Even though you have counter claims, you moderating the forum for your industry is problematic. You also seem keen to chime in about a competitor when you should be impartial and allow users to discuss their experiences alone.

Yes there are two sides to every story, but in no universe should you be the mod of that subreddit.

At best, if everything you say is true, what you are doing is akin to proudly volunteering as a firefighter so that you can slow-walk the response if a fire is ever reported at the NXIVM HQ. Your crusade against NXIVM may be righteous, and it might even be universally considered a net good if its HQ were to burn down, but it would still raise a lot of eyebrows if it came out that you intended to use your position in that fashion.

edit: To be clear, I sympathise with your claim that you are being subjected to a one-sided hit, and am starting to feel uneasy with the dogpiling atmosphere that is building in this subthread. However, it is understandable to me why this is happening - fundamentally, Reddit has become a town square that is really not engineered correctly to be one. In a town square, people want to choose their leaders, but subreddits are by design "storefronts", in which leaders (moderators) choose their people. This tension is resolved by a very unpleasant jerry-rigged substitute for democratic control: the one way you can "vote out" a moderator (who has the backing or indifference of everyone above him) is to apply psychological pressure, or other harm (such as the reputational damage your company is no doubt taking as we speak), until they crack and resign. This is sort of democratic because larger fractions of the "electorate" can achieve it more easily, but even turning up to such a "vote" that you ultimately lose entails social violence.

It doesn't seem like you are willing to resign, nor to put your moderator status up for a community vote (if that could even be made fair, after you presumably banned a lot of would-be voters, and conversely could accuse the other side of botting/brigading). What other options do those who do not want the town square to be moderated by you have?

> What other options do those who do not want the town square to be moderated by you have?

Start and visit a new subreddit. This is an important bit that gets covered up by metaphors like "landed gentry" and "peasants". Don't like it? Vote with your digital feet. It doesn't come with any of the baggage and complication that an equivalent real life move would have. Just stop going there and go somewhere else. Yes it would be nice if folks were awesome and tried to be awesome. The reality is they aren't and subreddits are property owned by the mods. Luckily, you don't have to be there.

>> I'm the co-founder of an interview prep mentorship platform [...] my company's services so there is a small amount of overlap on the most experienced end of Codesmith and the least experienced end of Formation. <<

https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/ana...

https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/08/software-engineer-training...

Everything I can find online, including your post on reddit about the outage, says the outage was for 4 days. Not 3 weeks.

I'll also note that your post on reddit about the outage was phrased as if you were a student impacted by the outage, going so far as to say it was your "final straw" even though you don't have skin in the game other than as a competitor.

They laid off their Future Code (a completely funded program by the city of NY) overnight with no warning - some of the most dedicated staff.

* Industry wide layoffs are happening.

* This company had a layoff.

* This company did not tell their workers they were being laid off in advance.

But that's not how you phrased it. You dismissed concerns about your biases by saying there are industry wide layoffs, and then in the exact next sentence castigated codesmith for having a layoff. Those statements don't align, that everyone is having layoffs and it's no big deal, and codesmith is having layoffs and it's a big deal.

Futher you add charged language about no notice, which is perfectly standard, and an assertion you can't possibly know, about codesmith having "the most dedicated staff". That's just not something you have context to state and its only purpose is to inflame and paint the worst possible picture.

In the words of Ron Swanson: Son, people can see you

This is what I do all day: https://github.com/mnovati

But yeah two sides to every story and if this has been going on for years, "1000 posts", there's clearly more to the story, and it's irresponsible to not reach out for comment if you are going to try to summarize that.

I have one of these types on my team and the level of productivity is shocking.

You showed me yours, I'll show you mine[0]. It’s all organic. A pretty significant part of that is open-source, or source-available, so it’s easy to verify. I think I may only have two or three private repos (but one of them is where I do a lot of work).

I’m retired, and work on code all day, most days. I’m just a wee bit obsessive, being “on the spectrum.” I average about 1,900 checkins per year. Some of the days that I do the most work, have 1 or zero checkins. I will sometimes shitcan a whole day’s worth of work, if I find myself in a rabbithole.

Here’s a fun GitHub tool[1].

I have no opinion on the article, or the responses, other than there’s a lot of ugly going on, and it isn’t really making my life any richer, reading it.

[0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#github-stuff

[1] https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti

I know your heart is in the right place, and have a great deal of respect for you. I think being the most active moderator of a coding bootcamp subreddit while also running one is probably not the best use of your time, right? Even though I know you're being honest, just the appearance of a conflict of interest can be an issue. Why not find someone else to take over the reins, someone who isn't actively involved in the industry?

You literally say it yourself!

Christ, man. Stop digging. You fucked up, stop moderating, and move on.

Also from his HN comment history:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43758527

> Hi, I'm the co-founder of Formation

Oops.

a) non sequitur

b) Then you're good with the massive amount of criticism you're receiving.

What does anything there have to do with any of the questions people in this thread are asking you?

I don't see anything there that adds anything to the story except solidifying the picture of you as an obsessive stalker. It certainly doesn't help your case.

In case I overlooked some key detail, please point it out.

However by your own admission you're a co founder of a "interview prep mentorship platform" (which you claim is not a bootcamp) - fine, I can admit they are slightly different - though this does feel like splitting hairs semantically.

What I don't understand is, how is your position as a mod on such a subreddit not a massive conflict of interest? You have no reason to dissuade people from another company unless it hurts your business (I'm guessing you or someone in your family didn't lose time or money on codesmith).

