'Coup Attempt' of Reddit's Wallstreetbets Forum Is Averted | Hacker News Reader

'Coup Attempt' of Reddit's Wallstreetbets Forum Is Averted

pcmag.com

68 pointsdrewrem1130 comments

One of the interesting takeaways from this is that if you get lucky to be a mod of a sub that blows up in popularity it can be come a lucrative business.

I know there's been many articles written about this kind of thing, but I'm surprised it hasn't (or maybe it has) become a trend to build a popular subreddit for the purpose of selling out once it has traction.

Some subreddits will be more profitable than others. Gaming subs or anything with commerce attached to it are obvious wins. Politics too are an obvious target for taking in money for approved content.

I wonder if there has been much speculation or analysis into which existing communities are poised for takeover/competition with the goal of 'selling out' for promoted content later.

I think if the problem became too common it would force Reddit to reevaluate the community mod aspect of the site but who knows.

quick edit: after I wrote this and thought about it I realized this is also kinda how reddit started in the early days with them faking users and comments in order to grow in popularity and gain traction as a forum. In a way it's sticking with the early ethos of Reddit's founding team.

Interestingly, Baidu had been selling moderator rights for boards on its Tieba (which is kind of the same as subreddits on reddit). It got lots of backlash especially after they sold mod rights for some cancer patient support group boards to, well, alternative medicine promoters.

This is also the strategy of a lot of social media accounts that compile cute animal pictures or something, amass followers then sell the account for ads.

Most of the popular subs are run by a small group of people who use mod power to sell native advertising and reputation manipulation (suppressing anti-advertiser commentary, promoting pro-advertisiter sentiment).

The unconnected dots here are why some group of old moderators have to ban newer moderators in order to garner some sort of lucrative movie deal just for themselves?

It seems like the narrative is that the older moderators were uninvolved with any of the recent events, so in order to boost their likelihood of being treated as experts by default, they decided they'd try to reduce the visibility of the moderators who would otherwise get the attention.

as a user and member of WSB I have been trying to think how one could create a platform that is meant to deal with bots. I think this is going to be a crucial thing in the coming years.

Bad actors are able to easily influence the sentiment of a community with these bots. I even thought after all this is over WSB is dead, it doesn’t cost much for these firms to continue to leave their bots on posting and changing the sentiment of the community and ultimately forcing members to leave.

Does anyone have any ideas on how this could be done?

> Does anyone have any ideas on how this could be done?

You can get rid of the automated variety pretty easily. What you can't do is stop people from paying others to post specific content. At that point, it's a human and they can pass any automated bot test you come up with.

> “They (the old mods) left for years and came back when they smelled money,” wrote “zjz," a banned moderator.

sort of ironic given the purpose of the sub.

I was going to say the same thing. Long holds work exactly like this... Don't look at it for a long time to restrict your temptation to day trade and potentially make a wrong move at the wrong time.

Every successful investor I know does this. They put in it, don't look at it for months, if not years, and do a eval-reshuffle of their portfolio every 5-10 years.

The more media /r/wallstreetbets gets, the more I'm convinced it's going to implode from within due to money and power.

Well that’s one strategy, nothing wrong with it but there are a lot of other ways to generate money from the stock market.

Its very different. Speculating on a market vs taking over a sub after being inactive for years to get into the spotlight when it's in the news is not comparable at all.

agreed, I think in this case reddit made the correct (or "least bad") decision. I just find it amusing that users of a subreddit dedicated to getting rich quick by making wild bets would complain about a mod cashing in on their position. it's sort of like a graffiti artist complaining about someone defacing their work.

> it's sort of like a graffiti artist complaining about someone defacing their work.

"bomb condos not murals"

WSB (read the name) is for gambling, not exploiting or defacing anything, so there's no reason members would condone trashing their home for money.

Isn't what the article calls an aversion more of a coup than the initial banning of the newer mods?

Sounds like a bad idea to grow a community on Reddit if the site can remove you and put others in your place. Why put any effort into the task at all, if Reddit reaps all the benefit?

I'm not saying what these mods did is or is not scummy. Rather, I'm looking at Reddit and the way they perceive the communities that live on their platform.

People need to remember that you don't own a subreddit, reddit owns your subreddit, they're just letting you moderate it for them.

Subreddits are discussion forums, they aren't business ventures. Obviously the very big ones run into some gray area, but the overwhelmingly common situation is that moderators "put effort into the task" of creating a subreddit so they can simply have a nice place to discuss things and not "to reap benefit".

Trying to monetize a subreddit isn't really the purpose of the site, and if you want to do that there are other tools available.

Seems no different than Bogleheads shilling index funds in the 00’s

From what little I know the person responsible for growing the WSB community was the banned admin 'zjz' who was quoted.

Yes. That's the business model of Reddit.

They host the website and have the user base.

And moderators create subreddits which they control.

The web comic xkcd's subreddit had a holocaust denier as the top mod. In 2014.

Reddit didn't step in even though the comic's creator didn't like it. And other mods and the community asked for it.

They were only removed once they were inactive for two months.

Summary I found: https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/reddit-xkcd-moderator-socce...

Reddit "steps" if and only if there is a marketing disadvantge or possibilties of judicial actions.

Reddit never had any problems hosting white supremacists, pedophiles, psychopaths and criminals as long as news networks or authorities didn't get involved.

User count is more important than morality, ethics, humanity or moderation. Reddit also tends to casually lie about this. The creepy smiling Smoo says it all.

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