Early this summer, tech entrepreneur Austen Allred was on Reddit, as he often is, when he noticed something suspicious. The coding forums he frequents, where people usually talk about JavaScript bugs and command line functions, were being suffocated by rants and raves on a particular topic: a coding bootcamp called Lambda School, which Allred happens to run.

To Allred, the posts looked suspiciously robotic. Perhaps a competitor was posting spam to get any mention of Lambda banned from the forums. Maybe it was a bootcamp critic on a tear. Allred had heard that people were spreading rumors he was behind the accounts, trying to gin up more exposure, good or bad, for his startup. “People want us to fail,” he says, casting a glance from under the brim of his signature grey and red trucker hat, emblazoned with the eponymous Greek letter. “People want to think that Lambda is a scam, because they want to believe the results we’re producing are impossible.”

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