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...
Mods aren't set in stone, they tend to be active for a few years and then give up. Once that happens and you notice the current mods not posting anything for a period of time, you can simply file a request to side-wide admins to take over that sub, as giving it to anyone else is better than leaving it completely unmoderated.
Apart from getting the existing mod team to hand over to you, you can also petition to the reddit admins. For example, there is a process to replace inactive mods and this could be used to take control of a subreddit with existing users.
Used to moderator a decent sized sub for a decent stint. Learned a fair bit from it. Eventually decided to step back because it’s a raw deal - all interactions are antagonistic, the torrent of confrontations is essentially endless, it’s not seen or appreciated by users and obviously not paid.
So not much of a personal payoff, right? UNLESS you’re the kind of person that thrives on drama, conflict and power trips.
Meaning this actively filters for people that are radioactively toxic
I think one of the most telling facts is that pro-Novati poster u/Ok-Donuts has posted numerous comments that are clearly a violation of all norms but seems to be immune to moderation.
Such accusations are a dime a dozen and almost always false. (I myself have been accused of being people I'm not.) It's simply a fact that there are people who think alike or who form alliances or kneejerk defenses of someone.
In any case, Novati is not acting like a disinterested moderator.
FWIW, there are similar top-of-google and top-of-reddit results for all bootcamps. Try googling 'lambda school', 'hyperiondev', 'coding temple', 'le wagon' along with 'reddit', 'review' 'legit' or anything similar (or often that's not even needed.
In the end, these bootcamps charge people thousands of dollars to sell them the dream of getting a high paying job after 3 months of part time work, and that's just not realistic.
In addition, in order to survive and sell to consumers, most bootcamps are 90% sales and marketing, and 10% education. They use their own students to teach the next generation, and increase their job placement rates (if you hire your own grad you can claim that that grad got a job!).
I used to work in the industry, and in theory I think it's great to have alternatives to universities which can be elitest and out-of-date with new tech, but I left because it felt kinda like the used-car market of CS, and I don't think it's a great model overall.
Ok, so this is precisely why I was defending Michael. He rightfully so, is upset about this, and calls it out. What, honestly, is bad about that? Why do a character assassination?
Reddit has problems with moderation being too easy and too difficult.
It is very easy to ban someone. Making the ban permanent and combining this with the moderator blocking the person (so they can't send messages), there's no appeal process.
Another part is that for any sub of reasonable volume, trying to actively moderate and shape beyond banning the most egregious actors is difficult. Deleting and locking posts for a finer level of moderation is time consuming. The judgement calls of "when is this going off the rails?" become more snap over time.
With the time consuming nature of actually moderating a sub and the ease of just banning someone - moderation becomes the policy of whoever has the most time. The stereotypical variations of this are the paid social media manager who's job it is to scrub anything positive of a competitor or negative about their brand, or a person who is moderating because of a deep interest in the subject but with strong opinions too.
With multiple active moderators, the most extreme views of each in turn become the overall "moderation philosophy" (and if those views are opposed the oldest one wins).
Combined with the echo chamber nature of the message board, the more and more extreme stances become the dominant stances.
To try to present a consistent approach to moderation (Reddit has gotten burned by inconsistent responses many times in the past) it appears that Reddit.inc is trying to be completely hands off. That in turn means that it takes extreme situations for corporate to get involved - often long after it's been a problem that they've been alerted to. Having let the problem fester for so long, when something is done, it tends to be very heavy handed, lopsided, and generates a significant amount of discontent that spreads elsewhere.
So, you've got a site that hosts thousands of message boards, that inevitably grow more and more partisan to one extreme or the other, are mostly facades for a corporation, or propaganda for a political organization.
It is impressive that it has remained "stable" for as long as it has.
I've seen a lot of shady moderation on reddit and it's one reason I quit using it. There is the obvious brigading, mods on powertrips and but also massive probably paid astro turfing campaigns. Reddit has gone downhill substantially in the last five years. HN is not immune either, but at least we dont' have a 'mods on powertrips' problem, in fact the opposite.
I've also just been using reddit for far too long. It's gotten to the point where I sometimes feel like I've seen all of the internet, because I recognize way too many videos/posts/stories/cool facts/etc as ones I have seen before.
Agreed, "mods" binging on their little power is a problem everywhere in society, and in Reddit it's made even worse by the fact they are hiding behind their screen
This is has to stop right now as it has gone on long enough. Reddit, Google, ProductHunt, Youtube and friends are continuously using their dirty, unethical even illegal techniques driven by profit.
I have experienced all myself and I can confirm that the writer is 100% correct.
He forgot to mention though that all this is driven by the same agenda, the same people that want to control the narrative.
I Wrote about it too : https://medium.com/@klaudibregu/hugstonone-empowering-users-...
Now OpenAI joined the agenda and they are playing dirty very hard also. Yesterday Huggingface Deleted the account of a talented User @BasedBase which was creative in open weights (threatening the big techs).
The same boot army discredit and reported his work in Huggingface and Reddit till all his accounts were off.
They have done the same to me personally since ever started with Hugston.com and HugstonOne.
Just Try to google my Company name "Sverken" (that was associated with Hugston.com) It comes out Porn and prostitution services. Even though this is illegal and screw our reputation Google thinks that this is legit and wont take down the information. Instead they decided to put it in the first page ranking first.
I have made some calculations and HugstonOne it is indeed very threatening to big techs.
If Our Local AI App takes away only 0.0001% of users from proprietary model websites OpenAI, that is a huge amount of money. And that is just one of them.
They have tried everything possible to shut us up, to suppress and undermine our work, to discredit us in abusive ways, but they wont succeed.
Thank you for speaking up, hope many other do as well. I really wish you get on your feet soon and the best of luck.
You have to get Google is very bubbled and that is the main issue here. Who gets to make the rules on what results you see first.
It is not just this, but things like order of search results (even just what shows up on auto-completion) has toppled election and changed the minds of undecided voters.
My clients (which are most the Gov, Uni, Med, are not happy for it but they got over it.
My proposals for funds/contracts suddenly get denied unless I explain what is really happening. This is not only damage to reputation but also to business.
I repeat this has to stop.
Now the competent Authorities are investigating properly but as always they get off with a fine (which is in Billion btw).The choice for them is Either stop this or pay billions, The world belongs to everyone.
Moderators are the reason why I stopped using Reddit years ago.
Every idiot can become a moderator, and there seem to be no rules for them.
Suppressing free speech and banning everyone that doesn't share their opinion seems to be ok for them.
This isn't even about Reddit the company. /r/canada got taken over by far right political people who will ban anyone not conservative. The /r/mattress mentioned in this post is also commonplace with private corporations taking over subreddits of interest to ban their competitors. Israel, a nation-state, also pays the mods of /r/news and /r/worldnews. You can't post anything, even factual articles, that goes against a very specific political narrative without being banned.
Besides allowing it to happen, Reddit the corporation is not the one doing this. It's private interests of all sorts that are driving down the quality and diversity of discussions for a website that often ranks at the top of google search results.
Reddit has a huge moderation issue. Mods run the place like their fiefdoms with no regard to being fair. There should be a way of flagging reddit users and especially mods if they are seen to have a clear conflict of interest (as is the case with Michael Novati) and Reddit should not allow them to run groups where they are openly harassing their competitors.
As an extreme example of this, the Iran subreddit is 100% run by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Any opinion wavering from official state messaging is moderated out of existence. Reddit seems to happily tolerate this kind of thing across its platform on many levels.
Same is the case with many of the groups relating to India. Some of these groups are clearly run by proxies of the Indian govt and shutdown any criticism of India or the government.
This isn't limited to reddit - normal forums and discord also suffer from mods with overgrown egos who treat maintaining the order as personal fight of good versus evil where they're of course the omnipotent gods of truth you can't argue with.
What is particularly specific to reddit is that subs associated with big media titles, companies etc. originally were ran by normal people, fans so to speak but at some point become marketing tools with entrusted mods whose job is to make sure no criticism of any kind - even the slightest is present. Some communities moved elsewhere, some gave up and some pretend everything is as it used to be.
There are niche places on reddit with little moderation, where actual votes people cast on posts are the moderating tool but even there, some hijackers tend to appear. Their MO is to spew dangerous content, make sub locked and then gracefully arrive as saviors who are from that point in control of what's actually posted.
It's not just moderation, it's the site admins themselves. I used to moderate a fairly large subreddit in my spare time years ago but the site admins not only did little to support you but would actively work against you at times as well. Just became completely not worth it.
The LLM aspect of this, I think shows both a common weakness and an opportunity.
If you suspect something is a commonly held misconception, frequently asking a LLM about it is close to useless, because the abundance of text repeating the misconception (it is common after all) just makes the model repeat the falsehood. Asking the model to apply a more balanced view quite often triggers an iconoclastic antagonism which will just give you the opposite of whatever the commonly held opinion. I have had some success in asking for the divergence between academia and public opinion on particular issues.
Models are still very bad at determining truth from opinion, but these are exactly the times when we need the models to work the best.
There may be an opportunity if there are enough known examples of instances like this story for a dataset to be made where a model can be taught to identify the difference between honest opinion and bad faith actors, or more critically identify confidently asserted statements from those supported by reasoning.
Unfortunately I can see models that can identify such falsehoods being poorly received. When a model can say you are wrong and everybody around you says you are right, what are the chances of people actually considering the possibility that the model is, in fact, correct?
> Models are still very bad at determining truth from opinion, but these are exactly the times when we need the models to work the best.
Suppose models could determine truth and opinion. How would anyone go about training that into the model? Even in unsupervised, adversarial, whatever training scenarios you still need some kind of framework to discern between the two. Academic manuscripts? There are decades of publications built upon "discoveries" later retracted or shown to be falsified.
How would you build the truth/opinion vector(-s) with impartial objectivity?
> <...> a model can be taught to identify the difference between honest opinion and bad faith actors, or more critically identify confidently asserted statements from those supported by reasoning.
You have a confidently asserted statement {from an industry veteran, backed by nothing but credibility}, and a statement supported by reasoning{, which is in turn supported by... implicit assumptions, verging on wild guesses and exaggerations}. Do you see a reasonable way to somehow embed the context in curly braces in any part of the LLM pipeline without nullifying the need for the LLM itself?
That's why I stated this case as an opportunity. To be able to do this you would need to have a set of examples where sometimes the dominant narrative is incorrect. This article represents one of those cases. Identifying more would be hard work and objectivity would be difficult, but I think possible.
Addressing your final point, I think there is scope for doing that. Having a provenance aspect to embeddings would do that, I suspect existing LLMs infer this information quite well already but I think there might be a possibility to go a little further at inference time by instead of a straight text to token embedding to have a richer input processing model that takes text plus other known context data to produce an embedding holding that extra data. The input processing model would have to be trained to convert the text plus context into a vector containing that info in a form the model already understands.
I think this would be useful in a number of other areas as well, firstly being able to distinctly tag model generated output so it doesn't confuse itself. Tagging individual tokens from code to say how long this code has been in the project, if it comes from a version that lints correctly, compiles, is used in production etc.
Not to mention tagging prompts from the user as prompts and filtering that same tagging out of all non-prompts so that prompt injection is much harder to do.
On that I disagree. LLMs are not simple Markov chains.
They may fail at a lot of logical tasks, but I don't think that is the same as exhibiting no logic.
Getting even slightly respectable performance on the ARC-AGI test set, I think shows that there is at least some logical processing going on. General intelligence is another issue entirely, but there's definitely more than nothing.
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.
The problem is that the alternative is usually only sites created only to chase affiliate revenue. At least on Reddit, there’s a _chance_ I’m reading something from someone genuinely sharing their opinion.
For certain types of searches it isn't a bad idea. Sometimes you want to include unverified testimonials, hearsay and gossip in results. It doesn't necessarily mean that you lose track of how unreliable the source is.
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.
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.
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.
Is it? I didn't notice any real issues besides crypto scam bots spamming comments with their conversations. Or do we count "influencers" peddling sponsored junk?
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 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.
Something can be most reliable without being reliable at all. I could call Reddit the place with most marbles in multiple piles of crap. Doesn't mean it still is not mostly pile of crap.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Moderation on Reddit has been questionable for a long time and its killing the site. To give some examples:
- /r/energy used to ban everyone in favour of nuclear energy
- If you post on /r/conservative you can expect to receive a bunch of bans from unrelated (popular) subs. Doesn't matter what you posted, being associated with that subs "taints" your account enough for some moderators.
- /r/UnitedKingdom banned me for critizing a government welfare program
- /r/assassinscreed banned me for critizing a character in their latest game
For me it makes sense that the smaller subreddits should have the freedom to moderate as they want but the larger reddits should aim to at allow opposing viewpoints to prevent echo chambers from forming. Moderation should be focused on quality, not on viewpoints. Obviously it goes without saying that threats of violence and celebration of murder have no place on any platform.
