I don't know about this particular case, but, generally... bad actor subreddit moderators have been an occasional thing for well over a decade.
And it's also been widely known for that long that Reddit is an influential venue in which to take over a corner -- for marketing or propaganda.
What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.
A bad actor mod 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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
this seems to be happening on city based subs as well where the split is political; creating echo chambers for each side. This feels dangerous as any potential middle ground gets eroded away.
- 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.
But what if they do get paid, by a competitor? It's very easy to DM a mod and tell them they will get x amount if they skewer the odds in your favor or blast your biggest competitor.
> 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.
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.
When the mods of major subs are also mods for over a hundred other subs, you have to doubt how much actual moderating they are actually doing in their holier-than-thou positions.
It's also why expressing certain views is effectively forbidden across most of the site. These moderators have far too much control over the conversation.
I don’t know if you can still see them without an account but even a few years ago this was well-known and you could verify it yourself by looking at the moderator list of almost any default subreddit; we’re talking about less than a few hundred users. There was no limit to how many subreddits you could moderate for most of Reddit’s history so in the early days a few users created as many subreddits as they could. A bunch of these moderators effectively shut down Reddit over changes to the API a couple of years ago. Steve Huffman compared the system to a landed gentry:
> “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.”
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”
Ghislaine Maxwell was maybe one of these powerful mods. But it is another contested conspiracy theory.
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.
Funny that you should mention a Reddit-originated conspiracy theory on an article about how Reddit is deteriorating as a source of information. I found this blog post: https://coagulopath.com/ghislaine-maxwell-does-not-have-a-se... which appears to conclusively refute the main evidence above, but I haven't independently verified. If you have stronger evidence than what appears to be copy-pasted AI output, I will re-evaluate.
Your link actually don't touch upon what I found most compelling: That /u/maxwellhill stopped positing two days before her arrest and haven't posted again since then.
I've gotta wonder how often this happens in the general case: a prolific user and mod of large subreddits stops posting abruptly without notice. How many users are as active as maxwellhill was with similar seniority? Maybe a few thousand? In a given year, how many of them abandon Reddit suddenly? It seems like some scraping and basic analytics could yield an answer, and then we'd know the posterior.
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.
Thanks. It wasn’t AI btw. I found this interesting comment analyzing the article you shared https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29898523 (it’s also curious that your article speculates about Maxwell’s innocence in taking part in abusing children herself but that’s not directly relevant)
Reddit has a serious abusive moderator issue. I suspect they will all be demoted to "VIP community member" soon enough and have that entire layer handled by AI. There's just too much ego involved for a human to do a job like that.
The model only works because of the subject matter filtering 99% of potential users. One good moderator can’t possibly scale to a network the size of Reddit.
Isn't dang a paid employee? If so, incentives are different. Its a day job that he could get fired from if he deviates from his main duties. (dang you are pretty decent don't get fired please).
Heh, according to the other guy he could get fired and replaced with AI because of his ego. For the less than subtle, I wasn't implying that it was good or bad. I was just pointing out the irony of criticizing centralized moderation on a site with centralized moderation.
As for whether or not pay makes a difference, I think you probably have a point, but I'm sure there's still wiggle room there.
Not cool you calling users “peasants”, they can’t do anything. Have you posted on Reddit, like, with actual personal opinion? You will quickly find out that it’s a moderator’s walled garden of opinions and your posts removed without explanation and notification. and complaining does not do anything.
I think you have it inversed. As I read it, the parent calling the users 'peasants' was to highlight precisely what you're saying. The users have no power, yes? As peasants didn't?
That's common. A marketing company took over r/mattress in order to get rid of any unfavorable reviews and pump up any bed in box mattress company as long as these companies pay to that market company. For more, https://www.reddit.com/r/MattressMod/comments/1c28g7b/recent...
Pretty shocking that someone whose business is being actively attacked on a subreddit, one that is not only relevant to them but is one of the biggest drivers of student interest and a major recruiting tool, has no recourse in this situation. A lot of people mentioning the legal angle don’t realize what a nightmare that kind of litigation would be. It’s frankly outrageous that Reddit doesn’t take the time to investigate such a flagrant conflict of interest and just chooses not to respond at all. I understand not wanting to police every subreddit but now you’re talking about potentially millions in losses for a business. All because of one unhinged asshole who’s trying to promote his own competing business. If this doesn’t turn into a lawsuit hopefully it makes enough noise for Reddit to pay attention and help resolve the issue.
The funny thing is that pretty much everything this guy is saying about Novati is correct. He's obsessed, and not in a good way.
However, most of Novati's criticisms of Codesmith are also correct. Like almost all coding bootcamps, it's scammy and incompetent, and should be avoided by anyone sensible.
Reddit should not be considered an authoritative source. Period. At this point it's the most astroturfed place on the internet. Accounts are bought and sold like cheap commodities. It's inherently unreliable.
That said, in this instance Codesmith actually has an unusually strong defamation case. That Reddit mod is not anonymous, and has made solid claims (about nepotism with fabricated details, accusations of resume 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've seen users with NSFW profiles leaving (relatively more) inane comments and their profile is private, so their posts and comments are not shown. I dread the day we can no longer evaluate users behind the comments.
Reddit moderation is also completely broken. Mods can ban anyone for any reason and do ban people for very stupid reasons with absolutely no recourse. It is so bad I have completely stopped posting on Reddit.
Reddit itself bans and shadowbans for no good reason on a very regular basis. And their appeal system generally does not work.
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.
> It’s highly unusual to have some sort of judicial process.
Every forum I ever used prior to Reddit had a ban appeal process, as did most game servers. For a few games reading the ban appeals could be more fun than playing the actual game. This was usually moderators making executive decisions based on a user-submitted form, but it was better than nothing.
Most older forums had an element of self-selection... people don't hang out where they're not wanted. But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics) so you're either there or nowhere. This forces to some extent people who would gravitate away from each other, and personalities go overboard. There's more need of a judicial process there, than there would be elsewhere. And that was before everything became politically polarized. Now that you could be perfectly happy talking to someone about X, you still end up hating their guts because they love/hate Trump/Obama and it slips out (over a long enough timespan).
But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics)
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.
Dang and the other moderators here are incredibly scrupulous. If you browse with show dead on, and find an account that is posting regularly but banned, and go back through their history, you'll almost always find multiple warnings and a public statement about their banning.
HN has problems but moderation being arbitrary isn't really one of them.
It's the anonymity and odd changes in who is moderating that makes it feel different.
Standard setup to me would be consistently opinionated person, or team with some central directive (and hopefully oversight).
I was banned from /r/sourdough for asking a question about rye flour, because someone dug into my post history and saw that I had posted a few times on the Catholicism subreddit. Someone's first instinct when reading a completely benign, neutral question was to see if I was on this or that "team".
There used to be bots that would do this automatically, but they seem to have fallen out of favor due to the high rate of false-positives (user from Subreddit A posts in Subreddit B and gets automatically banned by the automoderator on Subreddit A).
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.
Oh the automatic banning from subs for posting in another sub is particularly annoying. And often they won't even say what sub? This is amazingly lazy because it doesn't take into account if you posted in /r/conservative that Trump is a moron and got banned for it, you will still get banned form dozens of other subs.
Let me guess: it was a Pizza Cake Comics post? (Context, she's made posts about how women are always paranoid about men and men minimize/make fun of that and she says she's not anti men as she has a son herself. All this in the span of a single comic btw.)
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.
There are some big wins that they've never taken care of, despite spez talking big about fixing them, e.g.: stop allowing mods to pre-emptively ban you. I don't know anyone who uses Reddit that isn't banned from r/pics simply because they posted somewhere else on Reddit. The list of subs they ban for is huge.
