9 ms·

Reddit should not be considered an authoritative source. Period. At this point it's the most astroturfed place on the internet. Accounts are bought and sold

Reddit should not be considered an authoritative source. Period. At this point it's the most astroturfed place on the internet. Accounts are bought and sold like cheap commodities. It's inherently unreliable. That said, in this instance Codesmith actually has an unusually strong defamation case. That Reddit mod is not anonymous, and has made solid claims (about nepotism with fabricated details, accusations of resume fraud conspiracy, etc.) that have resulted in quantifiable damage ($9.4M in revenue loss attributed to Reddit attacks,) with what looks like substantial evidence of malice. Reddit, though protected to some extent by Section 230, can also credibly be sued if (1) they are formally alerted to the mod's behavior, i.e. via a legal letter, and (2) they do nothing despite the fact that the mod's actions appear to be in violation of their Code of Conduct for Moderators. For then matter (2) might become something for a judge or jury to decide. I'm actually confused as to why Codesmith hasn't sued yet. (?!?) Even if they lose, they win. Being a plaintiff in a civil case can turn the tables and make them feel powerful rather than helpless, and it's often the case that "the process is the punishment" for defendants.

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 ago
  There's really no way it costs them more than $3M, and many civil cases cost way less. They've already lost more than what I'd consider a reasonable upper bound. Besides, they're not a very small business, so they ought to have set aside money for legal events, and they might even have insurance to cover it. (I realize that it's absurd and inherently unjust that the legal process is so expensive.) IMO, even if it just gets the offending poster deleted, it would be money well-spent. The marketing/PR hit is just brutal. I blame Google for this.
  - jayd16 1y ago
    That's $3M down but what's the likely upside? Is it a net gain?
- bigyabai 1y ago
  With each passing day, it feels like we see more evidence for the "America is run by lawyers" assertion.
FridayoLeary 1y ago
It' not but it often is the most useful and sometimes only source of information. If i need to lok up some very specific thing what are my options? An SEO optimized blog post, often about a similar but adjacent topic, or a forum of guys. At least with a forum there should in theory be more diversity of opinion.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y ago
  Most topics still have old-fashioned forums, they're just even harder to find these days. And there are still lots of blogs. Not all of them are SEO blogspam. And there's always libgen... Reddit is pretty much the last place I'd go for reliable information, especially if we're talking about anything that's a commercial product.
  - nebula8804 1y ago
    This is like the Linux discussion. (No its not the year of Linux no matter how much Windows 11 pisses you off) "Old fashioned forums" absolutely suck for discoverability. You have to waste time digging through posts, most of which are unrelated or just filler. No upvote/downvote and usually a mediocre threading mechanism. While we are on this topic, Discord is the same. IRC like applications are not an easy way to get to the point for the same reasons.
    - rhines 1y ago
      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.
UltraSane 1y ago
Reddit moderation is also completely broken. Mods can ban anyone for any reason and do ban people for very stupid reasons with absolutely no recourse. It is so bad I have completely stopped posting on Reddit.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  Most online communities work that way. It’s highly unusual to have some sort of judicial process.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    Most older forums had an element of self-selection... people don't hang out where they're not wanted. But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics) so you're either there or nowhere. This forces to some extent people who would gravitate away from each other, and personalities go overboard. There's more need of a judicial process there, than there would be elsewhere. And that was before everything became politically polarized. Now that you could be perfectly happy talking to someone about X, you still end up hating their guts because they love/hate Trump/Obama and it slips out (over a long enough timespan). People do not scale.
    - jrowen 1y ago
      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.
    - LexiMax 1y ago
      > 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.
petesergeant 1y ago
> Reddit should not be considered an authoritative source. Period. At this point it's the most astroturfed place on the internet. Accounts are bought and sold like cheap commodities. It's inherently unreliable. I don't disagree with any of this, but I'll note that in addition, it's also the most reliable place to get a general crowd-sourced opinion on the internet. There are specialist forums for specialist subjects, sure, but nowhere else delivers like Reddit does on a diverse set of topics.
- blindriver 1y ago
