This whole thing is incredibly immature and seems to be blown up to an absurd degree.

Did ThePHD unfairly have their hopes raised about giving a keynote speech? Sure. Was this done out of malice? After - for some reason - thousands of words of aired dirty laundry I can’t see any indication it was. I can’t see how hyper-analyzing everyone’s testimonies and expecting people to have a perfect memory of things they never thought they would have to post-hoc justify helps anyone. Is it really reasonable to expect people that get into highly technical positions based on technical merit to also be perfect organisers and have flawless interpersonal skills?

If there was some catalog of people being offered keynotes or other prestigious things and having them taken away due to spite I could see this being worth spending time over but as a one-off this all just seems absurd. Unless of course there was some key detail I’ve missed in the half-dozen blogs posts that makes everyone involved terrible people?