In fact, I'd argue that many of the most effective ways to mislead people involve sticking rigidly to literal truth, because it makes them so much harder to counter. When there's no literal untruth to correct, it's natural to end up implying bad faith _without having any definitive proof_, and that is mighty unstable ground from which to argue.
I get what you’re saying, but imagine your name was Richard Branson. You’d hear no end to the jokes. At what point can you consider this an internalized behavior of the author? Is it still clickbait if the author believes his main raison d’etre is to have a meme name?
I think I basically agree with you. And this example is pretty benign — I'm not actually meaning to criticize anyone here.
However I will not that the author in question refers to himself as "Rick Branson", and the article title is "10 Things I Hate About PostgreSQL". So I think it's just the person who made the link who is being a bit cheeky.
They may have simply been intending to be relatively formal as a mark of respect. (there's enough language and culture dependencies in how one decides such things that 'may' is very much load bearing in that sentence, mind)
Certainly it wouldn't've occurred to me to think it was the businessman rather than a name collision.
But, eh, agreed on tangent, and I'm not intending to criticise either.
See the guy on Bluesky who is called Steve Wozniak and isn’t trying to pretend to be Woz and yet has issues while Bluesky also let someone with a racial slur username get an account
