alt Hacker NewsA competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator
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That's common. A marketing company took over r/mattress in order to get rid of any unfavorable reviews and pump up any bed in box mattress company as long as these companies pay to that market company. For more, https://www.reddit.com/r/MattressMod/comments/1c28g7b/recent...
Pretty shocking that someone whose business is being actively attacked on a subreddit, one that is not only relevant to them but is one of the biggest drivers of student interest and a major recruiting tool, has no recourse in this situation. A lot of people mentioning the legal angle don’t realize what a nightmare that kind of litigation would be. It’s frankly outrageous that Reddit doesn’t take the time to investigate such a flagrant conflict of interest and just chooses not to respond at all. I understand not wanting to police every subreddit but now you’re talking about potentially millions in losses for a business. All because of one unhinged asshole who’s trying to promote his own competing business. If this doesn’t turn into a lawsuit hopefully it makes enough noise for Reddit to pay attention and help resolve the issue.
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.
Why have they not sued him? Like isn't this slander?
I wonder what makes a platform like HN work, but not the others.
In almost every other platform moderators are just sad, angry little entitled narcissists who love exerting control over others. This has been proven time and again across multiple platforms:
Wikipedia
Quora
Stackoverflow (surprise, surprise!)
..
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.
I wonder - if there are evidences of such behaviour (and there are because they've been shown in this article), why can't the company sue the moderator?
It seems clear that this dude is engaged in a vendetta, but I feel like a larger issue lurking in the background is the whole swirling mist of Google, Reddit, and mod policies.
In the first place it's troubling that Google ever had so much power, and that AI search tools do now. The idea that a business can succeed or fail based on what appears on the first screen when someone types your business name into a little box is insane. It's just another indication to me that these large gatekeepers need to be shattered, simply in order to create more independent avenues of potential research.
In the second place, the centralization of forum-like content under Reddit likewise gives Reddit undue influence. There's a lot of good stuff on Reddit but it would be better for all that good stuff to be on a lot of separate sites.
And then there's the question of Reddit mod policies. The policy cited in the article falls into the same trap we see with laws on political corruption and the like. It says what you can not do, and narrowly circumscribes it in terms of "exchange" for "compensation", which focuses only on direct quid pro quo kinds of abuse of power. I think we should push for a much greater level of integrity, more like: "In your moderation, you must put the impartial furtherance of the good of the community ahead of your personal interests." I think there would be very little doubt that this moderator's actions fall afoul of such a policy.
The article was fascinating, but the part I didn't see was... what was the motive? Assuming the article paints an accurate picture of what was going on... why was it going on? Is it solely because he runs a company in the same competitive space?
What about the reverse of this, where the mods seem just a little to enthusiastic about one particular product?
This is oddly a case to signify there is value in an AI moderation tools - to avoid bias inherent to human actors.
Considering coding boot camps are borderline snake oil I'm struggling to take any of this seriously.
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.
For historical: https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
Nothing new, but sad a great incubator went down. There really isn't a solution for this, is there?
Michael reminds me of a fellow named ewk, from the zen subreddit. In his obsessive energy and poisonous tactics. It really is a thing to see. A type. There must be a name for it
This whole thing feels like a neat encapsulated example of how horrible the "Internet" has become. A bad actor with vested interest taking over a part of a website (Reddit) that is then used as a source of record (Google, LLMs), and bam, completely fabricated overviews of a brand/company are now all you see when you use the predominant search engine, because there are no alternatives.
All of this for what? Shareholder value? So Silicon Valley elites can get rich and force their shit ideas on everyone?
If you don't see this for what it is, and that is just pure rot of the major services that people use and rely on for their information needs, then you might be beyond helping. Everyone should be pissed that this is what the internet has become.
It was getting boring after the payroll industry's corporate episonage.
Thanks god. We have a new drama. I can keep my reduced TV time for a while longer.
Since it's getting downvoted hard and might be missed, FYI Michael is in the house. I encourage y'all to read the whole article before engaging.
Reddit moderation is a crap
I'm permabanned on Reddit for saying stuff that the mods didn't like on /r/games on multiple accounts. That website is beyond gone and it's depressing, because it was my favorite site. But the mod situation is seriously out of control. I used to buy Reddit Gold (when that was still a thing) so I found it to be incredibly stupid that this source of revenue was shut off.
And yet Reddit still lives on. Somehow.
If your business success depends on Reddit, Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, ChatGPT, maybe you are not doing the right thing.
Ideally you shouldn't depend heavily on things that are outside of your control.
The semantic web tried to fix this problem but it never caught on.
That initiative was so ahead of its time.
yeah, relatable, community based organizations spawn a lot of parasocial relationships and one loud detractor trolling you can kill the whole thing
when you try to respond, even with lawyers, it just looks immature because the comments levied are immature
no recommendation, let the org die and rebrand I guess
> 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.
Forum dictator is a messed up thing. Why is everybody so ok with it? Is it Stockholm Syndrome?
Were any of you around for the r/Seattle move to r/seattlewa That dude was crazy
https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1o1guxj/tho...
I wonder how long this will stay up.
Full title:
“The Story of Codesmith: How a Competitor Crippled a $23.5M Bootcamp By Becoming a Reddit Moderator”
An interesting part of this article is LLM chatbots regurgitating what seems to be defamatory comments by a rogue moderator who took over the coding boot camp subreddit. Google also seems to surface this person’s comments in search results.
a simple lawsuit will fix this. reddit has lots of money
[dead]
someone mind actually giving a detailed history of the timeline outside of the two main parties? this has those inklings of wordpress drama where not a lot of people are not invested enough and that obviously works to an advantage of sorts.
I'm Michael and this was about me. This person never reached out for comment and is missing half the story. I'm happy to fill people in on the rest if this person or someone else wants to hear.
I agree with one or two of the characterizations but the majority I don't and there is a lot more to this story than it seems...
RE: INDUSTRY. Rithm School (their main competitor) shut down. Hack Reactor is down to single digit cohorts allegedly. Launch School is slowing down from 3 cohorts a year to 2. Numerous other bootcamps have shut down. Codesmith's decline is predominantly an industry problem.
RE: CODESMITH. For starters as an example, Codesmith's website, email, and entire AWS account was down for 3 weeks because they got locked out from not updating their credit card and then losing the root password and their 2-factor was a phone number. This is unacceptable.
Yet they market themselves as similar outcomes to elite grad schools and it's very reasonable to challenge them on their hyperbolic marketing.
Both sides of the story need to be heard before making a judgement.
I don't know about this particular case, but, generally... bad actor subreddit moderators have been an occasional thing for well over a decade.
And it's also been widely known for that long that Reddit is an influential venue in which to take over a corner -- for marketing or propaganda.
What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.
A bad actor mod of a popular subreddit can persist for years, visibly, without people managing either to oust the mod, or to take down the sub's influence.
(Subreddit peasants sometimes migrate to a new sub over bad mods, but the old sub usually remains, still with a healthy brand. And still with a lot of members, who (speculating) maybe don't want to possibly miss out on something in the bad old sub, or didn't know what's going on, or the drama they noticed in their feed wasn't worth their effort to do the clicks to unjoin from the sub in question.)