Reddit’s moderators drew some criticism after “locking” a discussion about C++ paper/proposal author Andrew Tomazos. The URL (in the post with the locked discussion) had led to a submission for Slashdot’s queue of potential (but unpublished) stories, which nevertheless attracted 178 upvotes on Reddit and another 85 comments. That unpublished Slashdot submission was also submitted to Hacker News, where it drew another 38 upvotes but was also eventually flagged.
Back on Reddit’s C++ subreddit (which has 300,000 members), a “direct appeal” was submitted to the moderators to unlock Reddit’s earlier discussion (drawing over 100 upvotes). But there’s one problem with this drama, as Slashdot reader brantondaveperson pointed out. “There appears to be no independent confirmation of this story anywhere. The only references to it are this Slashdot story, and a Reddit story. Neither cite sources or provide evidence.” This drew a response from the person submitting the potential story to Slashdot:
You raise a valid point. The communication around this was private. The complaint about the [paper’s] title, the author’s response, and the decision to expel were all communicated by either private email, on private mailing lists or in private in-person meetings. These private communications could be quoted by participants in said communications. Please let us know if that would be sufficient.
The paper had already drawn some criticism in a longer blog post by programmer Izzy Muerte (which called it “a fucking cleaned up transcript of a ChatGPT conversation”.) It’s one of six papers submitted this year by Tomaszos to the ISO’s “WG21” C++ committee. Tomazos (according to his LinkedIn profile) is “lead programmer” of videogame company Fury Games (founded by him and his wife). It also shows an earlier two-year stint as a Google senior software engineer.
There were two people claiming direct knowledge of the situation posting on Reddit. A user named kritzikratzi posted:
I contacted Andrew Tomazos directly. According to him the title “The Undefined Behavior Question” caused complaints inside WG21. The Standard C++ Foundation then offered two choices (1) change the paper title (2) be expelled. Andrew Tomazos chose (2).
A Reddit user Dragdu posted:
He wasn’t expelled for that paper, but rather this was the last straw. And he wasn’t banned from the [WG21] committee, that is borderline impossible, but rather the organization he was representing told him to fuck off and don’t represent them anymore. If he can find different organization to represent, he can still attend… Tomazos has been on lot of people’s shit list, because his contributions suck… He decided that the title is too important to his ViSiOn for the chatgpt BS submitted as a paper, and that he won’t change the title. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back and his “sponsor” told him to fuck off….
There was also some back-and-forth on Hacker News.
bun_terminator: r/cpp mods just woke up, banning everyone who question… this lunatic behavior.
(Reddit moderator): We did not go on a banning spree, we banned only one person, you. After removing the comment where you insulted someone, I checked your history, noticed that you did not meaningfully participate in r/cpp outside this thread, and decided to remove someone from the community who’d only be there to cause trouble.
