A company with sales of 3 billion yen was completely ruined when a competitor became a Reddit moderator.



Codesmith , a technology school specializing in software engineering, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, has been highly acclaimed by many students in the years since its founding, and has seen significant growth in both sales and employee numbers. However, after the co-founder of a competing company became a moderator on the social media site Reddit , he repeatedly posted slanderous and libelous comments about Codesmith, leading to an 80% drop in sales from its peak and a reduction in the number of employees to less than half. Business consultant Lars Lofgren explains the troubles.

The Story of Codesmith: How a Competitor Crippled a $23.5M Bootcamp By Becoming a Reddit Moderator
https://larslofgren.com/codesmith-reddit-reputation-attack/



Codesmith was a rapidly growing technology bootcamp program that peaked at $23.5 million in revenue, but has since seen its revenue decline by about 80% since its peak. Codesmith co-founder and former CEO Will Sentance attributes 40% of that decline to Reddit.

One factor that had a significant impact on Codesmith's revenue decline was the appointment of Michael Novati as moderator of r/codingbootcamp, a major Reddit subreddit for the technology bootcamp industry. Novati worked at Facebook (now Meta) from 2009 to 2017, before founding the development bootcamp Formation in 2019. Given Novati's reputation within the industry and his experience speaking out on Reddit, he was approved as a moderator for r/codingbootcamp, an invitation-only position.



Moderators of a subreddit can delete posts and comments, manage the rules of the subreddit, and lock specific threads to keep them visible. The few moderators of r/codingbootcamp have been largely inactive, leaving Novati as the sole moderator.

After Novati became a moderator, a former Codesmith employee

posted to r/codingbootcamp in April 2023, claiming that Codesmith was a shitty company. The post revealed the company's terrible internal affairs, including the company calling students who made negative posts or comments to urge them to correct them, the terrible working environment, and numerous legal issues stemming from a boss having sex with a subordinate.



While Lofgren stated that the truth of the exposed information is 'nonsense,' the exact details remain unclear. However, the issue at stake here lies in the moderation system of 'r/codingbootcamp.' A former student who graduated from Codesmith in 2022 stated, 'Codesmith was one of the best communities I've ever been involved with,' and offered only objective opinions about areas for improvement in the Codesmith program. Moderator Novati then responded to the comment, claiming that 'Codesmith is like a sex cult, and that positive reviews of Codesmith are cult-like (brainwashed) opinions.' When people interested in participating in the bootcamp program subsequently solicited opinions on 'r/codingbootcamp,' Novati would make derogatory comments about Codesmith in response to positive reviews from former students.

Novati also criticized the school for hiring low-quality teachers through personal connections, which is not true, and accused Codesmith of selectively highlighting some of the employment data to create a false sense of success. He then sent emails to executives and threatened them if they repeatedly pointed out the problem in public.

The graph below shows the dates and frequency of negative comments mentioning or referencing Codesmith on Reddit, which show a consistent pattern between January 2024 and September 2025.



Codesmith is a competitor of Formation, which was founded by Novati. In fact, when searching for Codesmith on Google, a number of Reddit pages with titles such as 'Codesmith is a terrible waste of money' and 'Don't go to Codesmith' appear next to the official website, showing that Codesmith's reputation has been significantly damaged by Novati's repeated slander.



Furthermore, Reddit posts may also be reflected in the data used by large-scale language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. In fact, when Lofgren asked ChatGPT, 'Is Codesmith a good bootcamp?', he responded with a Reddit link and critical opinions, such as 'Codesmith is a waste of money.' Novati's negative campaign against Codesmith thus exposes its negative reputation to potential customers using search and LLMs.



Lofgren interviewed a total of 10 people, including students, Codesmith employees, and founders of competing coding bootcamps, to investigate whether Codesmith is really a bad company. The interviews were not just about interviews; they also required extensive review of internal company documents and submission of supporting screenshots. The overall response was that Codesmith was a very responsive company, honest and transparent in its work, and not one that would resort to corruption for profit.

Anthony Hughes, co-founder of Tech Elevator, a competitor of Codesmith, said, 'Both Codesmith and Tech Elevator strive to get the outcomes students want, and even if they lost the competition, they could accept it. It's not like a low-quality major program.' Similarly, Kush Patel, co-founder and former CEO of AppAcademy, a technology bootcamp, pointed out, 'Codesmith is one of the best companies in the space. Their programs are run in the industry-standard way that we use as a benchmark. There are many other schools that operate in a questionable way, but I haven't seen Novati criticize them.'

Even if the allegations were unfounded, the continued mass posting of these allegations over several years caused Codesmith's revenue to decline by nearly 80% from its peak. Furthermore, some employees have left the company due to mental health issues, and some contractors have ended their work with Codesmith out of fear of being implicated. 'It's difficult to underestimate the impact Novati's actions had on Codesmith,' Lofgren said. 'At the very least, anyone researching bootcamps should consider everything on r/codingbootcamp/ to be completely contaminated. For an unbiased review, it's best to only consider posts from communities not managed by rival bootcamp founders.'

When Lofgren's blog was featured on the social news site Hacker News, Novati himself posted a comment: 'This blog didn't ask me for a direct comment and is missing half the facts. Codesmith's decline is primarily an industry-wide issue. They've also caused unacceptable trouble, including three weeks of downtime for their entire site and accounts, so it's perfectly reasonable to object to their exaggerated marketing. We need to hear both sides before passing judgment.'

Hacker News has received a variety of opinions, including that there are problems with Reddit's moderator system and that there are many actual problems in the bootcamp industry. Meanwhile, Novati's counterargument has mostly been negative, with some arguing that 'industry-related people shouldn't be moderators and manipulate public opinion,' regardless of the actual situation at Codesmith, and others pointing out that 'regular criticism of a specific person is outrageous.'

Related Posts:

in Posted by log1e_dh