The irony is that all this censoring just creates a backlash and further polarisation. If you are only allowed to discuss certain subjects on a "left" space you both create the illusion that the left only cares about a subset of topics and by banning people you create resentment that drives them towards (more welcoming) extreme spaces.
There's many factors that form the political preferences and opinions of the younger generation but it would not suprise me if for a subset (young college educated males?) of them Reddit heavily contributes towards increased polarisation.
I can’t help but notice that Twitter and TikTok didn’t get called for that session. In November 2023, Twitter went from a zero tolerance policy for violent speech to “we may remove or reduce the visibility of violent speech.” Seems really relevant for the topic of the hearings! And yet.
I’m thus unwilling to take Rep. Comey’s decision to call Reddit to testify as evidence of anything. Feels more like political theater to me. This doesn’t either condemn or absolve Reddit, it’s just not strong evidence.
“The politically motivated assassination of Charlie Kirk claimed the life of a husband, father, and American patriot. In the wake of this tragedy, and amid other acts of politically motivated violence, Congress has a duty to oversee the online platforms that radicals have used to advance political violence. To prevent future radicalization and violence, the CEOs of Discord, Steam, Twitch, and Reddit must appear before the Oversight Committee and explain what actions they will take to ensure their platforms are not exploited for nefarious purposes,” said Chairman Comer.
---------------
Reddit absolutely does have a moderator problem, as one would expect for a platform that relies on anonymous volunteers, but this might merely be the pretext for a witch hunt. e.g. The Trump administration may actually attempt to track down users who posted anti-Kirk or anti-Trump memes. It might be something even more though. There may be an attempt to coerce these platforms to start moderating in a way that's more favourable to Trump. Reddit is a hotbed of anti-Trump memes after all.
Protest is the bane of authoritarian regimes. That's why the Trump administration moved to lock down colleges so rapidly early this year. However, online social media also has significant capacity for influencing public opinion. This is why so many authoritarian regimes simply cut off internet access for their people. Others (e.g. China) have attempted to censor, manipulate, and control the internet rather than cutting it off.
Americans, and the world, should be paying close attention to these hearings. They should also pay attention to any sudden changes in behaviour of these companies. Merely being summoned to a hearing might be enough of a threat to make them give Trump all he asks for.
There's an article on the reddit blog, still out on archive.org, showing that a huge percentage of the website's traffic comes from... Eglin AFB? in the United States. That base also happens to be home of at least three distinct units that engage in "cyber" stuff.
In my understanding, libel is a civil tort, and the victim can sue if they think they have been libeled. And wishing someone dead isn't illegal in the US, though it may be elsewhere.
An acquaintance who used to be active on reddit watched an angry mob "dox" his long-time pseudonym (they found a real person by the same name) with instructions to harass his employer and calls for IRL assault. Shortly afterward, his account was permabanned and he was unable to create a new one from the same IP.
This wasn't just a reddit problem, Twitter had plenty of the same cancel campaigns.
How can we know that this or that example of speech is illegal if there are no charges and no trial? This rule by corporate fiat is exactly what we don’t need. It lacks democratic oversight. To say nothing of the way that disingenuous claims of “political violence” is being used to suppress legitimate dissent in our country.
> 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.
What you'll also see is a lot of accounts banned just for saying that they can't wait for say Vladimir Putin to die. I'm sure there are ways in which you could construe that to be 'politically motivated death' but that's just a weak excuse to ban an account ignoring the deeper subtext. Wanting mass murderers to shuffle off their mortal coil is a net positive for the world.
>They've now been asked to appear in front of Congress to address concerns about politically motivated violence being incited through their platform
Funny how for the last 30 years of right wing violence/extremists far exceeding left wing nothing was done at all about it, no questions asked. Hush hush, don't talk about gun control or the real causes of these peoples' actions.
But then the year that left wing violence finally exceeds right wing, they all start crying that it's unacceptable and something needs to be done about it.
The reason why Reddit is being "investigated" in this way is clearly and without any doubt political and has nothing to do with Reddit's moderation. There are strong anti-free-speech forces in the USA currently, and Reddit is #1 on their target list.
Anyone who can't see that is blind on the right eye, which is unfortunately a common phenomenon in certain circles nowadays.
> 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.
I wonder if it would work a free speech site to allow mods to not include a story in a category/ subreddit, but then just place that story into, say, /r/changemyview/banned. You'd still need sitewide moderation, but you'd always be able to see the way your feed was being edited within that context.
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.
There should be a public service campaign telling users something like "Even in the best case scenario, the moderators are weirdos. Most likely they're shills".
People with careers, families, friends and hobbies are mostly not going to spend their limited free time being a digital janitor for an anonymous online community.
People sitting alone in their apartment with nowhere to go and nothing to do and no one to spend time with, however, might find that being a Reddit moderator gives them a hobby, a sense of purpose, and feelings of power, importance or significance that they otherwise never get in real life.
Someone should make a social media site with inverted dynamics- users who only spend a few minutes per day on the site and post once every few weeks should be treated as the influential power users, while the people lurking and scrolling for 10 hours per day are deprioritized.
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.
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.
Reddit being Reddit wasn't a problem until it became a source of truth and subsequently afforded consensus and an unwarranted sheen of credence by Agentic AI. As the author beautifully (albeit somewhat nihilistically) summarises:
"We have to remember that Reddit isn’t just Reddit anymore. The powers that be have decided that Reddit is infallible, a reliable set of training data for LLMs, and should be featured fucking everywhere."
Agreed, Reddit as a source of truth is the issue. Who in the their right mind would look at Reddit as whole and say that is an open, unbiased community focused on true and accurate information. And as the article and comments in this very thread show how moderation and its application within Reddit are "contaminated" which is a very good way to describe the situation.
Social media should operate under open protocols, including moderation. Choosing moderation should be client-controlled.
These companies burn through VC money to build systems with network effects then turn around and effectively extract rent. Rent extraction is economically parasitic and anti-productive. This is exactly the sort of thing the government should address by mandating open protocols.
An idea mostly doomed to failure, the vast majority of people (that are viewing the ads paying for the service) don't want do deal with that bullshit.
Moderation is a hard problem. You first have the flood/spam attacks that unless instantly dealt with will bring a service to its knees as there will be hundreds of bad messages for every good message creating an enormous bandwidth and filtering cost for each user.
Then there is a the porn problem. Any place that doesn't instantly block porn will be flooded with porn.
Then there is the flood of off topic bullshit that shows up in any given channel.
And from that point there is 20+ other little things that make people feel welcome and want to come to a channel in the first place.
Simply put anyone could have created and open protocol social media. No one has because it's hard and fraught with problems that your users won't want to deal with.
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.
Klein's case is about copyright (and a somewhat thin claim at that; it sure smells a lot like "I'm attempting to use copyright to quash criticism of me," and if the judge decides that's what's actually going on, he's going to lose his case). Unless I missed an update, he's suing Reddit to try and de-anonymize some people running the subreddit so that they can be properly the target of his copyright lawsuit.
Worth noting: he does not appear to have filed for defamation, which would be the thing he could complain if what they were saying was materially untrue.
There's no way to report a malicious sub as far as I can tell. I've been contacted by scammers that look very legit with the green Mod badge that shows in DMs.
We need to separate the web into data, identity, and moderation.
Users need to become aware that they're not using platforms, they are subscribing to moderator control.
Somebody owns ycombinator.com, can decide what is discussed, and if they ban you - us peasants can't tweak who is a moderating / recover your identity and data.
I'm convinced we'll get there eventually, but it starts with recognizing that the only thing special about Reddit is its multi-level-unpaid-moderator-marketing.
>What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.
it's a three-fold issue here.
1. Admins really don't care about moderator behavior. As long as you aren't breaking reddit you'll be ignored. Events like r/wow going private is one of the few times they directly intervene.
2. Moderator rankings is seniority first. Without admin intervention, you can have a "head moderator" who only really acts once a month and they will have the final say on anything in that sub.
3. Network effects. Like anything else the soluion of "start your own subreddit" is a doomed task unless the sub is very new. People will pool around the sub with the most subscribers. So avoiding the bad mod is difficult.
These are issues I was hoping in the '10's they'd attempt to address. But not much has changed to addreess this. At best the rule of only moderating 5 "high-traffic" subs may help the most extreme cases, but I'm not confident.
Yes, but how will you get the word out? The moderator can delete all your promotion of the breakaway subreddit within their subreddit. How are you going to get eyeballs?
And the truly vindictive moderators will start spamming your new subreddit with e.g. child pornography, and then immediately reporting it to the admins. You had best have your own moderator team running 24/7 to cope with intentional sabotage coming from a person who lives their whole life on Reddit, and will stop at nothing to keep control of the little power that they have. You won't be able to pin this sabotage on the moderator, unless you're in their private Discord channel where they coordinate the attack, which you obviously won't be as you're an outsider. Then they will openly gloat about doing it, because they're on the Right Side Of History, and you are Nazis and deserve everything you get.
Reddit also has default subreddits, or rather had them, but they still hold significant first-mover advantage and enjoy network effects. There's a reason that /r/pics is full of insipid drivel, but there's not a more popular /r/pics2
I'm equally confused at just how bad Reddit is at identifying and removing bad actors to the point that I'm convinced it must be an intentional.
I'm not sure if the reason may be as simple as the desire to pump their user numbers for earnings, or if it's something more egregious than that. It's not clear to me how a company owned by the public which relies on advertisers for revenue has been able to carry on for so long being a propaganda farm for foreign agents and marketing bots.
Oh it’s deliberate. It’s been THE online platform for far left radicalization and extremist views for at least a decade now. It’s by far the most intolerant social media platform relative to the mainstream platforms.
> What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.
I don’t see this as a big a problem as you do.
As soon as you solve this, then you have the issue of people you see as good actors being ousted and having their influence taken down. If the bad guys can be silenced then so can the good guys and then it’s just a matter of how we figure out the good guys and the bad guys!
There are lots of very large subreddits that are prolific at shadowbanning people -- you might think you're participating in the conversation for quite a while and people just aren't upvoting you or responding to you for whatever reason, and your posts aren't visible at all. /r/worldnews is very free with them, for example.
Surely bad actors leave a fairly clear data trail. Are there no analytics being used to track this sort of behaviour? Much of the scale of this comes from being able to do it with impunity. If bad actors were exposed, even after the fact, it would be a deterrent to others.
New account just to say I know this feeling very well. Tech-parallel sub has a moderator that does literally nothing other than shittalk a specific group once every 2 weeks. People have mentioned lack of moderation effort.
I can't say who, because the motherfucker is on this website and will instantly deny it all.
> What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.
It's more or less an open marketplace, with only a few high-level rules.
Why would it be resilient to these kinds of attacks? Human society as a whole isn't - if it were, I wouldn't have a job.
> A bad actor mod of a popular subreddit can persist for years, visibly, without people managing either to oust the mod, or to take down the sub's influence.
So, kind of like how bad companies persist in dominant market positions?
Bad actors put in a lot more effort to protect themselves than people with lives and jobs have to take them down. Anyone can bitch about Wells Fargo and Comcast, and 'tyrranical' mods, but at the end of the day, most people aren't switching their ISP or going to a forked community.
You don't have to be a moderator to poison the well.
Post a shitload of bad faith attacks and slander. Not as a root comment. You don't have to actually relate to the parent at all, you're just trying to get your talking points out there. If someone calls you out? Gish gallop never actually addressing their comments. It's another opportunity for you to spew whatever bullshit you want.
If they follow you around and get more engagement/up votes? Block them. Now you are free to continue to post whatever BS you want without any of those pesky fact checkers.
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?
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.
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.
Im not shocked at all. Not only do I think they were knowingly letting this kind of thing happen for years, I think they were actively participating in such sketchy practices for profit. Which easily explains how reddit could "lose" money for years and years but continuously be given more and more funding and increasingly hosting more and more content on their own servers. If they were actually losing money, they wouldn't have started hosting images and then later videos on their own servers while pushing people away from 3rd party hosts.
Did you read the article? It quotes him saying many things that aren't true. For that reason there probably is legal recourse for a defamation case, but it's the kind of thing that takes years, and costs a lot of money in the interim.
It's not a fact, but a first-hand recount of a first-hand experience. The bias of a person of themselves affects that on at least two levels: first, on how they perceive their own deed, second, on how they recount the perception of that deed.
Some times you can state facts and still be wrong in other ways.
Example:
If one side says "Hamas dresses as civilians" to excuse killing civilians, they're factually correct and criminal.
If someone then goes online and drops "Hamas dresses as civilians" they're factually correct and reinforcing a criminal's defense.
Anyway, the morality of IDF behavior is apparant to an impartial behavior by just considering the thought experiment that IDF doesn't killing Israeli civilians "just in case" they're Hamas in disguise. They only kill Palestinian civilians "just in case" they're Hamas.
