Magnora 7 | Information Control Tactics, Reddit Sketchiness, & MaxwellHill

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04:21 Rock me like a hurricane people from the Sunshine State. I'm Greg Carlwood and many of us recognize that there are some major psychological differences between the old tradition of reading a morning paper or sitting down for the nightly news and this situation we have today where we're immersed in a chaotic, it almost overwhelming internet swarm of narrative counter-narrative encounter counter-narrative information on nearly every event oftentimes mistaking that immersion for realness and our ritualization as participation. Many news stories now feel closer to an engaging ARG than an actual event, and even the conversations being had are oftentimes designed to steer your opinion to a desired conclusion by bot accounts masquerading as genuine

05:04 We've all heard of the dead internet theory that suggests the volume of genuine human activity is actually far smaller than advertised, and that hunch many have seems more than justified when hundreds of accounts using the exact same phrases are collected up and screenshotted together. And it gets weirder still, but here to talk all things under the hood of the internet from shadow banning and bots to engineering opinion through social media attacks on alternative platforms. The death of whistleblowers and Reddit moderator Galeen Maxwell is returning guest Mag Nora 7 you might remember him from two killer episodes We did in the past our first in 2017 covering the Rothschild's carving up of Africa and the diamond mine monopoly and a show titled The Rothschild World Order and the ownership of everything

05:48 And then he returned in 2018 for a look into the deaths of Anthony Bourdain, Kate Spade and the Suicide String Conspiracy. I initially discovered Magnora7 from his in-depth Reddit posts at a time when that was a bit more rare, and in the years since we last did the dance he's been the man behind the only true reddit alternative I know, setit.net And were gonna talk about all of things hes seen and experienced first hand in that struggle for censorship free platform in a compromised corporate digital landscape So let's do it. Trying to be the change he wants to see, the free information advocate censorship critic and digital dystopia dissident Magnor a seven my man long time welcome back

06:28 Hey great car what glad to be here man thanks for having me back of course thanks for doing this so i initiated this conversation cuz i really like those two previous interviews and you kinda came back at me with well what's the point if the two we've done already aren't even searchable, you can put in the exact title inward forward and youtube and it won't come up well. This is directed more at the listeners than yourself but we need to stop trying to go where were not wanted. The first show he did is there but you have to look pretty hard in the second show we did was removed from youtube entirely, can find them both on my website in the archive of any podcasting app and with a search on a non google search engine

07:14 So we can only control what we can control and i'm very interested in all the things you've seen as someone trying to run a censorship free alternative. But im kinda past expecting these platforms to change their behavior and i'm encouraging users to change theirs, i hope we get that message across today by explaining how bad it really is hence why u started setit.net in the first place right? Yeah, that's right. Reddit had some censorship problems that have been growing since about 2012 or so and in response a lot of people tried to make reddit alternatives especially since it was open source and most went under in about 2-3 years because of all these pressures shut down we're going to talk about but set is still around 6 years later anyone can go to it at setit.net

08:07 the censorship problem going back a little bit, you're saying about our YouTube things. If you just type in Magnora7 Hireside Chats into YouTube it's not there and it should be there The top result should be you know what into is our two interviews and i think ten years ago might have been that way where it would respond like that but now its stuff the funny if use alternate search engines and stuff just to find these basic interviews that we did. Yeah i need it is frustrating but like we're saying before we start recording podcasting is such a god send because it's totally decentralized the rss feeds in a bunch of different podcast apps

08:45 And they're trying to go after it but the only way really is to try to convert it all to video and if you have a video show there's only a few places to put it really only one and that's youtube and so. The advertisers love you too because you can see all the views right there there's no guessing, any algorithm helps them to sell if your not playing the advertising game was really not a reason to convert to video to get shoehorned into youtube and out of the podcasting apps And so I'm staying strong. It's tough because a lot of my colleagues don't agree with me, but here we are. Yeah and i gotta commend you man! You've really stuck it out and fought the good fight so far and diversified on a lot of different platforms because it is easy to just plop it on YouTube and turn on ads and just let that be that...and you've gotten away from that ecosystem and I think that's great! You know? To have your footprint in a lot of different places and I think that's real smart for the future

09:40 Fair enough but sometimes i wonder what it all is worth because it just seems to be like the game of the game and im doing this other thing and maybe some people you know give me a tip of that but, no what does it really work out now doesn't seem to bother. guests to go on shows full of ads and it doesn't seem to bother listeners to listen to shows full of ads. Yeah, I mean there's too many ads but like a few ads isn't necessarily bad but you know i'm on the same page as you where said we've never had ads for six years now we run the site completely based on patreon donations and my personal funding so

10:17 there's no access to profit being made there is no employees it just all going back into the site and it's just there as a public resource you know it's a charity basically. Yes yes well let's get past ourselves we got a lot of people listening that really I think will be quite interested to hear what you've learned trying to launch such a big platform like this. You've seen it all from DDoS attacks and all kinds of things in the back end, sent me some videos of Chinese click farms that are really insane obviously we don't have the video just talked about that but Reddit seems more like a propaganda tool for engineering consensus than anything and i'm on reddit alot It is basically my portal through the internet sadly

11:03 But the Internet's gotten a lot smaller. I mentioned dead internet theory in the intro, what do you think about that? It's not literally dead but there is so much less going on than people think. It's decaying more than dead it's becoming fossilized in some sort of way The old internet was all people, you're basically guaranteed to be talking to a person. And then bots started to exist and become popular and then shills started to become a thing paid actors who are there to influence opinion on the internet And then now we've got AI and chat GPT that can act as tools for these shills and these other bad actors that want to destroy or censor content on the internet. So, the amount of worthless garbage basically of just noise is increasing. It's a real uphill battle. I don't know if the cat can go back in the bag frankly...

