". Pretty telling.
I never even participated in /r/conservatives, I am merely pointing out that it is hardly relevant whether /r/conservatives has anything to do with conservatives.
You, and I imagine many other complainers, are obviously disqualified from participating there from the start. That is not a problem.
What is a problem is that many moderators, just like you, seem to think default front page subreddits or country subreddits are a place for liberals only where you should get to ban conservatives.
The entire basis of your argument was that it is for conservatives, so non-conservatives should be banned. And FWIW, I am classically a conservative. An actual conservative, not the cult of personality sort. In this new era suddenly I'm some weird liberal.
>many moderators, just like you
Like me? LOL, I'm not a moderator on Reddit, and can't fathom wasting my time like that. But, eh, people have their own hobbies.
And I've been banned on a number of "liberal" subs like worldnews, because of the aforementioned conservative foundations of my views. And...eh...I sob into my pillow a bit and move on. There are numerous other news subs, and I can make a /r/conservativeworldnews or something and compete for hearts and minds. Whatever.
There are not numerous other mainstream news subs where you would not get banned for conservative opinions. In fact I believe worldnews may be the most conservative leaning one. I know that /r/news is far more left.
You don't think that's a problem with the platform?
Regardless, and to rehash, the foundation of your position was that conservatives have their own place and non-conservatives should be banned on sight to give them their zone. But it isn't a conservative sub, it's a Donald Trump cult subreddit. Which everyone knows at this point -- it certainly isn't a secret -- but again I only brought it up because it was so comedic to mention that sub but not offer as an example of absolutely insane subreddit moderation.
If there is a problem with moderation on reddit, /r/conservative is the perfect example of power tripping moderation and an inability for casual visitors to understand how one-sided the perspective has been curated to be. Again, I only pointed out how hilarious it was to mention that sub, but only to criticize other subs.
>You don't think that's a problem with the platform?
It is a reality on any curated or moderated site (including HN). Every single human on this planet has biases and agendas and conflicts of interest.
Should every sub have a firehose of moderated away comments and or banned users and their reasons? Sure, probably, in the same way that HN has showdead. I mean, there's going to be a lot of heinous stuff among it, but it would make for a fascinating analysis.
EDIT: Every comment I made suddenly got a -4 applied to it, which is kind of funny in the context of this discussion. I am 100% convinced that HN has "super arrow" users, though this has never been disclosed or detailed. But, eh...
But is it a perfect example? I don't know. It's political in nature and one could expect that it's run by MAGA considering the current state of the Republican party and the fact that they banned the Trump subreddit.
I'm more concerned about /r/worldnews and my country subreddit. Reddit should enforce some standards for moderation and make sure those default places aren't run by political activists.
But maybe that's the least of Reddit's problems. Today I have seen multiple posts openly glorifying the Al-Qassam brigades. These posts may well be illegal under various European laws against publicly glorifying terrorism. Many upvotes too, and the posts have been up for hours.
And the funny thing is Redditors think that Twitter/X alone was a terrible platform that needs to be censored.
Now /r/conservative HAS to be strict with modding, if not the entire liberal leaning army of redditors will either have it banned, or taken over. Is that better in your mind? Or are you just upset that it was used as an example?
I don't expect to see any, but I'd certainly be curious to see what posts that got you banned or admonished so I can form my own opinion on them.
Could you motivate why this is relevant and what your counter point would be? I'm genuinely curious!
Furthermore, I'm sick and tired of self-created right-wing narrative of censorship when they're ever so eager to do it to the fullest possible extent they can with their current powers and societal acceptance. And then we're not just talking about random people being mean to you on Twitter, but government power. All while leaning on a narrative of "We're just doing what you did before" that they've created themselves by endless repetition.
I would prefer not to link my Reddit account to my HN account furthermore it's common for comments to be deleted at a ban so I'm unable to give you the exact comments but happy to provide insight into any (perceived) biased! I have voted D66 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrats_66) during the last elections, I'll let you do your own assessment of their standpoints.
I understand your frustration about the (perceived) narrative of censorship. But I think we can agree that censorship of _viewpoints_ (no matter who it's coming from) is a bad thing.
Unfortunately that seems to be rather rampant on Reddit and is the main point in my original post. As others have pointed out /r/conservative also seems to suffer from bad moderation so this seems more like an issue with Reddit than something coming from a particular political flank.
Hope this answers your concerns!
Understandable, no worries.
> I have voted D66 [..] during the last elections
I've been seeing sentiments like this before but I don't value them high because what matter is what people do and decide when things becomes hot and their professed principles need to be actually proven.
As an anecdote, and yes, I know it's an extreme example, but it's interesting to me and brings the point home: When listening to an audio book (it's on Audible if interested, recommended!) a while back that compiles a bunch of interviews with defendants of the Nuremberg trials, a surprising amount of them suggested, paraphrasing; "I was actually a liberal before the war!" (and also a strange amount of teachers curiously!).
I understand your point about deciding and acting when things become hot but shouldn't we place political vote(s) above comment(s) on social media? Realistically I would hope that the average voter in Europe does not encounter a "hot" situation where his or her morals will be tested as they were during the second world war.
Yet what we vote for influences real world actions, what we say online might influence one or two opinions slightly.
I’m thus unwilling to take Rep. Comey’s decision to call Reddit to testify as evidence of anything. Feels more like political theater to me. This doesn’t either condemn or absolve Reddit, it’s just not strong evidence.
Meanwhile posts about violence against Trump, Musk or celebrating the dead of Kirk did get massive upvotes and visibility on some of the biggest and most popular subs on Reddit.
My explicit hypothesis is that he’s not holding these hearings out of a desire to investigate, he’s holding them for other reasons.
Also you’re slipping down a slope here. Originally the question was about promoting violence yet you keep referring to hatred or even being glad someone’s dead. Promoting violence is not the same as being glad someone has passed away.
And let's not ignore the owner of the site posting inflammatory/hateful/violent rhetoric.
The closest that I've seen is conversations about violence rates and nationality (in the context of immigration) but these topics have also been discussed in the liberal left Dutch newspaper (Volkskrant) and conservative center newspaper (Neu Zuricher Zeitung) that I read.
My main point would be that Twitter does a better job at not amplifying calls for violence than Reddit. I, obviously, do not have access to internal Twitter data so my assessment is purely anecdotal but nonetheless seems relevant to the conversation.
There are some other options too. For instance, there are people who honestly believe that Twitter is now a much better place and feel right at home because they are the ones pushing the genocide apologia and putrid racism themselves.
I'm not an American, nor do I care very much about US politics (outside my sphere of influence). It's hard to discuss exactly what genocide apologia and putrid racism are without a closer definition but I do not see anything on Twitter that's not discussed in the left liberal Dutch newspaper that I read (Volkskrant) or the German conservative center newspaper that I read (NZZ).
But if that's your twitter experience then you have a very well curated feed and on top of that are somehow able to side-step the stuff that Musk pushes really hard.
While Twitter has many issues, I still find value in it and I figured that a counter point to the common narrative would add value to the discussion.
I would love a LLM curated social network where I can drive the content that I see by adjusting the prompt to ensure that only high quality, fact based content is presented to me.
While no doubt not perfect and accounting for LLM biases (at scale) is not trivial this seems doable on a small (personal or small community) scale. Given the low cost of LLMs these days (queries on Flash 2.5 Lite or QWEN usually cost me a fraction of a cent), this might actually be a pretty cool weekend project!
