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A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator
https://archive.ph/w0izj https://archive.ph/w0izj
- 86764736543765 1y ago[flagged]
- SilverElfin 1y agoFull 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.
- altairprime 1y agoTell us more about why you find that interesting? Simply saying it “is” hasn’t provided any new information for us beyond the article itself.
- Supermancho 1y agoIt's interesting if you are into those kinds of bots and interactions. If it was in my wheelhouse, I'd look. Otherwise, there's no reason to expect that content unless someone else points it out.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y agoReddit 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.
- SilverElfin 1y ago> 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.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y agoThere'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.
- jayd16 1y agoThat's $3M down but what's the likely upside? Is it a net gain?
- bigyabai 1y agoWith each passing day, it feels like we see more evidence for the "America is run by lawyers" assertion.
- FridayoLeary 1y agoIt' 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.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y agoMost 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.
- throwawaygo 1y agoThis has been happening in anthropic subreddits.
- randycupertino 1y agoTwo 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-deleting-posts-critical-of-him/ 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/1e63jkz/paige_lorenze_is_a_mod_of_nycinfluencersnark/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nycinfluencersnarking/comments/1e63...
- frumplestlatz 1y agoI’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.
- randycupertino 1y agoI saw the article about D4vd when it was popular enough to hit the front page- https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/1nnlqan/singer_d4vd_is_apparently_the_sole_moderator_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/1nnlqan/singer_d4vd_... The criminal case is an open investigation and also has been in the news lately: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/details-emerge-homicide-case-teen-171456936.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/details-emerge-homicide-... My significant other follows influencers thus I heard about the Paige Lorenze controversy/lore. I wouldn't say either of them is "not particularly relevant" as D4vd is super popular among GenZ on tiktok and has 30 million listeners and 4 million followers. Paige isn't as big but she is a well-known WAG dating some tennis bro and has a successful clothing brand that sells to the genZ crowd.
- 1y ago
- gennarro 1y agoSite isn’t loading. Hug of death?
- theturtle 1y ago[dead]
- michaelnovati 1y agoI'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.
- rvitorper 1y agoYou don’t know when to stop, do you?
- michaelnovati 1y ago[flagged]
- rvitorper 1y agoOne thing is a critic based on verifiable facts. Another thing is defending yourself. A third one is coming up with bad things nobody can verify. Your post mixes these things
- michaelnovati 1y ago[flagged]
- baobun 1y ago
- neuroelectron 1y agoPlease post an archive link
- washadjeffmad 1y agohttps://archive.is/w0izj https://archive.is/w0izj
- bix6 1y agoCan we get a tldr since the site is down?
- larrymcp 1y agoHere's an archive link: https://archive.is/w0izj https://archive.is/w0izj
- yieldcrv 1y agoyeah, 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
- ookblah 1y agosomeone 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.
- baobun 1y ago> 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.
- michaelnovati 1y agoThe 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.
- JonoBB 1y agoSo why the sneaky shitposting and stalking over such a long period of time? Just release the documents and let people decide. I call bullshit on the "treasure trove".
- michaelnovati 1y agoI have a lot of DMs that are there to protect me in making arguments. I don't think it's cool to share them - even anonymized, because people close to Codesmith leadership would be outed and it would impact a lot of people. I have to think about the right way to do that if I did and I might need to have a journalist with credibility go through and write it up.
- cr3ative 1y agoThis expectation that someone should approach you for comment (and the suggestion that the fact they haven’t matters for neutrality) is misguided.
- analog8374 1y agoForum dictator is a messed up thing. Why is everybody so ok with it? Is it Stockholm Syndrome?
- 4bpp 1y agoForum 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.
- michaelnovati 1y agoWell 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.
- baobun 1y agoSince 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45522396
- kjs3 1y agoReading it, seems like the downvotes are deserved.
- baobabKoodaa 1y agoDownvoting 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.
- ergocoder 1y agoNo doubt. He and many others would conflate it with people agreeing with him. It's not just him. Nobody uses upvotes for the purpose of "letting others see it". We are supposed to do that but we don't.
- Noumenon72 1y agoAlmost 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.
- stuaxo 1y agoIt truely is a car crash. It seems like he can't stop and will end up in court at some point.
- oeirugjoiwejo 1y agoLOL 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.
- analog8374 1y agoMichael 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
- Slow_Hand 1y agoWhat's the story there? I'm curious to know how such behavior manifests in Zen Buddhism, of all things.
- throwaway8902 1y agoMany 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.
- anigbrowl 1y ago16 hours a day every day for two decades If I hadn't taken a look at the subreddit just now I would have thought you were being flippant. What a voluble fellow. So much wisdom must be a terrible burden!