That's pretty crazy. I've been on reddit since its inception and have never been banned from pics despite having posted on all kinds of unsavory subreddits over the decades.
Reddit does have global rules about deceptive content manipulation (e.g. voting rings, bot farms etc.)
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 think it would be better if Reddit took more ownership. In other words, instead of hosting a platform where anyone can claim a subreddit as their little domain, and then it’s theirs forever, Reddit could say that the subreddits belong to the people that use them. For example, perhaps they could institute some sort of system where members of a subreddit could vote out moderators who abuse their power.
> For example, perhaps they could institute some sort of system where members of a subreddit could vote out moderators who abuse their power.
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.
I think the reason it feels offensive is that subreddits of common names feel like they should be more democratically managed or held to a high standard. Instead it’s a bunch of fiefdoms and if you create an alternate subreddit with a poor name it just won’t get readers. Codebootcamp2 or whatever is doomed from the start because of the importance of names.
I have some bad news for you about news.ycombinator.com or any other web forum. Unless you actually own the web site you can be prevented from posting on a whim.
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.
> I'm actually confused as to why Codesmith hasn't sued yet.
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.
There's really no way it costs them more than $3M, and many civil cases cost way less. They've already lost more than what I'd consider a reasonable upper bound. Besides, they're not a very small business, so they ought to have set aside money for legal events, and they might even have insurance to cover it.
(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.
> Reddit should not be considered an authoritative source. Period. At this point it's the most astroturfed place on the internet. Accounts are bought and sold like cheap commodities. It's inherently unreliable.
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.
> 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.
I think you're both correct and I think your analogy about Reddit being a minefield is perfected if we imagine that it's a minefield in a beautiful place.
Great experience with one step and blown to bits with one small step in a different direction.
Agreed. Every now and then I search the name of my employer on Reddit, which pulls up a bunch of plausible looking comments that recommend a variety of tools. Then if you look at the comment closely, it doesn't make any sense. And if you look at the account, they only makes comments that mention an assortment of companies + one specific one that they're really shilling.
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.
Argh, there isn't one - is the message we're trying to get you to accept.
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.
With the phrase "the most reliable" which is a phrase to mean the subject you're describing is inherently reliable. Meaning you can read the reviews on reddit differently than amazon, yelp, and the rest. If reddit reviews can't be read differently vs others, why would you say "most reliable"?
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 you're saying reddit is not reliable yet reliable?
I'm saying it can't be. 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.
I don't think there is one. Prediction Markets are probably the closest and even those have problems. But at least incentives in a prediction market aim for the truth rather than an entertaining experience.
Reddit was knowingly ruined by google. Once google pushed reddit to the top of search results, they created massive incentives to game reddit and fill it with disguised advertising and/or slop.
> Reddit was knowingly ruined by google. Once google pushed reddit to the top of search results
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.
So then why haven’t the higher credibility people in each niche set up an alternative?
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.
This isn't true. It leans extremely heavily left-wing so you won't get an accurate crowd-source opinion that disagrees with left-wing politics. There are pockets of conservative views but it's generally heavily left wing and you will get banned from many subreddits if you espouse any views to the opposite.
EDIT: I don't know why I'm getting so many downvotes, nothing I said is controversial at all.
The issue you're gesturing at is that "left" positions tend to be in touch with reality and coherent with each other. Whereas conservative positions tend to be out of touch with reality and often contradict each other.
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.
>EDIT: I don't know why I'm getting so many downvotes, nothing I said is controversial at all.
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.
It wasn't off-topic. His response was to this statement: "the most reliable place to get a general crowd-sourced opinion on the internet" - on which his statement was perfectly correct if he just sticks to Western forums.
You're proving my point. At least in the US half of the country is right wing. If you want an accurate crowd-sourced opinion you need to take that into account, regardless of your own beliefs.
But facts in real life are rarely that isolated and provably correct or not. Something like Tylenol vs autism or Covid lab leak theory is hugely emotionally charged and people get bogged down in details and then questioning the experts and the expertise and then there's always the discussion of what even are experts. It's horribly exhausting and hey, what do you think about the ice wall theory? Facts in the real world are fuzzy and dependent on the bubble you inhabit. Does chocolate cause acne or heartburn or gout? Is a glass of wine bad for you? This is the Internet, so someone can chime in with a list of studies on the latest facts about whichever of those, but the question you have you ask yourself, is in what way does it matter how correct someone actually is? If I say the store is closed because it's going to snow, and I'm the store owner, and I'm totally wrong about that, it doesn't matter that I'm totally wrong because as the store owner, my store is closed. I look like an idiot tomorrow when it hasn't snowed, but me looking like an idiot doesn't open the store for you to buy what you need.
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.
It's possible for the majority opinion to be wrong and contradict hard facts that are grounded in reality. For a couple thousand of years the opinion was that the universe was composed of 4-5 elements (earth, water, air, fire, and maybe ether).
That is not true. Labels aren’t for normies. There’s a reason a lot of center-right people love Bernie. And it’s not because of your incorrect use of political labels.
Your comment was balanced and respectful and yet the reply was denigrating. "All right wing, or simply non-left wing opinions are conspiracies" is the implication. This site is very left wing also.
"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."
It' not but it often is the most useful and sometimes only source of information. If i need to lok up some very specific thing what are my options? An SEO optimized blog post, often about a similar but adjacent topic, or a forum of guys. At least with a forum there should in theory be more diversity of opinion.
The authenticity of old fashioned forums is often outweighed by their poor UX and in general terrible ergonomics. It's no wonder that so few people want to use them anymore. Reddit's "nested, collapsible comments sorted by upvotes" format is simply superior.
20 years after Reddit started, the best that the forums can offer is perhaps discourse.org, which is barely any better than traditional forums – sleeker UI for 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.
This is like the Linux discussion. (No its not the year of Linux no matter how much Windows 11 pisses you off)
"Old fashioned forums" absolutely suck for discoverability. You have to waste time digging through posts, most of which are unrelated or just filler. No upvote/downvote and usually a mediocre threading mechanism. While we are on this topic, Discord is the same. IRC like applications are not an easy way to get to the point for the same reasons.
It doesn't matter, people will still use it as source and now it's boosted by OpenAI and Google. Even Ghislaine Maxwell being a powermod didn't kill it. It's a key information warfare weapon and it's heavily promoted up and defended.
The upcoming lawsuits around “we demand you remove [training data ruled to be libelous or IP infringing] from the model weights” are going to be fascinating.
Yes, the mod stopped posting publicly around the time she went to prison. That seems to have been the catalyst for the conspiracy theory.
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.
>It's basically just completely incoherent. Like many conspiracy theories,
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).
It's incoherent. It simply makes no sense at all that Ghislaine Maxwell, a wealthy socialite, would post a bunch of stuff on Reddit for years to accumulate meaningless internet points, under something based on her own name, while somehow also trying to be anonymous.
This is a simply incoherent theory. There's no sense in it. You don't post "anonymously" under your own name.
There's no need to respond to counter-evidence that can't be independently verified. The people claiming that (Reddit corporate, basically) have an interest in distancing themselves from her.
It’s not a problem, you are owned nothing by participating in an online forum. Your participation is a privilege, not a right. You are free to participate elsewhere.
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 a shame how many platforms are moving away from transparent moderation. I get that there are strong incentives to do so - a user that knows they're banned will immediately try to find a way to circumvent the ban. Shadowbanning delays that reaction if not stopping it outright. But damn does the concept feel dystopian. Like you're being ignored through seemingly no fault of your own. Surely that can't be healthy. And yet the platform is better off because the person isn't trying to circumvent the ban. And don't even get me started on replacing human interaction with AI for shadowbanned users.
