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.)
Reddit has a serious abusive moderator issue. I suspect they will all be demoted to "VIP community member" soon enough and have that entire layer handled by AI. There's just too much ego involved for a human to do a job like that.
> 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.
When 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.
It appears the original post they are discussing was removed. Seems like Reddit banned the original user who collected this data and deleted their posts.
Another discussion about this:
“Six powermods control 118 of the top 500 subreddits”
Ghislaine Maxwell was maybe one of these powerful mods
Evidence pasted:
The Name “Maxwellhill”
The username directly references “Maxwell,” which is not a common surname. Ghislaine Maxwell grew up at Headington Hill Hall, which was nicknamed “Maxwell Hill” after her father, Robert Maxwell, bought it. This isn’t a vague reference it’s oddly specific and personal. It’s like someone using “EpsteinIsland” as a username and claiming it’s just coincidence.
Posting Activity Stopped the Day of Her Arrest (actually 2 days before, when she began wrapping her phone in aluminum)
u/maxwellhill posted almost every day for 14 years and was one of Reddit’s most active users. Then, with no warning, all posting stopped after June 30, 2020. Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested on July 2, 2020. The timing is exact. This wasn’t a slow fade or gradual disinterest. It looks like someone was physically unable to post.
Gaps in Posting Line Up with Real-Life Events
There were other suspicious posting gaps during major events in Maxwell’s life. Notably, during her mother’s death in 2013 and during the 2011 Kleiner Perkins party, where she was confirmed to be present by former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao. That party shows Reddit leadership at the time was at least aware of her.
Moderator of Massive Subreddits
The account was a lead mod of r/worldnews, r/technology, r/politics, r/science, r/europe, r/upliftingnews, r/celebrities, and more. These are major subs that help shape Reddit’s front page and influence global discourse. Whoever had access to this account had immense control. Even after years of inactivity, Reddit auto added the account back as a moderator in 2024. That suggests the system still treats it like an active, important account.
The Content
Maxwellhill posted repeatedly about age of consent laws, often citing obscure countries. They also posted articles defending the legality of child exploitation material and criticized what they called “overzealous” child protection laws. These aren’t normal discussion points for the average Redditor. It reads like someone obsessed with legal gray areas surrounding child abuse.
Auto Deletion and Censorship
Mentions of “u/maxwellhill” have been automatically removed from comments in multiple subs. The Daily Dot reported on suspicious deletion behavior tied to the account. Posts about this user “vanished mysteriously,” raising real concerns about censorship. Who or what is protecting the account?
No Denial from the Account
If u/maxwellhill is just some random power user, where are they? Why haven’t they logged in to say anything? No posts, no comments, no denials. Nothing for five years. After 14 years of near daily activity, complete silence in the face of serious allegations is suspicious on its own.
The poster also uses many British expressions in their writing, and listed British foods as their favorite foods in one post.
Mods of r/WorldNews which is infamously compromised by paid agents demanded her posts be deleted from other subreddits.
The name matches Maxwell’s family estate. The account vanishes the day she’s arrested. It posted about topics deeply aligned with her known behavior. It held mod control over huge parts of Reddit. It still does. And yet it hasn’t said a word in five years. If this isn’t her, it’s someone with eerily similar patterns, priorities, and timing.
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?
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.
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.
It's the anonymity and odd changes in who is moderating that makes it feel different.
Standard setup to me would be consistently opinionated person, or team with some central directive (and hopefully oversight).
Dang and the other moderators here are incredibly scrupulous. If you browse with show dead on, and find an account that is posting regularly but banned, and go back through their history, you'll almost always find multiple warnings and a public statement about their banning.
HN has problems but moderation being arbitrary isn't really one of them.
I have some bad news for you about news.ycombinator.com or any other web forum. Unless you actually own the web site you can be prevented from posting on a whim.
Of course, most reputable forums have policies and rules but at the end of the day these do not mean much. Who are you going to complain to if you get unjustly banned - the Internet police?
