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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

I agree, but there’s this screaming cage match, euphemistically called “engagement,” that is the vein of gold for Web site owners.

As has become clear, “engagement” means public brawling. It generates clicks, and clicks are gold. It also encourages people to sign up for accounts, just so they can jump into the cesspool. Those accounts are quite valuable, as they are fodder for data miners, correlators, and aggregators. Making those accounts free, and easy to create (but not so easy to delete), is a natural.

That’s why so many of these sites wait until their comment fighting pits reach brand-destroying levels of rancor, before they do anything about it; sometimes, too late (remember when SlashDot was the HN? It’s now the place to go, if you want ASCII-art swastikas).

Yeah, I’m cynical.

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A friend of mine discovered that you can, uh... invest into engagement [0] and went ahead.

I did know about this shady part of the internet but knowing and seeing it in action is different.

[0]: https://www.techeblog.com/rare-look-inside-an-app-review-far...

> I remember when Reddit was caught paying trolls.

I've been there for like 10 years and I don't remember this. Was it even before? Do you have a link or something? I tried some searches but didn't find any relevant result. Thanks in advance.

I'll remove the reference (I can't be bothered to spend the time to hunt down the sources), but it was a huge (but brief) stink. It wasn't that long ago.

The guy was a paid subreddit mod, and an engineer in Arizona or New Mexico, or somewhere.

The story destroyed his career. I know he was immediately fired by his day job. Maybe it's a good thing that the story is hard to find. We all deserve a second chance. I actually felt a bit sorry for him.

Never mind. I was just curious.

> paid subreddit mod

They used to pay moderators?

I don't know if he was a mod, per se. The scandal was that he received renumeration from Reddit, and had a direct reporting relationship with them. It probably wasn't much, and was probably loose enough to allow a speedy under-bus transition of the person, when found out.

I am not much of a Reddit user, so I don't know the landscape well enough to be cognizant of the terminology.

You're getting it mixed up. He was running a bunch of shock porn and near-porn subreddits skirting really close to the line of illegality(most notoriously a number devoted to clothed but suggestive pictures of minors). Nobody was paying him. This was the piece you're thinking of: https://gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacrez-th...

Yes, that's probably it, and it does look like I was mistaken. The problem was that Reddit wasn't doing anything about it. People got quite upset over that.

Thanks for the correction. I [honestly] appreciate it.

I suspect this was what had me confused:

> Violentacrez's privileged position came from the fact that for years he had helped administrators deal with the massive seedy side of Reddit, acting almost as an unpaid staff member. Reddit administrators essentially handed off the oversight of the site's NSFW side to Violentacrez, according to former Reddit lead programer Chris Slowe (a.k.a. Keysersosa), who worked at Reddit from 2005 to the end of 2010. When Violentacrez first joined the site and started filling it with filth, administrators were wary and they often clashed. But eventually administrators and Violentacrez came to an uneasy truce, according to Slowe. For all his unpleasantness, they realized that Violentacrez was an excellent community moderator and could be counted on to keep the administrators abreast of any illegal content he came across.

And this might be why I didn't remember the case. So it's either a different one the GP is talking about -of which I couldn't find any relevant result, maybe my fault- or the GP is referring, like you suggest, to Violentacrez, a very different case that I still remember.

Well, the personal details he gave about the mod sound like they match up, and the article does talk about him working closely with the admins.

>(remember when SlashDot was the HN? It’s now the place to go, if you want ASCII-art swastikas).

I think it's always been like that. The GNAA (when it was new back in early 2000s) was copying the template of existing trolls by challenging those on probationary on their IRC to get racist first posts, something like that. It was already just one of those things you ran across on Slashdot, like bizarre Natalie Portman copy pasta.

>(remember when SlashDot was the HN? It’s now the place to go, if you want ASCII-art swastikas).

I do, and I had an old account there, back in the before times. But now it just looks like a less popular reddit comment section. What do you mean with the swastikas?

There's a certain...subculture...of /. troll that go into many of the comment threads, and post these giant ASCI art swastikas. They are usually accompanied by all kinds of racist pejoratives. I'm sure they get reported, but I have seem them stay up for weeks.

They probably aren't real Nazis; just bored teenagers, trying to get a rise.

You usually need to max out the comment filters to see them (rightly so).

But there's also plenty of good old-fashioned abuse trolls, there.

One of the reasons that I like this place, is because it highly discourages that kind of behavior.

If it starts happening here, I'm heading for the hills. I used to be a troll, but as I have gotten older, the shine has worn off that brand of behavior.

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