  This isn't true. It leans extremely heavily left-wing so you won't get an accurate crowd-source opinion that disagrees with left-wing politics. There are pockets of conservative views but it's generally heavily left wing and you will get banned from many subreddits if you espouse any views to the opposite. EDIT: I don't know why I'm getting so many downvotes, nothing I said is controversial at all.
  - voxl 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - blindriver 1y ago
      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.
      - ceejayoz 1y ago
        90% of people might believe 2+2=5, but that doesn’t make them correct. Facts aren’t a majority rules scenario.
        blindriver 1y ago
        The comment was specifically about "opinions" not "facts".
neuroelectron 1y ago
[flagged]
- dang 1y ago
  You aren't banned.
  - analog8374 1y ago
    But you could. And you wouldn't even need a reason. In fact, you could ban AND make the whole conversation disappear. And nobody would ever know. That's a problem.
    - toomuchtodo 1y ago
      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.
      - stefantalpalaru 1y ago
        [dead]
      - analog8374 1y ago
        "if you don't like it then you can leave" (to paraphrase) evades my point. My point (the problem) is that, when you do it this way, trust is right out the window. It looks like a forum but it really isn't. The conversation suffers from a taint.
        toomuchtodo 1y ago
        All you have is trust. No evasion, those are the rules of the road as it stands in the jurisdiction of US web properties. If your point is "I don't like the law of the jurisdiction and its outcomes," that is a feeling and a choice, but the fact remains. You can either change the law or change the feelings. Again, participation is a choice and optional, and the status quo is unlikely to change.
neuroelectron 1y ago
It doesn't matter, people will still use it as source and now it's boosted by OpenAI and Google. Even Ghislaine Maxwell being a powermod didn't kill it. It's a key information warfare weapon and it's heavily promoted up and defended. https://archive.ph/qpfED https://archive.ph/qpfED
- Analemma_ 1y ago
  The upcoming lawsuits around “we demand you remove [training data ruled to be libelous or IP infringing] from the model weights” are going to be fascinating.
- lambda 1y ago
  TIL that there's a conspiracy theory that Ghislaine Maxwell is the same person as power mod MaxwellHill. Seems like a pretty incoherent conspiracy theory. What a weird thing to believe.
  - hyperhello 1y ago
    Did the mod stop when she went to prison?
    - lambda 1y ago
      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.
nubinetwork 1y ago
> Reddit should not be considered an authoritative source. Period. I cringe inside every time I search for something, and the first autocomplete is "mysearchterm reddit"
- 1oooqooq 1y ago
  name one dataset used for AI that doesn't include Reddit
- argomo 1y ago
  These days, all the results that AREN'T from reddit are AI slop.
  - moosedev 1y ago
    And according to TFA, the AI slop results are also from Reddit!
    - qingcharles 1y ago
      It's slop all the way down.
    - fuck-you-nigger 1y ago
      [flagged]
  - 86764736543765 1y ago
    Still preferable to the disinformation in that cesspit.
- bibabaloo 1y ago
  The problem is that the alternative is usually only sites created only to chase affiliate revenue. At least on Reddit, there’s a _chance_ I’m reading something from someone genuinely sharing their opinion.
- asveikau 1y ago
  For certain types of searches it isn't a bad idea. Sometimes you want to include unverified testimonials, hearsay and gossip in results. It doesn't necessarily mean that you lose track of how unreliable the source is.
lurk2 1y ago
> At this point it's the most astroturfed place on the internet. YouTube is far worse and it isn’t even close.
- f4uCL9dNSnQm 1y ago
  Is it? I didn't notice any real issues besides crypto scam bots spamming comments with their conversations. Or do we count "influencers" peddling sponsored junk?
- permo-w 1y ago
  it's easier to tell on Youtube
aitchnyu 1y ago
I've seen users with NSFW profiles leaving (relatively more) inane comments and their profile is private, so their posts and comments are not shown. I dread the day we can no longer evaluate users behind the comments.
- swarnie 1y ago
  You can now just outright hide your profile/history even without NSFW content. Its a really good feature for everyone involved.
  - eps 1y ago
    Comment and post history is still trivial to find through a basic google query. All that hiding them on Reddit does is pissing other users off because it breaks establish site's norms and expectations.
    - swarnie 1y ago
      True, the only option is to not use the site entirely.
      - permo-w 1y ago
        the problem here is that in an inversion of the usual roles, Google has locked us into reddit's ecosystem by placing it highly in search results, killing off all the dedicated forums, meaning that some answers to some questions are only available there, simply by user quantity. I literally have reddit IP-blocked on my laptop using my hosts file and I still have to copy a reddit link into TOR once or twice a day to get at some useful information
    - firesteelrain 1y ago
      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.