11:58 No no i tend to say like if it's broken then fine i'm spending less time online i see that as a good thing so i know you have a lot of notes and want to take up too much time before we at least get rolling with those notes talk about some other things that you think are important that more people should know but don't. Yeah, there's a lot of different techniques to internet censorship and a lot of people think internet censorship is just your comic gets deleted or it doesn't. But there's a lot more subtle things like search hiding is something we just talked about with our YouTube videos Those interviews are there if you have the link, you can go to it. It just won't appear on the YouTube search so it's just kind of downplayed and they've gotten better too where it'll show up as like the 30th result So they can say oh, you know, it's there it's technically there but it clearly should be the number one result because it's the only thing with the text match

12:51 That type of search hiding is real common. And then other than search hiding, there's shadow banning which I'm sure a lot of people have run into and shadow bannings all over YouTube and Reddit comments especially shadow bannings when you personally see something is posted but it's not visible to anyone else so i can read it or youtube you can spend your whole day making comments and never get any votes never get any replies and wonder why. But if u log out or go into the second browser look at incognito mode or something you'll see that it's not there, it's gone. So it only appears when you're logged into the account and that's what shadow banning is so it gives you the appearance of participating but nobody else can see or participate back. It's a bizarrely isolating censorship maneuver to do this shadow banning and has become really common in last 10 years. It's like the new hot tool because people don't know they're being censored so they don't get mad

13:47 And so, you don't have this user pushback to fight against. It's just a very silent sort of censorship. So search banning and search hiding and shadow banning are really super important and the narrative shaping power of these tools is huge. You know it's done across all these different media websites... It's not a small effect you know? The internet now is larger than TV and radio in these things. Having the communities on these websites be shaped by these tools really influences the culture of the website but also that people use the website think you know this is what modern culture is this is how society is now but it's not. It's an illusion if feels like the evolution of polling in other used to just have a poll that said whatever public opinion they wanted to promote and then they put on the news and say well seventy percent of people think this,

14:40 Like 70% of what, the 70 you asked? That's not really a true representation. The people who answered their phones... Right! And now they do it a little more nuanced with actually crafting the opinions using bots using these Chinese click farms or any kind of click farm I guess that's not limited to China but But just elevating the bot opinions the mainstream opinion suppressing the other ones and then people who do absorb the mainstream opinion. They get more important cuz i think everybody's on their side and then they talk more shit to people like you and i cove it became pretty clear, but the beautiful thing about covid and you could even say the last election to a degree is like the narrative broke down

15:29 like the people who thought maybe they were isolated to an opinion of one found out that no actually a lot of people do agree with me and that's a beautiful thing you just have these choke points where they make it appear as if your. An opinion of one and you know so if as long as you learn to see through those things you can trust that yes we know she pulled out a people are dumb this and that but a lot of people aren't done. And a lot of people do agree with you they're trying to make people look down as well like there is this impetus to make society looks dumb so they go everyone's dumb i shouldn't even try,

16:06 Noam Chomsky wrote this book, Manufacturing Consent. There you go! And that's basically what this is. It's a manufactured culture and it manufactures consent in the people who participate in the culture and yeah, it's serious business. It is... And we should talk about the business so let's use Reddit. You were saying that Reddit is considered to be the sixth most visited website on the internet has been for years but they haven't turned a profit until Going public this year and that's a big thing people might not realize if you are ready to use or they went public in march of this year which means your gonna see way more ads way more censorship.

16:46 They've just signed up a company that never made money before, just signed up to need 10% growth year after year forever through infinity because that's what a public company must do. It's insane and ridiculous but that will be what Reddit is turning into. You're precisely right and then it's going to be totally oriented towards the investors because all public companies have to be operated in a way to maximize profit for the investors So the censorship on Reddit and so on is going to change as well. It's something I've anticipated, actually we built Seta.net six years ago anticipating they were going to go IPO that year. So it's been a long time coming that Reddits been talking about wanting to do this but yeah they've never turned a profit. I don't know how a company who has never once turned a profit you know is able to go IPO and get all this investment. It literally doesn't make sense. Are they valued at $1 billion? They're not but 100 million

17:42 I don't know. Let's look it up real quick, 30 billion, $30 billion, $30 billion apparently it's all funny money yeah and that's a lot of advertising money like we're talking about and a lot of the advertising money is based on these fake users that don't exist that are AI users and bot users and shill users and Reddit has zero incentive to get rid of those users because it makes their advertising click through rates higher which increases the advertising revenue, which increases their valuation. So this evaluation is totally based on their advertising potential basically, which is based on the number of monthly active users, which is based on all these fraudulent tools essentially so it's really a house of cards but its one that stood for 20 years so... Yeah and not that this is all about podcast advertising but people in that space are saying the same thing

18:37 They've gotten a lot of people dependent on the ad revenue and they're gonna rug pull youtube is already done this several times just by chopping the add rate lower and lower lower for people who that's their only mechanism for income. And it's like you think they would wanna make their content creators happy because i see only reason anyone goes there, What does happen with apple where apple used to auto download any podcast you are subscribed to which would count as a download and they made an update were they do not do that in people suddenly look at their podcasting statistics, and there way down like forty percent down what if your selling ads and your giving. Your views and downloads to add companies is not gonna work out