Other countries do exist and they also use Reddit and Twitter (despite the US politics spam we have to suffer through ;))
Imo, assuming you are not talking about what Arabs or whoever outside of America say about it was reasonable. Especially since your comment seemed to talk about American political environment.
You might be having a different experience, these timeline are after all personalised ;)
---------------
Reddit absolutely does have a moderator problem, as one would expect for a platform that relies on anonymous volunteers, but this might merely be the pretext for a witch hunt. e.g. The Trump administration may actually attempt to track down users who posted anti-Kirk or anti-Trump memes. It might be something even more though. There may be an attempt to coerce these platforms to start moderating in a way that's more favourable to Trump. Reddit is a hotbed of anti-Trump memes after all.
Protest is the bane of authoritarian regimes. That's why the Trump administration moved to lock down colleges so rapidly early this year. However, online social media also has significant capacity for influencing public opinion. This is why so many authoritarian regimes simply cut off internet access for their people. Others (e.g. China) have attempted to censor, manipulate, and control the internet rather than cutting it off.
Americans, and the world, should be paying close attention to these hearings. They should also pay attention to any sudden changes in behaviour of these companies. Merely being summoned to a hearing might be enough of a threat to make them give Trump all he asks for.
That’s the real comedy about this; when we like it censorship is good, when we don’t like it (Covid shutdown, anti vax, Jan 6th) censorship is bad. The double standard is shocking, yet completely normalized.
Besides any attempt to end violent rhetoric has to start with POTUS himself, theater exactly what it is.
If mainstream media had censored Adolf Hitler at the time, the Holocaust and the war in Europe might have been prevented. On the other hand, if they'd censored Winston Churchill, the Holocaust and the war in Europe might have been worsened.
It's like the argument for deregulation. Well, good regulations are good and there should be more of them; bad regulations are bad and there should be less of them. There's can be no serious argument for whether the number of regulations to go up or whether it should go down - that should entirely depend on each individual regulation being good or bad. Any argument that all are good or all are bad is pure irrational ideology.
I like the ones I think are good and I don't like the ones I think are bad. That's not a double standard - that's rationality. Besides what I think, there is also usually an objective measure of goodness or badness, but it's a lot harder to get at. I am not flipping a coin to think something is good or bad - I am estimating whether it's objectively good or bad. Am I a good estimator? Hard to tell.
Who is "we" in your comment?
Simply put in reality some censorship of some kind or I can simply 'win' by screaming really loud so no one else can even get a word in about their view.
The paradox of tolerance tells us that any view that intolerant of the existence of another person for simply existing should not be allowed as it is a terminal case. Of course electing the most violent and intolerant person we could find means we're going to have a hard time.
In my understanding, libel is a civil tort, and the victim can sue if they think they have been libeled. And wishing someone dead isn't illegal in the US, though it may be elsewhere.
This wasn't just a reddit problem, Twitter had plenty of the same cancel campaigns.
What you'll also see is a lot of accounts banned just for saying that they can't wait for say Vladimir Putin to die. I'm sure there are ways in which you could construe that to be 'politically motivated death' but that's just a weak excuse to ban an account ignoring the deeper subtext. Wanting mass murderers to shuffle off their mortal coil is a net positive for the world.
Funny how for the last 30 years of right wing violence/extremists far exceeding left wing nothing was done at all about it, no questions asked. Hush hush, don't talk about gun control or the real causes of these peoples' actions.
But then the year that left wing violence finally exceeds right wing, they all start crying that it's unacceptable and something needs to be done about it.
Source: https://www.csis.org/analysis/left-wing-terrorism-and-politi... "So far, 2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right."
It hasn't even! Like even if you take the Kirk murder as an explicitly left wing murder, "leftist" violence is still not even a shadow of what it used to be in the US
We used to shoot at business magnates for fighting unionization! The weather underground was an explicitly Marxist organization! The black panthers were a black supremacist organization!
Your own source makes the point that the reason left wing attacks "outnumber" right wing ones is that right wing attacks have dramatically decreased
Because when ICE does it, it's not considered a "right wing attack"!
this framing will most likely confuse most people because it's essentially a 100s of murders/mass shootings (by the right) vs 2 murders (by the left, the rest is probably property damage or whatever).
It's also going to be confusing because Luigi is not a confirmed leftist, the Kirk shooter is not a confirmed leftist, and putting aside the problematic presumption that they are before we have evidence, doing so means totalling up to approx 3 left wing murders since 2020.
But ICE's current actions would clearly be classified as right wing violence by those standards, which is overwhelmingly well documented and numerous. Some people also might not like that framing, whether it's because you're a right winger or because you're looking for info on non-state sanctioned terrorism, so it wouldn't be a bad idea to give ICE their own category in the next version of some of those charts.
Anyone who can't see that is blind on the right eye, which is unfortunately a common phenomenon in certain circles nowadays.
"If you can't see" <Insert my strongly held ideology> "then you are blind".
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).
I should start saving the many many posts where redditors talk about a civil war and revolution to stop their political opposition (In the US). It happens every single day.
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.
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.
It is illegal in most countries, no? Even in USA you aren't allowed to instigate murder.
Freedom of speech we don't like is the true litmus test of free speech. It is trivial to say I support free speech when someone says nice things about me.
The classic example, is can you shout "Fire!" in a crowded cinema? Should this be illegal in itself? Probably not. But if this causes a panic that kills people in a crush for the exits, then you are very culpable for these deaths.
But even if nothing bad happens, should there be laws against what you did? Saying no is in my mind similar to saying if you shoot at somebody but miss them, did you break any laws?
FWIW, yes, I do support free speech. Very much. But I also recognize you must be responsible for the consequences of what you say, and this leads to some very tricky ethical situations - Should you be held accountable for what could have happened, even if it did not happen?
People are free to say mean things, they just aren't allowed to encourage violence. There is a difference between saying "I hate how Trump runs the country, he is an idiot" and "Can't someone kill Trump already".
I have seen a lot of the second kind on reddit. The first kind gets you arrested in Britain though, they don't have any meaningful free speech there.
But as you say what constitutes "encouraging violence" is not entirely clear, but most agrees that encouraging violence shouldn't be protected by free speech laws.
Like, on Reddit you're technically not allowed to say "Man, I'm so glad that Adolf Hitler guy is dead."
To my knowledge it is not illegal to say something like that (anywhere you want to live anyways)
I think that a world where people are free to talk about how they're glad horrible tyrants are dead is a better world than the one where they aren't free to express those ideas.
You wouldn't want to live in an America where it wasn't legal to condone the death of Osama Bin Laden, would you?
Indeed, freedom of conscience is usually considered a human right.
This is a strawman. Your quoted text does not come from GP and does not fairly represent any of its argument (which makes your use of italics hard to understand).
Actual incitement to political violence is actually occurring on these platforms. People have screencaps and everything.
I wonder what an inefficient way would look like.
It is not like north would march in there to stop the slavery. There was an anti slavery army - John Brown with his, like, 20 or so people attacking south.
African Americans as second class citizens were in fact much better off then them being slaves.
But it's counterfactual. It took severe violence plus 100 years to get there. Plus another 60 (yikes) to get to where we are today.