"if you don't like it then you can leave" (to paraphrase) evades my point.
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.
All you have is trust. No evasion, those are the rules of the road as it stands in the jurisdiction of US web properties.
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.
Every publishing platform in existence is owned by someone with a God-like authority. What alternative is there? Can you give an example of a "real" forum?
It seems clear that this dude is engaged in a vendetta, but I feel like a larger issue lurking in the background is the whole swirling mist of Google, Reddit, and mod policies.
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.
I wonder what makes a platform like HN work, but not the others.
In almost every other platform moderators are just sad, angry little entitled narcissists who love exerting control over others. This has been proven time and again across multiple platforms:
Wikipedia
Quora
Stackoverflow (surprise, surprise!)
Reddit
..
And basically anything else that depends on those so called moderators for fairness and equality. It 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.
I've asked myself this many times. It warrants a study.
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.
Getting rid of bias in LLM training is a major research problem and anecdotally e.g., to my surprise, Gemini infers gender of the user depending on the prompt/what the question is about; by extension it’ll have many other assumptions about race, nationality, political views, etc.
The article was fascinating, but the part I didn't see was... what was the motive? Assuming the article paints an accurate picture of what was going on... why was it going on? Is it solely because he runs a company in the same competitive space?
Agreed, try to figure out how I benefit in any way from Codesmith's decline. Not theoretical, but hard facts. I know of THREE people that considered going to Codesmith and went to Formation instead. One of them I tried very hard to convince to go to Codesmith and she instead got a job on her own and then came to Formation.
All of this for three customers? It doesn't add up and there are some missing pieces in the story.
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.
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.
I don't think I've ever seen this phrase used about a conspiracy that actually happened. It always just ends up that they misread something.
Especially in politics, casual observers assume everything is about money (especially shadowy "corporations") but politicians are almost always legitimately ideological, which is actually worse!
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.
Michael reminds me of a fellow named ewk, from the zen subreddit. In his obsessive energy and poisonous tactics. It really is a thing to see. A type. There must be a name for it
Wow, very surprised to see someone mention ewk on HN of all places. So surprised in fact that I created an account to respond to you! I’ve been following him on the zen subreddit for over 10 years now, off and on. He really is an absolute sight to behold. And I’m sure there is a name for it.
Many folks end up in r/zen after reading books like “Zen Mind, Beginners Mind” written by Japanese Zen Buddhists.
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.
You're reminding me of the old 'News of the Weird' (RIP) category "No Longer Weird: frequently recurring stories that have been retired from circulation: ... violence breaks out at peace conference ...".
You're missing the bit where he has never studied under a Buddhist master and actively refuses to. Both Chan and Zen are traditions that are characterised by the belief that written works are always flawed and can't contain the actual teachings and if you want to learn you should find someone who already knows.
What you are describing sounds like the behaviour of someone who is passionate, righteous and perhaps obsessed. That is not the case in the case of Michael Novati according to Lars Lofgren's post. He is claiming that Novati's Reddit posts are entirely driven by profit motives, not to do with the truth or passion for the code bootcamp space.
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!
This whole thing feels like a neat encapsulated example of how horrible the "Internet" has become. A bad actor with vested interest taking over a part of a website (Reddit) that is then used as a source of record (Google, LLMs), and bam, completely fabricated overviews of a brand/company are now all you see when you use the predominant search engine, because there are no alternatives.
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.
Most people have only interacted with a late stage of the internet already sewed up into walled gardens.
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.
Almost always when someone shows up I upvote to thank and encourage them, but that's really hard to do in this case because he's doing exactly the behavior outlined in the article.
> The powers that be have decided that Reddit is infallible, a reliable set of training data for LLMs, and should be featured fucking everywhere.
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.
I'm permabanned on Reddit for saying stuff that the mods didn't like on /r/games on multiple accounts. That website is beyond gone and it's depressing, because it was my favorite site. But the mod situation is seriously out of control. I used to buy Reddit Gold (when that was still a thing) so I found it to be incredibly stupid that this source of revenue was shut off.
Forum dictators who are on your side can seem like a pretty nice thing, and the forum dictator of the canonical subreddit gets to curate a community that is on his side by design while everyone else is left to scramble for themselves in the wilderness.
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:
Also happens on YouTube. Mr Beast’s team deleted all comments on his videos (of which there were thousands) that mentioned or linked to those videos exposing alleged fraud by the Mr Beast group.
Err...I know I'm one of the olds and probably shouldn't be allowed to comment, but isn't the whole point of these sites to allow one to present and enforce a carefully curated public image, often completely divorced from reality?
I’m curious why you know about these cases off-hand.
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.
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.
“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.
It's interesting if you are into those kinds of bots and interactions. If it was in my wheelhouse, I'd look. Otherwise, there's no reason to expect that content unless someone else points it out.
someone mind actually giving a detailed history of the timeline outside of the two main parties? this has those inklings of wordpress drama where not a lot of people are not invested enough and that obviously works to an advantage of sorts.
I'm Michael and this was about me. This person never reached out for comment and is missing half the story. I'm happy to fill people in on the rest if this person or someone else wants to hear.
I agree with one or two of the characterizations but the majority I don't and there is a lot more to this story than it seems...
RE: INDUSTRY. Rithm School (their main competitor) shut down. Hack Reactor is down to single 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.
If you really cared, this should have started with: "I am stepping down as the moderator..."
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.
Even if we accept all your claims at face value, your behaviour in your capacity as the moderator of that subreddit was still immoral. However you feel about it, being a moderator is a voluntary responsibility which comes with an expectation of impartiality and service at the expense of, not in furtherance of, your personal goals.
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?
To be clear I agree with a lot of what you wrote here so this is just a small nit:
> 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.
> 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.
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.
do you think maybe they could have kept it up if they didn't layoff 80% of their staff because of your modding? reddit is essentially google results at this point, don't act coy.
Even if codesmith _was_ objectively bad, I am still wondering _why_ do you spend _so much time_ shittalking that company on every fucking occasion? Reddit, HN, LinkedIn. You are putting way too much energy into that, way more than the average person would objectively care. Makes me wonder.
a judge would def consider the extreme nature that’s occurred here. the number of posts is astounding, and the SEO damage could be monetarily accounted for.
I would really like to hear both sides to the story. But from the data it seems like you have been obsessively commenting on the subreddit about codesmith for more than a full year. And almost 80% have been negative. This looks unhinged because you are a moderator of the subreddit. What's the other side to this?
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.
Is that what you do all day? Its trivially easy to make a profile look like yours, its a lot harder to actually have an average of 28 commits a day every day for a year with zero days off. Not for weekends, not for vacations, not for sickness. All in completely private repositories
Your post does not really do much to dispel the negative picture that the opening article paints of you. You say their decline is "predominantly an industry problem". Is this also the case for your own company, Formation? You went on the record comparing Codesmith to a sex cult and accusing it of deceiving and exploiting its students and evidently consider criticising them to be a mission worth years of near-daily dedication, and the only example you have to offer to justify this in a thread where people question your motives for this is... some random anecdote about them having an IT fuckup?
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.
I compared the statement 'do this because it changed my life and the life of many others' to the type of language used in cult documentaries on HBO. I stand by that opinion.
Codesmith is not a sex cult. I can't believe I'm writing that sentence.
There were any number of less pejorative comparisons you could have made if that was all you wanted to say. I regularly see grandiose claims of life-changing benefits on everything ranging from mildly pointless and overpriced meditation retreats down to Toastmasters, and yet you chose the one entity whose main claim to publicity were things that got its leader-guru sentenced to 120 years in a max security prison.
Because the person was making an argument to go to Codesmith that sounded like the reasons people sold low-confident individuals into joining cults.