19:20 And that's just one step on a big road that I think is gonna make people not quite so happy in their podcasting business in a couple of years, but we do what we can. Yeah and it's a way to control the Overton window as well right? They can say like if you step outside these narrative boundaries your demonetized And so they can control the narrative that comes on YouTube just by deciding the winners and losers in terms of who gets funding and who doesn't. Yes, there was something I know there's an overlap with no agenda audience Adam Curry actually just referenced The Higher Side Chats not long ago but he said it was Cliff High's podcast which you know i'm still waiting on a correction Adam previous guest doesn't know those to show is now it's fine I don't really care if I actually make sense The Cliff Higher Side chats I understand

20:10 But the point was that they played some clips on no agenda where a totally random i think it was a show that just looked at peer reviewed science. It was not even a controversial show, not trying to be controversial at all they found out they were on a list that's given or shared amongst the big five advertising firms and it's like a do not participate list So they literally were blacklisted like on a no-fly list and you're like, wait I never did anything just because i have a name that sounds like someone else. And you know that sucks for them but it just made me aware that such lists exist and you don't really come off of them easily right and we're in the world now where you could have that list is global basically there's no escaping that list anymore if you run something on the internet

20:59 You can't just up and move to argentina or whatever you're on the internet. Yes, another thing we had kind of talked about is that building a platform that requires public participation is very hard you know said it's like people are only gonna go there because there's a lot of engagement why would I post their if instead no one's talking about it They're active on it. Right, it's the bootstrapping problem yeah you've got to have this lead in audience to be able to start a social media site is something... You know I was lucky I read all these articles like you mentioned I used to write articles pretty regularly on Reddit. I had a pretty good following and when we launched the site you know announced it to people who read my articles and we got I was like 20 thousand people or something came over that first day or whatever

21:46 That was kind of the nucleus that started the whole thing and a lot of sites didn't have that to fall back on. And they, you know, have to sort of create a false community to draw people in because he can't just have it be dead like you said so... Reddit actually started with bots and they had moderators running multiple accounts pretending to be the community they wanted to see basically, until they got enough people in. And I don't know if they ever stopped doing that but surely they've got enough people now but in the very beginning, they said they literally generated a fake community basically by running multiple accounts so it's not a real community even back then that was 2007-2006

22:26 This type of things been going on a long time and when it comes to set dot net you mentioned to me that, you're one of the only websites to make use of erin schwartz is open source code before reddit closed off the public in two thousand fifteen. And erin schwartz you know, really tragic story. I don't even know if it's ever been talked about on the air here but talk to us about Aaron Schwartz and his story. Yeah, Aaron Swartz he is about my age and he was one of the guys who was initial coders of Reddit He didn't start it right at the beginning but he joined in about four month mark or something and was there till that year two or three But he built basically the main code infrastructure of reddit that reddit uses to this day

23:13 So he built all these distributed database systems and all these things required for Reddit to be able to scale for millions of viewers on an hourly basis. I looked yesterday, Reddit has 1.5 billion page loads per hour. If you can imagine that server infrastructure required to do that smoothly it's incredible. Aaron Swartz was the guy behind that. He used to give interviews and say things like Information is power, but like all power there are those who want to keep it for themselves. And then I think people heard the story later he went to MIT and he did this thing where he snuck into MIT server room and basically downloaded all these scientific papers that he decided should be free to the public because they're basically paid for by taxpayer money. He put these papers out there on the internet

24:06 Basically, the Department of Justice dropped the hammer on this guy. They literally said they wanted to quote make an example out of him and they threw a full weight of federal law in his direction saying he'd violated privacy agreements for stuff that was military or had protections on it but anyways... This court battle is just getting started and then one day he was found suicided basically He was gone and they didn't even get to have the trial or anything. That's different, I thought he was looking at 35 years and then he committed suicide? Obviously any suicide you always wonder if it was a real suicide but you seem to lead towards he was suicided. I would think so because they didn't get to...I don't know but there was a movie recently that came out about him that brushes on this subject

24:58 It's just too convenient. He was such a strong conviction, you know? He was always like we're gonna fight things make the world better that was his whole deal so to arrive at this sort of big junction where he might have an influence and then to just fold and walk away You know that just seems out of character for him And that's all I'm really basing that on but you know it's speculation well and so Just so people understand there is a lot of debate about if he even committed a crime because What he did is he took peer reviewed scientific papers that are behind a paywall but these papers are free if you are an MIT student and he downloaded them through an MIT account, and then just made them public. So it really is a gray area on if he committed a crime as you say

25:51 Academia we rail on them so hard around here. It's like there is this thing where it's like if it's gonna be publicly funded, then the results should be publicly available too right? Yeah We paid for it So we should be able to see the results That's not even really a debatable thing to me. It's just crazy to me that why would I pay for a service and then never even be able to look at the results of that service? We disallowed legally from even looking at it, you know, it's bizarre. It's just like people when they talk about Aaron's situation they always use the word hacked and he didn't hack into anything! He used an account to access something he had privileged access to as an MIT student

26:36 and then released it. Maybe that's against the terms of service, is that against the law? I don't necessarily think it is but you know the law is missageable when they want to make an example of someone. Right. You could make the argument he did have software to sort of scrape the whole server so I think it was a pretty extensive information grab that he did in some of that might have overreached into certain areas of the server that he wasn't supposed have permission to i think was kind of the crux of the issue from perspective of m.i.t and now his memory is kinda like as a martyr or a figurehead for the dead idea of the freedom of the internet like the last guy who's gonna really push for it and then once he was snuffed out, it really just became the corporatized internet