I 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!
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.
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?
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.
And that's the problem with this interweb lark, made worse by aggregators who's algorithms can be gamed, and now we have stochastic LLMs adding to the remix, how do we know what is true?
The narrative related here is frighteningly believable, and, no doubt, so were all the reddit posts.
The difference between the narrative described by this narrative, and the narrative related in the narrative, is that one is death by a thousand cuts, the other either a well deserved take-down or an undeserved attempt at one.
I can't tell the difference, but reddit should be able to.
So this is really about whether reddit sees it's reputation as an asset to be monetized in the short-term, or invested in for the long-term. This is the classic tension between the brand manager and the brand guardian, maximize the cashflow or maximize the balance sheet value, and tells you almost everything important about a company's core culture.
How reddit handles this, it could be argued, will define reddit going forwards.
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.
Downvoting prevents other people from seeing his comments. You need to upvote to make sure everybody sees "his own words", as he put it. That's for the common good.
Sadly, Reddit has become a disease upon "normal" society.
Also, sadly, is that it is extremely addictive; it is my version of YouTube shorts or TikTok (which I do not use). It is so easy to say "I'm just going to browse for a few minutes", and have it turn into MUCH longer than a few minutes. Those darn cute cat videos!!!
I suspect this is true for almost every somewhat relevant subreddit. Everything has been captured, someone has taken control of the politburo and is defining the message. I've been using the site since 2008 and within the last couple of years it feels like you cannot post anything unless you know someone.
I feel like it was this way 10 years ago. Once r/TheDonald successfully gamed the system everyday I think people with interest took notice. Now you can be in a niche sub reddit that averages 40 comments on a post. Then a post that could be adjacent to some hot U.S. political wedge topic gets mentioned and there are 300 comments from users who never take part in the discussion. Even something very general like "students are protesting tuition hikes" the small city I live in gets posted and it gets flooded by people who never comment. If you hit a hot topic like Israel / Palestine, the Ukraine war you see it as well.
Reddit, Fackbook, Twitter, TikTok etc are the places where people get their information and form their options. That why the the wealthy and powerful are buying them outright, or paying to push their influence into every aspect of the conversation. Poisoning the well or "Flooding the zone with shit".
Reddit became what Digg was with MrBabyMan. Or actually something worse.
It's bad enough that one Reddit moderator can wield so much power with such impunity, but /u/spez handing over all of Reddit's data for LLMs to use has now poisoned the chatbots that so many are using in place of search engines.
Codesmith and other affected should probably sue Michael for defamation, harassment and other charges, and try to get like $500 million in reparations.
I wonder - if there are evidences of such behaviour (and there are because they've been shown in this article), why can't the company sue the moderator?
I shudder at the thought of "striving to become a Reddit moderator."
So much effort to achieve such a petty political goal. What sort of person does this?
I cannot comprehend people who would spend their life doing that... Out of all the things a person could do. Do Reddit moderators get a kick out of manipulating people's beliefs and banning people discussing niche topics? I don't get it.
Power. Spending 5 hours a day spamming and commenting is extremely easy compared to actually doing something positive for society.
I think everyone here has demonstrated how a mod is objectively lying or wrong and gotten banned for it. From their point of view, they won. For a loser, winning online arguments is the best feeling in the world.
Resonates. IMO, if it pays a fixed salary, that's one thing. Makes sense. But as some means of gaining power over others; or for kickbacks, it's pathetic.
TBH I don't think the goal is petty. I think there's a lot of money involved. That moderator runs a company in the space. Seems more about lining their pockets than revenge.
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.
The overwhelming majority of question closures on Stack Overflow are not done by moderators. And they are done according to clear guidelines that are openly and publicly discussed on the meta site, which have reasons behind them that have been discussed over many years and refined according to the community's consensus about the purpose of the site.
The overwhelming majority of people coming to Stack Overflow are expecting the site to provide something that it explicitly is not trying to provide. The site in fact exists specifically because of frustration with traditional forums where people did get the UX they expect from Stack Overflow (i.e.: individualized volunteer consultation and troubleshooting).
Asking a question on Stack Overflow is not about making your code work — no matter how much users might want their code to work, or want Stack Overflow to function that way. By design.
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.
>I wonder what makes a platform like HN work, but not the others.
Does HN work? We are not allowed to discuss all kinds of things. There are vague and unpublished rules about how things are ranked and how the front page is managed.
Did you know that HN accounts owned by people who have been selected by YC are "special" and can see each other highlighted orange?
Similar thing with the subreddit r/NYCapartments. Moderators are basically rental companies and agents, very convenient to do some lobbying, preventing price discussions etc.
It is crazy how some communities are being moderated by people with clear interests.
1) Article author did not reach out to Novati for comment.
2) Codesmith ran a misguided marketing campaign that ran afoul of Reddit auto-mods.
These seem like reasonable responses to me. Are they true? I don't know, but I would like reasonable discussion about it.
I really get the impulse to vent when reading about something so outrageous, and in a way this kerfuffle represents the arbitrary unfairness of power leveraged from the shadows, but is that happening here?
Just hyperbole. Obviously reddit is not the default source of all human knowledge, but many times, it's the one place to get critical information from - as in, it's mostly the only place where negative information have a chance to be not suppressed.
> Any time you attempt to defend yourself in the main subreddit, posts get deleted. Or you’re accused of running a Reddit bot army.
Not sure what's the story from the other side, but...
One strategy to counter this could be buying ads on Reddit to expose this, with evidence to show of course. And if possible, place the ad right on the offending subreddit.
And don't forget, if you have enough evidence to show, you can always sue. So, do both at the same time and keep them busy.
I’ve no idea whether the allegations in this piece are true.
But what is noteworthy is that the author of the article has also - on the same blog - written a bunch of content about how Reddit is used for spamming search results.
That includes one piece with detailed step by step instructions for how to spam Reddit apparently because Google and Reddit have poisoned the well of SEO.
“Why I’m Sharing Secret Tips on How to Manipulate Reddit: Shouldn’t I keep this all to myself? […] Because fuck Google that’s why… Reddit used to be a reliable source… Google torched all that.”
Make of that what you will - but the author seems to waging a one man campaign targeting what he identifies as dodgy Reddit moderation practices.
When you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail and all that.
Yeah. The mod of Seattle would ban anyone and everyone for the littlest things. Iirc, he was early on Reddit and had created the sub, and as the community grew his abuse got worse until there was a mass migration.
So the moderator of this Reddit group, has a company who directly competes with Bootcamps. What are Reddit policies on moderators competing commercial interests?
Could one person moderate r/azure while working for aws ?
Thinking of actually being moderator. Who outside industry would want to moderate such place? Probably for free... And I mean who would be such actually independent person.
If this would happen to me I would go nuclear. I would probably not retaliate until there's evidence like the author listed. But when I do, I would duck and cover.
Michael Novati really dug himself a hole with his words and actions. Does anyone know what was wrong with this guy for that level of obsession? Did we ever find out where his personal vendetta started?
The AI moderation tools are trained on the Reddit data that is actively being sabotaged by a competitor. If an AI were to take up moderation now, mentioning this specific bootcamp would probably get you warned or banned because of how bad it is according to the training data.
AI is as biased as humans are, perhaps even more so because it lacks actual reasoning capabilities.
Evals are showing reasoning (by which I mean multi-step problem solving, planning, etc) is improving over time in LLMs. We don't have to agree on metaphysics to see this; I'm referring to the measurable end result.
Why? Some combination of longer context windows, better architectures, hybrid systems, and so on. There is more research about how and where reasoning happens (inside the transformer, during the chain of thought, perhaps during a tool call).
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.
I taught at one for a year and a good number of my students (it was above 50% last time I took a pulse) had life-changing career switches.
I think what people don't realize is that the student is really the difference maker, and that it really takes a lot of effort, dedication, and interest to succeed.
I think it's possible some of these folks could have "self-taught" their way to the same technical proficiency, but it would've taken longer, and they wouldn't have had as much of a professional network of alums, sponsors, etc upon completion.
(I was a codesmith resident in 2022, just as the covid hiring bubble started to burst, take that bias as you will)
You're entirely right. What Codesmith teaches isn't revolutionary. Lars touches on it in his blog, but there are really only three things that have contributed to the success they had, and none of them have anything to do with the technology or languages/frameworks they teach:
1. Build a very strong enrollment pipeline that filters for highly motivated individuals who are also technically capable of self-learning. There's a lot of (free) coursework in their CSX platform that needs to be completed prior to even enrolling in the main program as well as passing both a behavioral and technical interview to be accepted. This sets a higher technical floor so the program can start fast without the risk of losing students. Good candidates => good graduates.
2. Focus the program primarily on self-learning principles. "Hard learning" was always Codesmith's motto. Lessons were very high level in order to push students toward official documentation. Instructors/fellows/mentors all actively discouraged the use of tutorials which are a waste of time. Projects proposals are screened for uniqueness. You don't learn anything following step by step instructions for an app someone else built to solve a problem that isn't yours. Unique problems will require unique solutions which will require actual understanding of the technology.
3. Go really hard on on soft skills and leveraging past experiences. Be it technical or otherwise, nearly everyone had at least a few years of experience in "real" careers. Residents have already proven they can interview well enough to be hired at least by someone. Of my cohort of ~30-35 residents, I can only remember a couple that I didn't want to work with due to either their technical ability as the program ramped up or their coworking ability in general. A brief scroll through r/cscareerquestions or r/csmajor shows how abysmally low the bar is when it comes to soft skills in tech. Even if you ignore college students and only look at those that have been hired in industry, now that I can see it firsthand, the "average" Codesmith student is astonishingly above average in this regard.
---
It's really not rocket science. When you start with a pool of people that are personable, technically capable of learning, career oriented, and mature, you're obviously going to get graduates that are able to punch way above their weight-class. Once you find 30-40 of those people, all Codesmith has to do is put them in the same room together for a few months, without the distractions of life and work, and just facilitate their own, collaborative self-learning.
This is in stark contrast with many bootcamps who will accept anyone that's willing to part with their money without any screening of ability. These I'd truly call snake oil praying on people's desire for a better life.
Yeah, I don't doubt this story for a minute. Wish we could pin this thread to the top of Hacker News for an entire year, its that important. In the old days if you were rich you would just buy a paper or radio station. Now you become a Reddit mod... Crazy statement, but many use it to crowd-source info on products. That's powerful if you control it.
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.
> 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.
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.
This really makes me mad. Codesmith was clearly a top tier bootcamp. I joined several of their public sessions when i was looking for a bootcamp and they were fantastic.
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.
I'm going to focus on the MODERATION ACCUSATION first since that seems to be the main issue.
What moderating r/codingbootcamp actually looks like:
I don't own the sub - I report to the owner who asked me to help after I'd been one of the most active and helpful contributors. The coding bootcamp industry is absolutely infested with astroturfing. Brand new accounts, manufactured conversations, fake testimonials. It's constant daily spam trying to manipulate people making $15K-20K decisions.
My job is to support authentic discussion. We have above-average Reddit AI filters. We generally don't review flagged content because we can't tell who these suspicious brand new accounts are. Occasionally we approve legitimate posts caught in filters.
The accusation that I delete Codesmith's posts:
This is not only false, it's the exact opposite of what I do. I regularly break the sub's rules to manually approve Codesmith content that Reddit's automated systems flag as spam. I shouldn't be doing this - the same rules should apply to everyone - but I do it constantly because their posts get caught unfairly.
Why are their posts getting flagged?
In mid-2024, Codesmith hired a marketing contractor to post on Reddit. Their CEO even sent me proof of this. They probably didn't know it at the time, but this guy was running one of the most extensive astroturfing operations I've ever seen. Dozens of high-karma sockpuppet accounts. Fake conversations across hundreds of subreddits promoting hemorrhoid cream, garage door openers, lava lamps, custom suits, you name it.
I helped uncover this network and Reddit nuked all those accounts. But Codesmith's legitimate accounts got tangled up in it, and Reddit's AI started auto-suspending them by association - IP addresses, posting patterns, behavioral signals.
I explained this to Codesmith. Multiple times. By email. By phone with their CEO directly. With screenshots. With specific suggestions on rebuilding trust signals through authentic engagement.
They accused me of "deleting their posts." I told them I was approving their content, not removing it. They didn't listen, didn't change their approach, and to this day their content gets constantly flagged.
The evidence is in their own sub, look at some of their official AMAs:
Go look right now. Count how many comments are flagged/suspended/deleted/collapsed. Roughly half get flagged by Reddit within weeks. Not by me - I'm banned from that sub. That doesn't happen with legitimate engagement.
There was a fake account on LinkedIn liking all their stuff that is now suspended as well.
With my moderator hat on, I'm being accused of bias while actively protecting Codesmith from the consequences of their own marketing decisions. I approve posts that should probably stay filtered. I give them more leniency than other bootcamps. I've consistently tried explaining how Reddit works and how to fix their reputation signals.