That's horrible! But nothing about that reality suggests to me that there was a less-violent or speedier way to get there. Governments are made of people.
Getting there was a worthwhile goal. I don't think there's a "but at what cost?" debate here.
So it sure doesn't feel "efficient", but it might be the "most efficient possible" in the human world.
Sometimes, progress is measured by funerals.
So, we can say that it was violence problem that got solved by violence. Not just political problem.
Moreover, that sentiment was literally expressed by slavery opposition back then. Afaik, the sophistry about "any government is violence therefore, it is the same, que" was not all that much thing back then.
Capturing moderation of a subreddit has long been a strategy of marketing agencies.
Even when they can’t take over the actual mod positions, they’ll shower the mods with free product and make them feel like a VIP. I watched this happen from inside one company and I couldn’t believe how easily the marketing team turned a mod into our biggest advocate by sending free products to them from time to time.
> A bad actor mod of a popular subreddit can persist for years, visibly, without people managing either to oust the mod, or to take down the sub's influence.
In some of the subreddits I followed, the remaining subreddit users felt some relationship with the mods over time and felt they were on the same side. There are subreddits like /r/nootropics where many users don’t realize the mod team has been captured by a supplement company (Nootropics Depot) and that they have a history of deleting some posts critical of Nootropics Depot. You would think this would be grounds for a subreddit riot, yet whenever I check it feels like everyone there is fans of Nootropics Depot and therefore they get a pass. Note that the quality of the science discussed on /r/nootropics is generally terrible and of very poor quality in recent years, which is certainly a related factor. It’s also not hard to find comments in other subreddits from people who were banned from /r/nootropics.
I think this happens across a lot of subreddits. Moderators find reasons to ban the dissenters and shape the conversation until the hive mind consensus favors the mods, so any issues aren’t discussed. People who object are banned for different reasons and minor infractions, then get tired of Reddit and move on. What remains is captured by companies pushing their products to an audience who thinks the mods are doing them a favor.
> What experience do you have modding such channels and the reddit community?
> Managing city subs are among the most difficult on the site... these are not single topic communities and discord is not organized in the same way so that bad actors can creep in and cause problems without being back lined to the site.
> There's more to this than people saying they're interested. It's also what kind of interest and what is being said and done that has to be in support of the sub and not a backdoor community that leeches activity from the sub / site and forwards it to something off site.
> Lots of concerns here.
Basically, we will not have the same kind of absolute power there that we have here, and we can't risk it becoming a rival community. This was to the innocent suggestion/question as to why there wasn't one already.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/54ie2t/seat...
r/CanadaPublicServants vs r/CanadaPublicServants2 (banned) vs r/CanadaPublicServants3
They:
- Don't get paid
- Spend time having to do some really thankless work
- Don't really have a regular work schedule
So what kind of person is going to do it?
Someone who is willing to do the work for no pay. For smaller subreddits and areas where the work of moderation isn't that heavy, you'll find passionate individuals.
Mods that moderate more time consuming content or the power mods modding many subs are chasing some other incentive. For some that means explicitly monetizing their time by pushing products and companies who pay them. For others it's the ideological satisfaction of pushing viewpoints they want pushed and suppressing viewpoints they want suppressed. For some it's prestige. For most it's probably some mix of all three.
What's absent is any incentive to surface organic, human content. That's merely a side effect of what mods do, not their main job.
People with careers, families, friends and hobbies are mostly not going to spend their limited free time being a digital janitor for an anonymous online community.
People sitting alone in their apartment with nowhere to go and nothing to do and no one to spend time with, however, might find that being a Reddit moderator gives them a hobby, a sense of purpose, and feelings of power, importance or significance that they otherwise never get in real life.
Someone should make a social media site with inverted dynamics- users who only spend a few minutes per day on the site and post once every few weeks should be treated as the influential power users, while the people lurking and scrolling for 10 hours per day are deprioritized.
The problem is most users are the "casuals", by a wide margin, in general; and a lot of them are also "weirdos" in different ways. Some of them will be obsessed with a different site; others have serious issues in spite of all the forms of social proof you describe.
This happens because the regular users have no power. I remember seeing some article that said a small number of mods control most of the popular subreddits. Many of them put their own bias into the system by banning users, banning sources, deleting content based on ideology, shadow banning, etc.
The other issue is as these mods linger for a while, they drive away or ban everyone who might disagree with them. So then the “community” ends up not actually disagreeing with the authoritarian mod. Reddit ends up not being resilient because it doesn’t want to be. Everyone else, is gone.
> “If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders,” he said.
> “And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
“The same 5 people moderates 500 of the most popular subreddits”
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/gjl27j/the_...
It appears the original post they are discussing was removed. Seems like Reddit banned the original user who collected this data and deleted their posts.
Another discussion about this:
“Six powermods control 118 of the top 500 subreddits”
https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/gkkfg5/upda...
Evidence pasted:
The Name “Maxwellhill”
The username directly references “Maxwell,” which is not a common surname. Ghislaine Maxwell grew up at Headington Hill Hall, which was nicknamed “Maxwell Hill” after her father, Robert Maxwell, bought it. This isn’t a vague reference it’s oddly specific and personal. It’s like someone using “EpsteinIsland” as a username and claiming it’s just coincidence.
Posting Activity Stopped the Day of Her Arrest (actually 2 days before, when she began wrapping her phone in aluminum)
u/maxwellhill posted almost every day for 14 years and was one of Reddit’s most active users. Then, with no warning, all posting stopped after June 30, 2020. Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested on July 2, 2020. The timing is exact. This wasn’t a slow fade or gradual disinterest. It looks like someone was physically unable to post.
Gaps in Posting Line Up with Real-Life Events
There were other suspicious posting gaps during major events in Maxwell’s life. Notably, during her mother’s death in 2013 and during the 2011 Kleiner Perkins party, where she was confirmed to be present by former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao. That party shows Reddit leadership at the time was at least aware of her.
Moderator of Massive Subreddits
The account was a lead mod of r/worldnews, r/technology, r/politics, r/science, r/europe, r/upliftingnews, r/celebrities, and more. These are major subs that help shape Reddit’s front page and influence global discourse. Whoever had access to this account had immense control. Even after years of inactivity, Reddit auto added the account back as a moderator in 2024. That suggests the system still treats it like an active, important account.
The Content
Maxwellhill posted repeatedly about age of consent laws, often citing obscure countries. They also posted articles defending the legality of child exploitation material and criticized what they called “overzealous” child protection laws. These aren’t normal discussion points for the average Redditor. It reads like someone obsessed with legal gray areas surrounding child abuse.
Auto Deletion and Censorship
Mentions of “u/maxwellhill” have been automatically removed from comments in multiple subs. The Daily Dot reported on suspicious deletion behavior tied to the account. Posts about this user “vanished mysteriously,” raising real concerns about censorship. Who or what is protecting the account?
No Denial from the Account
If u/maxwellhill is just some random power user, where are they? Why haven’t they logged in to say anything? No posts, no comments, no denials. Nothing for five years. After 14 years of near daily activity, complete silence in the face of serious allegations is suspicious on its own.
The poster also uses many British expressions in their writing, and listed British foods as their favorite foods in one post.
Mods of r/WorldNews which is infamously compromised by paid agents demanded her posts be deleted from other subreddits.