27:28 well read it especially yeah and then like you said the actual thing that happened with him taking the papers from mt never actually went to court so there was never actually a trial on that there was never decision on that's what. Call issue is still legally undecided because of his death but our site set dot net where the only sites use the open source code reddit still runs it but they had an open source until 2015 and then i close the source years after aaron's death. But we use open source and it's really complicated. So most sites that were our peers tried to build their own software from scratch which worked out great when they were small and then if they started to take off, it would always crash and fall apart because it wasn't built to be scalable but this open-source Reddit code is built to have a billion page views an hour so it's like a Ferrari. So if you can set this thing up right, it runs super well and we're able to do that with

28:25 Right on and you said that your moderation you put a lot of consideration and thought into how it should be moderated this is one of my issues i want to get two in the weeds for people who don't use reddit specifically but. you find that if there are censorship free platforms they just become something like for chan light and it's like not all the content in my life is conspiracy content believe it or not so its like i would just like to go somewhere where i can watch comedy, pop culture news and real deep diving conspiracy rabbit hole stuff all in one place. And maybe that's too much to ask, but you go to Rumble or some of these alternatives and it's just way too intense I guess. It's basically only one type of content exists there and that to me is a bit of a problem too. That's a great point! I kind of call it the overflow problem because

29:24 The stuff on Rumble is only there because it isn't allowed on YouTube a lot of the time, right? It's the overflow. So that ends up making Rumble be all these extreme things that aren't allowed on YouTube and then the more moderate stuff just is on YouTube because they'll get more views there. So, it creates a certain cultural selection pressure you could say... And Seta had a very similar problem where we had kind of the overflow for Reddit. It's all the people who weren't allowed on Reddit basically, kind of overflowed into Seta and then we have to make the choice of what people to allow and what people not to allow. You can't just allow everyone because there are literally doxing people or advocating murder doing crazy things you got to tell those people to go away. You can't just let them take over the culture. Right

30:10 I got a little bit of hot water myself for not moderating my forum well enough. And lot of people know that story." Yeah, it's a tricky deal because you want to be said its whole thing also is free speech so we want to be like a free speech website right? But you can't be too free speech or else it just goes crazy with people trying to sort of poison the culture Yeah, and I wanted to ask you about that. This is not in the outline but as I was digging into said it It seems like one of the big controversies things you've had to deal with is the ice Poseidon saga or debacle or whatever we could call it now i specify the name is a twitch streamer i'm not big in the twitch streaming space and watch a lot of that but,

30:56 There's a lot of eyes on these Twitch streamers and they get quite big. And I don't know if he himself is a problem or if it's the people that have rallied around him, that have started to dox him and stuff like that? My understanding is his own listeners or his own viewers called in a bomb threat to an airport when he was walking around the airport streaming. That became like a funny thing, a prank. Actually, I believe he did it. He called it in He did it. I don't know, i don't want to get in we don't know It's a crazy culture but the relevancy here is that I believe ice Poseidon got a Sub on set it and then I believe you've even said 40% of said its traffic came from this community And that became a bit of a problem yeah, it actually got up to 60 percent so they were the majority of the site at one point and

31:48 The group of people that follow this guy around, it's like a tornado just destroying everything all the time. And in trying to be free speech we let them hang with us and I defended them for a long time even though I don't agree with what they say, I agree with their right to say it sort of thing so I tried to work with these people but... We actually moved our server farm to Switzerland to try and get better free speech protections and after we moved our website to being hosted in switzerland because of this group, they were inviting all these videos and we got booted from the server farm that we're on in switzerland with twenty four hour notice they said we can't do this you destroying our server farm.

32:30 specific instance is being attacked so many times it's taken down our backbone for our server system. So they gave me 24 hours to leave and so we had to change servers again, see how we ended up having a change servers two or three times basically because of this group and it got to the point where third time the server group was going to boot us again in different one and we had to cut them a deal where we've had to let this community go basically side just said that kick off 60% of my community And that was a hard decision, man. After four years of work on this thing? Well some men just want to watch the world burn and they're going to just keep pushing and pushing. That's when a moderator has to step in and do something but talk to us about the kind of attacks that you generally see and where is a DDoS attack really coming from I mean this is like the most commonly talked about type of attack yeah like DDOS attacks

33:27 We're real popular in the 90s and early 2000's but basically, I mean they still go on but there's a lot of protections for them now. But basically, DDoS is you try and request a web page to load and you just do that like a million times a second. And it's so many requests that the server simply can't keep up and it gets gridlocked and it just shuts down and that's what a DDoS is. So, the way to protect against it as you put a layer of software in front of it that Receives all their class and then it only lets the legitimate ones through to try to detect if one is trying to do like a million requests that are something crazy. And block it so.

34:05 Set it is DDoS attack probably about nine hours every single day for the last six years. So it's like a non-stop, somebody has it on a scheduled calendar sort of thing. So we have our DDoS protection turned on maximum all the time and that's true for a lot of websites now but that's Cloudflare I don't know if you use Cloudflare? Do you ever use Cloudflare? I know of it but I don't think that I use it Okay, it's like the DDoS protection and basically if you're gonna run a website you gotta have cloudflare. Well then I do! Then I definitely do. You very well might have as part of yours yeah So there are other types of things too and i guess you should tell us about them because people might be curious to know what An admin of such a site has to deal with but let us know If you have any more insight into where these attacks come from that kind of thing