On my criticism of their program:
Yes, I've been critical of specific Codesmith practices since 2022 - whether bootcamp grads should present 3-week projects as "4 months of mid-level experience" or market themselves as "mid-level engineers" with zero professional experience. I have strong opinions backed by outcomes data and CIRR reports.
But that has nothing to do with how I moderate. I've been equally critical of other bootcamps like TripleTen, BloomTech, App Academy. I recommend a dozen or two people go to Codesmith! At the same time I was questioning their marketing. My moderation standards apply to everyone except Codesmith, who I give more leeway to.
Bottom line:
If I wanted to hurt Codesmith as a moderator, I would simply let Reddit's automated systems do their job. I wouldn't override the filters.
I checked the actual /r/codesmith links you posted. They all seem fake. Most replies are from users who are either deleted, or new accounts with a single comment. Note: I am not saying the founder of Codesmith did this, or that these are fake 100%. Just suspicious.
And the fact that you used your real name when being a mod gives you strong credibility. You weren't looking to hide your involvement, since you weren't doing anything wrong, in your opinion. This is unlike the "fake" mods who will have multiple levels of indirection, with fake post histories, etc. Astroturfing / shilling 101 is never use your real name.
And overall, if what you're saying is correct, the author owes you an apology. And so does the HN crowd. HN, although a good crowd in general, is super-susceptible to "witch hunts". I don't like witch hunts + character assassinations. So that's why I'm defending you.
P.s. It's ironic that Lars, the author, is a master affiliate marketer + growth hacker. He's started an affiliate company that did $7 million in revenue. I don't say he is an unethical person. But from what I know about this field, it's almost always on the grey line (and he's also admitted to this). See his video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QnwHAnJwv-k. And this is just what is public, if we were to "dig up" some of his stuff, it is possible one could spin it to make him look bad. My point is, he shouldn't exaggerate things to make you look bad. And the same warning applies to me or anyone.
Doesn't come across as a narcissist to me. He's just giving his side. Sure, he might have done things that were not right, but the article paints him as a monster. You should but yourself in his shoes? Are you squeaky clean? What if someone took something that you did that was grey, and framed you as a monster?
Oh, one more thing. All of these "bootcamp" companies are known to be bad, and HN knows this. Perhaps "Codesmith" is better, I can believe that. I did a quick search, and it does seem like it's above the pack. I'm not trying to knock down Codesmith, the founder Will seems genuine. but it's still very plausible it has some of the same "badness" of bootcamps, at least according to Michael. And one might ask, why did Michael focus on Codesmith? The answer is two-fold. 1) he targeted other bootcamps as well 2) and Codesmith claimed explicitly they were unlike other bootcamps, and Michael was on a personal "jihad" to make sure they were called out.
I hate fake reviews by competitors. But I read the article myself, and it seems exaggerated. It did read like a hit piece, and did feel ironic. This was before I even read your response.
I don't know who's saying the truth, but it's never too late to better one's self. So that's the advice to myself and you.
I comment a lot about them and I have gotten annoyed every now and then when my tone was not professional, but most of critical comments about Codesmith center on The fact that their website has a giant banner saying from zero to mid-level engineer and I think that that's misleading and setting people up for failure in the software industry regardless of their outcomes or their talent. I'm open to hearing all sides of this, but it's a very reasonable opinion to have and state.
“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.
There is a popular subreddit for people with hair loss ("tressless" with almost 500k members) and anyone who recommends the drug Finasteride (banned in Sweden and full of bad side effects e.g. depression, erectile dysfunction, muscle atrophy) gets upvoted and anyone who recommends against it gets their post removed from the front page of the subreddit and a squad of people attacking you. It is obvious some pharmaceutical company is behind this.
I would not underestimate how badly people make things part of their identity and see attacks against those things as attack against them. So it might be just moderators being overinvested in something on personal level.
Of course there will always be a mixture of things. Some of these people attacking could just be insecure people trying to justify their life choices through strangers (ton of those across the internet) but it is at such a scale and consistency that the stakes seem higher than that.
Very interesting that this got downvoted. Shouldn't even be controversial on HN. There might be an actual cult around this drug and not just a moderator issue.
Yup, I have now observed this a few times go up and down a couple of times. Very strange behaviour surrounding this without any negative response. Society is cooked.
Regardless of Michael's issues with Codesmith, I will say as someone who looked into bootcamps before, Codesmith is infamous for having people misrepresent their job experience to get swe jobs (even getting hired as seniors!). This is also why they used to have some of the highest job salary outcomes. I'm not going to link anything but this can be confirmed by just searching "Codesmith" in Linkedin and seeing how many Codesmith bootcampers are "senior" software engineers on "open source" codesmith "companies"
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
No doubt the industry suffered due to a market downturn, but your continuous posts and attacks worsened the situation for that company. Based on your Reddit activity, it appears to have been driven by a personal vendetta. If they pursue a defamation case, the evidence could strongly work against you. The overwhelming proof he presented of your actions toward the company would be difficult to defend. I honestly can’t understand why anyone would risk their own reputation—and that of their family—for dishonest gain. Most people are civil in such cases, but not everyone is if they conclude that evil was done. Scary situation to be in.
There are people coming forward with evidence on Michael Novati’s digital stalking. One previous instructor at code smith(who also worked at Microsoft at the time), said he was digitally stalked, Michael Novati found his employment history and kept calling him out publicly so he would get into trouble with Microsoft. All this despite the person having clearance from Microsoft to work as an instructor at codesmith.
With the twisted logic I see this guy using here, I would assume he doesn’t even see this as digital stalking. I guess that’s what being the “number 1 code commiter at Meta”(according to his linkedin) would do to you.
I've been trying to comment and post on reddit u/codingbootcamp and nothing goes through completely suppress by the mod.
My comments are removed and i can't even make a post. I'm following all guide lines and nothing goes through.
Here is something I posted.
I want to raise a concern about moderator conduct. I have evidence (screenshots and permalinks) that suggests a moderator may have accessed and referenced private information about former employees and their family members. That kind of behavior would be unethical and could violate subreddit policy on harassment/privacy.
Mods: please confirm whether these actions occurred and, if so, what steps you will take. I’m happy to provide the evidence via modmail.
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.
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.
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_...
I'm not interested in doing this at all, but how does a person take over a subreddit? That sounds like a very difficult thing to do.
"Hi I noticed you weren't that online as recently as you were are you ok?"
Wow that must be a lot of work
Wow I feel for you, friend
Yea id be happy to help out from time to time.
--- But needs to happen with other things.
Quite often seen in GitHub where an attacker can contribute to build trust. With Reddit, mini modding, regular submissions, good comments etc
Defense includes not being shamed or pressured when life seems more important.
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Mods aren't set in stone, they tend to be active for a few years and then give up. Once that happens and you notice the current mods not posting anything for a period of time, you can simply file a request to side-wide admins to take over that sub, as giving it to anyone else is better than leaving it completely unmoderated.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/ - see the sidebar.
If the sub has an inactive or no mod, its as simple as making a post.
Probably in the same way as Jia Tan took over the xz.
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/29184583611...
Apart from getting the existing mod team to hand over to you, you can also petition to the reddit admins. For example, there is a process to replace inactive mods and this could be used to take control of a subreddit with existing users.
People offer money to buy your reddit handle, assuming you are a mod of a reddit they want to control.
This is a second order effect of Google weighting Reddit heavily in Search.
And a third-order effect of every other link being SEO garbage or AI slop
Used to moderator a decent sized sub for a decent stint. Learned a fair bit from it. Eventually decided to step back because it’s a raw deal - all interactions are antagonistic, the torrent of confrontations is essentially endless, it’s not seen or appreciated by users and obviously not paid.
So not much of a personal payoff, right? UNLESS you’re the kind of person that thrives on drama, conflict and power trips.
Meaning this actively filters for people that are radioactively toxic
Samesies. I even had to switch to using a different pseudonym once I started receiving death threats :)
>this actively filters for people that are radioactively toxic
True. There's a reason "discord mod" is an epithet.
The discussion at https://larslofgren.com/codesmith-reddit-reputation-attack/ is not going well for Mr. Novati.
Edit: oops, that was the wrong link! I meant to link to the reddit post discussing that article: https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1o1guxj/tho...
I think one of the most telling facts is that pro-Novati poster u/Ok-Donuts has posted numerous comments that are clearly a violation of all norms but seems to be immune to moderation.
Were there replies to the comment you linked? Because I don't see any now.
I meant to link to the post, not Novati's comment, but they are close together:
https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1o1guxj/tho...
u/Ok-donuts is clearly his alt. Absolutely pathetic
Such accusations are a dime a dozen and almost always false. (I myself have been accused of being people I'm not.) It's simply a fact that there are people who think alike or who form alliances or kneejerk defenses of someone.
In any case, Novati is not acting like a disinterested moderator.
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Oh, I also defended Michael. Not a fan of character assassinations / witch hunts / exaggerated claims.
That'll show him!
Meaningless low effort comment.
FWIW, there are similar top-of-google and top-of-reddit results for all bootcamps. Try googling 'lambda school', 'hyperiondev', 'coding temple', 'le wagon' along with 'reddit', 'review' 'legit' or anything similar (or often that's not even needed.
In the end, these bootcamps charge people thousands of dollars to sell them the dream of getting a high paying job after 3 months of part time work, and that's just not realistic.
In addition, in order to survive and sell to consumers, most bootcamps are 90% sales and marketing, and 10% education. They use their own students to teach the next generation, and increase their job placement rates (if you hire your own grad you can claim that that grad got a job!).
I used to work in the industry, and in theory I think it's great to have alternatives to universities which can be elitest and out-of-date with new tech, but I left because it felt kinda like the used-car market of CS, and I don't think it's a great model overall.
I’m not surprised to hear they’re struggling. For some reason programming is not seen to be the meal ticket it was just a few years ago.
Ok, so this is precisely why I was defending Michael. He rightfully so, is upset about this, and calls it out. What, honestly, is bad about that? Why do a character assassination?
If you’d read the entire article, you wouldn’t ask why his character is called into question. The receipts are documented.
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Reddit has problems with moderation being too easy and too difficult.
It is very easy to ban someone. Making the ban permanent and combining this with the moderator blocking the person (so they can't send messages), there's no appeal process.
Another part is that for any sub of reasonable volume, trying to actively moderate and shape beyond banning the most egregious actors is difficult. Deleting and locking posts for a finer level of moderation is time consuming. The judgement calls of "when is this going off the rails?" become more snap over time.
With the time consuming nature of actually moderating a sub and the ease of just banning someone - moderation becomes the policy of whoever has the most time. The stereotypical variations of this are the paid social media manager who's job it is to scrub anything positive of a competitor or negative about their brand, or a person who is moderating because of a deep interest in the subject but with strong opinions too.
With multiple active moderators, the most extreme views of each in turn become the overall "moderation philosophy" (and if those views are opposed the oldest one wins).
Combined with the echo chamber nature of the message board, the more and more extreme stances become the dominant stances.
To try to present a consistent approach to moderation (Reddit has gotten burned by inconsistent responses many times in the past) it appears that Reddit.inc is trying to be completely hands off. That in turn means that it takes extreme situations for corporate to get involved - often long after it's been a problem that they've been alerted to. Having let the problem fester for so long, when something is done, it tends to be very heavy handed, lopsided, and generates a significant amount of discontent that spreads elsewhere.
So, you've got a site that hosts thousands of message boards, that inevitably grow more and more partisan to one extreme or the other, are mostly facades for a corporation, or propaganda for a political organization.
It is impressive that it has remained "stable" for as long as it has.
Subreddits = volunteering.
And wealth is extracted out of all that volunteering. Ads and tokens for AI training.
I've seen a lot of shady moderation on reddit and it's one reason I quit using it. There is the obvious brigading, mods on powertrips and but also massive probably paid astro turfing campaigns. Reddit has gone downhill substantially in the last five years. HN is not immune either, but at least we dont' have a 'mods on powertrips' problem, in fact the opposite.
I quit Reddit too. The posts and comments here are definitely much higher quality but the constant changing of titles by mods here drives me insane.
reddit has recently allowed users to hide their posts and comments from the profile, which has made astro-turfing a lot harder to detect
I've also just been using reddit for far too long. It's gotten to the point where I sometimes feel like I've seen all of the internet, because I recognize way too many videos/posts/stories/cool facts/etc as ones I have seen before.
It's been going on since forever and I find it insane that they still haven't done anything to curb it
There could just be an appeals system and if one moderator messes up a high enough percentage of the time, they get the boot.