The name matches Maxwell’s family estate. The account vanishes the day she’s arrested. It posted about topics deeply aligned with her known behavior. It held mod control over huge parts of Reddit. It still does. And yet it hasn’t said a word in five years. If this isn’t her, it’s someone with eerily similar patterns, priorities, and timing.
The theory here is merely that an influential socialite (what Maxwell was regularly described as before her arrest) was a reddit addict powermod, that some people running reddit were aware of her identity - not necessarily knowing anything about Maxwell's wider social network or the activities she was convicted of.
Nothing here is especially implausible. It may or may not be correct, but it's not a grand conspiracy theory, just a theory of everyday shady non-public coordination. It's no more a conspiracy theory than it it's a conspiracy theory that some people in your town sell drugs (yes, they do, and technically they have to engage in "criminal conspiracy" to do so, but we don't call people conspiracy theorists for believing it happens).
> But it’s not.
> I’m sorry to tell you this, but /u/maxwellhill did post after the 2nd of July. Just not in public. He continued to perform moderator duties, interact with staff members, and answer private messages. Here’s a conversation between /u/hasharin and /u/maxwellhill that happened on the 9th.
> Additionally, here’s evidence that /u/maxwellhill made a post inside a private subreddit, nine days after the “Tr45son” one.
> This seems pretty bad for the theory. With Ghislaine Maxwell in jail awaiting charges, /u/maxwellhill is casually swapping PMs with reddit moderators and spitballing around policy ideas. How could they be the same person?
That's from the link.
I stopped posting to Reddit in December 2015 and haven't been back since. David Bowie died a few days later 10 January 2016. Am I David Bowie?
Don't know if maxwellhill was ghislaine, but whoever he was, I think some big life event caused him to leave, and that it wasn't voluntary.
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.
"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 fucking everywhere."
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
Eh?
HN falls under centralized moderation for sure.
Reddit not quite so much. That's more of 'middle management moderation'.
It’s a systemic Reddit-the-company issue. Google “Ethan Klein vs Reddit” if you want to go down a recent rabbit hole
Worth noting: he does not appear to have filed for defamation, which would be the thing he could complain if what they were saying was materially untrue.
We need to separate the web into data, identity, and moderation.
Users need to become aware that they're not using platforms, they are subscribing to moderator control.
Somebody owns ycombinator.com, can decide what is discussed, and if they ban you - us peasants can't tweak who is a moderating / recover your identity and data.
I'm convinced we'll get there eventually, but it starts with recognizing that the only thing special about Reddit is its multi-level-unpaid-moderator-marketing.
it's a three-fold issue here.
1. Admins really don't care about moderator behavior. As long as you aren't breaking reddit you'll be ignored. Events like r/wow going private is one of the few times they directly intervene.
2. Moderator rankings is seniority first. Without admin intervention, you can have a "head moderator" who only really acts once a month and they will have the final say on anything in that sub.
3. Network effects. Like anything else the soluion of "start your own subreddit" is a doomed task unless the sub is very new. People will pool around the sub with the most subscribers. So avoiding the bad mod is difficult.
These are issues I was hoping in the '10's they'd attempt to address. But not much has changed to addreess this. At best the rule of only moderating 5 "high-traffic" subs may help the most extreme cases, but I'm not confident.
If the moderator is really that bad the new community takes over (yes its more complex than that, but broad strokes).
Its not that different then an open source project with bad maintainers.
And the truly vindictive moderators will start spamming your new subreddit with e.g. child pornography, and then immediately reporting it to the admins. You had best have your own moderator team running 24/7 to cope with intentional sabotage coming from a person who lives their whole life on Reddit, and will stop at nothing to keep control of the little power that they have. You won't be able to pin this sabotage on the moderator, unless you're in their private Discord channel where they coordinate the attack, which you obviously won't be as you're an outsider. Then they will openly gloat about doing it, because they're on the Right Side Of History, and you are Nazis and deserve everything you get.
Reddit also has default subreddits, or rather had them, but they still hold significant first-mover advantage and enjoy network effects. There's a reason that /r/pics is full of insipid drivel, but there's not a more popular /r/pics2
I'm not sure if the reason may be as simple as the desire to pump their user numbers for earnings, or if it's something more egregious than that. It's not clear to me how a company owned by the public which relies on advertisers for revenue has been able to carry on for so long being a propaganda farm for foreign agents and marketing bots.
I don’t see this as a big a problem as you do.
As soon as you solve this, then you have the issue of people you see as good actors being ousted and having their influence taken down. If the bad guys can be silenced then so can the good guys and then it’s just a matter of how we figure out the good guys and the bad guys!
I can't say who, because the motherfucker is on this website and will instantly deny it all.
It's more or less an open marketplace, with only a few high-level rules.
Why would it be resilient to these kinds of attacks? Human society as a whole isn't - if it were, I wouldn't have a job.
> A bad actor mod of a popular subreddit can persist for years, visibly, without people managing either to oust the mod, or to take down the sub's influence.
So, kind of like how bad companies persist in dominant market positions?
Bad actors put in a lot more effort to protect themselves than people with lives and jobs have to take them down. Anyone can bitch about Wells Fargo and Comcast, and 'tyrranical' mods, but at the end of the day, most people aren't switching their ISP or going to a forked community.
Post a shitload of bad faith attacks and slander. Not as a root comment. You don't have to actually relate to the parent at all, you're just trying to get your talking points out there. If someone calls you out? Gish gallop never actually addressing their comments. It's another opportunity for you to spew whatever bullshit you want.
If they follow you around and get more engagement/up votes? Block them. Now you are free to continue to post whatever BS you want without any of those pesky fact checkers.
I'd estimate way higher. Most moderators of meaningful subreddits are corrupt. Occasionally one makes it visible.
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.
not a bug, a feature. those who can pay for and use the API -- which makes them money -- get to influence the discussion.
that's the business model. they DGAF about free speech or reasonable, well run subreddits so long as they can still get paid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of torts, occurs when one person intentionally damages someone else's contractual or business relationships with a third party, causing economic harm.
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.
Example:
If one side says "Hamas dresses as civilians" to excuse killing civilians, they're factually correct and criminal.
If someone then goes online and drops "Hamas dresses as civilians" they're factually correct and reinforcing a criminal's defense.
Anyway, the morality of IDF behavior is apparant to an impartial behavior by just considering the thought experiment that IDF doesn't killing Israeli civilians "just in case" they're Hamas in disguise. They only kill Palestinian civilians "just in case" they're Hamas.
I’m really supposed to take people that celebrated October 7th in good faith when they celebrate Jewish civilians getting killed.
Nothing new, but sad a great incubator went down. There really isn't a solution for this, is there?
Marketers love this sort of organic promotion. That doesn't make it less authentic.
Especially in politics, casual observers assume everything is about money (especially shadowy "corporations") but politicians are almost always legitimately ideological, which is actually worse!
"Housing is expensive because Blackstone/BlackRock bought all the houses and is keeping them empty to raise prices" -> very common online and couldn't be less true if it tried.
"X politician gets donations from big tech companies" -> 99% comes from misreading donations on OpenSecrets from /employees of a company/ as if they were the company itself, but employees have different interests than their employer.
All of this for three customers? It doesn't add up and there are some missing pieces in the story.
Also you have failed to refute anything in the OP.