34:55 Unfortunately, you really can't know where they're coming from because with the DDoS attack you can see the IP address of every packet request. So you could in theory look up the IP but in reality they use VPNs and actually even more advanced IP spoofing so that it just have any IP address they want. They can pretend to be anywhere in the world or pretend to be any government or whatever just by pretending to use their IP address So, you can get DDO attacked from Russia and it looks like it's from New York or something. You really have no idea and that's one of the really frustrating things about this is it's so untraceable and the only people who have the access to trace it back are the backbone internet service providers like L3 and stuff who control these internet backbone lines that go across the ocean and stuff

35:47 They're really the only ones who have the capability to trace these things back to where they're coming from. So, it's truly unknowable which is extremely creepy I gotta be honest... Well, you've also had really creepy things happen in terms of people just trying to get into admin positions and weasel their way in there so they can de-admin everybody else and take over the space. That's odd! Yeah I say oh I'm so trustworthy Oh I've been here for months being real prominent user Hey You should make me head admin And then the second they get head admin They just start wrecking the place Just deleting stuff Banning people who are good

36:26 And we had that happen a couple times. I mean, people would play it cool for literally months and like embed themselves in the community to gain a trusted position and then as soon as you give them power, a week later they start doing everything wrong that you would want them not to do and it just creates a real situation but... That just happened continually over and over and over. You'd finally root one out and he'll be like oh, got it! Then the next guy would come. It was just a never-ending thing thing. So, they're always trying to get admin position and if they can't achieve that then they'll often just talk to the admins and say hey, the other admin was saying bad stuff about you and they actually hate you... And they'll try and drive these weird wedges between the admins so that they turn on each other and fracture the admin groups and they fall apart. There's a site there was a competitor called Ruckus and Ruckus basically had

37:18 five admins or whatever and it was too many cooks in the kitchen. And then little birdies started tweeting in their ear, and they all turned on each other and that was it man! Well, we know that the feds used to do this to a lot of counterculture communities and Black Panthers and really anyone that was critical of the war or the government in general. They didn't infiltrate so why wouldn't they do the same thing with freedom loving online communities? Sure exactly! And you don't even have to go there in person You can do it from a college dorm room whatever It's so easy So of course they're doing it

37:54 And then other types of attacks too, there's software level attacks. So if the Reddit open source code had a bug in it for example someone could exploit that and then lastly, there are social attacks so we talked about the admin attacks but there is also people trying to just ruin the culture of the website by say, posting 50 times a day about some garbage thing no one cares about and then trying to act as if this is the culture of the site now. Like one guy was really into share he's like I'm going to post videos of The Singer Share and that was his thing right? And then you'd have other accounts that would upvote it to the front and it started to make set it look like a website about share and it's like this is not what we're doing here

38:37 But if you've never seen the website before and you hop on it, and that's what you see. You might be like oh this is a stupid website... And there's always that kind of undercurrent happening stuff that's so dumb, that it's got to be purposeful and it's happening for years and years. It's not just a one-off here and there. It's very constant thing. Yes. And something else you brought up to me was the connection between Reddit and Langley Air Force Base? Is that just where a lot of the traffic comes from? What's that connection? Yeah, there was a big story that came out I want to say five years ago they found the number once source of all Reddits traffic was Langley Air Force Base. Hmm...

39:16 So, we're talking about that 1.5 billion page loads an hour you know like how much of that is from Langley? Yeah it's another checkbox towards it working to influence public opinion and just shows up that who's interacting with it, that who's using it... And I hope we have enough overlap with Reddit users in this audience that they find this interesting but they might be surprised to know how few moderators reddit really has that you think when you go to a sub it's like oh well it's moderated by a few super fans the joe rogan sub is a higher side chat so there's all kinds of different subs and they're usually just a couple of super fans who make sure the spam is down in. There's no mutiny even though a lot of podcasters have me some looking at your brand and schwab sorry man,

40:05 I think what's surprising is that you've said that a small group of super mods control basically 90% of Reddit and they didn't even really require approval from anyone. It looks organic, the subs are seemingly separate but not really if all the information... All the posts are funneled to a few different hands that can say thumbs up or thumbs down Yeah, at the beginning of Reddit's life it was different people for different subreddits or different moderators but over time it sort of consolidated and there are these people who kind of made it their mission to become moderators of as many subs as possible. And there are some moderators that moderate like 600 sub-Reddit and each sub-Reddit gets millions and millions of views a day

40:57 So there's no way you can moderate hundreds of those at once. I mean, it's not physically possible and then they get rid of the other moderators that might fight against them or whatever and it becomes this sort of little fiefdom these little kingdoms of subreddits that these people kind of assemble. Yes. And when you pitch this as a topic of an interview i thought the most compelling thing was this one potential super moderator is maxwell hill account and this is something you know if your in the reddit rabbit holes your aware of the situation, but it's heavily speculated no one i guess knows 100 percent that's heavily speculated this max well hill account.

