A Competitor Crippled a $23.5m Bootcamp by Becoming a Reddit Moderator

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.)

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

I'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> What other options do those who do not want the town square to be moderated by you have?

Start and visit a new subreddit. This is an important bit that gets covered up by metaphors like "landed gentry" and "peasants". Don't like it? Vote with your digital feet. It doesn't come with any of the baggage and complication that an equivalent real life move would have. Just stop going there and go somewhere else. Yes it would be nice if folks were awesome and tried to be awesome. The reality is they aren't and subreddits are property owned by the mods. Luckily, you don't have to be there.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/08/software-engineer-training...