Always a bit confusing since reddit has admins and moderators, and they are very different. Admins are reddit employees, moderators are just random people who run a specific subreddit.
So if I understand correctly, this was a site level feature, and admins gave a 1h heads up to the moderators of the specific subreddits using that feature, allowing the moderators to sell early.
Wouldn't the blame here be more on the admins? Is there a reason this "heads up" was secretly only given to mods, and not just announced publicly right away?
> In a regulated securities market, this would be considered insider information, and this could lead to jail time
Per the SEC's definition (and thus prevailing law of the land), this is already illegal insider trading. That said, it's a low enforcement priority, largely on account of the victims being unsympathetic.
> the victims here are literally the people who need protecting the most
If you look at my comment history, you'll see I'm for enforcement. When I've advocated for it, this is what I've been told: crypto enthusiasts aren't a sympathetic victim block. That leads to reduced enforcement when they're the victims. When it's regular folk, like those depositing with Gemini Earn, we get enforcement.
Same reason we don't see enforcement against dealers of adulterated illegal drugs in respect of their adulteration. The victims aren't sympathetic.
If you’re for enforcement, you should be appalled at this answer. According to non-crazy metrics, up to 13% of Americans held crypto currencies at some point.
Don’t tell me 13% of all Americans don’t deserve enforcement at least of the rules by which crypto currencies should operate. I’m not asking for the moon here.
You are incorrect. The only time that the SEC has been to court on the issue of that definition, the court ruled against them. The SEC does not have the power to determine what is a security anyway. That rests with statutory law and court precedent.
It's orders of magnitude too expensive to build anything like this in a regulated securities market. Even IPOs are being delayed until established companies can sustain today's enormous compliance costs.
The difference is that dang is one of the rare mods that’s actually paid for the work. I assume this means it’s a job to him, rather than a means to satisfy some desire for power and control.
I have a feeling that some of the "mods abusing power" phenomenon is that they may be subconsciously afraid of losing their mod position and all the power and authority that comes with. They have no method to hold that power tight except to wield it against any perceived threat.
So paying mods might reduce that behavior since their power is tied to them doing their job properly and there is an authority to appeal to if they suck and abuse power.
Not to say dang isn't doing a great job only because he's paid to! But I agree with you, paid mods have different rewards and goals than volunteer mods.
This and everything else shows that. It’s hard to find examples where trusting groups of people with power has worked out well in the medium/long term.
They used their privileged information. Privilege is a kind of power, and in this case they acted in ways they could only do if they were in those privileged positions.
I have a feeling you are correct in some ways (depending on which sub you were a mod of, r/the_donald was a very different crowd with different mod practices than something like r/pics) but a lot of the complaints also come from disagreements about particular interpretations of the rules and lack of recourse to an adjudicator with higher authority. I'm sure there are plenty of petty mod actions, especially on Reddit when posting in one sub can automatically get you banned in another if a mod checks your history.
Reddit is a special rodeo that I spent way longer than 8 seconds on. Positives came out of my time there but my, my was it too much time overall lol
Yeah really strange that people don't like other people with the power to write, interpret, and enforce riles against them, and who they have no power to remove from their position if they abuse it.
People don't like having rules they didn't have a say in applied against them.
Also fairly draconian punishments without a reddit-mandated ratcheting policy for further violations. I once got a 30 day ban for a first offense that was easily dealt with within 5 minutes of my post (which I was in the process of editing) by shadow-banning my post.
Then people should participate in democracies rather than tyrannies, I think. You can't willingly participate in a community where the mods unilaterally decide the rules and then complain that you didn't have a say in them.
Of course you can. Complaint is the fundamental bedrock of civilization. Complaint is the first thing which facilitates the overthrow of tyranny. Without complaint compatriots would never have gathered to assert their collective will against powers stronger than any single one of them.
Most of the mods involved are no longer mods. At least one (TNGSystems) is still a mod since they waited until the official announcement before dumping their position. Here is their explanation: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrencyMeta/comments/17b8lqe... In this argument you can only see TNGSystems's responses because all the comments from the other side were deleted by moderators.
Copied for posterity:
> If I’m an asshole for selling my moons in order to provide a guaranteed safety blanket while my wife is off on maternity leave and I’ve got to cover all bills & upkeep & all the new shit we have to buy for a baby, then so be it.