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 ago
There's really no way it costs them more than $3M, and many civil cases cost way less. They've already lost more than what I'd consider a reasonable upper bound. Besides, they're not a very small business, so they ought to have set aside money for legal events, and they might even have insurance to cover it. (I realize that it's absurd and inherently unjust that the legal process is so expensive.) IMO, even if it just gets the offending poster deleted, it would be money well-spent. The marketing/PR hit is just brutal. I blame Google for this.
- jayd16 1y ago
  That's $3M down but what's the likely upside? Is it a net gain?
bigyabai 1y ago
With each passing day, it feels like we see more evidence for the "America is run by lawyers" assertion.

FridayoLeary 1y ago

It' not but it often is the most useful and sometimes only source of information. If i need to lok up some very specific thing what are my options? An SEO optimized blog post, often about a similar but adjacent topic, or a forum of guys. At least with a forum there should in theory be more diversity of opinion.

A_D_E_P_T 1y ago
Most topics still have old-fashioned forums, they're just even harder to find these days. And there are still lots of blogs. Not all of them are SEO blogspam. And there's always libgen... Reddit is pretty much the last place I'd go for reliable information, especially if we're talking about anything that's a commercial product.
- nebula8804 1y ago
  This is like the Linux discussion. (No its not the year of Linux no matter how much Windows 11 pisses you off) "Old fashioned forums" absolutely suck for discoverability. You have to waste time digging through posts, most of which are unrelated or just filler. No upvote/downvote and usually a mediocre threading mechanism. While we are on this topic, Discord is the same. IRC like applications are not an easy way to get to the point for the same reasons.
  - rhines 1y ago
    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.

UltraSane 1y ago

Reddit moderation is also completely broken. Mods can ban anyone for any reason and do ban people for very stupid reasons with absolutely no recourse. It is so bad I have completely stopped posting on Reddit.

ceejayoz 1y ago
Most online communities work that way. It’s highly unusual to have some sort of judicial process.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  Most older forums had an element of self-selection... people don't hang out where they're not wanted. But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics) so you're either there or nowhere. This forces to some extent people who would gravitate away from each other, and personalities go overboard. There's more need of a judicial process there, than there would be elsewhere. And that was before everything became politically polarized. Now that you could be perfectly happy talking to someone about X, you still end up hating their guts because they love/hate Trump/Obama and it slips out (over a long enough timespan). People do not scale.
  - jrowen 1y ago
    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.
  - LexiMax 1y ago
    > 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.

petesergeant 1y ago

> Reddit should not be considered an authoritative source. Period. At this point it's the most astroturfed place on the internet. Accounts are bought and sold like cheap commodities. It's inherently unreliable. I don't disagree with any of this, but I'll note that in addition, it's also the most reliable place to get a general crowd-sourced opinion on the internet. There are specialist forums for specialist subjects, sure, but nowhere else delivers like Reddit does on a diverse set of topics.

blindriver 1y ago
This isn't true. It leans extremely heavily left-wing so you won't get an accurate crowd-source opinion that disagrees with left-wing politics. There are pockets of conservative views but it's generally heavily left wing and you will get banned from many subreddits if you espouse any views to the opposite. EDIT: I don't know why I'm getting so many downvotes, nothing I said is controversial at all.
- voxl 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - blindriver 1y ago
    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.
    - ceejayoz 1y ago
      90% of people might believe 2+2=5, but that doesn’t make them correct. Facts aren’t a majority rules scenario.
      - blindriver 1y ago
        The comment was specifically about "opinions" not "facts".