These are the reasons I TOLD PEOPLE TO GO TO CODESMITH PRIOR TO 2024: if you were extremely ambitious, successful in your previous job, a good communicator, and had a natural affinity to coding.
> Numerous other bootcamps have shut down. Codesmith's decline is predominantly an industry problem.
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?
Hi Michael. We overlapped significantly at Facebook and chatted a few times (I was on the source control team from 2012-2018ish, part of which was the migration to Mercurial). Correct me if I'm wrong, but you wrote some posts about how you wanted something like git rebase -i, right?
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?
One thing is a critic based on verifiable facts. Another thing is defending yourself. A third one is coming up with bad things nobody can verify. Your post mixes these things
What does anything there have to do with any of the claims people in this thread are asking you to back up?
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.
> Both sides of the story need to be heard before making a judgement.
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.
Do they though? Being a reddit mod for a sub that covers an industry you have a vested interest in with no other mods with similar backgrounds really does sound like a well traffic'd and successful bully pulpit.
My company works with a lot of bootcamp grads later on in their careers so wouldn't I have an interest in promoting bootcamps so more people go and create more customers down the road?
I recommended a bunch of people go to Codesmith until February 2024, when the first signs of collapsed started.
Would posting to 20,000 people telling them that I was using multiple Slack aliases to 'steal students' from Codesmith's community - which was entirely and utterly false in every aspect of that statement - count under this definition?
Are you planning to write something up about it? It would be interesting to hear the other side that you’re hinting at.
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.
I might. I have hordes of documents. It's a really sad situation and very sad that he characterized this this way without even talking to me whatsoever.
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.
I believe the phrase that applies here is "put up or shut up". If you have hordes of documents to draw on as primary sources, then it should be pretty simple (but perhaps time consuming) to write a rebuttal.
Hello. It's nice to be able to interact directly with the subject of the article, so thanks for coming on. It's a shame you're being downvoted, because it would definitely be interesting to hear your perspective. This can't be a pleasant experience for you.
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.]
This is a wonderfully mature and constructive comment.
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.
Yeah I'll I'm going to say for now is that if all your competitors (that I spoke positively about) are shutting down and shrinking and laying people off... there's more to the story. A sad story about an industry dying that should be told.
I'm sorry, what does anything there have to do with any of the claims people in this thread are asking you to back up?
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.
I don't know about this particular case, but, generally... bad actor subreddit moderators have been an occasional thing for well over a decade.
And it's also been widely known for that long that Reddit is an influential venue in which to take over a corner -- for marketing or propaganda.
What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.
A bad actor mod 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.)
Reddit has a moderation problem, and it's a big one.
They've now been asked to appear in front of Congress to address concerns about politically motivated violence being incited through their platform: https://oversight.house.gov/release/chairman-comer-invites-c...
Personally I believe I've seen more people in the past few years wish a politically motivated death on somebody else via Reddit, than I have anywhere else 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.
That may be a politically motivated congressional hearing. :-)
> 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.
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.
this seems to be happening on city based subs as well where the split is political; creating echo chambers for each side. This feels dangerous as any potential middle ground gets eroded away.
Think about a Reddit mod's incentives.
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.
But what if they do get paid, by a competitor? It's very easy to DM a mod and tell them they will get x amount if they skewer the odds in your favor or blast your biggest competitor.
> 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.
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.
When the mods of major subs are also mods for over a hundred other subs, you have to doubt how much actual moderating they are actually doing in their holier-than-thou positions.
It's also why expressing certain views is effectively forbidden across most of the site. These moderators have far too much control over the conversation.
Is there a source for this?
I don’t know if you can still see them without an account but even a few years ago this was well-known and you could verify it yourself by looking at the moderator list of almost any default subreddit; we’re talking about less than a few hundred users. There was no limit to how many subreddits you could moderate for most of Reddit’s history so in the early days a few users created as many subreddits as they could. A bunch of these moderators effectively shut down Reddit over changes to the API a couple of years ago. Steve Huffman compared the system to a landed gentry:
> “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.”
See this Reddit discussion:
“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...
Now I want to see a soap opera/reality show about the lives of Reddit Oligarchs!
Ghislaine Maxwell was maybe one of these powerful mods. But it is another contested conspiracy theory.
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.
Funny that you should mention a Reddit-originated conspiracy theory on an article about how Reddit is deteriorating as a source of information. I found this blog post: https://coagulopath.com/ghislaine-maxwell-does-not-have-a-se... which appears to conclusively refute the main evidence above, but I haven't independently verified. If you have stronger evidence than what appears to be copy-pasted AI output, I will re-evaluate.
Your link actually don't touch upon what I found most compelling: That /u/maxwellhill stopped positing two days before her arrest and haven't posted again since then.
I've gotta wonder how often this happens in the general case: a prolific user and mod of large subreddits stops posting abruptly without notice. How many users are as active as maxwellhill was with similar seniority? Maybe a few thousand? In a given year, how many of them abandon Reddit suddenly? It seems like some scraping and basic analytics could yield an answer, and then we'd know the posterior.
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.
Except it does
Thanks. It wasn’t AI btw. I found this interesting comment analyzing the article you shared https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29898523 (it’s also curious that your article speculates about Maxwell’s innocence in taking part in abusing children herself but that’s not directly relevant)
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Dang. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UX5ahM24o8A
Reddit has a serious abusive moderator issue. I suspect they will all be demoted to "VIP community member" soon enough and have that entire layer handled by AI. There's just too much ego involved for a human to do a job like that.
Friendly reminder that you are on a forum with essentially one benevolent moderator.
Two, I think? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43558671
The model only works because of the subject matter filtering 99% of potential users. One good moderator can’t possibly scale to a network the size of Reddit.
Isn't dang a paid employee? If so, incentives are different. Its a day job that he could get fired from if he deviates from his main duties. (dang you are pretty decent don't get fired please).
Heh, according to the other guy he could get fired and replaced with AI because of his ego. For the less than subtle, I wasn't implying that it was good or bad. I was just pointing out the irony of criticizing centralized moderation on a site with centralized moderation.
As for whether or not pay makes a difference, I think you probably have a point, but I'm sure there's still wiggle room there.
Not cool you calling users “peasants”, they can’t do anything. Have you posted on Reddit, like, with actual personal opinion? You will quickly find out that it’s a moderator’s walled garden of opinions and your posts removed without explanation and notification. and complaining does not do anything.
I think you have it inversed. As I read it, the parent calling the users 'peasants' was to highlight precisely what you're saying. The users have no power, yes? As peasants didn't?
That literally sounds like being a medieval peasant. Or a US tv show host.
That's common. A marketing company took over r/mattress in order to get rid of any unfavorable reviews and pump up any bed in box mattress company as long as these companies pay to that market company. For more, https://www.reddit.com/r/MattressMod/comments/1c28g7b/recent...
A happy(ish) ending: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mattress/comments/1l81nn6/and_were_...
If your business success depends on Reddit, Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, ChatGPT, maybe you are not doing the right thing.
Ideally you shouldn't depend heavily on things that are outside of your control.
Pretty shocking that someone whose business is being actively attacked on a subreddit, one that is not only relevant to them but is one of the biggest drivers of student interest and a major recruiting tool, has no recourse in this situation. A lot of people mentioning the legal angle don’t realize what a nightmare that kind of litigation would be. It’s frankly outrageous that Reddit doesn’t take the time to investigate such a flagrant conflict of interest and just chooses not to respond at all. I understand not wanting to police every subreddit but now you’re talking about potentially millions in losses for a business. All because of one unhinged asshole who’s trying to promote his own competing business. If this doesn’t turn into a lawsuit hopefully it makes enough noise for Reddit to pay attention and help resolve the issue.