> I hadn’t made my mind up on selling, even when the announcement was posted. Otherwise I would’ve done it after 10 seconds, not 3 and 6 mins after it was posted.
> At the end of the day I decided to take a guaranteed chunk of cash in return for my contributions, time and energy rather than wondering if the system can be built back up by mods.
There’s two “announcements” I see in the Reddit threads, and it isn’t clear which he’s talking about here: the internal announcement, from an hour before the public announcement.
It’s pretty shitty if he sold after the internal, and still even if he waited “3-6 minutes” after public, he still had an hour to prep his sell and make a decision on whether he would.
These "moons", or whatever, don't seem to have any connection with real world economic activity, and so are intrinsically worthless beyond the value that those involved in trading these notions give to them.
I wonder if there are any economic studies into the value that people place on assets and goods according to their direct connections with human wellbeing, e.g. food, housing, and clothing, vs capital, vs derivatives of capital such as shares etc, vs the crazy world of crypto.
I'm having a hard time imagining who they dumped it on. Like, who bought all of those tokens? Imagine buying Reddit coins, it reminds me of the "bingus token" meme.
As I said in the previous thread I thought one of the idea behind the killing of the 3rd party apps was to force everyone to use the official app > it has the crypto wallet so Reddit can promote it. Yet 2 months later they kill that too. Very strange (guess it didn't fit the IPO plans)
What was Reddit's angle, anyway? It feels like they saw crypto was hot in 2020, and organizational inertia made it impossible to launch a coin until 2022. By then, crypto's unbridled enthusiasm phase was over. I don't think Reddit even needed to be involved in crypto (they're an ad company), but if you want to get something launched while there's hype, you have to move a lot faster.
Reddit is destroyed, out of lack of maintenance and leaving everything to moderators who have grown to become figurative monsters.
Lemmy is growing and it s at this "not big enough" phase that makes things seem great . It doesnt scale, but it will be interesting to see how popular it will get before hitting the limit. Hopefully it will find equilibrium at a level that makes it still usable.
Lemmy's active user base has declined recently, while the number of posts and comments has grown. So the future looks mixed.
On the topic of its limit: when Digg/Reddit communities came about, the overall feeling was that people wanted to share and discuss things. There was far less polarization at early stages, which allowed for a rapid growth. Lemmy is already extremely polarized, with instances being defederated, never-ending hostile bickering in comments. This does not look like a welcoming community, and therefore is unlikely to grow into something that can compete with Reddit.
That's because the culture of the internet has changed. The innocence is lost from people, but i think reddit has swung completely to the other way, where people are no longer interested to debate, they are mostly looking for ways to report/ban you. It's exteremely cynical and lost its humour (unless you use /s you re most likely to be reported).
It will be interesting to see how lemmy goes . For me it is imnportant that it has an infinite Overton window even if it only happens on defederated edges. Popularity and reach is not everything, but the mere existence of all opinions is important
It's so obvious what happened here, all on the blockchain for the world to see. At least this is one benefit of the blockchain is it makes it easier to detect insider trading.
Yes, and it is insider trading under US law.[1] But for a few thousand dollars, the SEC probably won't go after them. The SEC is busy dealing with the billion dollar scams. There's about one crypto enforcement action every two weeks.[2] Not enough, but it's having an effect.
Meanwhile, 27 more crypto crashes/scams/thefts/rug pulls just this month.[3]
As a funny bit found in the 3rd link on "really" dumb crypto-bros:
> The American supermarket chain and cookie butter paradise, Trader Joe's, has filed a lawsuit against the popular Trader Joe decentralized exchange. According to the lawsuit, the supermarket believes the exchange is trying to benefit off the supermarket's popularity.
> This is actually the second such lawsuit by the supermarket against the exchange, after the first was thrown out when defendants claimed that they had simply named the project after the co-founder's brother, Joe. However, shortly after the victory, a co-founder admitted on their blog that they "just named it Trader Joe, after the supermarket".
> Trader Joe's is seeking all profits made by the exchange, plus damages and compensation for the failed lawsuit last year.
Are fake reddit bucks a real security? I'm not convinced anything illegal happened here. Even Reddit itself is not publicly traded so I don't think there's a case to be made for material non-public information.