You can always start your own blog/forum/subreddit and post whatever you like.
Yes, they can and that's how it's set up. Each community makes their own rules and can choose who participates.
It's not Reddit. It's the sub that made the decision and I'm not sure how it would be possible for Reddit the company to deal with sub level rule complaints and appeals.
I think it would be better if Reddit took more ownership. In other words, instead of hosting a platform where anyone can claim a subreddit as their little domain, and then it’s theirs forever, Reddit could say that the subreddits belong to the people that use them. For example, perhaps they could institute some sort of system where members of a subreddit could vote out moderators who abuse their power.
> For example, perhaps they could institute some sort of system where members of a subreddit could vote out moderators who abuse their power.
Leaving aside everything else wrong with that, that would be trivial to abuse, especially with the help of sockpuppetry but easily enough even without that.
I think the reason it feels offensive is that subreddits of common names feel like they should be more democratically managed or held to a high standard. Instead it’s a bunch of fiefdoms and if you create an alternate subreddit with a poor name it just won’t get readers. Codebootcamp2 or whatever is doomed from the start because of the importance of names.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a shame how many platforms are moving away from transparent moderation. I get that there are strong incentives to do so - a user that knows they're banned will immediately try to find a way to circumvent the ban. Shadowbanning delays that reaction if not stopping it outright. But damn does the concept feel dystopian. Like you're being ignored through seemingly no fault of your own. Surely that can't be healthy. And yet the platform is better off because the person isn't trying to circumvent the ban. And don't even get me started on replacing human interaction with AI for shadowbanned users.
"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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
That's some impressive blindness. That's exactly why the OP is stating it's unreliable. It _was_ reliable. Now it's a minefield, because trust->money.
Just like Amazon 5 star reviews. They used to be good probably until about 2012-2015 (if you stretch it). Then it became weaponized because the trust was so high. Anything with strong 5 star reviews sold.
Of course, you can "figure out" if what you're reading is trustworthy, but to blanket state "the most reliable place" - days gone to yesteryear.
I think you're both correct and I think your analogy about Reddit being a minefield is perfected if we imagine that it's a minefield in a beautiful place.
Great experience with one step and blown to bits with one small step in a different direction.
Agreed. Every now and then I search the name of my employer on Reddit, which pulls up a bunch of plausible looking comments that recommend a variety of tools. Then if you look at the comment closely, it doesn't make any sense. And if you look at the account, they only makes comments that mention an assortment of companies + one specific one that they're really shilling.
There's a variety of these marketing spambots on Reddit, and I'm sure like the toupee effect, there are more subtle ones that I'm not noticing. I think this is existential in the long run for Reddit as a platform, but maybe the owners/employees are happy to milk all the value out and walk away from the husk.
Reddit was knowingly ruined by google. Once google pushed reddit to the top of search results, they created massive incentives to game reddit and fill it with disguised advertising and/or slop.
> Reddit was knowingly ruined by google. Once google pushed reddit to the top of search results
Ehhhhh I agree and yet also disagree (it's fun though).
Yes they were ruined by being promoted by algo changes, but do I blame google directly? For me, no.
It's exactly as we stated before, it's because it was so trustworthy. Individual people's personal experience with X or Y many times with good details. That earned a lot of strong backlinks, blogs, etc. The domain became authoritative especially on esoteric searches. Then algo changes came (remember pandas?) and pushed them even further. I mean that's the point of search systems right? Get you to trustworthy information that you're looking for.
Then the money grabbers showed up.
So it's just like Harvey Dent said - either you die a trusted niche community or live long enough to see yourself become weaponized for money. He was so smart, that Harvey Dent.
So then why haven’t the higher credibility people in each niche set up an alternative?
Why let reddit drag down the credibility of well everyone in their niche by association. Even if it’s only a tiny bit per year, that adds up over time.
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.
The issue you're gesturing at is that "left" positions tend to be in touch with reality and coherent with each other. Whereas conservative positions tend to be out of touch with reality and often contradict each other.