The funny thing is that pretty much everything this guy is saying about Novati is correct. He's obsessed, and not in a good way.
However, most of Novati's criticisms of Codesmith are also correct. Like almost all coding bootcamps, it's scammy and incompetent, and should be avoided by anyone sensible.
No point in picking a side, both are assholes.
Reddit should not be considered an authoritative source. Period. At this point it's the most astroturfed place on the internet. Accounts are bought and sold like cheap commodities. It's inherently unreliable.
That said, in this instance Codesmith actually has an unusually strong defamation case. That Reddit mod is not anonymous, and has made solid claims (about nepotism with fabricated details, accusations of resume 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.
> Reddit should not be considered an authoritative source. Period.
I cringe inside every time I search for something, and the first autocomplete is "mysearchterm reddit"
These days, all the results that AREN'T from reddit are AI slop.
And according to TFA, the AI slop results are also from Reddit!
It's slop all the way down.
name one dataset used for AI that doesn't include Reddit
I've seen users with NSFW profiles leaving (relatively more) inane comments and their profile is private, so their posts and comments are not shown. I dread the day we can no longer evaluate users behind the comments.
You can now just outright hide your profile/history even without NSFW content. Its a really good feature for everyone involved.
> At this point it's the most astroturfed place on the internet.
YouTube is far worse and it isn’t even close.
Reddit moderation is also completely broken. Mods can ban anyone for any reason and do ban people for very stupid reasons with absolutely no recourse. It is so bad I have completely stopped posting on Reddit.
Reddit itself bans and shadowbans for no good reason on a very regular basis. And their appeal system generally does not work.
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.
Most online communities work that way. It’s highly unusual to have some sort of judicial process.
> It’s highly unusual to have some sort of judicial process.
Every forum I ever used prior to Reddit had a ban appeal process, as did most game servers. For a few games reading the ban appeals could be more fun than playing the actual game. This was usually moderators making executive decisions based on a user-submitted form, but it was better than nothing.
Reddit also has a ban appeals process. But it's the same people you're appealing to - the mods.
Speaking for myself I generally will unban if people are nice and express understanding for why they were banned.
Most older forums had an element of self-selection... people don't hang out where they're not wanted. But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics) so you're either there or nowhere. This forces to some extent people who would gravitate away from each other, and personalities go overboard. There's more need of a judicial process there, than there would be elsewhere. And that was before everything became politically polarized. Now that you could be perfectly happy talking to someone about X, you still end up hating their guts because they love/hate Trump/Obama and it slips out (over a long enough timespan).
People do not scale.
But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics)
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.
Is it any different here? Is this not the standard setup for all forums and considered perfectly right and normal?
Dang and the other moderators here are incredibly scrupulous. If you browse with show dead on, and find an account that is posting regularly but banned, and go back through their history, you'll almost always find multiple warnings and a public statement about their banning.
HN has problems but moderation being arbitrary isn't really one of them.
What you mention has nothing to do with their capabilities.
It's the anonymity and odd changes in who is moderating that makes it feel different. Standard setup to me would be consistently opinionated person, or team with some central directive (and hopefully oversight).
I was banned from /r/comics for saying a comic wasn't funny. Hacker news doesn't ban anyone for such stupid reasons.
I was banned from /r/sourdough for asking a question about rye flour, because someone dug into my post history and saw that I had posted a few times on the Catholicism subreddit. Someone's first instinct when reading a completely benign, neutral question was to see if I was on this or that "team".
There used to be bots that would do this automatically, but they seem to have fallen out of favor due to the high rate of false-positives (user from Subreddit A posts in Subreddit B and gets automatically banned by the automoderator on Subreddit A).
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.
Oh the automatic banning from subs for posting in another sub is particularly annoying. And often they won't even say what sub? This is amazingly lazy because it doesn't take into account if you posted in /r/conservative that Trump is a moron and got banned for it, you will still get banned form dozens of other subs.
Let me guess: it was a Pizza Cake Comics post? (Context, she's made posts about how women are always paranoid about men and men minimize/make fun of that and she says she's not anti men as she has a son herself. All this in the span of a single comic btw.)
>Mods can ban anyone for any reason
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.
There are some big wins that they've never taken care of, despite spez talking big about fixing them, e.g.: stop allowing mods to pre-emptively ban you. I don't know anyone who uses Reddit that isn't banned from r/pics simply because they posted somewhere else on Reddit. The list of subs they ban for is huge.
That's pretty crazy. I've been on reddit since its inception and have never been banned from pics despite having posted on all kinds of unsavory subreddits over the decades.
Reddit does have global rules about deceptive content manipulation (e.g. voting rings, bot farms etc.)
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 think it would be better if Reddit took more ownership. In other words, instead of hosting a platform where anyone can claim a subreddit as their little domain, and then it’s theirs forever, Reddit could say that the subreddits belong to the people that use them. For example, perhaps they could institute some sort of system where members of a subreddit could vote out moderators who abuse their power.
> For example, perhaps they could institute some sort of system where members of a subreddit could vote out moderators who abuse their power.
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.
I think the reason it feels offensive is that subreddits of common names feel like they should be more democratically managed or held to a high standard. Instead it’s a bunch of fiefdoms and if you create an alternate subreddit with a poor name it just won’t get readers. Codebootcamp2 or whatever is doomed from the start because of the importance of names.
Sure, but there are really NO RULES. And frankly they can do whatever they want as long as they use only a UUID for the forum name.
If one is squatting on a valuable forum name, then the moderators should be themselves subject to a standard enforced by Reddit.
I have some bad news for you about news.ycombinator.com or any other web forum. Unless you actually own the web site you can be prevented from posting on a whim.
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.
that's a feature not a bug.
> I'm actually confused as to why Codesmith hasn't sued yet.
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.
There's really no way it costs them more than $3M, and many civil cases cost way less. They've already lost more than what I'd consider a reasonable upper bound. Besides, they're not a very small business, so they ought to have set aside money for legal events, and they might even have insurance to cover it.
(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.
That's $3M down but what's the likely upside? Is it a net gain?
With each passing day, it feels like we see more evidence for the "America is run by lawyers" assertion.
> Reddit should not be considered an authoritative source. Period. At this point it's the most astroturfed place on the internet. Accounts are bought and sold like cheap commodities. It's inherently unreliable.
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.
> 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.
I think you're both correct and I think your analogy about Reddit being a minefield is perfected if we imagine that it's a minefield in a beautiful place.
Great experience with one step and blown to bits with one small step in a different direction.
Agreed. Every now and then I search the name of my employer on Reddit, which pulls up a bunch of plausible looking comments that recommend a variety of tools. Then if you look at the comment closely, it doesn't make any sense. And if you look at the account, they only makes comments that mention an assortment of companies + one specific one that they're really shilling.
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.
So you’re going to be able to tell me what _is_ the most reliable place to get a general crowd-sourced opinion then?
Argh, there isn't one - is the message we're trying to get you to accept.
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.
> is the message we're trying to get you to accept
You're replying to a comment where I said I agree with the statement "Reddit should not be considered an authoritative source"
With the phrase "the most reliable" which is a phrase to mean the subject you're describing is inherently reliable. Meaning you can read the reviews on reddit differently than amazon, yelp, and the rest. If reddit reviews can't be read differently vs others, why would you say "most reliable"?
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 you're saying reddit is not reliable yet reliable?
I'm saying it can't be. 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.
I don't think there is one. Prediction Markets are probably the closest and even those have problems. But at least incentives in a prediction market aim for the truth rather than an entertaining experience.
No, incentives aim for whatever gives a return - not an objective neutral verdict-of-the-crowd. It requires a regulator to be active.
