Rstudio – Pending Legal Matter | Hacker News Reader

Rstudio – Pending Legal Matter

datacamp.com

41 pointsamrrs21 comments

Buzzfeed coverage (that ran last year of the original incident) https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/daveyalba/datacamp-sexu...

DataCamp is a shady operation in my experience. I have no problem with the quality of the content, however I have personally experienced issues trying to work with them as a contractor and also have heard stories of similar issues from other candidate content authors. In short, they have no qualms about asking for content from authors in advance as a recruiting tactic and then telling the authors to take a hike. Of course, they keep the content as their intellectual property as use it as they wish.

That doesn't seem any different than asking a software engineer candidate to complete a take home coding assessment. If you don't like it then find another company to work with.

Per the comment you're responding to (I don't know the veracity of the claim) it's much different: take home assignments aren't kept as intellectual property.

> the financial benefit it gains from disparaging DataCamp and severing its ties with us

In other words, RStudio probably cancelled an agreement they had and DataCamp is unhappy with that.

> the distribution, and supporting the distribution, of an article published by BuzzFeed

What does this even mean? They are sharing a link? Why aren't they suing BuzzFeed? (obviously it's easier to bully a smaller company in court)

R-Ladies dropped some cross sponsorship and there used to be a datacamp ad link in rstudio clouds sidebar that got dropped.

They’re not sharing the link because it’s actually a fantastic piece of journalism and once you read it you get a picture for just how damning this is.

Thanks for this context, was very confused about what RStudio did. And was even more confused why datacamp considers RStudio a competitor... still don't think it makes sense but now I understand their motivations.

I've read the article (and shared it on Twitter) and I would agree.

What I mean was, why are they saying Rstudio distributed the article?

As far as I can tell (haven’t read datacamps legal complaint and it’s not clear anything has been filed), some members of the named groups tweeted and posted blogs with links to the buzzfeed write up.

DataCamp pretty much took every wrong turn possible in this story, and I don’t feel like this action is justified. In addition, I’m not sure that rstudio is a competitor to DataCamp.

Unfortunately the small but passionate R community is taking a hit while DataCamp and RStudio are duking it out. It was hard enough to advocate for R vs. Python and this controversy makes it worse. No one likes to join communities where leading figures are at each other's throats.

Can someone explain how RStudio is a competitor to datacamp?

Have briefly used RStudio IDE in past but don’t follow them or datacamp very closely.

What a terrible look for Datacamp.

Yeah right. There's no way DataCamp is getting its reputation cleaned with a defamation suit. How is reporting an internal incident defamation by any means.

Streisand Effect in action. I wasn't aware of the original incident but I am now they've drawn attention to it again.

The article goes through this. The claim is that RStudio knowingly pushed false information about the incident even after DaraCamp reached out to them to correct factual inaccuracies and false claims clears up by the independent third party investigation.

Reporting on an internal incident isn’t defamation in and of itself, but if you knowingly sprees lies about the incident to damage the reputation of a competitor, then it is.

The article states that the initial "independent third party investigation" was not all that independent. The investigation was done by an investor who had put a substantial amount of money into DataCamp.

There were two "independent third party investigations".

The first was carried out quietly by an investor in early 2018, long before DataCamp initially acknowledged this. This is the investigation referenced here: https://www.datacamp.com/community/blog/note-to-our-communit....

The second was carried out by a contractor as a response to the initial outcry. This has been sometimes referred to as an "investigation", but its authors frame it as a "review" targeted at helping DataCamp correct workplace issues. You can read the report here: https://www.datacamp.com/community/blog/working-ideal-indepe....

As far as I can tell, neither of these processes concluded anything that contradicted the BuzzFeed article in any significant way. The contractor's report concludes "there is little factual dispute about what happened". Since DataCamp's most recent post isn't specific about what factual disputes exist now, I guess we're in the dark about that.

This appears to be a pretty bad move from DataCamp. The original incident put DataCamp in pretty bad light at that time. I feel the reputation actually recovered pretty well since then.

I'm a premium member of DataCamp for 2-3 years and also an avid user of Rstudio and a fan of many of their staff.

I may be missing what the CEO is referring to but I haven't seen much disparagement of DataCamp by Rstudio.

The CEO doth protest too much, methinks.

DataCamp did nothing wrong.

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