This gives the appearance to people that hold positions that are out of touch with reality that the coherent narratives are an all-encompassing hegemonic echo chamber that covers the whole site. The incoherent conservative narratives fail to take root among a wider audience since they fall apart when scrutinized. The karma system om reddit's encourages this behavior among neutral subreddit to dunk on people when they say things that are nonsense.
So that's why you only see them being held in specific ideological echo chambers like /r/Conservative where you have mods that censor discussion that debunks or merely calls into doubt the narrative asserted by the moderation team.
>EDIT: I don't know why I'm getting so many downvotes, nothing I said is controversial at all.
I personally found it off topic, the conversation was about using Reddit as a source of truth for product opinions/reviews and it’s unlikely that the absence of a right wing majority is relevant when purchasing a dishwasher.
It wasn't off-topic. His response was to this statement: "the most reliable place to get a general crowd-sourced opinion on the internet" - on which his statement was perfectly correct if he just sticks to Western forums.
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.
It's possible for the majority opinion to be wrong and contradict hard facts that are grounded in reality. For a couple thousand of years the opinion was that the universe was composed of 4-5 elements (earth, water, air, fire, and maybe ether).
Your comment was balanced and respectful and yet the reply was denigrating. "All right wing, or simply non-left wing opinions are conspiracies" is the implication. This site is very left wing also.
"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing."
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
Wow, very surprised to see someone mention ewk on HN of all places. So surprised in fact that I created an account to respond to you! I’ve been following him on the zen subreddit for over 10 years now, off and on. He really is an absolute sight to behold. And I’m sure there is a name for it.
Many 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.
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.
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:
I’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.
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.
“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.
It'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.
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.
If you really cared, this should have started with: "I am stepping down as the moderator..."
Even though you have counter claims, you moderating the forum for your industry is problematic. You also seem keen to chime in about a competitor when you should be impartial and allow users to discuss their experiences alone.
Yes there are two sides to every story, but in no universe should you be the mod of that subreddit.
> 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.
Everything I can find online, including your post on reddit about the outage, says the outage was for 4 days. Not 3 weeks.
I'll also note that your post on reddit about the outage was phrased as if you were a student impacted by the outage, going so far as to say it was your "final straw" even though you don't have skin in the game other than as a competitor.
I would really like to hear both sides to the story. But from the data it seems like you have been obsessively commenting on the subreddit about codesmith for more than a full year. And almost 80% have been negative. This looks unhinged because you are a moderator of the subreddit. What's the other side to this?
Hi Michael. We overlapped significantly at Facebook and chatted a few times (I was on the source control team from 2012-2018ish, part of which was the migration to Mercurial). Correct me if I'm wrong, but you wrote some posts about how you wanted something like git rebase -i, right?
I know your heart is in the right place, and have a great deal of respect for you. I think being the most active moderator of a coding bootcamp subreddit while also running one is probably not the best use of your time, right? Even though I know you're being honest, just the appearance of a conflict of interest can be an issue. Why not find someone else to take over the reins, someone who isn't actively involved in the industry?
One 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
> Both sides of the story need to be heard before making a judgement.
Your side begins and ends at being a reddit moderator for an industry subreddit while working in said industry as a CTO. Anything you say or do in this position should rightfully be assumed to be biased.
Do they though? Being a reddit mod for a sub that covers an industry you have a vested interest in with no other mods with similar backgrounds really does sound like a well traffic'd and successful bully pulpit.
My company works with a lot of bootcamp grads later on in their careers so wouldn't I have an interest in promoting bootcamps so more people go and create more customers down the road?
I recommended a bunch of people go to Codesmith until February 2024, when the first signs of collapsed started.
Are you planning to write something up about it? It would be interesting to hear the other side that you’re hinting at.
It’s also not clear to me if the person who wrote this article was paid for it or if they’re somehow affiliated with someone involved. It says they’re a “Fractional VP of Content”. I’m curious if you know more.
I might. I have hordes of documents. It's a really sad situation and very sad that he characterized this this way without even talking to me whatsoever.
