I've had my house egged and repainted, and been physically assaulted at events over baseless personal grudges held by others. You could tell me they hate the guy just for existing, and it'd be 100% believable.

If I had to guess - I'd say it was down to refusing their name suggestion. Which is a really damn petty reason to hate someone, but one I can entirely believe. One of the personal grudges I was dragged into was exactly that petty.

The internet has been well overdue for a good chlorine dosing for a long time.

But the thing is... he claims he's never posted there. So how did they catch wind of him even existing?

It doesn't make any sense to me. Of course what they're saying in those threads is inexcusible but I don't think cookieengineer is giving the full truth either.

/g/ has it's pulse on the happenings in the tech world just as much as hn. I'm sure they knew about the Audacity situation because it's interesting stuff. From my PoV the "4chan raided a naming poll and then got mad when their polling was overridden" story checks out 100%.

- Dev holds contest to name new fork

- 4chan meme reference wins contest (Sneedacity)

- Dev declares results invalid

tenacity isn't anything special when most of their commits are literally trivial README corrections, while sneedacity has received quite a number of code contributions in just a few days.