41:42 Was or is galane maxwell's account and that she was in charge of moderating a lot of content and she was a real super user. She was always on reddit probably had multiple people using the account but it seems like she was one of them help make the case that galene maxwell before she went down one of her big Operations was controlling a huge chunk of Reddit. Yeah, Maxwell Hill the account user Maxwell Hill has been around basically since the very beginning of Reddit And it posted daily, probably 20-30-40 posts every day hitting the front page of Reddit which is very hard to do but doing it extremely consistently for 14 years. And then the day Ghislaine Maxwell gets arrested... The day! They account stops posting forever and has not posted since

42:38 I mean, that's a pretty red flag there. And also, she was arrested a couple of years ago at this point right? I want to say maybe two years sounds about right. Sounds right. This account is still the eighth biggest Reddit account of all time. I think that's correct yeah it has so much karma from all the accumulated posts and stuff and you go to Reddit you would see a Maxwell Hill post for years and years and years i mean that's how it was the name Maxwell Hill, it's Galene Maxwell's name and then her father Robert Maxwell who was a Mossad agent apparently owned the Hill McGraw textbook company that we all used in school in the 80s and 90s in America. So you probably used to Hill McGraw textbook and Robert Maxwell owned that textbook company and that hill McGraw is where this Maxwell Hill likely comes from in my estimation so

43:35 Those are the puzzle pieces I've got that I've been able to fit together and of course, you know, we'll never be able to prove it one way or the other but it's pretty astounding that after 14 years of daily posts this user that shares the name of Maxwell goes away when she gets arrested. So, is very likely she was funding it... You know, I really doubt she was actually doing it? I don't think she was sitting behind the computer, she's got bigger fish to fry But I would not be surprised if she had a team of four people that she hired, that were employees of her and did this. Do you think the logic there, the motivation is kinda like why Jeff Bezos buys a newspaper? He's like I don't really care what you talk about just don't talk about me. Is it that kind of thing? Like she was just looking for posts that would maybe be about Israel or Mossad or her father or Epstein and just shutting those things down

44:28 And just flooding Reddit with a bunch of unrelated content, just as long as it sticks throw it up there because anything that is unsavory will get buried in this avalanche of content. Yeah that's definitely part of it and then also the promotion of narratives that they do want people to see you know like oh Israel's doing such a great job or whatever And so, they promote those as well. And then there's the additional pressure she now has that she's bringing in this account is a core part of the Reddit culture. So, the admins of reddit love this account because it's like 1% of all the Reddit culture basically. So they'll never touch this account because of the ad revenue being generated. So there's an implicit threat of do not mess with this account or

45:18 we can damage your ad revenue. So as an admin, these super high profile users can get kind of scary to deal with because they have a lot of power and they know it. And it seems like the admins have all the power but really that website's nothing without the users right? The super prominent user actually do you have a lot of pull in the ones who know it can use that leverage and get things Yeah and i was looking into this just to flush out the case a little bit more and apparently the people who have done this research say that not only,

45:55 Did the account go down when she was arrested but if you look at the phrases and language used there's a lot of things that suggest this person is a knowledgeable international traveler now you know there's a lot of international travelers. But they also sussed out, a quote, seemingly unapologetic attitude towards pedophilia in this account's comments. Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me. That's part of this cultural manipulation and this manufacturing of false consensus you know? And they're trying to normalize certain bad values in young people that read this website and there's a lot of kind of cultural sub movements on Reddit that are like that, that are just genuinely destructive

46:41 If you take them seriously. Yeah, and man the rabbit hole of content on YouTube is insane I mean you wanna suppress and remove videos that are just two guys talking with no video whatsoever just a blank screen in a conversation being had that's gotta be removed, what the things that you can find on there for kids like. It looks all cute see and then the bears chop each other's heads off of chainsaws or the little girl licks a lollipop thats been held by the knees of dog really nasty stuff. I mean, they're playing with every possible line and YouTube's just like whatever...I thought when Daniel Tosh did that whole Elsagate thing it became a little bit of a viral sensation but all that stuff is definitely still there you can find a lot of nasty stuff on there and it's fun yeah it's crazy but then you like can't say the word murder sometimes you have to say like unalive

47:43 That's why all these people are saying unalive now because the murder word is too scary and it's just... It's a very bizarre prioritization of values but you know, it's not real. It's the thing this isn't in a real culture that doesn't reflect real human beings' values. It's just a manufactured culture I think that's really the takeaway here. I agree and even just having little kids you constantly hear about Miss Rachel, well i just watched a psychological analysis of miss rachel and they go through and they count every instance of overstimulation that's being used whether it's a graphic or an exaggerated tone or music in the background like

48:27 To some people who know a lot more than i do about this it appears like it was engineered from absolute maximum psychological manipulation and. Basically engineering ad in children but no parents get lazy they want something to put on for their kids they say well everyone else does that and its educational, And then their kid is super hyperactive and has no attention span and has ADD going into kindergarten. And you wonder why? Yeah, it's incredible how far a lot of the culture has gotten from how people actually think can operate. But luckily for ADD there's a pill for that so thankfully we can solve that problem. You know it's a lifelong prescription but you'll be okay. They create the problem in cellular solution yeah

49:18 Man, so another point- one last point about Reddit and Ghislaine Maxwell is apparently her father Robert Maxwell used to own Condé Nast? Which is the company that bought Reddit. Oh, is that right? Yeah. That checks out I didn't know that specifically but yeah that checks out huh? Yeah Condé Nast had it for quite a while crazy yeah that is crazy I didn't know that one nice good digging yeah well you know I've done this a time or two very nice One more thing on Reddit though, also they're headquartered in the New World Trade Center is something I read. They rebuilt the World Trade Center and then they gave Reddit like three floors of it. Really? Yeah and this is a company that's never turned to profit. Hey let's set up shop in the most expensive office space in the world you know like who's paying for that? Yeah pretty crazy

50:14 Well man this is one of the more in the weeds subjects that i've done a show about it along time and mainly just because i use reddit and we have a good history and i was curious about the things you see managing such as situation what are some of your final points or the things you want people to take away who might be listening. So, like we said don't listen to internet culture especially text-based internet culture. That is on its way out. We just got to think of it in the same way you think of TV when you turn on the TV news our generation... You know? We immediately are like this is garbage they're gonna lie to me. You go into it with that mindset and I think

