There is clearly no technical reason for Scott's involvement in the first place, as Troy could just have created an account himself using any photo whatsoever. The whole post is structured as a joke about the idea of Scott being gay and having a Grindr account.

Do I think Troy is a raging homophobe? No. But his initial response to my comment was to claim that he chose the photo because it looked like a typical Grindr profile photo (!), rather than to just admit that it was a joke. That doesn't increase my confidence that the photo was chosen with good intentions. You apparently think that there is another explanation for the choice of photo relating to some inside baseball between Troy and Scott (which I frankly don't care about, not knowing either of these guys). If that is the real reason then Troy could just have said so himself.

In general, making in-jokes in public blog posts that anyone can read doesn't always go over so well. I'm not saying "Troy is a class A homophobe and must be deleted from the internet". I'm just registering that I'm one gay dude who is bored of this kind of gay joke.

> There is clearly no technical reason for Scott's involvement in the first place, as Troy could just have created an account himself using any photo whatsoever.

"I was able to log into my own account after resetting the password" isn't a particularly good attention grabber

> The whole post is structured as a joke about the idea of Scott being gay and having a Grindr account.

Scott is married, I'm pretty sure the joke is about him being on a dating app in the first place.

> [...]

I guess at this point, Troy assumes he's famous enough that everyone who sees his blog will know about him and Scott as well as all the shenanigans they get up to with each other.

Tech and infosec definitely have a lot of problems with inclusivity towards anyone that's not a straight white male, but I really don't think that this blog post was written from the perspective of "ha ha ha ha imagine being gay".

Still, he usually takes criticism, let's see if he does a followup.

>"I was able to log into my own account after resetting the password" isn't a particularly good attention grabber

You’d still be resetting the password in a way that doesn’t require access to the associated email account but only knowledge of the email address. It doesn’t make any difference whether you created the account yourself or got a friend to do it for you. You're still showing that anyone who knows my email address can access my Grindr account, which surely ought to grab people's attention.

From my point of view, its a precursor to a sensible discussion about this that we acknowledge that Troy had Scott make the profile purely to add a little humor to the post. There’s of course nothing wrong with adding humor to a blog post. However, subtly mocking people for being gay is a pretty ingrained part of our culture, and it’s easy for straight people to thoughtlessly slip into doing it.

I know that you have given an alternative explanation of the intention behind the photo, but unfortunately it's not the explanation that Troy himself gave in the comments.