I believe the phrase that applies here is "put up or shut up". If you have hordes of documents to draw on as primary sources, then it should be pretty simple (but perhaps time consuming) to write a rebuttal.
Hello. It's nice to be able to interact directly with the subject of the article, so thanks for coming on. It's a shame you're being downvoted, because it would definitely be interesting to hear your perspective. This can't be a pleasant experience for you.
I have a couple of questions for you. Firstly the article really didn't hold back about you in a way that you don't usually see. But he makes very specific and verifiable claims. The owner blames the market for 40% of their decline and you for another 40%. You have made over 400 negative comments about the company over the last couple of years. You run the subreddit as a bad faith mod, and you run a rival company so you have an interest in the decline of codesmith. Those are some of the accusations laid against you by the article.
I would be interested in hearing what you have to say about them. Obviously i don't expect you to say anything that might create legal issues for yourself. But you have opinions that youre not shy of expressing. The article was perhaps not wholly neutral so maybe you can clarify your side of the story. Do you have a specific problem with codesmith? why do you care so much about them? Is it because they are competitiors? Do you take such an active role on reddit in order to promote your own interests, outside of creating and maintaining a better community?
To be clear i'm a completely random guy with no skin in the game, just looking for answers.
[edit to reply: There is no plausible scenario that my life will depend on the answer. Literally the only reason i'm on here is for casual chit chat. Frankly, this might be life changing for some people, but i'm really not too invested in the story so i don't mind opening some dialogue in good faith from my end.]
This is a wonderfully mature and constructive comment.
I appreciate this is off-topic, but I really wanted to highlight/praise what you'd written. It came across to me as very "HN" and the guidelines appear to corroborate this...
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Yeah I'll I'm going to say for now is that if all your competitors (that I spoke positively about) are shutting down and shrinking and laying people off... there's more to the story. A sad story about an industry dying that should be told.
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.)
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.
“The same 5 people moderates 500 of the most popular subreddits”
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/gjl27j/the_...
It appears the original post they are discussing was removed. Seems like Reddit banned the original user who collected this data and deleted their posts.
Another discussion about this:
“Six powermods control 118 of the top 500 subreddits”
https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/gkkfg5/upda...
Evidence pasted:
The Name “Maxwellhill”
The username directly references “Maxwell,” which is not a common surname. Ghislaine Maxwell grew up at Headington Hill Hall, which was nicknamed “Maxwell Hill” after her father, Robert Maxwell, bought it. This isn’t a vague reference it’s oddly specific and personal. It’s like someone using “EpsteinIsland” as a username and claiming it’s just coincidence.
Posting Activity Stopped the Day of Her Arrest (actually 2 days before, when she began wrapping her phone in aluminum)
u/maxwellhill posted almost every day for 14 years and was one of Reddit’s most active users. Then, with no warning, all posting stopped after June 30, 2020. Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested on July 2, 2020. The timing is exact. This wasn’t a slow fade or gradual disinterest. It looks like someone was physically unable to post.
Gaps in Posting Line Up with Real-Life Events
There were other suspicious posting gaps during major events in Maxwell’s life. Notably, during her mother’s death in 2013 and during the 2011 Kleiner Perkins party, where she was confirmed to be present by former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao. That party shows Reddit leadership at the time was at least aware of her.
Moderator of Massive Subreddits
The account was a lead mod of r/worldnews, r/technology, r/politics, r/science, r/europe, r/upliftingnews, r/celebrities, and more. These are major subs that help shape Reddit’s front page and influence global discourse. Whoever had access to this account had immense control. Even after years of inactivity, Reddit auto added the account back as a moderator in 2024. That suggests the system still treats it like an active, important account.
The Content
Maxwellhill posted repeatedly about age of consent laws, often citing obscure countries. They also posted articles defending the legality of child exploitation material and criticized what they called “overzealous” child protection laws. These aren’t normal discussion points for the average Redditor. It reads like someone obsessed with legal gray areas surrounding child abuse.