Agreed, "mods" binging on their little power is a problem everywhere in society, and in Reddit it's made even worse by the fact they are hiding behind their screen
This is has to stop right now as it has gone on long enough. Reddit, Google, ProductHunt, Youtube and friends are continuously using their dirty, unethical even illegal techniques driven by profit. I have experienced all myself and I can confirm that the writer is 100% correct. He forgot to mention though that all this is driven by the same agenda, the same people that want to control the narrative. I Wrote about it too : https://medium.com/@klaudibregu/hugstonone-empowering-users-... Now OpenAI joined the agenda and they are playing dirty very hard also. Yesterday Huggingface Deleted the account of a talented User @BasedBase which was creative in open weights (threatening the big techs). The same boot army discredit and reported his work in Huggingface and Reddit till all his accounts were off. They have done the same to me personally since ever started with Hugston.com and HugstonOne. Just Try to google my Company name "Sverken" (that was associated with Hugston.com) It comes out Porn and prostitution services. Even though this is illegal and screw our reputation Google thinks that this is legit and wont take down the information. Instead they decided to put it in the first page ranking first. I have made some calculations and HugstonOne it is indeed very threatening to big techs. If Our Local AI App takes away only 0.0001% of users from proprietary model websites OpenAI, that is a huge amount of money. And that is just one of them. They have tried everything possible to shut us up, to suppress and undermine our work, to discredit us in abusive ways, but they wont succeed. Thank you for speaking up, hope many other do as well. I really wish you get on your feet soon and the best of luck.
> Yesterday Huggingface Deleted the account of a talented User @BasedBase which was creative in open weights (threatening the big techs).
I looked it up it found a pretty clear reason they'd delete it themselves?
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1o0st2o/basedba...
That´s is incorrect, I demonstrated how all that is not true. The models were 100% distill and very powerful. Hard facts
https://vimeo.com/1125658282
https://vimeo.com/1125657672
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1o1m9nz/the_mos...
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If I google ‘sverken hugston’ I don’t get any porn or prostitution results. Nor if I google just ‘sverken’.
You have to get Google is very bubbled and that is the main issue here. Who gets to make the rules on what results you see first.
It is not just this, but things like order of search results (even just what shows up on auto-completion) has toppled election and changed the minds of undecided voters.
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Made this one for you: https://vimeo.com/1125804680
My clients (which are most the Gov, Uni, Med, are not happy for it but they got over it. My proposals for funds/contracts suddenly get denied unless I explain what is really happening. This is not only damage to reputation but also to business. I repeat this has to stop. Now the competent Authorities are investigating properly but as always they get off with a fine (which is in Billion btw).The choice for them is Either stop this or pay billions, The world belongs to everyone.
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Competition is for losers!
Moderators are the reason why I stopped using Reddit years ago. Every idiot can become a moderator, and there seem to be no rules for them. Suppressing free speech and banning everyone that doesn't share their opinion seems to be ok for them.
The constitution for the Nation of Reddit makes all speech legally protected, after all.
This isn't even about Reddit the company. /r/canada got taken over by far right political people who will ban anyone not conservative. The /r/mattress mentioned in this post is also commonplace with private corporations taking over subreddits of interest to ban their competitors. Israel, a nation-state, also pays the mods of /r/news and /r/worldnews. You can't post anything, even factual articles, that goes against a very specific political narrative without being banned.
Besides allowing it to happen, Reddit the corporation is not the one doing this. It's private interests of all sorts that are driving down the quality and diversity of discussions for a website that often ranks at the top of google search results.
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Reddit has a huge moderation issue. Mods run the place like their fiefdoms with no regard to being fair. There should be a way of flagging reddit users and especially mods if they are seen to have a clear conflict of interest (as is the case with Michael Novati) and Reddit should not allow them to run groups where they are openly harassing their competitors.
As an extreme example of this, the Iran subreddit is 100% run by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Any opinion wavering from official state messaging is moderated out of existence. Reddit seems to happily tolerate this kind of thing across its platform on many levels.
Same is the case with many of the groups relating to India. Some of these groups are clearly run by proxies of the Indian govt and shutdown any criticism of India or the government.
This isn't limited to reddit - normal forums and discord also suffer from mods with overgrown egos who treat maintaining the order as personal fight of good versus evil where they're of course the omnipotent gods of truth you can't argue with.
What is particularly specific to reddit is that subs associated with big media titles, companies etc. originally were ran by normal people, fans so to speak but at some point become marketing tools with entrusted mods whose job is to make sure no criticism of any kind - even the slightest is present. Some communities moved elsewhere, some gave up and some pretend everything is as it used to be.
There are niche places on reddit with little moderation, where actual votes people cast on posts are the moderating tool but even there, some hijackers tend to appear. Their MO is to spew dangerous content, make sub locked and then gracefully arrive as saviors who are from that point in control of what's actually posted.
It's not just moderation, it's the site admins themselves. I used to moderate a fairly large subreddit in my spare time years ago but the site admins not only did little to support you but would actively work against you at times as well. Just became completely not worth it.
The LLM aspect of this, I think shows both a common weakness and an opportunity.
If you suspect something is a commonly held misconception, frequently asking a LLM about it is close to useless, because the abundance of text repeating the misconception (it is common after all) just makes the model repeat the falsehood. Asking the model to apply a more balanced view quite often triggers an iconoclastic antagonism which will just give you the opposite of whatever the commonly held opinion. I have had some success in asking for the divergence between academia and public opinion on particular issues.
Models are still very bad at determining truth from opinion, but these are exactly the times when we need the models to work the best.
There may be an opportunity if there are enough known examples of instances like this story for a dataset to be made where a model can be taught to identify the difference between honest opinion and bad faith actors, or more critically identify confidently asserted statements from those supported by reasoning.
Unfortunately I can see models that can identify such falsehoods being poorly received. When a model can say you are wrong and everybody around you says you are right, what are the chances of people actually considering the possibility that the model is, in fact, correct?
> Models are still very bad at determining truth from opinion, but these are exactly the times when we need the models to work the best.
Suppose models could determine truth and opinion. How would anyone go about training that into the model? Even in unsupervised, adversarial, whatever training scenarios you still need some kind of framework to discern between the two. Academic manuscripts? There are decades of publications built upon "discoveries" later retracted or shown to be falsified.
How would you build the truth/opinion vector(-s) with impartial objectivity?
> <...> a model can be taught to identify the difference between honest opinion and bad faith actors, or more critically identify confidently asserted statements from those supported by reasoning.
You have a confidently asserted statement {from an industry veteran, backed by nothing but credibility}, and a statement supported by reasoning{, which is in turn supported by... implicit assumptions, verging on wild guesses and exaggerations}. Do you see a reasonable way to somehow embed the context in curly braces in any part of the LLM pipeline without nullifying the need for the LLM itself?
That's why I stated this case as an opportunity. To be able to do this you would need to have a set of examples where sometimes the dominant narrative is incorrect. This article represents one of those cases. Identifying more would be hard work and objectivity would be difficult, but I think possible.
Addressing your final point, I think there is scope for doing that. Having a provenance aspect to embeddings would do that, I suspect existing LLMs infer this information quite well already but I think there might be a possibility to go a little further at inference time by instead of a straight text to token embedding to have a richer input processing model that takes text plus other known context data to produce an embedding holding that extra data. The input processing model would have to be trained to convert the text plus context into a vector containing that info in a form the model already understands.
I think this would be useful in a number of other areas as well, firstly being able to distinctly tag model generated output so it doesn't confuse itself. Tagging individual tokens from code to say how long this code has been in the project, if it comes from a version that lints correctly, compiles, is used in production etc. Not to mention tagging prompts from the user as prompts and filtering that same tagging out of all non-prompts so that prompt injection is much harder to do.
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> Models are still very bad at determining truth from opinion
Models are not bad at it. Models are not even trying. As you point out, it is about what is the most common text. It has nothing to do with logic.
On that I disagree. LLMs are not simple Markov chains.
They may fail at a lot of logical tasks, but I don't think that is the same as exhibiting no logic.
Getting even slightly respectable performance on the ARC-AGI test set, I think shows that there is at least some logical processing going on. General intelligence is another issue entirely, but there's definitely more than nothing.
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"
The problem is that the alternative is usually only sites created only to chase affiliate revenue. At least on Reddit, there’s a _chance_ I’m reading something from someone genuinely sharing their opinion.
For certain types of searches it isn't a bad idea. Sometimes you want to include unverified testimonials, hearsay and gossip in results. It doesn't necessarily mean that you lose track of how unreliable the source is.
These days, all the results that AREN'T from reddit are AI slop.
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name one dataset used for AI that doesn't include Reddit
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.
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Is it any different here? Is this not the standard setup for all forums and considered perfectly right and normal?
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>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.
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that's a feature not a bug.
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.
With each passing day, it feels like we see more evidence for the "America is run by lawyers" assertion.
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.
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> At this point it's the most astroturfed place on the internet.
YouTube is far worse and it isn’t even close.
Is it? I didn't notice any real issues besides crypto scam bots spamming comments with their conversations. Or do we count "influencers" peddling sponsored junk?
it's easier to tell on Youtube
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.
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> 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.
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Something can be most reliable without being reliable at all. I could call Reddit the place with most marbles in multiple piles of crap. Doesn't mean it still is not mostly pile of crap.
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.
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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.
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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.
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[flagged]
You aren't banned.
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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.
Following or observing?
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.
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The behavior described here, if true, is psychopathic.
A chilling read.
Con artist?
[dead]
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.
Moderation on Reddit has been questionable for a long time and its killing the site. To give some examples:
- /r/energy used to ban everyone in favour of nuclear energy
- If you post on /r/conservative you can expect to receive a bunch of bans from unrelated (popular) subs. Doesn't matter what you posted, being associated with that subs "taints" your account enough for some moderators.
- /r/UnitedKingdom banned me for critizing a government welfare program
- /r/assassinscreed banned me for critizing a character in their latest game
For me it makes sense that the smaller subreddits should have the freedom to moderate as they want but the larger reddits should aim to at allow opposing viewpoints to prevent echo chambers from forming. Moderation should be focused on quality, not on viewpoints. Obviously it goes without saying that threats of violence and celebration of murder have no place on any platform.
The irony is that all this censoring just creates a backlash and further polarisation. If you are only allowed to discuss certain subjects on a "left" space you both create the illusion that the left only cares about a subset of topics and by banning people you create resentment that drives them towards (more welcoming) extreme spaces.
There's many factors that form the political preferences and opinions of the younger generation but it would not suprise me if for a subset (young college educated males?) of them Reddit heavily contributes towards increased polarisation.
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I can’t help but notice that Twitter and TikTok didn’t get called for that session. In November 2023, Twitter went from a zero tolerance policy for violent speech to “we may remove or reduce the visibility of violent speech.” Seems really relevant for the topic of the hearings! And yet.
I’m thus unwilling to take Rep. Comey’s decision to call Reddit to testify as evidence of anything. Feels more like political theater to me. This doesn’t either condemn or absolve Reddit, it’s just not strong evidence.
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“The politically motivated assassination of Charlie Kirk claimed the life of a husband, father, and American patriot. In the wake of this tragedy, and amid other acts of politically motivated violence, Congress has a duty to oversee the online platforms that radicals have used to advance political violence. To prevent future radicalization and violence, the CEOs of Discord, Steam, Twitch, and Reddit must appear before the Oversight Committee and explain what actions they will take to ensure their platforms are not exploited for nefarious purposes,” said Chairman Comer.
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Reddit absolutely does have a moderator problem, as one would expect for a platform that relies on anonymous volunteers, but this might merely be the pretext for a witch hunt. e.g. The Trump administration may actually attempt to track down users who posted anti-Kirk or anti-Trump memes. It might be something even more though. There may be an attempt to coerce these platforms to start moderating in a way that's more favourable to Trump. Reddit is a hotbed of anti-Trump memes after all.
Protest is the bane of authoritarian regimes. That's why the Trump administration moved to lock down colleges so rapidly early this year. However, online social media also has significant capacity for influencing public opinion. This is why so many authoritarian regimes simply cut off internet access for their people. Others (e.g. China) have attempted to censor, manipulate, and control the internet rather than cutting it off.
Americans, and the world, should be paying close attention to these hearings. They should also pay attention to any sudden changes in behaviour of these companies. Merely being summoned to a hearing might be enough of a threat to make them give Trump all he asks for.
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There's an article on the reddit blog, still out on archive.org, showing that a huge percentage of the website's traffic comes from... Eglin AFB? in the United States. That base also happens to be home of at least three distinct units that engage in "cyber" stuff.
If those are illegal, where are the prosecutions?
In my understanding, libel is a civil tort, and the victim can sue if they think they have been libeled. And wishing someone dead isn't illegal in the US, though it may be elsewhere.
That may be a politically motivated congressional hearing. :-)
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An acquaintance who used to be active on reddit watched an angry mob "dox" his long-time pseudonym (they found a real person by the same name) with instructions to harass his employer and calls for IRL assault. Shortly afterward, his account was permabanned and he was unable to create a new one from the same IP.
