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

Yes, I had that in mind too.

Its worth any maintainer to be familiar with these methods to build up defences. With a few sock puppet accounts a single person could do it on their spare time. A nation state or criminal full time enterprise could do several attacks.

It's scary and immoral but I find it fascinating too. Like the dark side of the how to win friends books.

Security.

Seniority. Older mods can remove younger mods.

Fitting username ... I'm the person who posted the comment just above calling out Novati for not moderating the alleged sock.

Use your real account michael

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What do you mean the facts are not very hard. If you understand just a bit of LLM you will clearly identify a Distill LLM. All the point is to delete the user because he had created some incredible models beating The best proprietary models out there. The pretext was that he was a fraud and his models were not a distill but a copy. Therefor I show clearly that he was framed and his work deserves credit. I still have the models and scripts for all the procedure. I am not interested to argue further, but it is clearly visible to me. The post in HN also is well voted and most importantly commented, meaning that users have a lot to say about it.

My website never served any of that. You got to stop using this very well known techniques by associating further names (knowing perfectly that HN comments get indexed very fast). The domain in question Sverken.se was always used for science or respectable business. Please refrain mentioning otherwise as I repeat, at any point my company website did such thing. Whoever keep associating them further is doing so by malicious intentions.

>The issue is NOT lack of such database per se, the issue is lack of impartial oracle used to build such database. You don't need a perfectly impartial oracle, sure that would make the task much simpler. You build examples from instances where this is generally agreed to be the case.

The notable aspect here is that oracles predict the future. but all data is from the past. You can build examples from cases where, with the benefit of hindsight you know the truth of the outcome even if the majority consensus was the opposite at the time that the data was created.

Perhaps Bitcoin is a good example, albeit on a different time scale. There are ample examples of arguments about Bitcoin predicting various outcomes, that data is available now. At some point in the future it will be obvious which of those predicted outcomes is false. Any widely believed outcome that turned out to be false is a candidate for the data set. If there is any signal in that data to reveal that it is was going to be false the model has potential to learn it. if there is no signal in that data then on average signalless examples will balance out to have no overall impact.

>The issue is lack of context informing us of the sincerity behind the claim, therefore proposal is to use LLMs to infer that. When presented with difficulties inferring that context from immediate message, your proposal is to build broader context and then feed it to LLM. To do what, spit it back packed in certain language tone? Do you see the tautology here? There is no tautology here. The additional context is the provenance of the document and a combination of data that is clearly quantifiable by automated processes. If you note all of the examples of tagging types I gave, they are all things that can be calculated analytically. Age of code can be determined by looking at git logs, when a model generates output itself it can tag that to say that it was generated by itself. User input can be identified at the user interface and all other data that enters the model can be therefore marked as not coming via the user interface.

I proposed no LLM to do any of this, nor even for the translation of that data into the model. I suggested a model, that may involve a transformer, it may not. That input layer is only a translator to turn that additional context into terms that the LLM knows.

A LLM will have an internal way to represent the notion of code that was part of a successful build. Or that a word is from a peer reviewed scientific paper,or a reddit post, or that it does not know the source. Any information you can analytically determine about a source can be fed into the LLM along with its token if you know how the LLM represents that information in its embedding space.

Turning data we know something about into a structure that is how an existing model would represent the same thing is precisely a task that machine learning can currently solve.

It's slop all the way down.

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Reddit also has a ban appeals process. But it's the same people you're appealing to - the mods.

Speaking for myself I generally will unban if people are nice and express understanding for why they were banned.

But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics)

What are some examples? In my experience there are numerous other communities of various types for any given interest. Reddit is just kind of a convenient surface level a lot of the time.

> But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics) so you're either there or nowhere.

Reddit wasn't even that good as a community space in the first place. It was a content aggregator with user-moderated comment sections, and those make for pretty awful communities because on anything remotely controversial you get factions dog piling each other trying to hide each other's posts.

That said, communities are all on discord now, and quite honestly I think it's for the better. It gives moderators a lot more discretion, but balances the scales by making it very easy to create new servers where one can invite like-minded people and grow organically.

Reddit always was a flawed place

What you mention has nothing to do with their capabilities.

I was banned from /r/sourdough for asking a question about rye flour, because someone dug into my post history and saw that I had posted a few times on the Catholicism subreddit. Someone's first instinct when reading a completely benign, neutral question was to see if I was on this or that "team".