neuroelectron 1y ago

[flagged]

dang 1y ago
You aren't banned.
- analog8374 1y ago
  But you could. And you wouldn't even need a reason. In fact, you could ban AND make the whole conversation disappear. And nobody would ever know. That's a problem.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    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.
    - stefantalpalaru 1y ago
      [dead]
    - analog8374 1y ago
      "if you don't like it then you can leave" (to paraphrase) evades my point. My point (the problem) is that, when you do it this way, trust is right out the window. It looks like a forum but it really isn't. The conversation suffers from a taint.
      - toomuchtodo 1y ago
        All you have is trust. No evasion, those are the rules of the road as it stands in the jurisdiction of US web properties. If your point is "I don't like the law of the jurisdiction and its outcomes," that is a feeling and a choice, but the fact remains. You can either change the law or change the feelings. Again, participation is a choice and optional, and the status quo is unlikely to change.

neuroelectron 1y ago

It doesn't matter, people will still use it as source and now it's boosted by OpenAI and Google. Even Ghislaine Maxwell being a powermod didn't kill it. It's a key information warfare weapon and it's heavily promoted up and defended. https://archive.ph/qpfED https://archive.ph/qpfED

Analemma_ 1y ago
The upcoming lawsuits around “we demand you remove [training data ruled to be libelous or IP infringing] from the model weights” are going to be fascinating.
lambda 1y ago
TIL that there's a conspiracy theory that Ghislaine Maxwell is the same person as power mod MaxwellHill. Seems like a pretty incoherent conspiracy theory. What a weird thing to believe.
- hyperhello 1y ago
  Did the mod stop when she went to prison?
  - lambda 1y ago
    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.

nubinetwork 1y ago

> Reddit should not be considered an authoritative source. Period. I cringe inside every time I search for something, and the first autocomplete is "mysearchterm reddit"

1oooqooq 1y ago
name one dataset used for AI that doesn't include Reddit
argomo 1y ago
These days, all the results that AREN'T from reddit are AI slop.
- moosedev 1y ago
  And according to TFA, the AI slop results are also from Reddit!
  - qingcharles 1y ago
    It's slop all the way down.
  - fuck-you-nigger 1y ago
    [flagged]
- 86764736543765 1y ago
  Still preferable to the disinformation in that cesspit.
bibabaloo 1y ago
The problem is that the alternative is usually only sites created only to chase affiliate revenue. At least on Reddit, there’s a _chance_ I’m reading something from someone genuinely sharing their opinion.
asveikau 1y ago
For certain types of searches it isn't a bad idea. Sometimes you want to include unverified testimonials, hearsay and gossip in results. It doesn't necessarily mean that you lose track of how unreliable the source is.

lurk2 1y ago

> At this point it's the most astroturfed place on the internet. YouTube is far worse and it isn’t even close.

f4uCL9dNSnQm 1y ago
Is it? I didn't notice any real issues besides crypto scam bots spamming comments with their conversations. Or do we count "influencers" peddling sponsored junk?
permo-w 1y ago
it's easier to tell on Youtube

aitchnyu 1y ago

I've seen users with NSFW profiles leaving (relatively more) inane comments and their profile is private, so their posts and comments are not shown. I dread the day we can no longer evaluate users behind the comments.

swarnie 1y ago
You can now just outright hide your profile/history even without NSFW content. Its a really good feature for everyone involved.
- eps 1y ago
  Comment and post history is still trivial to find through a basic google query. All that hiding them on Reddit does is pissing other users off because it breaks establish site's norms and expectations.
  - swarnie 1y ago
    True, the only option is to not use the site entirely.
    - permo-w 1y ago
      the problem here is that in an inversion of the usual roles, Google has locked us into reddit's ecosystem by placing it highly in search results, killing off all the dedicated forums, meaning that some answers to some questions are only available there, simply by user quantity. I literally have reddit IP-blocked on my laptop using my hosts file and I still have to copy a reddit link into TOR once or twice a day to get at some useful information
  - firesteelrain 1y ago
    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.