This wasn't just a reddit problem, Twitter had plenty of the same cancel campaigns.
It's not a moderation problem. It's a design decision fundamental to their platform architecture.
Worth noting the heavy irony in talking about James Comer taking on bad-faith moderation, though.
How can we know that this or that example of speech is illegal if there are no charges and no trial? This rule by corporate fiat is exactly what we don’t need. It lacks democratic oversight. To say nothing of the way that disingenuous claims of “political violence” is being used to suppress legitimate dissent in our country.
> 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.
What you'll also see is a lot of accounts banned just for saying that they can't wait for say Vladimir Putin to die. I'm sure there are ways in which you could construe that to be 'politically motivated death' but that's just a weak excuse to ban an account ignoring the deeper subtext. Wanting mass murderers to shuffle off their mortal coil is a net positive for the world.
>They've now been asked to appear in front of Congress to address concerns about politically motivated violence being incited through their platform
Funny how for the last 30 years of right wing violence/extremists far exceeding left wing nothing was done at all about it, no questions asked. Hush hush, don't talk about gun control or the real causes of these peoples' actions.
But then the year that left wing violence finally exceeds right wing, they all start crying that it's unacceptable and something needs to be done about it.
Source: https://www.csis.org/analysis/left-wing-terrorism-and-politi... "So far, 2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right."
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The reason why Reddit is being "investigated" in this way is clearly and without any doubt political and has nothing to do with Reddit's moderation. There are strong anti-free-speech forces in the USA currently, and Reddit is #1 on their target list.
Anyone who can't see that is blind on the right eye, which is unfortunately a common phenomenon in certain circles nowadays.
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What country are you from? To "wish a politically motivated death" on someone is illegal there?
Reddit set itself up as a speakeasy, people speak their minds openly because it appears in some areas to be free of thought policing.
Do you think it is wrong to wish a dictator dead? Over the past decades USA has not only wished it, but made it happen, at the cost of many lives.
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> 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.
I wonder if it would work a free speech site to allow mods to not include a story in a category/ subreddit, but then just place that story into, say, /r/changemyview/banned. You'd still need sitewide moderation, but you'd always be able to see the way your feed was being edited within that context.
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.
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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.
There should be a public service campaign telling users something like "Even in the best case scenario, the moderators are weirdos. Most likely they're shills".
People with careers, families, friends and hobbies are mostly not going to spend their limited free time being a digital janitor for an anonymous online community.
People sitting alone in their apartment with nowhere to go and nothing to do and no one to spend time with, however, might find that being a Reddit moderator gives them a hobby, a sense of purpose, and feelings of power, importance or significance that they otherwise never get in real life.
Someone should make a social media site with inverted dynamics- users who only spend a few minutes per day on the site and post once every few weeks should be treated as the influential power users, while the people lurking and scrolling for 10 hours per day are deprioritized.
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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.
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> 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.
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Dang. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UX5ahM24o8A
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.
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Reddit being Reddit wasn't a problem until it became a source of truth and subsequently afforded consensus and an unwarranted sheen of credence by Agentic AI. As the author beautifully (albeit somewhat nihilistically) summarises:
"We have to remember that Reddit isn’t just Reddit anymore. The powers that be have decided that Reddit is infallible, a reliable set of training data for LLMs, and should be featured fucking everywhere."
Agreed, Reddit as a source of truth is the issue. Who in the their right mind would look at Reddit as whole and say that is an open, unbiased community focused on true and accurate information. And as the article and comments in this very thread show how moderation and its application within Reddit are "contaminated" which is a very good way to describe the situation.
That's really stupid. Anyone spending more than an hour reading reddit comments knows that reddit comments are not some bastion of truth.
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Social media should operate under open protocols, including moderation. Choosing moderation should be client-controlled.
These companies burn through VC money to build systems with network effects then turn around and effectively extract rent. Rent extraction is economically parasitic and anti-productive. This is exactly the sort of thing the government should address by mandating open protocols.
>Choosing moderation should be client-controlled.
An idea mostly doomed to failure, the vast majority of people (that are viewing the ads paying for the service) don't want do deal with that bullshit.
Moderation is a hard problem. You first have the flood/spam attacks that unless instantly dealt with will bring a service to its knees as there will be hundreds of bad messages for every good message creating an enormous bandwidth and filtering cost for each user.
Then there is a the porn problem. Any place that doesn't instantly block porn will be flooded with porn.
Then there is the flood of off topic bullshit that shows up in any given channel.
And from that point there is 20+ other little things that make people feel welcome and want to come to a channel in the first place.
Simply put anyone could have created and open protocol social media. No one has because it's hard and fraught with problems that your users won't want to deal with.
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Reddit has an easy way to choose moderation, just stop going to the reddits that are poorly moderated.
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.
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Reddit employees are also moderators that also directly influence public opinion and encourage witch hunts.
It’s a systemic Reddit-the-company issue. Google “Ethan Klein vs Reddit” if you want to go down a recent rabbit hole
Klein's case is about copyright (and a somewhat thin claim at that; it sure smells a lot like "I'm attempting to use copyright to quash criticism of me," and if the judge decides that's what's actually going on, he's going to lose his case). Unless I missed an update, he's suing Reddit to try and de-anonymize some people running the subreddit so that they can be properly the target of his copyright lawsuit.
Worth noting: he does not appear to have filed for defamation, which would be the thing he could complain if what they were saying was materially untrue.
A few years ago a NPR (National Public Radio) reporter called Reddit "...a Frankenstein's monster even they can't control."
There's no way to report a malicious sub as far as I can tell. I've been contacted by scammers that look very legit with the green Mod badge that shows in DMs.
This is how the entire internet functions.
We need to separate the web into data, identity, and moderation.
Users need to become aware that they're not using platforms, they are subscribing to moderator control.
Somebody owns ycombinator.com, can decide what is discussed, and if they ban you - us peasants can't tweak who is a moderating / recover your identity and data.
I'm convinced we'll get there eventually, but it starts with recognizing that the only thing special about Reddit is its multi-level-unpaid-moderator-marketing.
>What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.
it's a three-fold issue here.
1. Admins really don't care about moderator behavior. As long as you aren't breaking reddit you'll be ignored. Events like r/wow going private is one of the few times they directly intervene.
2. Moderator rankings is seniority first. Without admin intervention, you can have a "head moderator" who only really acts once a month and they will have the final say on anything in that sub.
3. Network effects. Like anything else the soluion of "start your own subreddit" is a doomed task unless the sub is very new. People will pool around the sub with the most subscribers. So avoiding the bad mod is difficult.
These are issues I was hoping in the '10's they'd attempt to address. But not much has changed to addreess this. At best the rule of only moderating 5 "high-traffic" subs may help the most extreme cases, but I'm not confident.
Isn't the solution to "fork" the community?
If the moderator is really that bad the new community takes over (yes its more complex than that, but broad strokes).
Its not that different then an open source project with bad maintainers.
Yes, but how will you get the word out? The moderator can delete all your promotion of the breakaway subreddit within their subreddit. How are you going to get eyeballs?
And the truly vindictive moderators will start spamming your new subreddit with e.g. child pornography, and then immediately reporting it to the admins. You had best have your own moderator team running 24/7 to cope with intentional sabotage coming from a person who lives their whole life on Reddit, and will stop at nothing to keep control of the little power that they have. You won't be able to pin this sabotage on the moderator, unless you're in their private Discord channel where they coordinate the attack, which you obviously won't be as you're an outsider. Then they will openly gloat about doing it, because they're on the Right Side Of History, and you are Nazis and deserve everything you get.
Reddit also has default subreddits, or rather had them, but they still hold significant first-mover advantage and enjoy network effects. There's a reason that /r/pics is full of insipid drivel, but there's not a more popular /r/pics2
I'm equally confused at just how bad Reddit is at identifying and removing bad actors to the point that I'm convinced it must be an intentional.
I'm not sure if the reason may be as simple as the desire to pump their user numbers for earnings, or if it's something more egregious than that. It's not clear to me how a company owned by the public which relies on advertisers for revenue has been able to carry on for so long being a propaganda farm for foreign agents and marketing bots.
Oh it’s deliberate. It’s been THE online platform for far left radicalization and extremist views for at least a decade now. It’s by far the most intolerant social media platform relative to the mainstream platforms.
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> What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.
I don’t see this as a big a problem as you do.
As soon as you solve this, then you have the issue of people you see as good actors being ousted and having their influence taken down. If the bad guys can be silenced then so can the good guys and then it’s just a matter of how we figure out the good guys and the bad guys!
There are lots of very large subreddits that are prolific at shadowbanning people -- you might think you're participating in the conversation for quite a while and people just aren't upvoting you or responding to you for whatever reason, and your posts aren't visible at all. /r/worldnews is very free with them, for example.
Surely bad actors leave a fairly clear data trail. Are there no analytics being used to track this sort of behaviour? Much of the scale of this comes from being able to do it with impunity. If bad actors were exposed, even after the fact, it would be a deterrent to others.
New account just to say I know this feeling very well. Tech-parallel sub has a moderator that does literally nothing other than shittalk a specific group once every 2 weeks. People have mentioned lack of moderation effort.
I can't say who, because the motherfucker is on this website and will instantly deny it all.
> What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.
It's more or less an open marketplace, with only a few high-level rules.
Why would it be resilient to these kinds of attacks? Human society as a whole isn't - if it were, I wouldn't have a job.
> A bad actor mod of a popular subreddit can persist for years, visibly, without people managing either to oust the mod, or to take down the sub's influence.
So, kind of like how bad companies persist in dominant market positions?
Bad actors put in a lot more effort to protect themselves than people with lives and jobs have to take them down. Anyone can bitch about Wells Fargo and Comcast, and 'tyrranical' mods, but at the end of the day, most people aren't switching their ISP or going to a forked community.
You don't have to be a moderator to poison the well.
Post a shitload of bad faith attacks and slander. Not as a root comment. You don't have to actually relate to the parent at all, you're just trying to get your talking points out there. If someone calls you out? Gish gallop never actually addressing their comments. It's another opportunity for you to spew whatever bullshit you want.
If they follow you around and get more engagement/up votes? Block them. Now you are free to continue to post whatever BS you want without any of those pesky fact checkers.
> have been an occasional thing for about a decade.
I'd estimate way higher. Most moderators of meaningful subreddits are corrupt. Occasionally one makes it visible.
Yep. For example anyone can own /r/canada, which seems like a legit Canadian representation for anyone searching about Canada.
And then make it a very opinionated/hatred/political avenue. Maybe of a right wing group.
Not saying it has happened, or that it looks like that. But it can happen very easily.
> What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.
not a bug, a feature. those who can pay for and use the API -- which makes them money -- get to influence the discussion.
that's the business model. they DGAF about free speech or reasonable, well run subreddits so long as they can still get paid.
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.
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.
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.
Im not shocked at all. Not only do I think they were knowingly letting this kind of thing happen for years, I think they were actively participating in such sketchy practices for profit. Which easily explains how reddit could "lose" money for years and years but continuously be given more and more funding and increasingly hosting more and more content on their own servers. If they were actually losing money, they wouldn't have started hosting images and then later videos on their own servers while pushing people away from 3rd party hosts.
Not really. Most bootcamps are trash. Legal recourse would only be available if he said stuff that wasnt true
Under you assumptions, a really facile conclusion to make would be that Novati is trashing one boot camp to promote his own trash boot camp.
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Did you read the article? It quotes him saying many things that aren't true. For that reason there probably is legal recourse for a defamation case, but it's the kind of thing that takes years, and costs a lot of money in the interim.
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Why on earth should your brand new account be considered trustworthy when it comes to commenting on either party?
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It’s weird to refer to yourself by your own surname, dude.
I'm french
I was banned from the France subreddit for saying Hamas fighters dress as civilians.
The problem of Reddit goes beyond astroturfing.
It's a judge jury executioner problem.
Moderation is the most expensive problem of online platforms.
Twitter is the other opposite end of Reddit. It's not exactly better either.
The irony of your post being downvoted for stating facts (i.e. what personally happened to you).
It's not a fact, but a first-hand recount of a first-hand experience. The bias of a person of themselves affects that on at least two levels: first, on how they perceive their own deed, second, on how they recount the perception of that deed.
Not all facts are on topic.
Some times you can state facts and still be wrong in other ways.
Example:
If one side says "Hamas dresses as civilians" to excuse killing civilians, they're factually correct and criminal.
If someone then goes online and drops "Hamas dresses as civilians" they're factually correct and reinforcing a criminal's defense.
Anyway, the morality of IDF behavior is apparant to an impartial behavior by just considering the thought experiment that IDF doesn't killing Israeli civilians "just in case" they're Hamas in disguise. They only kill Palestinian civilians "just in case" they're Hamas.
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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?