- pyuser583 1y agoWhat about the reverse of this, where the mods seem just a little to enthusiastic about one particular product?
- koshergweilo 1y agoAstroturfing?
- kjs3 1y agoFollow the money.
- michaelnovati 1y agoAgreed, 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.
- sizzlers 1y agoWhy did you obsessively stalk and harass people? Very, very weird behavior.
- cindyllm 1y ago[dead]
- michaelnovati 1y agoStalking is a serious allegation. If you want to publish your projects everywhere under the sun in public and ask for them to be 'stared on Github', giving people a script to instantly vote 50 claps on Medium, etc... Then I can open up those people's LinkedIns and note down how they represent themselves. Is that weird? I don't think so but you can decide, but it's not stalking and harassing. If that's stalking then the guy who wrote the post was stalking the hell out of me.
- neilv 1y agoI 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.)
- SilverElfin 1y ago> 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.
- cap11235 1y agoWhen 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.
- genghisjahn 1y agoIs there a source for this?
- skort 1y agoThis 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.
- collingreen 1y agoMost 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.
- angrydev 1y agoWhat is the suggestion for filtering out the grifters from these places on the internet that have become super valuable?
- ChimboScrill 1y ago[flagged]
- phil-martin 1y agoThe 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?
- fragmede 1y ago> And I believe that’s why Michael is doing what he’s doing. He wins when Codesmith loses. Yes.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lemagedurage 1y agoYes, he owns a competitor with his wife, formation.dev, so there is a clear incentive.
- peab 1y agoWhy 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?
- devmor 1y agoLawsuits can be very expensive. Even if you win. I’ve given up on recovering tens of thousands of dollars in the past because it would likely ruin me to pursue it.
- peab 1y agoBut in this case there's a multi million dollar company on the line, it seems appropriate.
- baobun 1y agoThe author is not a party to the case but an investigative blogger.
- lovegrenoble 1y agoReddit moderation is a crap
- ergocoder 1y agoIt 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.
- SilverElfin 1y ago> payroll industry's corporate episonage. Huh? I can’t imagine a company like ADP having drama.
- ergocoder 1y agoKeep up man. It's Rippling vs. Deel.
- kjs3 1y agoReddit is better than TV? Who knew?!?
- zoklet-enjoyer 1y agoWere any of you around for the r/Seattle move to r/seattlewa That dude was crazy
- SilverElfin 1y agoWhat’s the background on that? Mod abuse?
- zoklet-enjoyer 1y agoYeah. 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.
- zoklet-enjoyer 1y agoApparently it was more complicated than I remember https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/s/6PxOpe0LRs https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/s/6PxOpe0LRs
- dimgl 1y agoI'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.
- LaurensBER 1y agoI 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.
- binsquare 1y agoThis is oddly a case to signify there is value in an AI moderation tools - to avoid bias inherent to human actors.
- MaxLeiter 1y agoThey still have bias. Not sure its necessarily worse but there is bias inherent to LLMs https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/do-language-models-favor-their-home-countries-asymmetric-propagation-of-positive-misinformation-and-foreign-influence-audits/ https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/do-language-mo...
- LaurensBER 1y agoThe 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 ;)
- baq 1y agoGetting 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.
- zahlman 1y ago> 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?
- jeroenhd 1y agoThe 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.
- knowitnone3 1y agoa simple lawsuit will fix this. reddit has lots of money
- raincom 1y agoThat'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_events_on_rmattress/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MattressMod/comments/1c28g7b/recent...
- re 1y agoA happy(ish) ending: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mattress/comments/1l81nn6/and_were_back/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Mattress/comments/1l81nn6/and_were_...
- idk1 1y agoI'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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- thinkingemote 1y ago"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.
- hu3 1y agoBut can any mod remove other mods? How does that work in reddit?
- vintermann 1y agoSeniority. Older mods can remove younger mods.
- fsckboy 1y agotortious interference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
- twibs_io 1y agoPretty 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.
- dragnettle 1y ago[flagged]
- madaxe_again 1y agoIt’s weird to refer to yourself by your own surname, dude.
- GavinMcG 1y agoWhy on earth should your brand new account be considered trustworthy when it comes to commenting on either party?
- dragnettle 1y agoIt shouldn't, nor should anyone's accounts on most topics. You should do the research and draw your own conclusions.
- tchalla 1y agoYes and the conclusion is pretty clear that most people believe the article not your comment.
- 1y ago
- rootsudo 1y agoFor historical: https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm 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?
