I knew nothing about replit prior to this post and upon reading it and the claim of “20 million software creators building on Replit” i knew there was something dodgy about this company. Your links confirmed it.
look i'm admittedly replit friendly (tho no vested interest whatsoever) but how does one badly handled issue with an intern, make the entire company's 20m registered user claim "dodgy"? its a very short path from there to wire fraud and i dont think they will go anywhere near there.
It was plain intimidation by the founder and further doubling down on it made it pretty clear where they stand ethically.
Whether someone wants to let the behaviour of a company's founder color their judgement of the company is upto them. But painting the whole thing as "one badly handled issue" undermines is.
Those 20 million, what are they? Created user accounts? Active user accounts? User accounts that created at least one Repl?
I have at least three Replit accounts - one on my uni email (which I no longer have access too), a previous work account (experimenting for doing interviews with it), and my personal account. Am I three developers? None of those accounts are active, do they count or not?
If that 20 million figure is taken from anything less than active users I'd consider it deceptive. Which doesn't mean Replit the app is bad! But it does make the company a bit suspicious.