What about the reverse of this, where the mods seem just a little to enthusiastic about one particular product?
Astroturfing?
Follow the money.
I agree with other commenters - it's not always about money. Sometimes a customer just had a good experience with a product, and it catches.
Marketers love this sort of organic promotion. That doesn't make it less authentic.
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!
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In regards to the vast majority of reddit moderators:
_how_?
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.
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The competitor is Michael Novati, who is known as the originator of the “Coding Machine” archetype of principal engineer at Meta.
TFA gets the Risk board game story from the same article where I first heard of him: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-coding-machin...
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?
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> And I believe that’s why Michael is doing what he’s doing. He wins when Codesmith loses.
Yes.
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.
That's some deep dark shit, if it's true...
And that's the problem with this interweb lark, made worse by aggregators who's algorithms can be gamed, and now we have stochastic LLMs adding to the remix, how do we know what is true?
The narrative related here is frighteningly believable, and, no doubt, so were all the reddit posts.
The difference between the narrative described by this narrative, and the narrative related in the narrative, is that one is death by a thousand cuts, the other either a well deserved take-down or an undeserved attempt at one.
I can't tell the difference, but reddit should be able to.
So this is really about whether reddit sees it's reputation as an asset to be monetized in the short-term, or invested in for the long-term. This is the classic tension between the brand manager and the brand guardian, maximize the cashflow or maximize the balance sheet value, and tells you almost everything important about a company's core culture.
How reddit handles this, it could be argued, will define reddit going forwards.
I watch with baited breath...
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.
What is the suggestion for filtering out the grifters from these places on the internet that have become super valuable?
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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.
LOL He show his github profile, private, and it has a link to the competitor. To me this reinforces the linked article.
Nice competitor you have there, would be a shame if someone did the same to it.
It truely is a car crash.
It seems like he can't stop and will end up in court at some point.
Reading it, seems like the downvotes are deserved.
Downvoting prevents other people from seeing his comments. You need to upvote to make sure everybody sees "his own words", as he put it. That's for the common good.
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Sadly, Reddit has become a disease upon "normal" society.
Also, sadly, is that it is extremely addictive; it is my version of YouTube shorts or TikTok (which I do not use). It is so easy to say "I'm just going to browse for a few minutes", and have it turn into MUCH longer than a few minutes. Those darn cute cat videos!!!
I suspect this is true for almost every somewhat relevant subreddit. Everything has been captured, someone has taken control of the politburo and is defining the message. I've been using the site since 2008 and within the last couple of years it feels like you cannot post anything unless you know someone.
I feel like it was this way 10 years ago. Once r/TheDonald successfully gamed the system everyday I think people with interest took notice. Now you can be in a niche sub reddit that averages 40 comments on a post. Then a post that could be adjacent to some hot U.S. political wedge topic gets mentioned and there are 300 comments from users who never take part in the discussion. Even something very general like "students are protesting tuition hikes" the small city I live in gets posted and it gets flooded by people who never comment. If you hit a hot topic like Israel / Palestine, the Ukraine war you see it as well.
Reddit, Fackbook, Twitter, TikTok etc are the places where people get their information and form their options. That why the the wealthy and powerful are buying them outright, or paying to push their influence into every aspect of the conversation. Poisoning the well or "Flooding the zone with shit".
Reddit became what Digg was with MrBabyMan. Or actually something worse.
It's bad enough that one Reddit moderator can wield so much power with such impunity, but /u/spez handing over all of Reddit's data for LLMs to use has now poisoned the chatbots that so many are using in place of search engines.
Codesmith and other affected should probably sue Michael for defamation, harassment and other charges, and try to get like $500 million in reparations.
and btw - for all of Michael’s attempts to say “we’re not competitors!”, i think its pretty damn clear they are.
Absolutely a competitor:
https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/08/software-engineer-training...
I wonder - if there are evidences of such behaviour (and there are because they've been shown in this article), why can't the company sue the moderator?
I shudder at the thought of "striving to become a Reddit moderator." So much effort to achieve such a petty political goal. What sort of person does this? I cannot comprehend people who would spend their life doing that... Out of all the things a person could do. Do Reddit moderators get a kick out of manipulating people's beliefs and banning people discussing niche topics? I don't get it.
Power. Spending 5 hours a day spamming and commenting is extremely easy compared to actually doing something positive for society.
I think everyone here has demonstrated how a mod is objectively lying or wrong and gotten banned for it. From their point of view, they won. For a loser, winning online arguments is the best feeling in the world.
Resonates. IMO, if it pays a fixed salary, that's one thing. Makes sense. But as some means of gaining power over others; or for kickbacks, it's pathetic.
TBH I don't think the goal is petty. I think there's a lot of money involved. That moderator runs a company in the space. Seems more about lining their pockets than revenge.
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 I could possibly pull off.
Thank you for this corner of the internet, dang (and a couple others).
Edit: mobile typos
Dang?
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The overwhelming majority of question closures on Stack Overflow are not done by moderators. And they are done according to clear guidelines that are openly and publicly discussed on the meta site, which have reasons behind them that have been discussed over many years and refined according to the community's consensus about the purpose of the site.
The overwhelming majority of people coming to Stack Overflow are expecting the site to provide something that it explicitly is not trying to provide. The site in fact exists specifically because of frustration with traditional forums where people did get the UX they expect from Stack Overflow (i.e.: individualized volunteer consultation and troubleshooting).
Asking a question on Stack Overflow is not about making your code work — no matter how much users might want their code to work, or want Stack Overflow to function that way. By design.
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.
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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.
>I wonder what makes a platform like HN work, but not the others.
Does HN work? We are not allowed to discuss all kinds of things. There are vague and unpublished rules about how things are ranked and how the front page is managed.
Did you know that HN accounts owned by people who have been selected by YC are "special" and can see each other highlighted orange?
How many flags does it take to kill a discussion?
Similar thing with the subreddit r/NYCapartments. Moderators are basically rental companies and agents, very convenient to do some lobbying, preventing price discussions etc.
It is crazy how some communities are being moderated by people with clear interests.
Everyone take a moment to read and absorb Novati's rebuttal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45524707
Novati makes two relevant points:
1) Article author did not reach out to Novati for comment.
2) Codesmith ran a misguided marketing campaign that ran afoul of Reddit auto-mods.
These seem like reasonable responses to me. Are they true? I don't know, but I would like reasonable discussion about it.
I really get the impulse to vent when reading about something so outrageous, and in a way this kerfuffle represents the arbitrary unfairness of power leveraged from the shadows, but is that happening here?
Or you could just downvote without comment. That's an option.
"And since Reddit is considered the default source of all human knowledge now, [Reddit threads pop to the top of Google.]"
I hope this is sarcasm
Just hyperbole. Obviously reddit is not the default source of all human knowledge, but many times, it's the one place to get critical information from - as in, it's mostly the only place where negative information have a chance to be not suppressed.
Reddit API scandal tells you everything you need to know about the platform itself. The CEO is not giving a f to anything.
Moderators there means if I don't like your POV, your posts will be deleted if I have good humour or perma ban if I have had a bad day.
Start using Reddit too much and you quickly start getting depressed with all the shit going on in there.
> Any time you attempt to defend yourself in the main subreddit, posts get deleted. Or you’re accused of running a Reddit bot army.
Not sure what's the story from the other side, but...
One strategy to counter this could be buying ads on Reddit to expose this, with evidence to show of course. And if possible, place the ad right on the offending subreddit.
And don't forget, if you have enough evidence to show, you can always sue. So, do both at the same time and keep them busy.
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.
Keep up man. It's Rippling vs. Deel.
I legit wish some of my harder daily habit heatmaps looked as good and for as long as his negative comments ones.
A similar story happens to Chinese company, Xiaomi vs Huawei
Turns out you only need dozens of Internet accounts to smear a Fortune 500 company.
Which one of Xiaomi and Huawei is being crippled?
Mostly Xiaomi. Huawei was notorous for its "wolf pack" saturation attacks.
Xiaomi had a very clever defence tactic. It's a long story.
did they sue?
Reddit moderation is a crap
I’ve no idea whether the allegations in this piece are true.
But what is noteworthy is that the author of the article has also - on the same blog - written a bunch of content about how Reddit is used for spamming search results.
That includes one piece with detailed step by step instructions for how to spam Reddit apparently because Google and Reddit have poisoned the well of SEO.
“Why I’m Sharing Secret Tips on How to Manipulate Reddit: Shouldn’t I keep this all to myself? […] Because fuck Google that’s why… Reddit used to be a reliable source… Google torched all that.”
Make of that what you will - but the author seems to waging a one man campaign targeting what he identifies as dodgy Reddit moderation practices.
When you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail and all that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1o1guxj/tho...
I wonder how long this will stay up.
If you read the thread, the amount of fake accounts supporting the moderator is just insulting to me as a reader. Just bizarre.
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?
Yeah. The mod of Seattle would ban anyone and everyone for the littlest things. Iirc, he was early on Reddit and had created the sub, and as the community grew his abuse got worse until there was a mass migration.
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So the moderator of this Reddit group, has a company who directly competes with Bootcamps. What are Reddit policies on moderators competing commercial interests?
Could one person moderate r/azure while working for aws ?
Thinking of actually being moderator. Who outside industry would want to moderate such place? Probably for free... And I mean who would be such actually independent person.
Honest question because I just don't know: Is Reddit shielded by Section 230 for comments made by moderators?
I would say moderation is by definition editorial, but I have learned to not confuse logic with the law.
Moderators don't work for Reddit, though?
What an unhinged individual
If this would happen to me I would go nuclear. I would probably not retaliate until there's evidence like the author listed. But when I do, I would duck and cover.
Michael Novati really dug himself a hole with his words and actions. Does anyone know what was wrong with this guy for that level of obsession? Did we ever find out where his personal vendetta started?
This is oddly a case to signify there is value in an AI moderation tools - to avoid bias inherent to human actors.
The AI moderation tools are trained on the Reddit data that is actively being sabotaged by a competitor. If an AI were to take up moderation now, mentioning this specific bootcamp would probably get you warned or banned because of how bad it is according to the training data.
AI is as biased as humans are, perhaps even more so because it lacks actual reasoning capabilities.
> [AI] lacks actual reasoning capabilities.
Evals are showing reasoning (by which I mean multi-step problem solving, planning, etc) is improving over time in LLMs. We don't have to agree on metaphysics to see this; I'm referring to the measurable end result.
Why? Some combination of longer context windows, better architectures, hybrid systems, and so on. There is more research about how and where reasoning happens (inside the transformer, during the chain of thought, perhaps during a tool call).
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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.
> to my surprise, Gemini infers gender of the user depending on the prompt/what the question is about
What, automatically (and not, say, in response to a "what do you suppose my gender is" prompt)? What evidence do we have for this?
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 big advantage of LLMs is that we can test on the biases and attempt to correct them.
We'll never get it 100% right but having something more sensible and neutral than the average Reddit mod is not a high bar ;)
> to avoid bias inherent to human actors.
Do you understand how AI tools are trained?
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
Considering coding boot camps are borderline snake oil I'm struggling to take any of this seriously.
I don't think they're as bad as snake oil.
I taught at one for a year and a good number of my students (it was above 50% last time I took a pulse) had life-changing career switches.
I think what people don't realize is that the student is really the difference maker, and that it really takes a lot of effort, dedication, and interest to succeed.
I think it's possible some of these folks could have "self-taught" their way to the same technical proficiency, but it would've taken longer, and they wouldn't have had as much of a professional network of alums, sponsors, etc upon completion.
Did you teach in 2021? That kind of ratio seems unthinkable now. Hope I'm wrong though!
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(I was a codesmith resident in 2022, just as the covid hiring bubble started to burst, take that bias as you will)
You're entirely right. What Codesmith teaches isn't revolutionary. Lars touches on it in his blog, but there are really only three things that have contributed to the success they had, and none of them have anything to do with the technology or languages/frameworks they teach:
1. Build a very strong enrollment pipeline that filters for highly motivated individuals who are also technically capable of self-learning. There's a lot of (free) coursework in their CSX platform that needs to be completed prior to even enrolling in the main program as well as passing both a behavioral and technical interview to be accepted. This sets a higher technical floor so the program can start fast without the risk of losing students. Good candidates => good graduates.
2. Focus the program primarily on self-learning principles. "Hard learning" was always Codesmith's motto. Lessons were very high level in order to push students toward official documentation. Instructors/fellows/mentors all actively discouraged the use of tutorials which are a waste of time. Projects proposals are screened for uniqueness. You don't learn anything following step by step instructions for an app someone else built to solve a problem that isn't yours. Unique problems will require unique solutions which will require actual understanding of the technology.