> the four essential elements of the crime of wire fraud are: (1) that the defendant voluntarily and intentionally devised or participated in a scheme to defraud another out of money; (2) that the defendant did so with the intent to defraud; (3) that it was reasonably foreseeable that interstate wire communications would be used; and (4) that interstate wire communications were in fact used
The moment the seller knows that the tokens they are selling have taken a big hit to their value, they are engaging in parts 1 and 2 above when they attempt to sell the tokens to those ignorant of this hit in value. Parts 3 and 4 are guaranteed with internet architecture.
If this doesn't fall under the SEC's authority, they can easily send it on to the FBI.
I like the idea of fake reddit points being crypto tokens.
But I find it pretty dumb that some people consider it an "investment", thus what should just be a silly thing with almost null value, becomes a multi million dollar market (with it's inevitable insider trading, pump and dumps, etc).
It's a good thing crypto is a totally unregulated securities market with ultimate freedom, so that these folks won't suffer any consequences for acting on their insider information, as it should be. /s
Sarcasm aside, this is a great example of why a partially regulated market is a good thing.
A former friend of mine dumped his remaining savings into a niche crypto coin. Dude also doesn’t have a 401k. It’s wild how blind and into the crypto propaganda he’s dug himself. The dude’s future is fucked.
It's not as if crypto has a particularly good reputation or the scammy nature of crypto is a secret. I wonder if your former friend has the same kind of personality that just as well would have deluded themselves into thinking they have some amazing insights into horse racing or sports. Without crypto, would they have found some other way to gamble away their future?
> I wonder if your former friend has the same kind of personality that just as well would have deluded themselves into thinking they have some amazing insights into horse racing or sports.
I would not be surprised. The arrogance and self-righteousness in his character had gotten pretty out of control.
It's funny, because when I thought it might actually turn out to be a black swan event and thus a huge investment opportunity back in, oh, 2011-2012 or so, everyone thought I was crazy.*
The thing is, you have to be crazy to see it early I guess. If you don't get in at the beginning of these things, you will miss your hockey stick. AND, there has to be a fundamental advantage OTHER THAN hype to carry it forward.
*(Don't bother hacking me. There are none left, unfortunately, because I got disgusted by the scamminess of the people entering the market around 2016 or so and I don't like money sitting in things I'm not watching. And I now of course wish I hadn't've bought that Tesla with 2013-era bitcoins... A Tesla that still runs like a top. I've also survived multiple hacking attempts already. So, sellers' remorse, partly. Anyway. I believed in crypto, and survived crypto.)
That’s probably because they’re largely appointed (the directors anyway) from a pool of highly conflicted industry insiders who hold little to no intention of fulfilling their public responsibilities.
They're also not held accountable in any meaningful way by regulators (again, because they're highly conflicted). Bernie Madoff was the exception; most don't even get the Martha Stewart treatment, even after causing orders of magnitude more damage.
Lemmy seems to be growing as an alternative. Tehcnical superiority is overrated - Reddit is held together by the network effect. The nagging about its bad technology turns out to be quite a talking point on reddit too.
Speaking as someone who spent over a decade spending way too much time on Reddit… the problem with fediverse apps like lemmy is yes, partially the experience of the fediverse is inherently confusing. But it also doesn’t feel much like the raw, unfiltered internet. The fediverse has a bit of a sterilized and utopian feeling to it, in a way that even corpo-internet sites like Instagram, Reddit, Tumbler, etc don’t.
There is this hard to place aura about it, that the closest word I would use to describe it might be elitism. Despite being prescriptively and almost cloyingly inclusive at times, it’s still somehow not a place for all people and walks. Contrast that to a place like Facebook or Reddit, and even if you’re uneducated, technologically limited, and by all accounts living a most ordinary and unexamined life, you can find a community to welcome you. The fediverse really doesn’t have space for that sort of person, or really even folks who just empathize with such people and don’t mind them around.
And yes I know the fediverse is beautifully principled in that it’s not one thing or platform or instance and anyone can make their own blah blah but that’s not really how it plays out.
I don’t think the fediverse is a bad thing. But I do think it’s more of a home for the kind of people who love RSS feeds and classical music and vim and GPL and adblockers than it is for the huddled masses that comprise the majority of internet space.
What impression of the fediverse you get is highly dependent on who you federate and interact with. If you're on one of the nodes that block everything the admins disagree with, you're going to see the sterilized content you're describing. If you go with a node that doesn't block anything (except illegal content), you're likely to see more of the raw, unfiltered"old internet" style content where it was ok to be offensive or disagreeable.