According to your Hacker News post history, you are the co-founder of Formation.dev. Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43758527
According to Formation.dev, the company is in the same space as LeetCode, "interview prep programs", "mock interview platforms" and "bootcamps". When it comes to bootcamps, Formation.dev claims to be doing (at least partially) four of the seven mentioned functions. Source: https://formation.dev/
And Codesmith is a bootcamp. Source: https://www.codesmith.io/
It does not seem that far-fetched that you benefit as the founder of a company that is competing against bootcamp companies like Codemsith.
Well That Settles It. /sarcasm
P.S. - quit saying there are some missing pieces in the story until you are going to fill in the rest of the story. You keep saying it, and you are pegging to 11 the bullshit meter of people (like me) who never heard of you or your company (which I won't get near with a 10m pole next time training budget is on the table) or the companies you clearly tried targeted.
P.P.S. - Get a media consultant. Seriously, you suck at this.
Well the author thinks I'm a mastermind marketer ... maybe I'm not and I'm just a person frustrated with a company that I pointed out problems to for years, they did nothing about them, and those same problems caused their implosion.
They are effectively accusing you of destroying a multi-million company through libel... If this happened in court you'd be getting a lawyer, no? Maybe i'm being dramatic and the best way to go through this is just to ignore it and let it calm out but it's probably not a bad idea to talk to someone with a cool head and experience.
If you want to publish your projects everywhere under the sun in public and ask for them to be 'stared on Github', giving people a script to instantly vote 50 claps on Medium, etc...
Then I can open up those people's LinkedIns and note down how they represent themselves.
Is that weird? I don't think so but you can decide, but it's not stalking and harassing.
If that's stalking then the guy who wrote the post was stalking the hell out of me.
> If that's stalking then the guy who wrote the post was stalking the hell out of me.
Utterly bogus tu quoque argument.
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...
Yes.
In the first place it's troubling that Google ever had so much power, and that AI search tools do now. The idea that a business can succeed or fail based on what appears on the first screen when someone types your business name into a little box is insane. It's just another indication to me that these large gatekeepers need to be shattered, simply in order to create more independent avenues of potential research.
In the second place, the centralization of forum-like content under Reddit likewise gives Reddit undue influence. There's a lot of good stuff on Reddit but it would be better for all that good stuff to be on a lot of separate sites.
And then there's the question of Reddit mod policies. The policy cited in the article falls into the same trap we see with laws on political corruption and the like. It says what you can not do, and narrowly circumscribes it in terms of "exchange" for "compensation", which focuses only on direct quid pro quo kinds of abuse of power. I think we should push for a much greater level of integrity, more like: "In your moderation, you must put the impartial furtherance of the good of the community ahead of your personal interests." I think there would be very little doubt that this moderator's actions fall afoul of such a policy.
And that's the problem with this interweb lark, made worse by aggregators who's algorithms can be gamed, and now we have stochastic LLMs adding to the remix, how do we know what is true?
The narrative related here is frighteningly believable, and, no doubt, so were all the reddit posts.
The difference between the narrative described by this narrative, and the narrative related in the narrative, is that one is death by a thousand cuts, the other either a well deserved take-down or an undeserved attempt at one.
I can't tell the difference, but reddit should be able to.
So this is really about whether reddit sees it's reputation as an asset to be monetized in the short-term, or invested in for the long-term. This is the classic tension between the brand manager and the brand guardian, maximize the cashflow or maximize the balance sheet value, and tells you almost everything important about a company's core culture.
How reddit handles this, it could be argued, will define reddit going forwards.
I watch with baited breath...
All of this for what? Shareholder value? So Silicon Valley elites can get rich and force their shit ideas on everyone?
If you don't see this for what it is, and that is just pure rot of the major services that people use and rely on for their information needs, then you might be beyond helping. Everyone should be pissed that this is what the internet has become.
I don't know if it will work but it would be nice to show folks what the alternatives might be, examples of your ideal internet, instead of insult a generation of folks who don't know what a forum or a bulletin board or a blogroll is.
The stuff you miss is still out there. You can do good by sharing it with those who don't know what they are missing.
Also, sadly, is that it is extremely addictive; it is my version of YouTube shorts or TikTok (which I do not use). It is so easy to say "I'm just going to browse for a few minutes", and have it turn into MUCH longer than a few minutes. Those darn cute cat videos!!!
Nice competitor you have there, would be a shame if someone did the same to it.
It seems like he can't stop and will end up in court at some point.
It's not just him. Nobody uses upvotes for the purpose of "letting others see it". We are supposed to do that but we don't.
Reddit, Fackbook, Twitter, TikTok etc are the places where people get their information and form their options. That why the the wealthy and powerful are buying them outright, or paying to push their influence into every aspect of the conversation. Poisoning the well or "Flooding the zone with shit".
Reddit became what Digg was with MrBabyMan. Or actually something worse.
Absolutely a competitor:
https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/08/software-engineer-training...
I think everyone here has demonstrated how a mod is objectively lying or wrong and gotten banned for it. From their point of view, they won. For a loser, winning online arguments is the best feeling in the world.
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!)
..
And basically anything else that depends on those so called moderators for fairness and equality. It would be interesting to experiment using an LLM with explicit set of hard guidelines (like outlined in the Reddit's code of conduct) and see how it behaves. Sure, LLM's are biased due to their training sources, but I'm curious to see if they will be as biased as human moderators. We need the HN formula for the rest of the platforms (I know HN doesn't use AI) with or without AI.
What an insanely hard job, done with far more grace and far fewer mistakes than I could possibly pull off.
Thank you for this corner of the internet, dang (and a couple others).
Edit: mobile typos
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.
So if the boss wants good moderation as Ycombinator does, fine.
If not, you get X.
I have managed large sites where I had to recruit mods. I would recruit the most popular and lovely users to be mods, and universally I would be forced to ban them within about 6 months. The power would go to their heads and every one of them would turn into a fascist dictator just banning anyone who spoke out of turn and deleting any content they didn't like.
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?
It is crazy how some communities are being moderated by people with clear interests.
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 the impulse to vent when reading about something so outrageous, and in a way this kerfuffle represents the arbitrary unfairness of power leveraged from the shadows, but is that happening here?
I hope this is sarcasm
Moderators there means if I don't like your POV, your posts will be deleted if I have good humour or perma ban if I have had a bad day.
Start using Reddit too much and you quickly start getting depressed with all the shit going on in there.
Not sure what's the story from the other side, but...
One strategy to counter this could be buying ads on Reddit to expose this, with evidence to show of course. And if possible, place the ad right on the offending subreddit.
And don't forget, if you have enough evidence to show, you can always sue. So, do both at the same time and keep them busy.
Thanks god. We have a new drama. I can keep my reduced TV time for a while longer.
Huh? I can’t imagine a company like ADP having drama.
Turns out you only need dozens of Internet accounts to smear a Fortune 500 company.
But what is noteworthy is that the author of the article has also - on the same blog - written a bunch of content about how Reddit is used for spamming search results.
That includes one piece with detailed step by step instructions for how to spam Reddit apparently because Google and Reddit have poisoned the well of SEO.
“Why I’m Sharing Secret Tips on How to Manipulate Reddit: Shouldn’t I keep this all to myself? […] Because fuck Google that’s why… Reddit used to be a reliable source… Google torched all that.”
