Reddit mods dumped tokens hours before blockchain program termination

[ehsankia]

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?

[chris_wot]

In a regulated securities market, this would be considered insider information, and this could lead to jail time.

[I_Am_Nous]

Reddit mods who are historically very power hungry and abusive acted in power hungry ways which abused their power to make money.

However they aren't paid so I could see how someone could easily justify doing this as "payment" for their hard Reddit mod work they have put in.

[pityJuke]

I see no discussion on /r/cryptocurrency, but I do see some on /r/buttcoin [0]. If I haven't missed anything, supression of the story (predictable)?

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/17cikr2/reddit_mo...

[gurchik]

It looks like most discussion has been deleted by the mods. They've allowed this one to stay: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrencyMeta/comments/17b8lqe...

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.

> Crypto is a zero sum game.

[cowsup]

It's from a few days ago, and (predictably) got a lot of downvotes, but the post from the Reddit admin is still up:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/17a33ql/ser...

[qingcharles]

I've been on Reddit since it started and never heard of Moons, so I had to look them up:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/wiki/moons_wiki/

[sexy_seedbox]

Did you hear about /r/FortNiteBR Bricks?

https://blog.kraken.com/product/asset-listings/brick-and-moo...

[runnr_az]

Haha. Same… but that happened to me with the whole third party client thing too.

[mardifoufs]

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.

[omneity]

Usually there's a liquidity pool which acts like a self-service market maker (see Uniswap for details on how it works).

Unless everyone pulls their stake from the liquidity pool (it's the same "pull" in rugpull), there is always a counterparty to any sell/buy position.

[mertd]

They are no different than the people who bought before them. They just couldn't find a greater fool this time.

[haunter]

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)

[JumpCrisscross]

> guess it didn't fit the IPO plans

From what I heard, this is exactly it. Going public as a crypto-tainted company would have reduced the pool of buyers and lowered the stock price.

[jrockway]

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.

[rootsudo]

Angle? To make money. What else? They are adtech.

[seydor]

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.

[paulpauper]

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.

[Animats]

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]

[1] https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2022/07/crypto...

[2] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...

[3] https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

[redox99]

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).

[29athrowaway]

That site is malicious. It tries to access your clipboard.

[bozhark]

How’d you catch that?

[fudged71]

I don't see anything on /r/modnews

I know a bunch of mods are close with the admins so maybe there was a private discussion somewhere.

[sexy_seedbox]

It's on /r/CryptoCurrencyMeta

[IvyMike]

Is my butt-ugly NFT avatar safe?

[jedberg]

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.

[jsbisviewtiful]

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.

[baz00]

Market regulation is only a worse idea for the people selling you something.

[yterdy]

FWIW, insiders regularly get away with dumping regulated securities just before bad news becomes public.

[gdevenyi]

LBRY and Odysee would like a word.

[SoftTalker]

Regulation just moves where the corruption happens. I’m being a bit sarcastic but not completely.

[latchkey]

I sold all of the MRIN I was holding at $25 thanks to Reddit, and that's a fully regulated market.

[SuperNinKenDo]

Ah yes, insider trading, something that only ever occurs in unregulated markets.

[Havoc]

Reddit while still having good user generated content has become an utter shithole as platform.

Just shows how powerful network effects are.

[MichaelZuo]

Which makes it more strange that it has no competitors that are technically better as a platform.

Even Mastodon bungles and messes up very simple things like uploading a PNG image, and it's not trying to match even 80% of reddit's functionality.

[RivieraKid]

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.

[webnrrd2k]

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.

[pstuart]

Tell me again about how crypto is not a scam?

[fturst]

The Internet contains a lot of scams. Does that make the WWW, a scam? No. Same thing.

[rabbits_2002]

Thats the fun part, it is!

[dewey]

Searching HN for "insider trading", around 80% of the stories are about insider trading happening on Wall Street.

[yanderekko]

Demand for an asset fell so its price dropped. Nothing scammy about this.

[AnonCoward42]

Crypto (currencies) are not a scam. These are currencies and like any other currency are subject to devaluation and abolition.

[charcircuit]

Selling when you learn reddit is abandoning it is expected. Not many people would want to keep holding after.

[anonymouskimmer]

That's the point of most criminal and tort laws: Penalizing anti-social expected behavior in order to disincentivize it.

[RugnirViking]

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.

[abigail95]

MNPI?

https://www.penningtonslaw.com/news-publications/latest-news...