Read about the whale trades and wash trades on Polymarket: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41999743
Reddit was knowingly ruined by google. Once google pushed reddit to the top of search results, they created massive incentives to game reddit and fill it with disguised advertising and/or slop.
> Reddit was knowingly ruined by google. Once google pushed reddit to the top of search results
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.
So then why haven’t the higher credibility people in each niche set up an alternative?
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.
Beyond my pay grade but I'll take a stab (meaning I'm talking out of my ass).
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.
This isn't true. It leans extremely heavily left-wing so you won't get an accurate crowd-source opinion that disagrees with left-wing politics. There are pockets of conservative views but it's generally heavily left wing and you will get banned from many subreddits if you espouse any views to the opposite.
EDIT: I don't know why I'm getting so many downvotes, nothing I said is controversial at all.
There are plenty of non political conversations on Reddit, it's a really big site.
The issue you're gesturing at is that "left" positions tend to be in touch with reality and coherent with each other. Whereas conservative positions tend to be out of touch with reality and often contradict each other.
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.
Why on earth would you crowd-source your political views?
>EDIT: I don't know why I'm getting so many downvotes, nothing I said is controversial at all.
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.
It wasn't off-topic. His response was to this statement: "the most reliable place to get a general crowd-sourced opinion on the internet" - on which his statement was perfectly correct if he just sticks to Western forums.
Ok: "any forum where there isn't a direct motive for product/service recommendation or ideological bias".
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You're proving my point. At least in the US half of the country is right wing. If you want an accurate crowd-sourced opinion you need to take that into account, regardless of your own beliefs.
90% of people might believe 2+2=5, but that doesn’t make them correct. Facts aren’t a majority rules scenario.
But facts in real life are rarely that isolated and provably correct or not. Something like Tylenol vs autism or Covid lab leak theory is hugely emotionally charged and people get bogged down in details and then questioning the experts and the expertise and then there's always the discussion of what even are experts. It's horribly exhausting and hey, what do you think about the ice wall theory? Facts in the real world are fuzzy and dependent on the bubble you inhabit. Does chocolate cause acne or heartburn or gout? Is a glass of wine bad for you? This is the Internet, so someone can chime in with a list of studies on the latest facts about whichever of those, but the question you have you ask yourself, is in what way does it matter how correct someone actually is? If I say the store is closed because it's going to snow, and I'm the store owner, and I'm totally wrong about that, it doesn't matter that I'm totally wrong because as the store owner, my store is closed. I look like an idiot tomorrow when it hasn't snowed, but me looking like an idiot doesn't open the store for you to buy what you need.
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.
When is any discussion a simple fact? If it was, you could just list it on a static website.
I think the problem is that people get their incorrect world views from Reddit.
The comment was specifically about "opinions" not "facts".
It's possible for the majority opinion to be wrong and contradict hard facts that are grounded in reality. For a couple thousand of years the opinion was that the universe was composed of 4-5 elements (earth, water, air, fire, and maybe ether).
During those thousands of years was there information showing the majority was incorrect?
Yes, they could see chemical reactions happening around them all the time, they just didn't understand what what they were looking at.
That is not true. Labels aren’t for normies. There’s a reason a lot of center-right people love Bernie. And it’s not because of your incorrect use of political labels.
If I need an accurate crowd sourced opinion about the Dyson v14 Portable Vacuum I need to take politics into account?
Reddit is far from left wing, liberal maybe, but not left wing.
Yes exactly. Actual left wing communities get banned on Reddit (like Chapo Trap House did a while back and when I started visited it a lot less)
Your comment was balanced and respectful and yet the reply was denigrating. "All right wing, or simply non-left wing opinions are conspiracies" is the implication. This site is very left wing also.
Being balanced and respectful doesn't make you correct.
But it leads to something more important.
"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."
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Reddit is not left-wing. Could you define left-wing?
It' not but it often is the most useful and sometimes only source of information. If i need to lok up some very specific thing what are my options? An SEO optimized blog post, often about a similar but adjacent topic, or a forum of guys. At least with a forum there should in theory be more diversity of opinion.
Most topics still have old-fashioned forums, they're just even harder to find these days.
And there are still lots of blogs. Not all of them are SEO blogspam. And there's always libgen...
Reddit is pretty much the last place I'd go for reliable information, especially if we're talking about anything that's a commercial product.
The authenticity of old fashioned forums is often outweighed by their poor UX and in general terrible ergonomics. It's no wonder that so few people want to use them anymore. Reddit's "nested, collapsible comments sorted by upvotes" format is simply superior.
20 years after Reddit started, the best that the forums can offer is perhaps discourse.org, which is barely any better than traditional forums – sleeker UI for 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.
This is like the Linux discussion. (No its not the year of Linux no matter how much Windows 11 pisses you off)
"Old fashioned forums" absolutely suck for discoverability. You have to waste time digging through posts, most of which are unrelated or just filler. No upvote/downvote and usually a mediocre threading mechanism. While we are on this topic, Discord is the same. IRC like applications are not an easy way to get to the point for the same reasons.
It doesn't matter, people will still use it as source and now it's boosted by OpenAI and Google. Even Ghislaine Maxwell being a powermod didn't kill it. It's a key information warfare weapon and it's heavily promoted up and defended.
https://archive.ph/qpfED
The upcoming lawsuits around “we demand you remove [training data ruled to be libelous or IP infringing] from the model weights” are going to be fascinating.
TIL that there's a conspiracy theory that Ghislaine Maxwell is the same person as power mod MaxwellHill.
Seems like a pretty incoherent conspiracy theory. What a weird thing to believe.
Did the mod stop when she went to prison?
Yes, the mod stopped posting publicly around the time she went to prison. That seems to have been the catalyst for the conspiracy theory.
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.
>It's basically just completely incoherent. Like many conspiracy theories,
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).
It's incoherent. It simply makes no sense at all that Ghislaine Maxwell, a wealthy socialite, would post a bunch of stuff on Reddit for years to accumulate meaningless internet points, under something based on her own name, while somehow also trying to be anonymous.
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.
Precisely, but the coincidences that line up are on the side on improbable she was not the mod. (See link in OP)
i.e. it's almost impossible for to have been anybody else. The supposed "mod chats" are clearly fabrications met to cover it up.
There's no need to respond to counter-evidence that can't be independently verified. The people claiming that (Reddit corporate, basically) have an interest in distancing themselves from her.
Their code of conduct is enforced selectively, at best.
Edit: i'm banned now from hacker news. 8-)
Edit 2: yes, i can no longer post and this submission was also removed from the front page. It's back on the front page now after upvotes doubled.
You aren't banned.
But you could.
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.
> And nobody would ever know
Considering how quickly they make new accounts, I think you're underestimating banned HN users by quite a margin!
It’s not a problem, you are owned nothing by participating in an online forum. Your participation is a privilege, not a right. You are free to participate elsewhere.
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 a shame how many platforms are moving away from transparent moderation. I get that there are strong incentives to do so - a user that knows they're banned will immediately try to find a way to circumvent the ban. Shadowbanning delays that reaction if not stopping it outright. But damn does the concept feel dystopian. Like you're being ignored through seemingly no fault of your own. Surely that can't be healthy. And yet the platform is better off because the person isn't trying to circumvent the ban. And don't even get me started on replacing human interaction with AI for shadowbanned users.
Why stop at shadowbanned users? A uniquely crafted custom world for every user!
"if you don't like it then you can leave" (to paraphrase) evades my point.
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.
All you have is trust. No evasion, those are the rules of the road as it stands in the jurisdiction of US web properties.
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.
Every publishing platform in existence is owned by someone with a God-like authority. What alternative is there? Can you give an example of a "real" forum?
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If he did this habitually, I think word would get around. This is a pretty small community.