Make of that what you will - but the author seems to waging a one man campaign targeting what he identifies as dodgy Reddit moderation practices.
When you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail and all that.
I wonder how long this will stay up.
Could one person moderate r/azure while working for aws ?
AI is as biased as humans are, perhaps even more so because it lacks actual reasoning capabilities.
Evals are showing reasoning (by which I mean multi-step problem solving, planning, etc) is improving over time in LLMs. We don't have to agree on metaphysics to see this; I'm referring to the measurable end result.
Why? Some combination of longer context windows, better architectures, hybrid systems, and so on. There is more research about how and where reasoning happens (inside the transformer, during the chain of thought, perhaps during a tool call).
I don't understand what you are talking about. I have to wonder if you posted in the wrong place. Care to explain:
- What specifically did I write that was misinformation?
- How do you justify saying it "makes situations like the OP’s worse". Connect the dots for me?
Please remember to be charitable here.
What, automatically (and not, say, in response to a "what do you suppose my gender is" prompt)? What evidence do we have for this?
https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/do-language-mo...
We'll never get it 100% right but having something more sensible and neutral than the average Reddit mod is not a high bar ;)
Do you understand how AI tools are trained?
when you try to respond, even with lawyers, it just looks immature because the comments levied are immature
no recommendation, let the org die and rebrand I guess
I taught at one for a year and a good number of my students (it was above 50% last time I took a pulse) had life-changing career switches.
I think what people don't realize is that the student is really the difference maker, and that it really takes a lot of effort, dedication, and interest to succeed.
I think it's possible some of these folks could have "self-taught" their way to the same technical proficiency, but it would've taken longer, and they wouldn't have had as much of a professional network of alums, sponsors, etc upon completion.
Edit: Well, that said, I still mentored recently, and the numbers for the one bootcamp I mentored for are about 50% over the last couple of years, which honestly seems pretty good considering the state of things, but that bootcamp has also skipped a couple of cohorts because of market conditions.
It is most definitely less rosy now, but I think the "the student is the main driver of success" aspect is still correct, IMO.
You're entirely right. What Codesmith teaches isn't revolutionary. Lars touches on it in his blog, but there are really only three things that have contributed to the success they had, and none of them have anything to do with the technology or languages/frameworks they teach:
1. Build a very strong enrollment pipeline that filters for highly motivated individuals who are also technically capable of self-learning. There's a lot of (free) coursework in their CSX platform that needs to be completed prior to even enrolling in the main program as well as passing both a behavioral and technical interview to be accepted. This sets a higher technical floor so the program can start fast without the risk of losing students. Good candidates => good graduates.
2. Focus the program primarily on self-learning principles. "Hard learning" was always Codesmith's motto. Lessons were very high level in order to push students toward official documentation. Instructors/fellows/mentors all actively discouraged the use of tutorials which are a waste of time. Projects proposals are screened for uniqueness. You don't learn anything following step by step instructions for an app someone else built to solve a problem that isn't yours. Unique problems will require unique solutions which will require actual understanding of the technology.
3. Go really hard on on soft skills and leveraging past experiences. Be it technical or otherwise, nearly everyone had at least a few years of experience in "real" careers. Residents have already proven they can interview well enough to be hired at least by someone. Of my cohort of ~30-35 residents, I can only remember a couple that I didn't want to work with due to either their technical ability as the program ramped up or their coworking ability in general. A brief scroll through r/cscareerquestions or r/csmajor shows how abysmally low the bar is when it comes to soft skills in tech. Even if you ignore college students and only look at those that have been hired in industry, now that I can see it firsthand, the "average" Codesmith student is astonishingly above average in this regard.
---
It's really not rocket science. When you start with a pool of people that are personable, technically capable of learning, career oriented, and mature, you're obviously going to get graduates that are able to punch way above their weight-class. Once you find 30-40 of those people, all Codesmith has to do is put them in the same room together for a few months, without the distractions of life and work, and just facilitate their own, collaborative self-learning.
This is in stark contrast with many bootcamps who will accept anyone that's willing to part with their money without any screening of ability. These I'd truly call snake oil praying on people's desire for a better life.
That initiative was so ahead of its time.
This is the line. Remember google bombs? Remember Wikipedia vandalism for company promotion? These were the early search engine hacking. And now we have LLM hacking.
It was only a matter of time. Reddit has become a cesspool.
1. The singer D4vd is sole mod of his fan subdeddit and deletes every post about the the dead body recently found in the trunk of his Tesla:
https://www.tvfandomlounge.com/singer-d4vd-apparently-deleti...
2. Influencer Paige Lorenze is a mod of nycinfluencer snark and she prolifically deletes all unflattering threads and specifically all photos of her from before her numerous plastic surgeries:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nycinfluencersnarking/comments/1e63...
I have the impression that there’s a certain type of user that likes to be a gadfly in communities to devoted to not particularly relevant or famous personalities.
The criminal case is an open investigation and also has been in the news lately: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/details-emerge-homicide-...
My significant other follows influencers thus I heard about the Paige Lorenze controversy/lore.
I wouldn't say either of them is "not particularly relevant" as D4vd is super popular among GenZ on tiktok and has 30 million listeners and 4 million followers. Paige isn't as big but she is a well-known WAG dating some tennis bro and has a successful clothing brand that sells to the genZ crowd.
And yet Reddit still lives on. Somehow.
At this point it's a zombie, it might look somewhat like the good old Reddit that we all enjoyed but the light inside has long gone out.
What moderating r/codingbootcamp actually looks like:
I don't own the sub - I report to the owner who asked me to help after I'd been one of the most active and helpful contributors. The coding bootcamp industry is absolutely infested with astroturfing. Brand new accounts, manufactured conversations, fake testimonials. It's constant daily spam trying to manipulate people making $15K-20K decisions.
My job is to support authentic discussion. We have above-average Reddit AI filters. We generally don't review flagged content because we can't tell who these suspicious brand new accounts are. Occasionally we approve legitimate posts caught in filters.
The accusation that I delete Codesmith's posts:
This is not only false, it's the exact opposite of what I do. I regularly break the sub's rules to manually approve Codesmith content that Reddit's automated systems flag as spam. I shouldn't be doing this - the same rules should apply to everyone - but I do it constantly because their posts get caught unfairly.
Why are their posts getting flagged?
In mid-2024, Codesmith hired a marketing contractor to post on Reddit. Their CEO even sent me proof of this. They probably didn't know it at the time, but this guy was running one of the most extensive astroturfing operations I've ever seen. Dozens of high-karma sockpuppet accounts. Fake conversations across hundreds of subreddits promoting hemorrhoid cream, garage door openers, lava lamps, custom suits, you name it.
I helped uncover this network and Reddit nuked all those accounts. But Codesmith's legitimate accounts got tangled up in it, and Reddit's AI started auto-suspending them by association - IP addresses, posting patterns, behavioral signals.
I explained this to Codesmith. Multiple times. By email. By phone with their CEO directly. With screenshots. With specific suggestions on rebuilding trust signals through authentic engagement.
They accused me of "deleting their posts." I told them I was approving their content, not removing it. They didn't listen, didn't change their approach, and to this day their content gets constantly flagged.
