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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

There's nothing we can do. Her music reached hundreds of thousands of people, of course there will be some bad apples. As more and more people start using the internet, this is only going to increase. There's going to be 3.5 billion people on the internet soon, nobody can stop that tide.

Celebrities have solved this problem by moving a step away from the population by using publicists and assistants to communicate. Perhaps people facing consistent harassment like this should try something similar? Or work under a pseudonym?

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Compare the second part you say to the following:

>IF I come and creep you out, stalk you, threaten harm to you and your family, maybe you should just change name and location, and go live in a different state.

Pre-empting the 'but this is internet, just stop looking at it', argument:

Essentially, how is it different from "if X group of people doesn't want to be harassed, they should just avoid their harassers, and not go to where they are". Replace the "X" with women, or persons of any race.

I totally get where you're coming from, I don't like what I suggested either. But it is reality. We would be ignorant to say "Shouldn't people just stop harassing?". People won't stop harassing. You can educate and PSA the hell out of the issue. It will not stop. You can lessen it, but it won't stop; welcome to Humanity.

Like I said, celebrities have been dealing with this for decades. It's only become an issue now because "commoners" are much more capable of reaching fame than ever before. Nobody shed any tears for the hundreds of actors and actresses who have been harassed over the years. "That's fame, deal with it" they said.

>IF I come and creep you out, stalk you, threaten harm to you and your family, maybe you should just change name and location, and go live in a different state.

I would alter that to say "maybe you should contact the police".

Yupp. As many, including Brianna Wu, have done. Then what? The harasser could be a 21 year old man in Siberia, covering himself up with multiple layers of anonymity.

I'm suggesting that the attackers will keep attacking until you leave the platform, or just shut up, and so they will have won. The means to police harassment is not yet where we expect it to be. Why should those that are being attacked be on the lookout? As many in this forum feel, if the governmental authorities shouldn't have the abilities to shut you up, why should randos on the internet? (I would argue they can, and often are both one and the same)

Imagine suggesting to Cory Doctorow that he should work under a pseudonym because the British government doesn't like what he's saying. My argument is: what you're saying is equivalent to that.

I'm not going to pretend I have answer, but I'm just going to repeat what I said; that celebrities have been trying to solve this problem for a long time. They hire security, have security installed in their homes, etc. etc.

Plugging our ears and saying "LALALA the bad guys need to stop being bad" won't solve anything. Because yes, people will hide behind proxies.

You don't need to leave the platform. You don't need to move states. But you do need to do something. You can't just sit around waiting for someone to come to your rescue.

You know, the kinds of comments you have repeatedly made in this discussion helps create an atmosphere where creeps feel okay about doing shitty things and everyone looks the other way and says "Boys will be boys."

I get that you think you are just being pragmatic, but since you do not have an actual solution to offer, the best thing you can do is at least not help promote an atmosphere where folks think it is normal and okay for men to behave this way. Choosing to not put out the fire with gasoline is a constructive choice if you have no real solution to offer. It at least burns slower that way.

>> Perhaps people facing consistent harassment like this should try something similar? Or work under a pseudonym?

Perhaps we need to get rid of pseudonyms. A lot of this behavior would stop if people had to be identifiable. Although that doesn't seem to stop them all - you see some real names and email addresses in there.

Then post your name and address.

>> Then post your name and address.

I almost do. You should be able to locate my real world postal address inside of 10 minutes. Probably 5.

I'm not saying there should be no anonymity online. I think the default should be identifiable, and sites and services can strip that info and provide locally anonymous environments. That way you can't get anonymous attacks unless you're participating in those places. It's easy to strip ID, but hard to verify it if it's not built-in.

So you would require all online activity be done through "identity verifiers" such as Facebook? You have probably seen how many issues Facebook's Real Name policy has caused, and that doesn't even come close that level.

No. I would have at least a secure subnet that uses a slice of IPv6 address space to geolocate - encode lat/long/alt. As one example. So now if you know where a packet came from, you can walk your ass over there and knock on the door. I say a slice of the space because things mobile wouldn't work. There are issue of course, you need to be able to support multiple carriers among other things. But nobody is even trying to solve the problems around this, and they won't because nobody from corporations to government agencies wants it to exist.

IP addresses are not people and WiFi isn't always secure.

http://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php?id=cracking_wpa

No. Look, anonymity is a wonderful thing.

Candide, The Silence Dogood Letters, even The Mill on the Floss wouldn't have been written had the authors had to use their real names. Way too many examples to count. Hard to imagine the Revolutionary war getting as much support state-side as quickly as it did without Common Sense, which was published anonymously. So you can probably say, "Without anonymity you wouldn't be in America."

Whatever the problem, the solution should just about never be "get rid of freedom." Having some sort of NSA-approved sign-on for the internet (AKA Facebook) would be horrible. Read 1984, or Fahrenheit 451, or any other book against authoritarianism. First you make a list, then you analyze, then you start crossing people off it...

I kind of miss the days when there was general agreement that only idiots would do anything online under their real name.

I think what changed is that it got really, really lucrative to market oneself online—see also: using github and social accounts in the hiring process—even at the low end of reward for Internet activity, the pressure is real. There's now a clash between how the Internet works, which has not changed, and economic incentives, which have.

Disclaimer that is for some reason necessary on any comment like this: no, of course I don't think harassment is OK.

I agree there's a push to have a public persona online.

My perspective... you have a "work" account (LinkedIn, GitHub, Dribbble), and you have your personal accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), and you draw a clear line.

If you want to Tweet with the public, set up a public Twitter that is only for professional photos, and comments. And block out everyone except your friends from the private account.

Is it more work to have public and personal profiles? Sure. But so is putting on a condom. And by the same logic, if you can't be bothered to take the extra time, maybe you should rethink the activity.

Or perhaps creeps could try stop being creeps.

Yeah totally. And murders should stop being murders. And rapists should stop being rapists. So easy!

I wasn't quite ready to go with 'creeps should be removed from society for the good of the rest of us', but ok.

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