- BrenBarn 1y agoIt 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.
- nashashmi 1y ago> 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.
- neya 1y agoI 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.
- Karrot_Kream 1y agoThe mods here are paid that's why.
- neya 1y agoBut getting paid doesn't guarantee being neutral. I think it's more about the principle and vision than just the pay.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- baubino 1y agoGetting paid means the mod has been vetted, is (presumably) being supervised in some way or reporting to someone, and thus is expected to adhere to some standard or protocol (however loose it might be). Getting paid comes with rules of the job and that alone makes paid moderation far more structured and with more potential for effectiveness than unpaid moderation.
- jeffrallen 1y ago"He who pays the piper calls the tune." So if the boss wants good moderation as Ycombinator does, fine. If not, you get X.
- Mistletoe 1y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1o1guxj/thoughts_on_this_blog_post_alleging_harassment/ https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1o1guxj/tho... I wonder how long this will stay up.
- Multiplayer 1y agoIf you read the thread, the amount of fake accounts supporting the moderator is just insulting to me as a reader. Just bizarre.
- 29athrowaway 1y agoThe semantic web tried to fix this problem but it never caught on. That initiative was so ahead of its time.
- DeathArrow 1y agoIf 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.
- paulddraper 1y agoHave you built a business?
- p0w3n3d 1y agoI 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?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Spacemolte 1y agoWhy have they not sued him? Like isn't this slander?
- forgetfreeman 1y agoConsidering coding boot camps are borderline snake oil I'm struggling to take any of this seriously.
- rkomorn 1y agoI 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.
- deaux 1y agoDid you teach in 2021? That kind of ratio seems unthinkable now. Hope I'm wrong though!
- rkomorn 1y agoNo, it was 2018, but of those students, more than 50% are now/still in tech. Edit: Well, that said, I still mentored recently, and the numbers for the one bootcamp I mentored for are about 50% over the last couple of years, which honestly seems pretty good considering the state of things, but that bootcamp has also skipped a couple of cohorts because of market conditions. It is most definitely less rosy now, but I think the "the student is the main driver of success" aspect is still correct, IMO.
- eintrottel 1y ago(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.
- pkphilip 1y agoReddit 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.
- UberFly 1y agoAs 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.
- pkphilip 1y agoSame 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.
- pndy 1y agoThis 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.
- CSMastermind 1y agoIt'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.
- 86764736543765 1y ago[flagged]
- throw-10-8 1y agoMy kind? Genuinely curious what kind of generalization you are making.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- michaelnovati 1y agoI'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/1iduu2d/ https://www.reddit.com/r/codesmith/comments/1ilpihd/ https://www.reddit.com/r/codesmith/comments/1ilpihd/ https://www.reddit.com/r/codesmith/comments/1gvazaz/ 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.
- pg_bot 1y agoI 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.
- alzoid 1y agoI 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.
- trilogic 1y agoThis 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-one-workflow-at-a-time-58d614a654bf 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.
- beeflet 1y agoCompetition is for losers!
- BoorishBears 1y ago> 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/basedbaseqwen3coder30ba3binstruct480bdistillv2_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1o0st2o/basedba...
- jokoon 1y agoI'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.
- GJim 1y agoThe irony of your post being downvoted for stating facts (i.e. what personally happened to you).
- baobun 1y agoNot all facts are on topic.
- oeirugjoiwejo 1y agoSome 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.
- throwaway189i 1y agoAnd Hamas only targeted civilians on October 7th and didn’t even try to go after soldiers, so by your logic they are even worse. I’m really supposed to take people that celebrated October 7th in good faith when they celebrate Jewish civilians getting killed.
- GJim 1y agoYou <-------> The point
- npteljes 1y ago
- sixhobbits 1y agoFWIW, 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.
- mr_toad 1y agoI’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.
- truetraveller 1y agoOk, 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?
- alsetmusic 1y agoIf you’d read the entire article, you wouldn’t ask why his character is called into question. The receipts are documented.
- truetraveller 1y agoThat's a one-sided article. You should read Michael's replies + other people who've been to Codesmith.
- dwedge 1y agoToo much swearing in that article for me to take it more than a rant. I couldn't finish it.
- belter 1y agoSo 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 ?
- Ekaros 1y agoThinking 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.
- jacquesm 1y agoI'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.
- sebstefan 1y agoIt'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.
- _vqpz 1y agoI 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.
- oulipo2 1y agoAgreed, "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
- permo-w 1y agoreddit has recently allowed users to hide their posts and comments from the profile, which has made astro-turfing a lot harder to detect
- cyrialize 1y agoI'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.