The evidence is in their own sub, look at some of their official AMAs:
https://www.reddit.com/r/codesmith/comments/1iduu2d/ https://www.reddit.com/r/codesmith/comments/1ilpihd/ https://www.reddit.com/r/codesmith/comments/1gvazaz/
Go look right now. Count how many comments are flagged/suspended/deleted/collapsed. Roughly half get flagged by Reddit within weeks. Not by me - I'm banned from that sub. That doesn't happen with legitimate engagement.
There was a fake account on LinkedIn liking all their stuff that is now suspended as well.
With my moderator hat on, I'm being accused of bias while actively protecting Codesmith from the consequences of their own marketing decisions. I approve posts that should probably stay filtered. I give them more leniency than other bootcamps. I've consistently tried explaining how Reddit works and how to fix their reputation signals.
On my criticism of their program:
Yes, I've been critical of specific Codesmith practices since 2022 - whether bootcamp grads should present 3-week projects as "4 months of mid-level experience" or market themselves as "mid-level engineers" with zero professional experience. I have strong opinions backed by outcomes data and CIRR reports.
But that has nothing to do with how I moderate. I've been equally critical of other bootcamps like TripleTen, BloomTech, App Academy. I recommend a dozen or two people go to Codesmith! At the same time I was questioning their marketing. My moderation standards apply to everyone except Codesmith, who I give more leeway to.
Bottom line: If I wanted to hurt Codesmith as a moderator, I would simply let Reddit's automated systems do their job. I wouldn't override the filters.
You inserted yourself in to this situation. There is an easy path out of it.
And the fact that you used your real name when being a mod gives you strong credibility. You weren't looking to hide your involvement, since you weren't doing anything wrong, in your opinion. This is unlike the "fake" mods who will have multiple levels of indirection, with fake post histories, etc. Astroturfing / shilling 101 is never use your real name.
And overall, if what you're saying is correct, the author owes you an apology. And so does the HN crowd. HN, although a good crowd in general, is super-susceptible to "witch hunts". I don't like witch hunts + character assassinations. So that's why I'm defending you.
P.s. It's ironic that Lars, the author, is a master affiliate marketer + growth hacker. He's started an affiliate company that did $7 million in revenue. I don't say he is an unethical person. But from what I know about this field, it's almost always on the grey line (and he's also admitted to this). See his video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QnwHAnJwv-k. And this is just what is public, if we were to "dig up" some of his stuff, it is possible one could spin it to make him look bad. My point is, he shouldn't exaggerate things to make you look bad. And the same warning applies to me or anyone.
The receipts in the article were meh. Backed by other "bootcamps" testimonies. The article read like a hit piece, with exaggereated language. And it did not mention he was against other bootcamps as well.
And, not knocking down Codesmith at all, but I think there marketing might be a little exaggerated. Which is typical of many bootcamps.
I hate fake reviews by competitors. But I read the article myself, and it seems exaggerated. It did read like a hit piece, and did feel ironic. This was before I even read your response.
I don't know who's saying the truth, but it's never too late to better one's self. So that's the advice to myself and you.
Ideally you shouldn't depend heavily on things that are outside of your control.
“The Story of Codesmith: How a Competitor Crippled a $23.5M Bootcamp By Becoming a Reddit Moderator”
An interesting part of this article is LLM chatbots regurgitating what seems to be defamatory comments by a rogue moderator who took over the coding boot camp subreddit. Google also seems to surface this person’s comments in search results.
You have that in TFA? Author is an outsider to the drama.
I got no request for comment, no interviews, sitting on a treasure trove of my own documents the guy should look at.
So yeah. I would love an actually neutral party to put together a timeline after talking to both sides fairly.
Also, I was defending Michael, because I'm not a fan of witch-hunts. I truly believe the article is exaggerated, even if there are bits of truth. The author himself is a master affiliate marketer, it's a grey area to say the least. It wouldn't be difficult for me to "spin" some things he's done in a bad way, and make a 10 page article out of it, but that would be wrong.
I call bullshit on the "treasure trove".
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 digit cohorts allegedly. Launch School is slowing down from 3 cohorts a year to 2. Numerous other bootcamps have shut down. Codesmith's decline is predominantly an industry problem.
RE: CODESMITH. For starters as an example, Codesmith's website, email, and entire AWS account was down for 3 weeks because they got locked out from not updating their credit card and then losing the root password and their 2-factor was a phone number. This is unacceptable.
Yet they market themselves as similar outcomes to elite grad schools and it's very reasonable to challenge them on their hyperbolic marketing.
Both sides of the story need to be heard before making a judgement.
Even though you have counter claims, you moderating the forum for your industry is problematic. You also seem keen to chime in about a competitor when you should be impartial and allow users to discuss their experiences alone.
Yes there are two sides to every story, but in no universe should you be the mod of that subreddit.
At best, if everything you say is true, what you are doing is akin to proudly volunteering as a firefighter so that you can slow-walk the response if a fire is ever reported at the NXIVM HQ. Your crusade against NXIVM may be righteous, and it might even be universally considered a net good if its HQ were to burn down, but it would still raise a lot of eyebrows if it came out that you intended to use your position in that fashion.
edit: To be clear, I sympathise with your claim that you are being subjected to a one-sided hit, and am starting to feel uneasy with the dogpiling atmosphere that is building in this subthread. However, it is understandable to me why this is happening - fundamentally, Reddit has become a town square that is really not engineered correctly to be one. In a town square, people want to choose their leaders, but subreddits are by design "storefronts", in which leaders (moderators) choose their people. This tension is resolved by a very unpleasant jerry-rigged substitute for democratic control: the one way you can "vote out" a moderator (who has the backing or indifference of everyone above him) is to apply psychological pressure, or other harm (such as the reputational damage your company is no doubt taking as we speak), until they crack and resign. This is sort of democratic because larger fractions of the "electorate" can achieve it more easily, but even turning up to such a "vote" that you ultimately lose entails social violence.
It doesn't seem like you are willing to resign, nor to put your moderator status up for a community vote (if that could even be made fair, after you presumably banned a lot of would-be voters, and conversely could accuse the other side of botting/brigading). What other options do those who do not want the town square to be moderated by you have?
> What other options do those who do not want the town square to be moderated by you have?
Start and visit a new subreddit. This is an important bit that gets covered up by metaphors like "landed gentry" and "peasants". Don't like it? Vote with your digital feet. It doesn't come with any of the baggage and complication that an equivalent real life move would have. Just stop going there and go somewhere else. Yes it would be nice if folks were awesome and tried to be awesome. The reality is they aren't and subreddits are property owned by the mods. Luckily, you don't have to be there.
>> I'm the co-founder of an interview prep mentorship platform [...] my company's services so there is a small amount of overlap on the most experienced end of Codesmith and the least experienced end of Formation. <<
https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/ana...
https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/08/software-engineer-training...
Everything I can find online, including your post on reddit about the outage, says the outage was for 4 days. Not 3 weeks.
I'll also note that your post on reddit about the outage was phrased as if you were a student impacted by the outage, going so far as to say it was your "final straw" even though you don't have skin in the game other than as a competitor.
They laid off their Future Code (a completely funded program by the city of NY) overnight with no warning - some of the most dedicated staff.
* Industry wide layoffs are happening.
* This company had a layoff.
* This company did not tell their workers they were being laid off in advance.
But that's not how you phrased it. You dismissed concerns about your biases by saying there are industry wide layoffs, and then in the exact next sentence castigated codesmith for having a layoff. Those statements don't align, that everyone is having layoffs and it's no big deal, and codesmith is having layoffs and it's a big deal.
