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