So I have a friend. For the purpose of this post, I'm going to call him Hideyuki Chikafuji. That isn't his name, but it gives the right sort of feel. He works as a well-paid professional in an industry which isn't investment banking, but could be. He has a degree from Northwestern in, well, let's call it Physics. Magna cum laude.
What question do you think he gets asked in every job interview? If your answer was "Do you even speak English?", you win a gold star.
Hideyuki recently got his first name legally changed to Frank. Whammo. No more awkward questions.
I would further note that there is at least one person widely respected on HN who does business under a name which is not their birth name, specifically to avoid pervasive problems with this issue in our industry. (His story is not mine to tell.) The practice is also endemic in journalism, acting, etc etc etc.
It probably isn't the only issue: Redditors are nortoriously anti-capitalist, too, so it's much more convenient to be a community-minded hobbyist developer than to be a corporation (gasp!) with investors (gasp!) and hundreds of thousands of dollars (gasp!).
P.S. If race is totally not an issue, it would be a wee bit instructive that people get so pissed of when someone pretends to be a white guy.
I think you're mistaken about the issue at hand here, patio11. This has nothing to do with being anti-capitalist or having an Asian sounding name.
This has to do with lying to the community about your story, playing up the good parts and running under a false narrative for no good reason. As pointed out in the linked thread, a competitor to Teevox, WellPlayed.tv has been completely transparent about the fact that it's a company that runs it, not some unemployed dude fantasy, it lists the exact users who represent it, and doesn't do things like violate Paypal TOS and solicit donations under a false name for a corporation. Also, this is not OSS Teevox is peddling here. They were actively receiving funds for profit and nothing was Open Source about it in the least.
It's Reddit. Reddit, when it comes to doing things for the community, absolutely doesn't care what your race or gender is. What Reddit also is, though, is violently anti-commercialism. Any sort of additional advertising, or company-posing-as-a-user, or anything that tries to take advantage of the community's overall good will in that fashion, will get slapped down.
That's currently the case here. It seems to be a company (a small one, mind you), who lied about who they were, and why they were doing what they were doing.
Now, it seems to be a small enough company that if they had let this be known from the get-go, then Reddit wouldn't have cared. However, from what seems to be the case, they didn't even use one of their cofounders as a "company face" sort of deal-- they have, in essence, made up a person from the ground up, to the standard of "Well, Starcraft players can relate to someone like this", to PR for them.
I should add something to your statements. SCReddit is a lot of things (not good), but their leniency towards commercialism is by and large more flexible than the other SRs. It's mostly driven by the fact Starcraft has been an underground, disproportionately represented (compared to how much "passion" the TL/etc community as put in) community. As such, they are starving for progress.
That being said, there are some "new kids" to the SC scene which create a stink at every turn. Overall, your description of Reddit is more or less accurate.
I think you can see now that "JakeFink" has more or less won the day over there.
I'd be thrilled if what you describe is what happened here. All it would take I think would be the actual developer speaking up and clarifying. However, the situation does have the potential to be a bit more complex. If Warp Prism was a commercial venture from the start, I think people will have a problem with that. It was marketed as the effort of a community-minded developer who was soliciting donations. If such marketing was a scam, clearly it was being done to play on the personality quirks of Reddit that you describe.
It's also a mistake to assume that Starcraft fans of Reddit have have a problem with for profit companies; they don't. The entire former moderation staff started a for-profit company (http://wellplayed.org) and they are still on great terms with the community. I think the problem alleged here is the misleading marketing. We just need to wait and get some clarifying remarks from the developers of Warp Prism in order to determine what has actually happened.
I assume you're talking about Andrew Warner, which is an assumed name (I think the original was super obviously Russian Jewish or something); I remember that he went into this on Mixergy with someone else who had also changed his name.
What question do you think he gets asked in every job interview? If your answer was "Do you even speak English?", you win a gold star.
Hideyuki recently got his first name legally changed to Frank. Whammo. No more awkward questions.
I would further note that there is at least one person widely respected on HN who does business under a name which is not their birth name, specifically to avoid pervasive problems with this issue in our industry. (His story is not mine to tell.) The practice is also endemic in journalism, acting, etc etc etc.
It probably isn't the only issue: Redditors are nortoriously anti-capitalist, too, so it's much more convenient to be a community-minded hobbyist developer than to be a corporation (gasp!) with investors (gasp!) and hundreds of thousands of dollars (gasp!).
P.S. If race is totally not an issue, it would be a wee bit instructive that people get so pissed of when someone pretends to be a white guy.