I wouldn't describe it as "sterilized and utopian" but otherwise I agree.
Basically, 99% of the people on the Fediverse are tech-savvy, anti-corporate, chronically-online people*. Which also means that there's a much smaller population, because it only consists of these types of people. Meanwhile, there are more "normal" people on Reddit so it has more/more active communities and the viewpoints are more diverse.
It's ironic seeing Lemmy have even worse left-wing bias than Reddit, because there's a lot of left-center people on Reddit, but mostly only radical leftists are motivated to participate in Lemmy.
* Excluding the nearly-separate Fediverse of right-wing groups, who move to alternative platforms because they're banned from centralized ones. Except it's also an extreme echo-chamber, just a different one.
> The fediverse has a bit of a sterilized and utopian feeling to it
I mean if you want to join an instance with no rules that is a hive of horror and villainy, I'm pretty sure they are out there. They just won't be widely federated.
it certinaly doesnt feel like that on lemmy , maybe you re talking about some other part of the 'fediverse'?
To be honest i don't even care about that. As a user i want a place to store my thoughts, outside the impossibly juvenile corporate gardens, even if very few people read it. And if censorship becomes too much of a problem i can still create my own instance.
I wish there was a place for high quality discussion on any topic. By "high-quality" I don't mean super serious and polite, just intellectually stimulating.
Early Quora was a bit like that. I also used to visit a non-English website with a blog section that was amazing - wide variety of mostly smart people with memorable personalities and diverse set of opinions. There were heated debates on various topics, humor, technical posts about some niche field and a specific atmosphere, it felt a bit like a small-town pub. It was not an echo-chamber like most places today, probably because there was no comment voting. Little to no moderation. I still remember a lot of the people, which I can't say about HN or Reddit.
Reddit is now a cesspool. I tried to post something criticalof Uber to the Uberdriver forum and it was auto-blockef four times. Each attempt was milder and less critical than the previous, and the fourth attempt was almost pablum. Each was blocked within a second or so of posting, so they must have some sort of auto block or sentiment analysis going on.
The internet also contains countless legit websites & services and offers many ways to use it productively.
I think if blockchain projects offered a comparable value, people would have better ways to defend it than assuring everyone it's definitely not all a scam.
I have seen good, dispassionate defenses of blockchain tech pop up in the comments here, but this argument has played out many times and it probably wears on people.
Anyway, Namecoin seemed like a pretty nice use case, even if it didn't take off. Smart contracts seem like a good idea to me. Behind all the hype and idiotic money chasing behavior and criminality there are some niche but proven-useful technical innovations. And despite people throwing blockchain-everything at the wall to see what sticks for some time, there's still plenty of opportunity for new applications to emerge.
It's not the worst medium of exchange when the credit card oligopoly doesn't want PR risk or is a bit puritanical with an otherwise legitimate, legal, popular good or service. You (or some government) could probably build better or just legislate the equivalent of net neutrality on our payment processors, but we don't live in that world yet.
> Searching HN for "insider trading", around 80% of the stories are about insider trading happening on Wall Street
Because most insider trading is trivial to catch. An insider trader has to act ex ante. That's difficult on multiple levels: acquisition of the information, predicting its effect and executing the trades all while evading capture. Detection, on the other hand, is ex post facto: find unusually profitable trades after the information has occurred. That's what the SEC does. To the extent insider traders aren't caught, it's because they failed to turn a profit.
Look at the people being caught insider trading; they're rarely professionals. Because professionals know how hard it is relative to the gains. Instead, it's mostly numpties who heard about an acquisition from their spouse or whatever.
With crypto, we have the tape. But linking the wallets to the numpties is hard. (Also fewer people care about the victims, let's be honest.) Imagine if this chain had real names attached to it. We'd have a predictable list of offenders to prosecute.
Insider trading is when an insider knows the true price better than you do and takes advantage of that by making buys/sells on the market without disclosing the insider information.
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What happened here is a rugpull. Not insider trading. The coin was collapsing, but plenty of people figured out how to make money even in the collapse.
Rugpulls don't really happen in the regulated market. But they are a dime a dozen on cryptocoins.
I'm not sure if you're intentionally trying to miss the point - the scam is that people who knew that demand for the asset was about to crater - because they were about to crater it, by shutting it down, extracted their investment knowing that others would not be able to.