It seems clear that this dude is engaged in a vendetta, but I feel like a larger issue lurking in the background is the whole swirling mist of Google, Reddit, and mod policies.
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.
I wonder what makes a platform like HN work, but not the others.
In almost every other platform moderators are just sad, angry little entitled narcissists who love exerting control over others. This has been proven time and again across multiple platforms:
Wikipedia
Quora
Stackoverflow (surprise, surprise!)
Reddit
..
And basically anything else that depends on those so called moderators for fairness and equality. It 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.
Dang. Dang makes this work.
What an insanely hard job, done with far more grace and far fewer mistakes than imI could possibly pull off.
Thank you for this corner of the internet, dang (and a couple others).
The mods here are paid that's why.
But getting paid doesn't guarantee being neutral. I think it's more about the principle and vision than just the pay.
I've asked myself this many times. It warrants a study.
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.
This is oddly a case to signify there is value in an AI moderation tools - to avoid bias inherent to human actors.
Getting rid of bias in LLM training is a major research problem and anecdotally e.g., to my surprise, Gemini infers gender of the user depending on the prompt/what the question is about; by extension it’ll have many other assumptions about race, nationality, political views, etc.
They still have bias. Not sure its necessarily worse but there is bias inherent to LLMs
https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/do-language-mo...
The article was fascinating, but the part I didn't see was... what was the motive? Assuming the article paints an accurate picture of what was going on... why was it going on? Is it solely because he runs a company in the same competitive space?
Yes, he owns a competitor with his wife, formation.dev, so there is a clear incentive.
Why didn't the author sue? Feels like this is a case where if what he says is true then that's what litigation is for, no?
> And I believe that’s why Michael is doing what he’s doing. He wins when Codesmith loses.
Yes.
What about the reverse of this, where the mods seem just a little to enthusiastic about one particular product?
Astroturfing?
Follow the money.
Agreed, try to figure out how I benefit in any way from Codesmith's decline. Not theoretical, but hard facts. I know of THREE people that considered going to Codesmith and went to Formation instead. One of them I tried very hard to convince to go to Codesmith and she instead got a job on her own and then came to Formation.
All of this for three customers? It doesn't add up and there are some missing pieces in the story.
Why did you obsessively stalk and harass people? Very, very weird behavior.
Stalking is a serious allegation.
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.
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I know of THREE people
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.
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I don't think I've ever seen this phrase used about a conspiracy that actually happened. It always just ends up that they misread something.
Especially in politics, casual observers assume everything is about money (especially shadowy "corporations") but politicians are almost always legitimately ideological, which is actually worse!
Would love to read some examples! The most offensive things I know about that spring to mind have all been about either money or saving face.
tortious interference
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.
For historical: https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
Nothing new, but sad a great incubator went down. There really isn't a solution for this, is there?
The semantic web tried to fix this problem but it never caught on.
That initiative was so ahead of its time.
Michael reminds me of a fellow named ewk, from the zen subreddit. In his obsessive energy and poisonous tactics. It really is a thing to see. A type. There must be a name for it
Wow, very surprised to see someone mention ewk on HN of all places. So surprised in fact that I created an account to respond to you! I’ve been following him on the zen subreddit for over 10 years now, off and on. He really is an absolute sight to behold. And I’m sure there is a name for it.
Machiavellian?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiavellianism_(psychology)
What's the story there? I'm curious to know how such behavior manifests in Zen Buddhism, of all things.
Many folks end up in r/zen after reading books like “Zen Mind, Beginners Mind” written by Japanese Zen Buddhists.
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.
You're reminding me of the old 'News of the Weird' (RIP) category "No Longer Weird: frequently recurring stories that have been retired from circulation: ... violence breaks out at peace conference ...".
You're missing the bit where he has never studied under a Buddhist master and actively refuses to. Both Chan and Zen are traditions that are characterised by the belief that written works are always flawed and can't contain the actual teachings and if you want to learn you should find someone who already knows.
What you are describing sounds like the behaviour of someone who is passionate, righteous and perhaps obsessed. That is not the case in the case of Michael Novati according to Lars Lofgren's post. He is claiming that Novati's Reddit posts are entirely driven by profit motives, not to do with the truth or passion for the code bootcamp space.
16 hours a day every day for two decades
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!
The behavior described here, if true, is psychopathic.
A chilling read.
Con artist?
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This whole thing feels like a neat encapsulated example of how horrible the "Internet" has become. A bad actor with vested interest taking over a part of a website (Reddit) that is then used as a source of record (Google, LLMs), and bam, completely fabricated overviews of a brand/company are now all you see when you use the predominant search engine, because there are no alternatives.
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.
Most people have only interacted with a late stage of the internet already sewed up into walled gardens.
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.
Since it's getting downvoted hard and might be missed, FYI Michael is in the house. I encourage y'all to read the whole article before engaging.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45522396
Almost always when someone shows up I upvote to thank and encourage them, but that's really hard to do in this case because he's doing exactly the behavior outlined in the article.
Reading it, seems like the downvotes are deserved.
Reddit moderation is a crap
It was getting boring after the payroll industry's corporate episonage.
Thanks god. We have a new drama. I can keep my reduced TV time for a while longer.
Reddit is better than TV? Who knew?!?
> payroll industry's corporate episonage.
Huh? I can’t imagine a company like ADP having drama.
> The powers that be have decided that Reddit is infallible, a reliable set of training data for LLMs, and should be featured fucking everywhere.
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.
I'm permabanned on Reddit for saying stuff that the mods didn't like on /r/games on multiple accounts. That website is beyond gone and it's depressing, because it was my favorite site. But the mod situation is seriously out of control. I used to buy Reddit Gold (when that was still a thing) so I found it to be incredibly stupid that this source of revenue was shut off.
And yet Reddit still lives on. Somehow.
https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1o1guxj/tho...
I wonder how long this will stay up.
yeah, relatable, community based organizations spawn a lot of parasocial relationships and one loud detractor trolling you can kill the whole thing
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
Site isn’t loading. Hug of death?
Here's an archive link: https://archive.is/w0izj
Very strange that this happened after said michael novati commented here.
Forum dictator is a messed up thing. Why is everybody so ok with it? Is it Stockholm Syndrome?
Forum dictators who are on your side can seem like a pretty nice thing, and the forum dictator of the canonical subreddit gets to curate a community that is on his side by design while everyone else is left to scramble for themselves in the wilderness.
Well I don't own the sub, so you should talk to the actual forum dictator who does stay on top of things and I have to answer to.
Were any of you around for the r/Seattle move to r/seattlewa That dude was crazy
What’s the background on that? Mod abuse?
This has been happening in anthropic subreddits.
Two other recent examples:
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...
Also happens on YouTube. Mr Beast’s team deleted all comments on his videos (of which there were thousands) that mentioned or linked to those videos exposing alleged fraud by the Mr Beast group.
That’s different. That’s your own video. Having control of your own video makes some sense. The Reddit stuff is not directly analogous.
Err...I know I'm one of the olds and probably shouldn't be allowed to comment, but isn't the whole point of these sites to allow one to present and enforce a carefully curated public image, often completely divorced from reality?
I’m curious why you know about these cases off-hand.
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.
I saw the article about D4vd when it was popular enough to hit the front page- https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/1nnlqan/singer_d4vd_...
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.
Full title:
“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.
Tell us more about why you find that interesting? Simply saying it “is” hasn’t provided any new information for us beyond the article itself.
It's interesting if you are into those kinds of bots and interactions. If it was in my wheelhouse, I'd look. Otherwise, there's no reason to expect that content unless someone else points it out.
a simple lawsuit will fix this. reddit has lots of money
Can we get a tldr since the site is down?