Auto Deletion and Censorship
Mentions of “u/maxwellhill” have been automatically removed from comments in multiple subs. The Daily Dot reported on suspicious deletion behavior tied to the account. Posts about this user “vanished mysteriously,” raising real concerns about censorship. Who or what is protecting the account?
No Denial from the Account
If u/maxwellhill is just some random power user, where are they? Why haven’t they logged in to say anything? No posts, no comments, no denials. Nothing for five years. After 14 years of near daily activity, complete silence in the face of serious allegations is suspicious on its own.
The poster also uses many British expressions in their writing, and listed British foods as their favorite foods in one post.
Mods of r/WorldNews which is infamously compromised by paid agents demanded her posts be deleted from other subreddits.
The name matches Maxwell’s family estate. The account vanishes the day she’s arrested. It posted about topics deeply aligned with her known behavior. It held mod control over huge parts of Reddit. It still does. And yet it hasn’t said a word in five years. If this isn’t her, it’s someone with eerily similar patterns, priorities, and timing.
Thanks god. We have a new drama. I can keep my reduced TV time for a while longer.
Yes.
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.
HN has problems but moderation being arbitrary isn't really one of them.
Of course, most reputable forums have policies and rules but at the end of the day these do not mean much. Who are you going to complain to if you get unjustly banned - the Internet police?
You can always start your own blog/forum/subreddit and post whatever you like.
Yes, they can and that's how it's set up. Each community makes their own rules and can choose who participates.
It's not Reddit. It's the sub that made the decision and I'm not sure how it would be possible for Reddit the company to deal with sub level rule complaints and appeals.
Leaving aside everything else wrong with that, that would be trivial to abuse, especially with the help of sockpuppetry but easily enough even without that.
If one is squatting on a valuable forum name, then the moderators should be themselves subject to a standard enforced by Reddit.
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.
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.
(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.
https://archive.ph/qpfED
Seems like a pretty incoherent conspiracy theory. What a weird thing to believe.
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.
Edit: i'm banned now from hacker news. 8-)
Edit 2: yes, i can no longer post and this submission was also removed from the front page. It's back on the front page now after upvotes doubled.
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.
Considering how quickly they make new accounts, I think you're underestimating banned HN users by quite a margin!
HN moderates mostly transparently, which they do not have to do at all. That demonstrates respect for their participants, or ideals, your pick.
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.
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.
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.
That's some impressive blindness. That's exactly why the OP is stating it's unreliable. It _was_ reliable. Now it's a minefield, because trust->money.
Just like Amazon 5 star reviews. They used to be good probably until about 2012-2015 (if you stretch it). Then it became weaponized because the trust was so high. Anything with strong 5 star reviews sold.
Of course, you can "figure out" if what you're reading is trustworthy, but to blanket state "the most reliable place" - days gone to yesteryear.
Great experience with one step and blown to bits with one small step in a different direction.
There's a variety of these marketing spambots on Reddit, and I'm sure like the toupee effect, there are more subtle ones that I'm not noticing. I think this is existential in the long run for Reddit as a platform, but maybe the owners/employees are happy to milk all the value out and walk away from the husk.
Ehhhhh I agree and yet also disagree (it's fun though).
Yes they were ruined by being promoted by algo changes, but do I blame google directly? For me, no.
It's exactly as we stated before, it's because it was so trustworthy. Individual people's personal experience with X or Y many times with good details. That earned a lot of strong backlinks, blogs, etc. The domain became authoritative especially on esoteric searches. Then algo changes came (remember pandas?) and pushed them even further. I mean that's the point of search systems right? Get you to trustworthy information that you're looking for.
Then the money grabbers showed up.
So it's just like Harvey Dent said - either you die a trusted niche community or live long enough to see yourself become weaponized for money. He was so smart, that Harvey Dent.
Why let reddit drag down the credibility of well everyone in their niche by association. Even if it’s only a tiny bit per year, that adds up over time.