Let me guess: it was a Pizza Cake Comics post? (Context, she's made posts about how women are always paranoid about men and men minimize/make fun of that and she says she's not anti men as she has a son herself. All this (edit: plus lots of commenters and mod drama) in the span of a single comic btw.)

Edit: this comment on such a politically touchy topic lasted almost 40 minutes before getting 2 downvotes, honestly I'm impressed it lasted almost an hour.

Of course as always, the downvote is a signal of communication, and without a reply, all communication I receive is that this is a sensitive topic. If there's anything factually wrong I'll be happy to change it. (And I would consider myself having spent ~~too much~~ enough time on reddit to know which comics are popular and/or get folks banned easily.)

> For example, perhaps they could institute some sort of system where members of a subreddit could vote out moderators who abuse their power.

Leaving aside everything else wrong with that, that would be trivial to abuse, especially with the help of sockpuppetry but easily enough even without that.

That's pretty crazy. I've been on reddit since its inception and have never been banned from pics despite having posted on all kinds of unsavory subreddits over the decades.

> If this guy had disclosed his conflict of interest, he would just have been an obsessed crank and even as a moderator, that's his right.

I'm not sure, as in this case it seems to rise to Defamation + Trade Libel/Commercial Disparagement. So it may go beyond being simply unethical.

True, the only option is to not use the site entirely.

It’s not a bad thing. People on there, if you piss them off in a discussion, will go find your old posts and downvote them and in some rare cases harass you by replying or worse put two and two together to doxx you.

I don't think there is one. Prediction Markets are probably the closest and even those have problems. But at least incentives in a prediction market aim for the truth rather than an entertaining experience.

Argh, there isn't one - is the message we're trying to get you to accept.

Just because reddit is reliable vs its peers != absolutely reliable.

Like Amazon, Yelp, Google any review system will become gamified for money. So just like those platforms every review you read you need to ask "who is the reviewer? do they review other things? how 'realistic' does it read? Are they pushing anything? Is the thing i'm reading affected by money? Were they given a product? were they given a discount/kickback for a review?" etc etc.

You cannot simply look at a review and say oh yeah that's a good review of someone who just wants to help others.

The whole reason this thread exists is exactly because of above. Someone weaponized the trust, your trust, of reddit to bring down a startup - and it worked.

> Reddit was knowingly ruined by google. Once google pushed reddit to the top of search results

Ehhhhh I agree and yet also disagree (it's fun though).

Yes they were ruined by being promoted by algo changes, but do I blame google directly? For me, no.

It's exactly as we stated before, it's because it was so trustworthy. Individual people's personal experience with X or Y many times with good details. That earned a lot of strong backlinks, blogs, etc. The domain became authoritative especially on esoteric searches. Then algo changes came (remember pandas?) and pushed them even further. I mean that's the point of search systems right? Get you to trustworthy information that you're looking for.

Then the money grabbers showed up.

So it's just like Harvey Dent said - either you die a trusted niche community or live long enough to see yourself become weaponized for money. He was so smart, that Harvey Dent.

You're proving my point. At least in the US half of the country is right wing. If you want an accurate crowd-sourced opinion you need to take that into account, regardless of your own beliefs.

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It wasn't off-topic. His response was to this statement: "the most reliable place to get a general crowd-sourced opinion on the internet" - on which his statement was perfectly correct if he just sticks to Western forums.

Regardless of the positions held, I think that moderators and admins have a lot of control over the discussion on reddit, and a lot of subreddits and users just get banned for no good reason. There is a selection bias at play.

Just because an opinion seems to be popular there does not nessisarially mean it won the "marketplace of ideas". It's more like the "warzone of powermods". I think a lot of social media sites go through a phase of controlling discussion to suit powerusers, but this comes at the cost of losing long-term social capital.

I mean we are in the second term of a trump presidency. The climate on reddit is very left wing but in the real world, people are voting right wing (or more likely not at all). Reddit itself is now an echo chamber, and r/Conservative is just the echo chamber within the echo chamber.

Yes, the mod stopped posting publicly around the time she went to prison. That seems to have been the catalyst for the conspiracy theory.

But it was actually a couple days apart; he stopped posting before she went to prison. And he actually posted to some private subs, and was involved in some DMs, after he stopped posting publicly and after she went to prison.

There's really very little evidence other than a vague coincidence of when he left Reddit and when she went to prison, and the name.