- blahblah12334 1y agoRegardless 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"
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- podobo 1y agoYeah Codesmith is trash and I am seriously wondering if this thread itself is being swarmed by their PR people.
- karlkloss 1y agoModerators 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.
- tencentshill 1y agoThe constitution for the Nation of Reddit makes all speech legally protected, after all.
- culi 1y agoThis 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.
- dlubarov 1y ago> Israel, a nation-state, also pays the mods of /r/news and /r/worldnews. Is there any evidence behind this claim?
- poisonborz 1y agoThat sounds bad and unfair... so... the victim is a coding bootcamp. Oh well, anyway, next post.
- est 1y agoA similar story happens to Chinese company, Xiaomi vs Huawei Turns out you only need dozens of Internet accounts to smear a Fortune 500 company.
- otikik 1y agoHonestly, why not name the competitor?
- phpnode 1y agoThey do - formation.dev
- lesser-shadow 1y ago[dead]
- saaaaaam 1y agoI’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.
- JasminAI99 1y ago[dead]
- defraudbah 1y agooh man, you are lucky your competitors don't have a downvote button on hackernews
- jongjong 1y agoI 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.
- bapak 1y agoPower. 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.
- jongjong 1y agoResonates. 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.
- tyleo 1y agoTBH 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- random9749832 1y agoThere 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.
- Ekaros 1y agoI 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.
- random9749832 1y agoOf 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.
- random9749832 1y agoVery 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.
- random9749832 1y agoYup, 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.
- ratel 1y agoHonest 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.
- rkomorn 1y agoModerators don't work for Reddit, though?
- Havoc 1y agoUsed 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
- pavel_lishin 1y agoSamesies. I even had to switch to using a different pseudonym once I started receiving death threats :)
- dogleash 1y ago>this actively filters for people that are radioactively toxic True. There's a reason "discord mod" is an epithet.
- Uptrenda 1y agoYeah, 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.
- imdsm 1y agoWhat an unhinged individual
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jibal 1y agoThe discussion at https://larslofgren.com/codesmith-reddit-reputation-attack/ 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/thoughts_on_this_blog_post_alleging_harassment/ 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.
- tdeck 1y agoWere there replies to the comment you linked? Because I don't see any now.
- jibal 1y agoI meant to link to the post, not Novati's comment, but they are close together: https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1o1guxj/thoughts_on_this_blog_post_alleging_harassment/ https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1o1guxj/tho...
- blackhaj7 1y agou/Ok-donuts is clearly his alt. Absolutely pathetic
- jibal 1y agoSuch 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.
- BrokenCogs 1y ago[flagged]
- Lerc 1y agoThe 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?
- Frieren 1y ago> 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.
- Lerc 1y agoOn 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.
- friendzis 1y ago> 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?
- rendall 1y agoEveryone take a moment to read and absorb Novati's rebuttal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45524707 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?
- rendall 1y agoOr you could just downvote without comment. That's an option.
- kittikitti 1y agoIf 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.
- TomMasz 1y agoIt'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.
- rainytruck 1y agoThey
- rainytruck 1y agoCodesmith and other affected should probably sue Michael for defamation, harassment and other charges, and try to get like $500 million in reparations.
- Montymio 1y agoand 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-platform-formation-raises-4m-in-round-led-by-andreessen-horowitz/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/08/software-engineer-training...
- nirui 1y ago> 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.
- shagie 1y agoReddit 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.
- 29athrowaway 1y agoSubreddits = volunteering. And wealth is extracted out of all that volunteering. Ads and tokens for AI training.
- ANarrativeApe 1y agoThat'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...
- NoSalt 1y agoSadly, 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!!!
- hersko 1y agoThis 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.
- fajmccain 1y agoWho is out there launching new Reddit alternatives that could catch on?
- senkora 1y agoThe 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-machine-at-meta https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-coding-machin...
- thimkerbell 1y agoIs Lars now the contact person for Reddit malfeasance?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ninininino 1y agoReddit moderation is the most undemocratic process to ever masquerade as a democratic process.
- amai 1y agoSee also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716044
- quentindanjou 1y agoSimilar 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.
- abhaynayar 1y agoI legit wish some of my harder daily habit heatmaps looked as good and for as long as his negative comments ones.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago"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
- npteljes 1y agoJust 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.
- h4kunamata 1y agoReddit 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.
- matt-p 1y agoEx Meta, well I never.
- codeXI 1y agoMichael 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?
- enlguy 1y agoThis guy is Hannibal Lecter level sociopath. I hope he goes to prison for all the fraud and libel, at least, and spends his last days rotting in a cell.