Sneedacity / Tenacity Harassment Controversy

Overview

Sneedacity / Tenacity Harassment Controversy refers to the alleged harassment of programmer Cookiengineer over choosing to name his Audacity fork "Tenacity" rather than "Sneedacity" despite the name winning a poll made by the programmer to decide the name of the fork. Shortly after deciding not to name the fork Sneedacity, Cookiengineer made a post to GitHub alleging attempted physical harassment and doxxing from 4chan users, resulting in him quitting the project. A similar fork named "Sneedacity" has since been created. "Sneed" is a reference to Sneed's Feed and Seed, a Simpsons joke popular on 4chan.

Background

In May 2021, the programmers behind the open-source audio engineering software Audacity, which had recently switched management hands, added telemetry to the program, which is used to gather data from users for various reasons.^[1] Telemetry was removed from the program days later after massive backlash as users claimed privacy violations,^[2] however, a number of other security updates caused anger in the community.^[3] These changes inspired programmers to "fork" Audacity, meaning to program out various components themselves, with the aim of restoring the program to a state before the major privacy changes.

A programmer by the name of Cookiengineer developed the most popular fork of this kind, announcing it on July 5th via a now-deleted tweet reading, "Oh boi, #audacity issue regarding legal terms and privacy policy exploded yesterday. Like, for real. I created a fork that removed all those features, and we're currently working on a rebrand, github orga, and automated builds via GitHub actions." He also created a Github^[4] page where users could vote on the name of the fork, allegedly based on suggestions from a previous post, with a number of options available, including Audacium, AudioBakery, Tenacity and Sneedacity (shown below). It is worth noting that Cookiengineer included the option of his own will.

Over the course of the day, numerous posts were made to 4chan^[5][6] asking users to vote for Sneedacity as the new name of the fork (shown below). Sneed is a popular joke on 4chan with no real meaning that is often interpreted by people outside the know as offensive simply because of its popularity on 4chan, which has a reputation of attracting problematic posters and content due to its anonymity.

On the same date, a second Audacity fork project named "Sneedacity" was uploaded to GitHub,^[7] notably including a GIF of Sneed and Chuck dabbing on the page (shown below, left, Sneedacity description, right).

Although Sneedacity received the majority of the votes, Cookiengineer decided to officially name the fork "Tenacity" after learning about 4chan's involvement. Cookiengineer made a number of tweets about the incident, which have since been deleted (shown below via Wayback Machine).

Developments

Cookiengineer Alleges Harassment From 4chan

On July 6th, 2021, Cookiengineer put out a post on the GitHub^[8] project for Tenacity announcing that he would step down from working on the fork. He cited 4chan users' harassment as the reason, claiming their acts went beyond trolling and that his address and identity were doxxed. He links several specific 4chan threads harassing him.

The full statement reads:

Disclaimer: I really thought long about this, and I haven't slept in two days due to ongoing harassments of 4chan.

As the first people were literally arriving at my place of living, where they knocked on my doors and windows to scare us, I am hereby officially stepping down as a maintainer of this project.

4chan thinks I cannot code C, so they win.
4chan thinks I'm unfit to lead the project, so they win.
4chan successfully bullied me out in order to have their fucked up sneedacity fork. A fork that was finally created with blood, quite literally.

I give up. I don't care. The safety of my family is worth more than an open source project. They found out my address via a YouTube video where someone was posting my nickname combined with my real legal name (which meanwhile got taken down due to my asking).

The incident happened shortly 23:00 CEST, today; and the police took over this case.

I will discuss this further in our (private as of now) communication channels with other people that helped out here so far, and will let you know of a successor.

Please, if you have the time, report the https://github.com/Sneeds-Feed-and-Seed/sneedacity project to GitHub as a hate speech, violence and harassment insinuating project). Report every single member contributing in this fork, because they were part of the harassment movement against me and my family.

They are cyber terrorists, not cringe cancel kiddos. They physically tried to harm me in real life, and this has gotten out of hand.