Futher you add charged language about no notice, which is perfectly standard, and an assertion you can't possibly know, about codesmith having "the most dedicated staff". That's just not something you have context to state and its only purpose is to inflame and paint the worst possible picture.
In the words of Ron Swanson: Son, people can see you
This is what I do all day: https://github.com/mnovati
But yeah two sides to every story and if this has been going on for years, "1000 posts", there's clearly more to the story, and it's irresponsible to not reach out for comment if you are going to try to summarize that.
I have one of these types on my team and the level of productivity is shocking.
You showed me yours, I'll show you mine[0]. It’s all organic. A pretty significant part of that is open-source, or source-available, so it’s easy to verify. I think I may only have two or three private repos (but one of them is where I do a lot of work).
I’m retired, and work on code all day, most days. I’m just a wee bit obsessive, being “on the spectrum.” I average about 1,900 checkins per year. Some of the days that I do the most work, have 1 or zero checkins. I will sometimes shitcan a whole day’s worth of work, if I find myself in a rabbithole.
Here’s a fun GitHub tool[1].
I have no opinion on the article, or the responses, other than there’s a lot of ugly going on, and it isn’t really making my life any richer, reading it.
I don't "post" that much about Codesmith. I comment a lot about them.
Question still stands, why are you writing (posting or commenting) this almost every day.
I can't imagine being so obsessed by something for that long that I comment on it almost every day.
You're a moderator.
It's hard to assume good faith about anything you say.
You have just proved that Lars is spot on with his analysis that you are an obsessive stalker.
Your side begins and ends at being a reddit moderator for an industry subreddit while working in said industry as a CTO. Anything you say or do in this position should rightfully be assumed to be biased.
I recommended a bunch of people go to Codesmith until February 2024, when the first signs of collapsed started.
In that case can you share the user stats for the sub? Because if coding boot camp as an industry is dying the growth of the sub should have also slowed down or plateaued, right?
This doesn't read as if you have a coherent case that Codesmith is bad to an extent that justifies your single-minded effort to spread this message, but as either an attempt to throw more FUD at the wall in the hope that something sticks even in this forum, or an indication that you are not quite well.
Codesmith is not a sex cult. I can't believe I'm writing that sentence.
why did you make that comparison?
I paused my recommendation to wait to see if they did what they said they would do. In my opinion they did not, so I then removed my recommendation.
That's the straw that broke the camels back? What a weird thing to decide to destroy a company over.
This is ludicrous ... it's also the type of language used by all sorts of people in all sorts of situations. Mentioning a cult is the least charitable thing that can be said.
I know your heart is in the right place, and have a great deal of respect for you. I think being the most active moderator of a coding bootcamp subreddit while also running one is probably not the best use of your time, right? Even though I know you're being honest, just the appearance of a conflict of interest can be an issue. Why not find someone else to take over the reins, someone who isn't actively involved in the industry?
Also from his HN comment history:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43758527
> Hi, I'm the co-founder of Formation
Oops.
You literally say it yourself!
Christ, man. Stop digging. You fucked up, stop moderating, and move on.
a) non sequitur
b) Then you're good with the massive amount of criticism you're receiving.
However by your own admission you're a co founder of a "interview prep mentorship platform" (which you claim is not a bootcamp) - fine, I can admit they are slightly different - though this does feel like splitting hairs semantically.
What I don't understand is, how is your position as a mod on such a subreddit not a massive conflict of interest? You have no reason to dissuade people from another company unless it hurts your business (I'm guessing you or someone in your family didn't lose time or money on codesmith).
Ergo, if you can, please do tell me why your activity isn't financially motivated, and therefore tortious interference. I see no other reason for a person to obsessively track another company in detail (baring a few health conditions I wouldn't want to wish on anyone.)
What does anything there have to do with any of the questions people in this thread are asking you?
I don't see anything there that adds anything to the story except solidifying the picture of you as an obsessive stalker. It certainly doesn't help your case.
In case I overlooked some key detail, please point it out.
My comments are removed and i can't even make a post. I'm following all guide lines and nothing goes through.
Here is something I posted.
I want to raise a concern about moderator conduct. I have evidence (screenshots and permalinks) that suggests a moderator may have accessed and referenced private information about former employees and their family members. That kind of behavior would be unethical and could violate subreddit policy on harassment/privacy.
Mods: please confirm whether these actions occurred and, if so, what steps you will take. I’m happy to provide the evidence via modmail.
I have a couple of questions for you. Firstly the article really didn't hold back about you in a way that you don't usually see. But he makes very specific and verifiable claims. The owner blames the market for 40% of their decline and you for another 40%. You have made over 400 negative comments about the company over the last couple of years. You run the subreddit as a bad faith mod, and you run a rival company so you have an interest in the decline of codesmith. Those are some of the accusations laid against you by the article.
I would be interested in hearing what you have to say about them. Obviously i don't expect you to say anything that might create legal issues for yourself. But you have opinions that youre not shy of expressing. The article was perhaps not wholly neutral so maybe you can clarify your side of the story. Do you have a specific problem with codesmith? why do you care so much about them? Is it because they are competitiors? Do you take such an active role on reddit in order to promote your own interests, outside of creating and maintaining a better community?
To be clear i'm a completely random guy with no skin in the game, just looking for answers.
[edit to reply: There is no plausible scenario that my life will depend on the answer. Literally the only reason i'm on here is for casual chit chat. Frankly, this might be life changing for some people, but i'm really not too invested in the story so i don't mind opening some dialogue in good faith from my end.]
I appreciate this is off-topic, but I really wanted to highlight/praise what you'd written. It came across to me as very "HN" and the guidelines appear to corroborate this...
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Next we should hear from the counter party is from a court filing. Not here. This is well past having a chill chat on hackernews.
I don't see anything there that adds anything to the story except solidifying the picture of you as an obsessive stalker. It certainly doesn't help your case.
In case I overlooked some key detail, please point it out.
This sums it up. The attitude and behaviours deemed by this man as acceptable are a highly problematic, and a contributor the cesspool that the internet has become.
To that extent, it might be relevant. But you'd want to consult a lawyer about it.
It’s also not clear to me if the person who wrote this article was paid for it or if they’re somehow affiliated with someone involved. It says they’re a “Fractional VP of Content”. I’m curious if you know more.
Funny enough, one of my attorneys taught me a lesson a long time ago around this. Simplified, she said "only and idiot claims to have lots of documents" to support their action. Sure, it's the easy/lazy way to try and intimidate people with the lowest amount of knowledge about how things work. But anyone with the slightest clue knows 1) talk is cheap, 2) you don't need a lot of docs, you just need the one that matters, and 3) if you claim to have documents, you'll eventually have to produce them, and if you can't, you look like an idiot.
Maybe put another way...don't let your mouth write checks your body can't cash.
As our lawyer told us: "It does not matter what is said, what matters is what your can proof in court".
That life lesson has helped out multiple times in life, against people who made grand claims, and threatening legal action. But they all vanished when we pointed out some of our evidence. Its funny how fast opposing council tell their clients to drop it when evidence shows up.
What is the expression, the louder the bark, the lesser the bite? People who have proof, do not need to bark around on social media platform. They simply sue and get big fat settlements.