Ergo, if you can, please do tell me why your activity isn't financially motivated, and therefore tortious interference. I see no other reason for a person to obsessively track another company in detail (baring a few health conditions I wouldn't want to wish on anyone.)

This doesn't read as if you have a coherent case that Codesmith is bad to an extent that justifies your single-minded effort to spread this message, but as either an attempt to throw more FUD at the wall in the hope that something sticks even in this forum, or an indication that you are not quite well.

Codesmith is not a sex cult. I can't believe I'm writing that sentence.

why did you make that comparison?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I paused my recommendation to wait to see if they did what they said they would do. In my opinion they did not, so I then removed my recommendation.

That's the straw that broke the camels back? What a weird thing to decide to destroy a company over.

You wouldn't have needed to write that sentence had you not flippantly compared Codesmith to a sex cult in a public forum -- so flippantly that you couldn't even be bothered to spell the cult's name correctly, as if your words carried no weight.

Words do carry weight, and online discourse matters. And your refusal to acknowledge that in your comments here would be incredible if it weren't predictable given your pattern of behavior as outlined by the article and confirmed by a few simple Google searches.

You're even blatantly lying in this very thread that you aren't in the same industry as Codesmith. It would be remarkable except that we've seen the same behavior time and again from founders who think pattern recognition and basic verbal competence relieves them of the need for integrity.

All I can say is that I was in doubt after reading the article, but after reading your responses here, I have a negative view of both you and your company.

This is ludicrous ... it's also the type of language used by all sorts of people in all sorts of situations. Mentioning a cult is the least charitable thing that can be said.

Your side begins and ends at being a reddit moderator for an industry subreddit while working in said industry as a CTO. Anything you say or do in this position should rightfully be assumed to be biased.

I recommended a bunch of people go to Codesmith until February 2024, when the first signs of collapsed started.

It’s also not clear to me if the person who wrote this article was paid for it or if they’re somehow affiliated with someone involved. It says they’re a “Fractional VP of Content”. I’m curious if you know more.

Funny enough, one of my attorneys taught me a lesson a long time ago around this. Simplified, she said "only and idiot claims to have lots of documents" to support their action. Sure, it's the easy/lazy way to try and intimidate people with the lowest amount of knowledge about how things work. But anyone with the slightest clue knows 1) talk is cheap, 2) you don't need a lot of docs, you just need the one that matters, and 3) if you claim to have documents, you'll eventually have to produce them, and if you can't, you look like an idiot.

Maybe put another way...don't let your mouth write checks your body can't cash.

As our lawyer told us: "It does not matter what is said, what matters is what your can proof in court".

That life lesson has helped out multiple times in life, against people who made grand claims, and threatening legal action. But they all vanished when we pointed out some of our evidence. Its funny how fast opposing council tell their clients to drop it when evidence shows up.

What is the expression, the louder the bark, the lesser the bite? People who have proof, do not need to bark around on social media platform. They simply sue and get big fat settlements.

I have a couple of questions for you. Firstly the article really didn't hold back about you in a way that you don't usually see. But he makes very specific and verifiable claims. The owner blames the market for 40% of their decline and you for another 40%. You have made over 400 negative comments about the company over the last couple of years. You run the subreddit as a bad faith mod, and you run a rival company so you have an interest in the decline of codesmith. Those are some of the accusations laid against you by the article.

I would be interested in hearing what you have to say about them. Obviously i don't expect you to say anything that might create legal issues for yourself. But you have opinions that youre not shy of expressing. The article was perhaps not wholly neutral so maybe you can clarify your side of the story. Do you have a specific problem with codesmith? why do you care so much about them? Is it because they are competitiors? Do you take such an active role on reddit in order to promote your own interests, outside of creating and maintaining a better community?

To be clear i'm a completely random guy with no skin in the game, just looking for answers.

[edit to reply: There is no plausible scenario that my life will depend on the answer. Literally the only reason i'm on here is for casual chit chat. Frankly, this might be life changing for some people, but i'm really not too invested in the story so i don't mind opening some dialogue in good faith from my end.]

I appreciate this is off-topic, but I really wanted to highlight/praise what you'd written. It came across to me as very "HN" and the guidelines appear to corroborate this...

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Next we should hear from the counter party is from a court filing. Not here. This is well past having a chill chat on hackernews.

I don't see anything there that adds anything to the story except solidifying the picture of you as an obsessive stalker. It certainly doesn't help your case.

In case I overlooked some key detail, please point it out.

This sums it up. The attitude and behaviours deemed by this man as acceptable are a highly problematic, and a contributor the cesspool that the internet has become.

To that extent, it might be relevant. But you'd want to consult a lawyer about it.

I don't "post" that much about Codesmith. I comment a lot about them.

Question still stands, why are you writing (posting or commenting) this almost every day.

I can't imagine being so obsessed by something for that long that I comment on it almost every day.

You're a moderator.

It's hard to assume good faith about anything you say.

In that case can you share the user stats for the sub? Because if coding boot camp as an industry is dying the growth of the sub should have also slowed down or plateaued, right?

You have just proved that Lars is spot on with his analysis that you are an obsessive stalker.

My comments are removed and i can't even make a post. I'm following all guide lines and nothing goes through.

Here is something I posted.

I want to raise a concern about moderator conduct. I have evidence (screenshots and permalinks) that suggests a moderator may have accessed and referenced private information about former employees and their family members. That kind of behavior would be unethical and could violate subreddit policy on harassment/privacy.

Mods: please confirm whether these actions occurred and, if so, what steps you will take. I’m happy to provide the evidence via modmail.