3. Go really hard on on soft skills and leveraging past experiences. Be it technical or otherwise, nearly everyone had at least a few years of experience in "real" careers. Residents have already proven they can interview well enough to be hired at least by someone. Of my cohort of ~30-35 residents, I can only remember a couple that I didn't want to work with due to either their technical ability as the program ramped up or their coworking ability in general. A brief scroll through r/cscareerquestions or r/csmajor shows how abysmally low the bar is when it comes to soft skills in tech. Even if you ignore college students and only look at those that have been hired in industry, now that I can see it firsthand, the "average" Codesmith student is astonishingly above average in this regard.
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It's really not rocket science. When you start with a pool of people that are personable, technically capable of learning, career oriented, and mature, you're obviously going to get graduates that are able to punch way above their weight-class. Once you find 30-40 of those people, all Codesmith has to do is put them in the same room together for a few months, without the distractions of life and work, and just facilitate their own, collaborative self-learning.
This is in stark contrast with many bootcamps who will accept anyone that's willing to part with their money without any screening of ability. These I'd truly call snake oil praying on people's desire for a better life.
Reddit moderation is the most undemocratic process to ever masquerade as a democratic process.
Yeah, I don't doubt this story for a minute. Wish we could pin this thread to the top of Hacker News for an entire year, its that important. In the old days if you were rich you would just buy a paper or radio station. Now you become a Reddit mod... Crazy statement, but many use it to crowd-source info on products. That's powerful if you control it.
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.
The semantic web tried to fix this problem but it never caught on.
That initiative was so ahead of its time.
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.
Who is out there launching new Reddit alternatives that could catch on?
Why have they not sued him? Like isn't this slander?
> 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.
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.
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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.
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Ex Meta, well I never.
a simple lawsuit will fix this. reddit has lots of money
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716044
This really makes me mad. Codesmith was clearly a top tier bootcamp. I joined several of their public sessions when i was looking for a bootcamp and they were fantastic.
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.
I have a 14 year old account on Reddit (and it's my second account) and I honestly don't enjoy using the site anymore.
At this point it's a zombie, it might look somewhat like the good old Reddit that we all enjoyed but the light inside has long gone out.
That sounds bad and unfair... so... the victim is a coding bootcamp. Oh well, anyway, next post.
Honestly, why not name the competitor?
They do - formation.dev
Is Lars now the contact person for Reddit malfeasance?
They
oh man, you are lucky your competitors don't have a downvote button on hackernews
I'm going to focus on the MODERATION ACCUSATION first since that seems to be the main issue.
What moderating r/codingbootcamp actually looks like:
I don't own the sub - I report to the owner who asked me to help after I'd been one of the most active and helpful contributors. The coding bootcamp industry is absolutely infested with astroturfing. Brand new accounts, manufactured conversations, fake testimonials. It's constant daily spam trying to manipulate people making $15K-20K decisions.
My job is to support authentic discussion. We have above-average Reddit AI filters. We generally don't review flagged content because we can't tell who these suspicious brand new accounts are. Occasionally we approve legitimate posts caught in filters.
The accusation that I delete Codesmith's posts:
This is not only false, it's the exact opposite of what I do. I regularly break the sub's rules to manually approve Codesmith content that Reddit's automated systems flag as spam. I shouldn't be doing this - the same rules should apply to everyone - but I do it constantly because their posts get caught unfairly.
Why are their posts getting flagged?
In mid-2024, Codesmith hired a marketing contractor to post on Reddit. Their CEO even sent me proof of this. They probably didn't know it at the time, but this guy was running one of the most extensive astroturfing operations I've ever seen. Dozens of high-karma sockpuppet accounts. Fake conversations across hundreds of subreddits promoting hemorrhoid cream, garage door openers, lava lamps, custom suits, you name it.
I helped uncover this network and Reddit nuked all those accounts. But Codesmith's legitimate accounts got tangled up in it, and Reddit's AI started auto-suspending them by association - IP addresses, posting patterns, behavioral signals.
I explained this to Codesmith. Multiple times. By email. By phone with their CEO directly. With screenshots. With specific suggestions on rebuilding trust signals through authentic engagement.
They accused me of "deleting their posts." I told them I was approving their content, not removing it. They didn't listen, didn't change their approach, and to this day their content gets constantly flagged.
The evidence is in their own sub, look at some of their official AMAs:
https://www.reddit.com/r/codesmith/comments/1iduu2d/ https://www.reddit.com/r/codesmith/comments/1ilpihd/ https://www.reddit.com/r/codesmith/comments/1gvazaz/
Go look right now. Count how many comments are flagged/suspended/deleted/collapsed. Roughly half get flagged by Reddit within weeks. Not by me - I'm banned from that sub. That doesn't happen with legitimate engagement.
There was a fake account on LinkedIn liking all their stuff that is now suspended as well.
With my moderator hat on, I'm being accused of bias while actively protecting Codesmith from the consequences of their own marketing decisions. I approve posts that should probably stay filtered. I give them more leniency than other bootcamps. I've consistently tried explaining how Reddit works and how to fix their reputation signals.
On my criticism of their program:
Yes, I've been critical of specific Codesmith practices since 2022 - whether bootcamp grads should present 3-week projects as "4 months of mid-level experience" or market themselves as "mid-level engineers" with zero professional experience. I have strong opinions backed by outcomes data and CIRR reports.
But that has nothing to do with how I moderate. I've been equally critical of other bootcamps like TripleTen, BloomTech, App Academy. I recommend a dozen or two people go to Codesmith! At the same time I was questioning their marketing. My moderation standards apply to everyone except Codesmith, who I give more leeway to.
Bottom line: If I wanted to hurt Codesmith as a moderator, I would simply let Reddit's automated systems do their job. I wouldn't override the filters.
These accusations could all have been avoided by not moderating a community in which you stand to have a direct reputational gain.
You inserted yourself in to this situation. There is an easy path out of it.
One thing I learned from lawyers is that not only impropriety should be avoided, the appearance of impropriety should also be avoided.
I checked the actual /r/codesmith links you posted. They all seem fake. Most replies are from users who are either deleted, or new accounts with a single comment. Note: I am not saying the founder of Codesmith did this, or that these are fake 100%. Just suspicious.
And the fact that you used your real name when being a mod gives you strong credibility. You weren't looking to hide your involvement, since you weren't doing anything wrong, in your opinion. This is unlike the "fake" mods who will have multiple levels of indirection, with fake post histories, etc. Astroturfing / shilling 101 is never use your real name.
And overall, if what you're saying is correct, the author owes you an apology. And so does the HN crowd. HN, although a good crowd in general, is super-susceptible to "witch hunts". I don't like witch hunts + character assassinations. So that's why I'm defending you.
P.s. It's ironic that Lars, the author, is a master affiliate marketer + growth hacker. He's started an affiliate company that did $7 million in revenue. I don't say he is an unethical person. But from what I know about this field, it's almost always on the grey line (and he's also admitted to this). See his video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QnwHAnJwv-k. And this is just what is public, if we were to "dig up" some of his stuff, it is possible one could spin it to make him look bad. My point is, he shouldn't exaggerate things to make you look bad. And the same warning applies to me or anyone.
You're seriously gonna Streisand yourself with your defenses here. Nothing but narcissistic defense mechanisms on display.
Doesn't come across as a narcissist to me. He's just giving his side. Sure, he might have done things that were not right, but the article paints him as a monster. You should but yourself in his shoes? Are you squeaky clean? What if someone took something that you did that was grey, and framed you as a monster?
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Oh, one more thing. All of these "bootcamp" companies are known to be bad, and HN knows this. Perhaps "Codesmith" is better, I can believe that. I did a quick search, and it does seem like it's above the pack. I'm not trying to knock down Codesmith, the founder Will seems genuine. but it's still very plausible it has some of the same "badness" of bootcamps, at least according to Michael. And one might ask, why did Michael focus on Codesmith? The answer is two-fold. 1) he targeted other bootcamps as well 2) and Codesmith claimed explicitly they were unlike other bootcamps, and Michael was on a personal "jihad" to make sure they were called out.
Thanks for your side.
I hate fake reviews by competitors. But I read the article myself, and it seems exaggerated. It did read like a hit piece, and did feel ironic. This was before I even read your response.
I don't know who's saying the truth, but it's never too late to better one's self. So that's the advice to myself and you.
I comment a lot about them and I have gotten annoyed every now and then when my tone was not professional, but most of critical comments about Codesmith center on The fact that their website has a giant banner saying from zero to mid-level engineer and I think that that's misleading and setting people up for failure in the software industry regardless of their outcomes or their talent. I'm open to hearing all sides of this, but it's a very reasonable opinion to have and state.
https://www.codesmith.io/is-codesmith-worth-it
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Can we get a tldr since the site is down?
Here's an archive link: https://archive.is/w0izj
Please post an archive link
https://archive.is/w0izj
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My kind?
Genuinely curious what kind of generalization you are making.
Too much swearing in that article for me to take it more than a rant. I couldn't finish it.
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.
Have you built a business?
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.
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.
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There is a popular subreddit for people with hair loss ("tressless" with almost 500k members) and anyone who recommends the drug Finasteride (banned in Sweden and full of bad side effects e.g. depression, erectile dysfunction, muscle atrophy) gets upvoted and anyone who recommends against it gets their post removed from the front page of the subreddit and a squad of people attacking you. It is obvious some pharmaceutical company is behind this.
I would not underestimate how badly people make things part of their identity and see attacks against those things as attack against them. So it might be just moderators being overinvested in something on personal level.
Of course there will always be a mixture of things. Some of these people attacking could just be insecure people trying to justify their life choices through strangers (ton of those across the internet) but it is at such a scale and consistency that the stakes seem higher than that.
Very interesting that this got downvoted. Shouldn't even be controversial on HN. There might be an actual cult around this drug and not just a moderator issue.
Yup, I have now observed this a few times go up and down a couple of times. Very strange behaviour surrounding this without any negative response. Society is cooked.
Regardless of Michael's issues with Codesmith, I will say as someone who looked into bootcamps before, Codesmith is infamous for having people misrepresent their job experience to get swe jobs (even getting hired as seniors!). This is also why they used to have some of the highest job salary outcomes. I'm not going to link anything but this can be confirmed by just searching "Codesmith" in Linkedin and seeing how many Codesmith bootcampers are "senior" software engineers on "open source" codesmith "companies"
Yeah Codesmith is trash and I am seriously wondering if this thread itself is being swarmed by their PR people.
or maybe you’re part of formation’s PR. The article lays out the reality.
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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.
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> 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.
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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.
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i heard this has actually been going on for 3 years
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.
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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.
> 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.
You’re doing the same thing here that the article is accusing you of doing on Reddit.
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.
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> 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?
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.
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No doubt the industry suffered due to a market downturn, but your continuous posts and attacks worsened the situation for that company. Based on your Reddit activity, it appears to have been driven by a personal vendetta. If they pursue a defamation case, the evidence could strongly work against you. The overwhelming proof he presented of your actions toward the company would be difficult to defend. I honestly can’t understand why anyone would risk their own reputation—and that of their family—for dishonest gain. Most people are civil in such cases, but not everyone is if they conclude that evil was done. Scary situation to be in.
You don’t know when to stop, do you?
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Oh you are gonna taste your own medicine here. Welcome.
He's not losing millions of dollars by being here. A taste of his own medicine should be given in court.
You should have never started moderating that subreddit because of the conflict of interest, it is completely unacceptable.
There are people coming forward with evidence on Michael Novati’s digital stalking. One previous instructor at code smith(who also worked at Microsoft at the time), said he was digitally stalked, Michael Novati found his employment history and kept calling him out publicly so he would get into trouble with Microsoft. All this despite the person having clearance from Microsoft to work as an instructor at codesmith. With the twisted logic I see this guy using here, I would assume he doesn’t even see this as digital stalking. I guess that’s what being the “number 1 code commiter at Meta”(according to his linkedin) would do to you.
I've been trying to comment and post on reddit u/codingbootcamp and nothing goes through completely suppress by the mod.
My comments are removed and i can't even make a post. I'm following all guide lines and nothing goes through.
Here is something I posted.
I want to raise a concern about moderator conduct. I have evidence (screenshots and permalinks) that suggests a moderator may have accessed and referenced private information about former employees and their family members. That kind of behavior would be unethical and could violate subreddit policy on harassment/privacy.
Mods: please confirm whether these actions occurred and, if so, what steps you will take. I’m happy to provide the evidence via modmail.
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.
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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.
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I commented on the moderation stuff only to start, https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=45524707&goto=item%3Fi...
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I hope he sues you.
https://www.google.com/search?q=intentional+interference+wit...
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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.
Lofgren is a critic of Reddit moderation. It's extremely unlikely that he was paid for his blog entry, and he's not affiliated with anyone involved.
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.
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Hey Michael -- you're a fucking loser.
Hey Fuck You Michael, you are a piece of shit and no one should get to know you. Just got aware what shitty people exist in this field
His responses here and on reddit remind me of Karoline Levitt responding to press.
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