51:02 we need to have that same mindset going into reading comments and stuff on the internet. And just being aware that this is happening and it's not just like a far away theoretical problem, this is like half the internet comments you read every day right now are this... The comments you actually read on daily basis are constantly being influenced by this. So if you see something weird and there's like oh, this culture doesn't make any sense it's probably manufactured its probably fake so just walk away from that don't be so invested and don't let a few comments psychologically manipulate you into thinking that that's. A bigger opinion are widely adopted opinion when maybe i really isn't exactly

51:49 We are lucky to have known a pre internet world the younger kids not so lucky this is all they know and a lot of them seem very erratic and very adn. Basically traumatized without knowing that i mean suicide depression or up the poppin of all kinds of pills is up, It's having a huge effect. They're figuring it out though, I mean people are starting to connect the dots on this stuff you know can't remain a mystery forever and just like we saw pre-internet culture there may very well be a point coming up here of a post internet culture where people get tired and walk away and have some sort of post internet society you know like Amish but stuck in 2008 or something yeah well get the Discman out people i'll start mailing you the monthly cd

52:37 We'll go Columbia House on this bitch. Nice! Awesome, well anything else to add in terms of what's next for you? What's next for SETiT? Do you have a plan going forward? Anything else to throw out to people? SETIT's going to be around, it's not going anywhere and I'm probably not going to be super active with it but it'll be there for a resource for people who need it. And then you know I might come out with some articles here and there that was kind of how this whole thing got started is I wrote a couple articles and you caught them and here we are so... Yes! Go to setit.net make an account share your cat videos there

53:16 Share content that doesn't trigger the sensors because we don't want it just to be based 4chan light. Exactly, it doesn't need to only overflow. It can be just regular stuff too. Awesome! Well, it was good to reconnect after I do not even know how many years but... I think 7 actually. Seven years? Unreal. Yeah time does fly. Indeed Well, I appreciate your time. Thanks for sharing some of the stuff you see behind the curtain and hopefully it was good to vent a little bit and this is great man. I appreciate you Greg thanks for doing what you do man. Of course thanks for doing what you do and we'll talk again in the future all right have a good one

54:04 All right, people a little something different. A little unexpected I initiated this by reaching out to Magnora7 because I thought our previous two interviews were true standouts really top tier the one we did first about the Rothschilds taking over diamond mines in Africa and how they basically co-opted every country like going through that country by country there really is no other show in The Archive quite like it and then later after the death of Anthony Bourdain, that really weird Kate Spade thing with the rescuer's mask on her husband he crushed that as well and it was also very unique so I was looking through the archive of Who We Should Talk To Again and i rang his bell and asked him about any more recent work and he outlined a show built around the themes we covered today

54:58 It seems like that's really been his big focus, trying to get SETiT off the ground rather than doing the kind of research he maybe did previously. I mean it all weaves together you know you gotta weave but i think he really wanted to let people know about the hidden headaches and behind-the-curtain coordinated attacks that he's had to deal with trying to build a truly independent free speech social media alternative A very ambitious and noble goal And I do find it interesting to hear about but i worry that we might not all be reddit users or care too much about the strife of building an alternative platform. Like it might be a narrow segment of the audience that is really engaged with this one but it does help to explain why we can't have nice things right?

55:46 And the two pieces of information that stuck out the most to me, that I felt like should be in the THC record were the bits about the highly likely Ghislaine Maxwell Reddit moderator account and the tragic tale of Aaron Swartz. Certainly not new information for the people who swim in those waters but certainly not anything we've talked about here as far back as I can remember which is sometimes not that far But what is new though, is now that Trump is in the driver's seat again he actually made good on one of his big promises that's kind of adjacent to this sort of stuff. A little bit of an obscure promise but one that was really important to internet culture and that's the communing of the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road

56:35 and really a major reason why Bitcoin has any value at all. He was sentenced to life in 2013, and I definitely think 12 years is plenty. I don't really want to go too deep into the moral or philosophical analysis of Silk Road. I do know people who have used it to access psychedelics that's no big deal And it really is just an interesting test case of anarchist values. Do you truly think anyone should be able to buy anything anonymously? It's a bold stance in a pretty tricky situation because we have things today that can do insane amounts of damage, although based on some articles I'd read at least 70% of the sales were drugs and don't really have a problem with that as long as its

57:26 Just purchases for personal use from people who are of an age to be able to make all those decisions about what to put in their own body. But then you get into hacking services and purchasing computer viruses, malware, stolen credit cards, weapons... but from what I remember contrary to news coverage Silk Road specifically said it prohibited the sale of anything that could be used to cause harm And then either this got done anyway, or it was more something done on Silk Road clones. Because once the website is made others can just duplicate the model and have even more laxed rules But what Ross did technically is actually just pretty amazing in terms of how it all worked anonymously Just on reviews and permissionless blockchain transactions Especially at the time Of course you mess with The Bull You get the horns and all that but I'm glad he's free

58:24 So back to the show today, in the second hour we filled it out with some more semi-related stuff like the death of Trevor Moore. Pokemon Go and The CIA and Hugh Hefner as a proto Diddy Epstein archetype And a few other things too but you know Magnora's problems with SETIT are of interest to someone in my own position swimming upstream where I'm not wanted Sometimes it is the corporate system attacking alternatives. Sometimes you're shadow banned for too much raw truth, and sometimes it's just human nature that gets in the way a little bit of THC history but this is kind of what happened with the original attempt at community with the THC Facebook group It was sort of hijacked by people who tried to build their own brands by promoting two THC fans now that they were centralized

