Nina Niskanen

If you're wondering about the specific proximate case this is referencing, Guild Wars 2 developer (and frankly brilliant advocate for the game and its community) Jessica Price was fired because she didn't sufficiently coddle this dude's opinions.

She was talking about one of the unique challenges of writing for an MMO (creating a persona in the story for the player character to inhabit as they go through the game's storyline) and this dude thought he had the answer.

And his answer was to just use branching dialogue, which... I mean. I'm not a developer for MMOs. But this is a problem I've thought about for more than five minutes, because I'm interested in the subject.

And Jessica Price has done this for a living for a long time.

Few things in life are frustrating in quite exactly the same way as describing a thorny problem you have grappled with for years and have someone come up and blithely assert a "solution" you have already considered, tried, maybe even incorporated a little.

But because you've been working with the problem for so long, you've heard all the obvious solutions and you know if they work and to what extent they work. You certainly know when something is not a magic bullet or cure-all.

So Price used this guy's interjection of a "simple solution" that does not actually address it into her description of one of the core problems of her discipline as an example, a learning moment, about what it's like to be a female professional talking about your work online.

And this so polite and so reasonable man whose only interest in all the world is making sure that all of the poor little polite discussions find a home before the polite discussion orphanage closes down and they're all shut out into the cold went to Reddit and whipped up a mob.