The reddit moderators who cashed out were not the ones who were shutting down the service. They simply had insider information that allowed them to move first with this information. This was not a rugpull scenario.
They are very unlike other currencies, in that almost all of them are rigged for a period of rapid hype-based growth followed by a deflationary apocalypse where late adopters are squeezed out by those who perpetuated the ponzi scheme (which is to say, nearly the entire community aside from Satoshi and maybe Vitalik Buterin -- who are probably good people, but hold silly beliefs)
> They are very unlike other currencies, in that almost all of them are rigged [...]
So you're actually agreeing with me, that crypto currencies are not a scam. The number of currencies is also irrelevant even in a more colloquial sense. What's more important is how much is really invested in a given currency and the bad tokens are a niche. Ponzi scheme (or just new) coins are usually for gamblers and not in broad use and are comparable to jettons in a casino. Are jettons a scam in that sense?
We should be alarmed about any money system that has the properties that give way to gambling and ponzi-like systems. I would not hesitate to criticize both the money system and the con artists who took advantage of it, when it's so clear that the money system's rules have such inevitable outcomes. I don't mind abolishing any of the money systems that turn out to be harmful and are pushed without broad sociopolitical consent.
Very few people are swapping yen and euros trying to get rich from them.
The standard gambling that happens with "our current money system" can also happen with self-written IOUs. This kind of gambling isn't about the money, per se, whereas with crypto you get an additional kind of gambling on the currency itself.
For Yen and Euro it makes less sense since these are relatively stable, but for less stable currencies that is actually a thing. The definition of gambling you are talking about is built into our monetary system.
I give you the point that it is harder (not impossible) to enforce any regulations on these currencies. It's like cash in that sense, but it has easy access and there are plenty of options of cash, which is unlike regular cash.
No, the casino is the scam that's why the house always wins and just like cryptocurrencies as soon as you build one the incentives are to make it an even more predatory scam. That's why they're variously illegal or heavily regulated
Yes.... and it was a terrible system, not having a money system with any sort of democratic political controls on its supply and demand. Through a modern lens, we should view the thousands of years of gold coin currency as a human system that was ripe to cause artificial limitations and excesses of resource availability for populations that participated in the system. With a time machine, we should advise people of the past that a much better (but still imperfect) system -- clay tablets with a list of creditors and debtors, with regular debt cancellations/easements as needed to maintain stability -- had already been invented, possibly thousands of years before the invention of coins.
Funny thing about crypto enthusiasts is that they'll claim cryptocurrencies are currencies when it's convenient then claim they are "assets" or "a store of value" when it's not.
> aren't all currencies, by definition, assets / stores of value?
Yes and no. Modern currencies separate the medium of exchange and unit of account functions, on one hand, from the store of value and standard of deferred payment functions, on the other hand. Paper and deposit dollars are the former, Treasuries are the latter. Someone complaining about inflation eroding their cash under a mattress's value is literally using their dollars wrong.
You said "Bitcoiners" and "their scambucks" in one sentence.
Before eCommerce took off the internet was almost exclusively used for scams and arguably that is still the case even if not exclusively it's still a big part, so we should declare the internet a scam I suppose.
Disclaimer: I am not even heavily invested (in any sense). It's just a means to pay for stuff for me.
People can't overpay if they can't buy it at all. By putting it on the market the seller aids and abets their buying at higher than the true market price. This is a social bad.
It's also generally not allowed, just like you aren't allowed to buy stock in your own company right before a merger agreement you negotiated, or sell shares right before you post quaterly earnings you know will be bad.
Heck look at the scandal (which imo should have been bigger) around congresspeople trading around mask/healthcare/vaccine stocks early in 2020 based on their reports while publicly downplaying risks.
That's because the US government at least hates competition. If people get too good at discovering the value of something those methods become illegal because it isn't fair to those who don't want to actually go after information and just want to read news headlines and earning reports.
If the US government "hated competition" it would nationalize everything.
Though maybe you're right. If it really loved competition it would be better at preventing monopolies, would bar patents, and do sundry other things that would guarantee an unregulated (by anyone, not just government) free-for-all.
So if I understand correctly, this was a site level feature, and admins gave a 1h heads up to the moderators of the specific subreddits using that feature, allowing the moderators to sell early.
Wouldn't the blame here be more on the admins? Is there a reason this "heads up" was secretly only given to mods, and not just announced publicly right away?