Here's an archive link: https://archive.is/w0izj
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Please post an archive link
https://archive.is/w0izj
someone mind actually giving a detailed history of the timeline outside of the two main parties? this has those inklings of wordpress drama where not a lot of people are not invested enough and that obviously works to an advantage of sorts.
> someone mind actually giving a detailed history of the timeline outside of the two main parties?
You have that in TFA? Author is an outsider to the drama.
The author talked to numerous Codesmith staff and their cherry picked information provided for the article.
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.
I'm Michael and this was about me. This person never reached out for comment and is missing half the story. I'm happy to fill people in on the rest if this person or someone else wants to hear.
I agree with one or two of the characterizations but the majority I don't and there is a lot more to this story than it seems...
RE: INDUSTRY. Rithm School (their main competitor) shut down. Hack Reactor is down to single 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.
If you really cared, this should have started with: "I am stepping down as the moderator..."
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.
This is not my industry, no. Had the author reached out for comment they could publish my claims. More interested in a hit piece than the truth.
Even if we accept all your claims at face value, your behaviour in your capacity as the moderator of that subreddit was still immoral. However you feel about it, being a moderator is a voluntary responsibility which comes with an expectation of impartiality and service at the expense of, not in furtherance of, your personal goals.
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?
To be clear I agree with a lot of what you wrote here so this is just a small nit:
> 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.
> 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.
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.
It was 3 weeks.
do you think maybe they could have kept it up if they didn't layoff 80% of their staff because of your modding? reddit is essentially google results at this point, don't act coy.
That's not correct. Their closest competitor entirely shut down for example, and the industry is the main factor responsible for their decline.
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.
Even if codesmith _was_ objectively bad, I am still wondering _why_ do you spend _so much time_ shittalking that company on every fucking occasion? Reddit, HN, LinkedIn. You are putting way too much energy into that, way more than the average person would objectively care. Makes me wonder.
a judge would def consider the extreme nature that’s occurred here. the number of posts is astounding, and the SEO damage could be monetarily accounted for.
I would really like to hear both sides to the story. But from the data it seems like you have been obsessively commenting on the subreddit about codesmith for more than a full year. And almost 80% have been negative. This looks unhinged because you are a moderator of the subreddit. What's the other side to this?
I was being threatened by anonymous Reddit accounts a few weeks ago so I made some defensive PR docs but I need to sleep on it to decide what to do.
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.
Is that what you do all day? Its trivially easy to make a profile look like yours, its a lot harder to actually have an average of 28 commits a day every day for a year with zero days off. Not for weekends, not for vacations, not for sickness. All in completely private repositories
Based on my experience working with Novati (a long time ago) that level of output is par for the course. So I would take it at face value.
It's real code.
Well that proves it!
A github with no public work isn't really a flex.
You’re doing the same thing here that the article is accusing you of doing on Reddit.
You’re trying to defend yourself, but you still can’t stop yourself from casting shade on Codesmith multiple times in this very comment.
You have just proved that Lars is spot on with his analysis that you are an obsessive stalker.
Your post does not really do much to dispel the negative picture that the opening article paints of you. You say their decline is "predominantly an industry problem". Is this also the case for your own company, Formation? You went on the record comparing Codesmith to a sex cult and accusing it of deceiving and exploiting its students and evidently consider criticising them to be a mission worth years of near-daily dedication, and the only example you have to offer to justify this in a thread where people question your motives for this is... some random anecdote about them having an IT fuckup?
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.
I compared the statement 'do this because it changed my life and the life of many others' to the type of language used in cult documentaries on HBO. I stand by that opinion.
Codesmith is not a sex cult. I can't believe I'm writing that sentence.
There were any number of less pejorative comparisons you could have made if that was all you wanted to say. I regularly see grandiose claims of life-changing benefits on everything ranging from mildly pointless and overpriced meditation retreats down to Toastmasters, and yet you chose the one entity whose main claim to publicity were things that got its leader-guru sentenced to 120 years in a max security prison.
> I compared the statement 'do this because it changed my life and the life of many others' to the type of language used in cult documentaries on HBO
why did you make that comparison?
Because the person was making an argument to go to Codesmith that sounded like the reasons people sold low-confident individuals into joining cults.
These are the reasons I TOLD PEOPLE TO GO TO CODESMITH PRIOR TO 2024: if you were extremely ambitious, successful in your previous job, a good communicator, and had a natural affinity to coding.
What happened in 2024 that changed your mind?
Oh you are gonna taste your own medicine here. Welcome.
> Numerous other bootcamps have shut down. Codesmith's decline is predominantly an industry problem.
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?
You don’t know when to stop, do you?
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Hi Michael. We overlapped significantly at Facebook and chatted a few times (I was on the source control team from 2012-2018ish, part of which was the migration to Mercurial). Correct me if I'm wrong, but you wrote some posts about how you wanted something like git rebase -i, right?
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?
Hi. I don't run a bootcamp. I recommended people go to Codesmith too and there's a lot more to this story. It's missing half the context.
Bud, your LinkedIn of you and your wife say you are founders of a bootcamp.
One thing is a critic based on verifiable facts. Another thing is defending yourself. A third one is coming up with bad things nobody can verify. Your post mixes these things
Let's start with this: https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/ana...
This is some fourth thing...
What does anything there have to do with any of the claims people in this thread are asking you to back up?
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.
Dramatic much?
> Both sides of the story need to be heard before making a judgement.
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.
Do they though? Being a reddit mod for a sub that covers an industry you have a vested interest in with no other mods with similar backgrounds really does sound like a well traffic'd and successful bully pulpit.
My company works with a lot of bootcamp grads later on in their careers so wouldn't I have an interest in promoting bootcamps so more people go and create more customers down the road?
I recommended a bunch of people go to Codesmith until February 2024, when the first signs of collapsed started.
I hope he sues you.
https://www.google.com/search?q=intentional+interference+wit...
Would posting to 20,000 people telling them that I was using multiple Slack aliases to 'steal students' from Codesmith's community - which was entirely and utterly false in every aspect of that statement - count under this definition?
Are you planning to write something up about it? It would be interesting to hear the other side that you’re hinting at.
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.
I might. I have hordes of documents. It's a really sad situation and very sad that he characterized this this way without even talking to me whatsoever.
I have hordes of documents.
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.
I believe the phrase that applies here is "put up or shut up". If you have hordes of documents to draw on as primary sources, then it should be pretty simple (but perhaps time consuming) to write a rebuttal.
Dozens of former staff, students, alumni. Attending sessions that I WAS PERSONALLY INVITED TO.
This is a hit piece.
Is it a hit piece? It’s well argued and comes with sources, which is more than you’ve offered.
I don't see any links to those hordes of documents in this response. Could you please provide some, like you claim to have?
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I have the concept of a plan. /s
Hello. It's nice to be able to interact directly with the subject of the article, so thanks for coming on. It's a shame you're being downvoted, because it would definitely be interesting to hear your perspective. This can't be a pleasant experience for you.
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.]
This is a wonderfully mature and constructive comment.
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.
You should be able to identify badfaith because your life depends on it. Otherwise you will drown in a pit of bothsides. Bad way to go.
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.
Yeah I'll I'm going to say for now is that if all your competitors (that I spoke positively about) are shutting down and shrinking and laying people off... there's more to the story. A sad story about an industry dying that should be told.
There’s a pattern to the way you communicate, where you always end things at a cliffhanger.
Michael for what it's worth I went to Codesmith back in 2016 lol and even then Will was a lil greasy with his marketing! LOL
Were you a moderator for them as well?
Great, then give us more to the story.
With sources.
Start with this and let me know what you think of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/ana...
I'm sorry, what does anything there have to do with any of the claims people in this thread are asking you to back up?
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.
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