59:15 And that was a long, long time ago. But then Aaron Keith stepped up to be a big help and I hope people are still enjoying it! I don't really get on Facebook much anymore And then I thought, well what if we had a private forum for PLUS? That way we could keep the community a little more insulated from that kind of thing. But i let it become the Wild West and it got me caught up in the Tracy thing because one user was being creepy and weird If that one guy from the mysterious strange campground wasn't messaging her and she wasn't coming to the forum to see those posts... ...I probably never would have gotten mentioned in that video

59:54 And then even recently, the Telegram that we have had a recent dust up with banned users feeling like the moderator was too harsh and drama. Honestly I just like to focus on the interviews and keep to myself! I really am pretty social by nature and extroverted and all that but anytime you have communities you're going to have people trying to use them for their own thing and anytime you give people that moderation power you can likely find times where they flex it So thinking about what Magnora's doing and running something like a Reddit alternative, that sounds like a nightmare to me.

1:00:32 I don't even really get too friendly with guests anymore because of course the Tracy thing but i also had things go sideways with John Brisson. He was happy to use THC for promotion and he wrote a great book about gut health, I wish we could do more shows together but then he went nuts posting all over the place that Gordon White is my occult handler and My Friend's Psychotic Break was because of MY magic use And I don't even have any legitimate magic use. Yes, I've made some sigils. I tried the Sigil a Day project but this isn't summoning Baphomet or anything dark and just like exercise or having any kind of discipline when it comes to diet...I fell off pretty quickly not because anything crazy happened but because it just takes work to do magic right

1:01:25 So you know in that instance I think his Christian bias had him very paranoid and making massive assumptions, and i thought we were becoming friends but so it goes. And people wonder why I'm critical sometimes of people that have that persuasion But again, coming back to this show. Raiders will let me know how they feel as they always do but I could understand some people feeling like this was just kind of a slow news day or a range of topics not exactly relevant to them but i love the work Magnora has done and I thought we'd give another go sometimes when people do work that doesn't seem to be appreciated they just need time to vent hopefully this was cathartic for him

1:02:10 But mentioning the ratings, yes. Let's look at the last show the most recent episode with Charlie Robinson it clocked in at a 4.8 Yes! We're back baby I knew it would be a good one In the past I always enjoyed interviews with Charlie but I just sort of waited until he had a new book out that's been my philosophy with many guests who tend to write regularly But now I hope we can just check in a bit more often. Clearly he's very busy, busier than ever but hopefully he'll make time for us when we get these strings of highly charged manipulated events and on with the routine doing the meetup calendar thing we do let's see what's going on January 23rd LA Truth at The Coral Tree

1:02:59 January 25th McCall Collective Brewery in Allentown, Pennsylvania. February 1st Conway Pub in Conway Washington. February 3rd Gail Braths Ale House and Auckland New Zealand. February 8th McCall's Collective Taphouse and Baringsville Pennsylvania. February 10th Roots & Leaves in Santa Fe New Mexico. And February 15th H2 Booster in Vlissingen, Netherlands. Love it! And again big event with Gordon coming up on March 8th here in the Tampa area. In fact now I think it might be at High Springs Brewing and we're gonna take a party bus from here to there...here being Tampa but

1:03:44 That's probably 90% gonna happen. I do still need to lock it in, probably shouldn't say anything until it is locked in but it's looking good. I know the High Springs brewing guys, I've met them. It seems like it's going to work out and because high springs is a little off the beaten path and not exactly close to any major city and every time we've done this before it's been in a city and we don't really know anything about our draw in Florida We might open this up to non-premium, non plus members and just really rip the doors off and go with a free and open event for the total broad audience we might have. Could get crazy but again more on that later In higher side news I did add the recent custom episode specific songs to the bottom of the show posts on the website

1:04:38 A lot of mixed feelings about those songs, but I've always loved writing lyrics. And in high school one of my best friends played guitar so we had a little Tenacious D type thing going on when I moved away from him. I would use Fruity Loops and different programs to basically use loops and the Lego blocks of music to put things together just so I could get that creative outlet And now I use some of these AI systems. I have huge problems with AI in a lot of different areas, I guess just for me music isn't one because it's just something I've always wanted to be able to do but never took the time to really develop it and it went from outsourcing the music to a friend to using the Lego blocks of software to just pressing create! But if I was using Fruity Loops

1:05:36 or garage band loops, nobody would think I was like affecting a musician's job. Right? It is just kind of weird thing you use AI and doing something bad. You use loops in digital software that basically get you there with just a few more building blocks and that is acceptable. But I'm sorry! There is no way I could make custom songs for each episode any other way and I just like doing it guys not everybody hates them But because they're easy for me to make and they're free, they're available to anyone. Go to the higher side chats dot com if you hear a specific one you like go to that episode page scroll at the bottom and just download it

1:06:17 But hey, not a lot more to say. Check out setit.net if you want a free speech alternative to Reddit and you want it to be successful it requires participation I hope maybe this made you think about how hard it is to beat back the big system and how lucky we are to have anything left! I hope Magnora7 keeps fighting the good fight and sees some new users making his efforts worth it. I'll see ya next time...I've done my part Your move, corporate controllers independent platform destroyers and agents of the sanitized and maybe even dead internet. You're fuckin' through Some of us remember Wild West Spirit was in full swing Harvest Nairz This digital public square is propaganda on our life support And we should rest We're always connected but God knows

1:07:45 And the blue light pouring is killing us It's so dystopia, it's all a sin of consensus In an end we'd go touch some grass They say anybody saw my just fall