Some in fact have but the majority? Probably laziness, but laziness is just misaligned incentive-goals.
Communities have very little incentive to de-reddit. It's actually a huge amount of work and they gain almost nothing directly.
Separately, I was thinking you know HNews is pretty immune to this problem because we don't have a central theme or something, right?
But no, that just means I can't see how I'm being monetized is all. Blind leading the blind.
EDIT: I don't know why I'm getting so many downvotes, nothing I said is controversial at all.
This gives the appearance to people that hold positions that are out of touch with reality that the coherent narratives are an all-encompassing hegemonic echo chamber that covers the whole site. The incoherent conservative narratives fail to take root among a wider audience since they fall apart when scrutinized. The karma system om reddit's encourages this behavior among neutral subreddit to dunk on people when they say things that are nonsense.
So that's why you only see them being held in specific ideological echo chambers like /r/Conservative where you have mods that censor discussion that debunks or merely calls into doubt the narrative asserted by the moderation team.
I personally found it off topic, the conversation was about using Reddit as a source of truth for product opinions/reviews and it’s unlikely that the absence of a right wing majority is relevant when purchasing a dishwasher.
I think the problem is that people get their incorrect world views from Reddit.
"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiavellianism_(psychology)
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45522396
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
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-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/1e63...
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.
The criminal case is an open investigation and also has been in the news lately: 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.
“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.
You have that in TFA? Author is an outsider to the drama.
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.
Even though you have counter claims, you moderating the forum for your industry is problematic. You also seem keen to chime in about a competitor when you should be impartial and allow users to discuss their experiences alone.
Yes there are two sides to every story, but in no universe should you be the mod of that subreddit.
Everything I can find online, including your post on reddit about the outage, says the outage was for 4 days. Not 3 weeks.
I'll also note that your post on reddit about the outage was phrased as if you were a student impacted by the outage, going so far as to say it was your "final straw" even though you don't have skin in the game other than as a competitor.
I know your heart is in the right place, and have a great deal of respect for you. I think being the most active moderator of a coding bootcamp subreddit while also running one is probably not the best use of your time, right? Even though I know you're being honest, just the appearance of a conflict of interest can be an issue. Why not find someone else to take over the reins, someone who isn't actively involved in the industry?
Your side begins and ends at being a reddit moderator for an industry subreddit while working in said industry as a CTO. Anything you say or do in this position should rightfully be assumed to be biased.
I recommended a bunch of people go to Codesmith until February 2024, when the first signs of collapsed started.
It’s also not clear to me if the person who wrote this article was paid for it or if they’re somehow affiliated with someone involved. It says they’re a “Fractional VP of Content”. I’m curious if you know more.
I have a couple of questions for you. Firstly the article really didn't hold back about you in a way that you don't usually see. But he makes very specific and verifiable claims. The owner blames the market for 40% of their decline and you for another 40%. You have made over 400 negative comments about the company over the last couple of years. You run the subreddit as a bad faith mod, and you run a rival company so you have an interest in the decline of codesmith. Those are some of the accusations laid against you by the article.
I would be interested in hearing what you have to say about them. Obviously i don't expect you to say anything that might create legal issues for yourself. But you have opinions that youre not shy of expressing. The article was perhaps not wholly neutral so maybe you can clarify your side of the story. Do you have a specific problem with codesmith? why do you care so much about them? Is it because they are competitiors? Do you take such an active role on reddit in order to promote your own interests, outside of creating and maintaining a better community?
To be clear i'm a completely random guy with no skin in the game, just looking for answers.
[edit to reply: There is no plausible scenario that my life will depend on the answer. Literally the only reason i'm on here is for casual chit chat. Frankly, this might be life changing for some people, but i'm really not too invested in the story so i don't mind opening some dialogue in good faith from my end.]
I appreciate this is off-topic, but I really wanted to highlight/praise what you'd written. It came across to me as very "HN" and the guidelines appear to corroborate this...
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Next we should hear from the counter party is from a court filing. Not here. This is well past having a chill chat on hackernews.