And, like, if she were posting anonymously, why would she use that name?

It's basically just completely incoherent. Like many conspiracy theories, they take a lot of other random data points, and if you sift through and cherry pick enough data points you can find others that taken out of context look like coincidences. But that's just because you're cherry picking between two large distributions of data.

I'm not sure I agree. If I go to a photography forum, there will be one thread for photos taken with a specific camera. Those threads are easily found and I can browse them to get huge amounts of relevant info if I'm interested in that camera. If I want to find that on Reddit or Discord, god help me. At best I can hope for a specific subreddit or server dedicated to that. But mostly I'll find hundreds of posts or comments mentioning or asking about that camera, all by people I don't know and have no way of judging if they know their stuff.

Discord and Reddit have so much repetition and fragmentation because there's no real organization of content, and people with no expertise often weigh in and even get upvoted because the average user is not particularly knowledgeable and the experts aren't on 24/7 looking for new posts to contribute to. On forums topics are stickier and get bumped when there's activity so experts more often find relevant threads and it's easier to judge reputations on forums.

Granted, badly managed forums are bad. If question threads from new users are mixed in with everything else they can quickly dominate search results. You need to be able to filter, but IME most forums do have pretty decent filters.

I strongly disagree. But maybe because of a difference of perspective. If you're imagining a Reddit-scale forum, with millions of people with no sense of community and no knowledge of the content they're consuming, then yeah a traditional forum format is awful.

Forums shine as spaces for focused communities, where people have reputations and care about the subject matter. Time-sorted discussions are great because that's what's happening - a discussion in the community. You don't want to read someone's quip first, you want to get the whole context. You don't want there to be upvotes that people try to earn - there's already your reputation in the community. If someone's a troll or gives bad advice or is wrong, they'll get called out, or banned, or simply ignored as everyone knows they aren't respected.

Forums just aren't meant for generic content and it's not because of the UI, it's because the entire concept is not compatible with masses of semi-anonymous users with no commonalities.

"Nested comments sorted by upvotes" is, for free and frank discussion, inherently far worse than non-nested in-line comments. With the latter there's no hive-mind effect, no consensus-seeking, no dopamine/approval-chasing. Also, traditional forums tended to encourage longer-form posts (which you can still see in places like Spacebattles), which naturally contained quite a lot of technical detail and pictures, whereas Reddit (and HN) are optimized for very short comments. In Reddit's case, smarmy one-liners, usually.

But the main problem, to repeat for emphasis, is that the upvote/downvote system (even if it's fair and used virtuously, and it usually isn't,) stifles disagreement and debate.

> And nobody would ever know

Considering how quickly they make new accounts, I think you're underestimating banned HN users by quite a margin!

It’s not a problem, you are owned nothing by participating in an online forum. Your participation is a privilege, not a right. You are free to participate elsewhere.

HN moderates mostly transparently, which they do not have to do at all. That demonstrates respect for their participants, or ideals, your pick.

If he did this habitually, I think word would get around. This is a pretty small community.

No, I think you misread the post. The story about backstabbing Zuckerberg in a Risk game and boasting about it in his blog, I believe the author included especially to show that it's not just about the profit motive. It's far more about rivalry and crushing your opponents, he's basically saying. Clearly, spending so much time in a forum trash talking a rival (without disclosure) isn't a good investment of time, if profit is the sole motive.

Certainly, such people exist though. The picture he's painting of Novati is not something I'd find terribly surprising from an ex-Facebook code boot camp entrepreneur.

If you say anything remotely controversial anywhere on reddit you will be hunted by a moderator of another sub and then targeted for banning.

I pointed out on a sub that the question on the 4473 (form to buy a firearm) asking if you are a drug user is a 5th amendment violation as it asks you to incriminate yourself to exercise a right.

An Ivy league lawyer, moderator of another sub, about a whole year later, found it, declared that it was illegal legal advice, then had my whole account nuked using his legal credentials to scare reddit into getting rid of me.

> You left out the fact that you can’t post to /r/conservative until the moderators there audit your post history and perform an interview with you to confirm your ideology matches theirs.

> If someone does pass the test they’re allowed to comment. If they make a comment that disagrees with the message the moderators want to push, their commenting privilege is revoked.

Be that as it may, i dont see how the solution to /r/conservative being a weird echo chamber, is for other subs to be an anti-/r/conservative echochamber. Seems like both are wrong, and two wrongs dont make a right.