4chan people made up stories about me posting here, posting there. Faking sceenshots, calling out even themselves as "cookie faggot" because they cannot verify any source of information they use as "source of truth" for their executive actions. I never posted on 4chan, and I never will. This site is the most disgusting place in the whole world, and I think all the people that are active in /g/ should get put in jail and be ashamed of themselves for making the world a worse place than it already is.

They are physically harming people, in real life. Be aware of anything you do BEFORE trying to do the right thing.

This is not cancel culture. This is not anon. This is tyranny, oppression and senseless physical violence. Something the anon movement never stood for in the beginning.

In case people didn't follow what happened, here are the threads with lots of faked shitposts, faked sceenshots, defamations and whatnot:

The relevant 4chan threads about "sneedacity" (which is equivalent for harassing me):

https://boards.4channel.org/g/thread/82413768
https://boards.4channel.org/g/thread/82410116
https://boards.4channel.org/g/thread/82409026
https://boards.4channel.org/g/thread/82407520
https://boards.4channel.org/g/thread/82413937
https://boards.4channel.org/g/thread/82416433
https://boards.4channel.org/g/thread/82418711
https://boards.4channel.org/g/thread/82420783

I knew from the start that I wanted to not govern this project, as all the other invited members of this organization already knew. I believe this project can succeed by embracing an open governance model. And I still think that my actions were morally correct and the right thing to do.

Also, I am in contact with GitHub and the German BKA (federal police) as of now, therefore I will not disclose any more information publicly about what happened to anyone. Evidence has been gathered, submitted and will be acted upon. I will not legally let go of this.

When another more fitting project lead has been elected by the team, I will let you know here. I will revoke my own vote on this matter.

Thank you for your understanding, even though it has been a horrible journey for me so far.

~Chris

Cookiengineer Accused Of Lying

Some following the story doubted Cookiengineer's claims of harassment and doxxing, offering posts that seemingly refute his claims of harassment. Some found Cookiengineer's tendency to post and delete content about the harassment suspicious. Others pointed to a now-deleted comment where he claims he had to "reflash" his Pinephone because he was getting too many harassing texts, a statement some found to make no sense (shown below). Further, he claimed he was doxxed via incriminating information in YouTube videos, but none of this has surfaced. He also allegedly made a post to GitHub claiming he'd been stabbed over the incident, but offered no sufficient proof and deleted the post later.

On July 6th, 2021, Redditor u/atrt7 made a post to /r/programming^[9] linking to the GitHub page announcing Cookiengineers step-down from Tenacity, garnering over 1,100 upvotes in a day. In the post, u/party_waffel writes a long comment doubting Cookiengineer's claims:

Before someone accuses me of anything I'm just an audacity user trying to get to the bottom of this. This guy wasn't "targeted" as far as I can see. He added "sneedacity" to the poll himself, this wasn't a Boaty McBoatface situation. Sure, it's not really a serious name but it's not like he isn't the one who added it to the poll and made the poll public.

I don't want to make accusations but it just seems fishy how much time he spent talking about this alleged harassment but became silent right after people wanted to see proof, having some proof would support his case too. […]

His latest claim is that someone stabbed him in the arm, again with no images or police report. To be crystal clear I don't condone violence of any kind but this guy has been making increasingly more serious claims with no proof so I have hard time believing someone who got stabbed in the arm hours ago would write a long github post instead of just posting a picture of the wound or police report with a brief explanation, I mean it's easier than writing with a stab wound in your arm and would get rid of doubts had by people like me. Again I'm really sorry if this has actually happened to him but this wouldn't be the first time I've seen someone lie on the internet.

Over the course of July 6th, Cookiengineer changed his bio a number of times to various quotes taken from online discussions of the controversy, typically from 4chan. Many of these can be seen in a graphic collected by followers of the story showing posts that question the legitimacy of the harassment claims (shown below, click to zoom). An Imgur^[10] thread was made to collect all these bio changes in a more organized way.

Cookiengineer denied a number of these bio changes on Twitter, particularly ones including racist phrasing. He also tweeted^[11] on July 8th claiming people are editing their comments to alter the context of the controversy.

Sneedacity

On July 6th, YouTuber Mental Outlaw posted a video showcasing Sneedacity (shown below).

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References