The Developer Formerly Known as FreeBSDGirl
blog.randi.io
blog.randi.io
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I thought she was exaggerating or maybe misunderstanding something. Sure, this guy is probably an asshole, but legalizing rape, come on!
I followed the link and... it is kind of almost entertaining. He means it. Literally. You can't stop reading that trainwreck of an argument, because it gets worse and worse.
And then you've lost all hope in mankind. I thought I knew what misogyny was about, but that is absolutely breathtaking.
It's one thing if you keep your horrible-person persona separate from your technical one (as e.g. the Strange Loop thing earlier this year), although I still think it's legitimate to say that's too much. But when someone is deliberately tying their work in a project with their views that drive out other people from that same project, it's not giving them attention to kick them out. It's giving them attention to keep them in.
But since that didn't happen, Randi is trying to bring attention to the fact that the above isn't how things work.
EDIT TO CLARIFY: the man I'm referring to is the FreeBSD contributor Randi Harper speaks of in the article, not the voosh guy.
Etc.
Yes.
>Did (do) you worry that you can't go to the police for who you are
Yes.
Most recently in Malmo.
At the very least, there's the empirical argument that the major operating systems are overwhelmingly developed by private corporations, and you can be sure that if a developer said "hey, this new hire is getting his white supremacist followers on Twitter to attack me," the new hire wouldn't be working on that project very much more. And we generally don't find the price of this less-than-free speech too much to pay.
Can you explain why it helps develop a better net installer or Linux emulation layer to be able to use slurs against fellow developers?
A COC forces you to be compliant to it every where on social media, on regular media, in person, on private forums... everywhere - this is thought police.
A COC forces you to "hide" your personal beliefs, ideas, who you vote for who you donate money to etc. on the off chance they might be considered offensive to some one.
We already had a CEO who had to resign due to a political donation, COC's will have the same effect you post something offensive on facebook? you're out, you go to a political rally that some one finds offensive? well though luck.
If COC's only covered official project channels no one would care about them, and the people that want them would not push with such vigor because they could not be used for thought policing.
On a side note I find it ironic that people who had to hide who they are for most of history and maybe for most of their lives want to force the same thing on other people just because of their personal beliefs.
And on another side note the wworse of the humanity tends to fester in dark rooms when things are out in the open you know here everyone stands and you can ridicule them for that if you want.
Please can you show me the HN rule that tells people how to downvote? Specifically, the rule that tells people not to downvote for disagreement?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
> I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347
> Downvoting has always been used to express disagreement.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691
> IIRC we first had this conversation about a month after launch. Downvotes have always been used to express disagreement. Or more precisely, a negative score has: users seem not to downvote something they disagree with if it already has a sufficiently negative score.
I love how you're comparing the choice of being a person who dehumanizes and threatens vulnerable people as like... a demographic to compare to being a woman, or being trans, etc.
where free speech is an actuality and not a slogan.
Harassment isn't protected speech, and that's beyond the point because this isn't an issue of free speech at all.
the price you'll pay in trying is way too high for my taste
Someone in an organized community was being harassed, and they're upset that leadership of that community didn't seem to think it was a problem. The price being paid is that someone harassing a community member isn't part of the community anymore. That's a high price?
That's an american definition, all forms of speech should be protected even hate speech, when hate is being pushed to the sidelines it only festers and becomes worse, let it be in the open and let it be ridiculed.
>Someone in an organized community was being harassed
Some one claimed to be harassed (there's a very thick and really not one sided story behind all this), considering the authors day to day activities allot of the things she does are also harassment or is calling out some one all the time for their beliefs is only harassment if those beliefs are currently socially progressive?
>The price being paid is that someone harassing a community member isn't part of the community anymore. That's a high price?
Well the price in this case was that she wasn't in the community any more, mostly because of her doing I would guess but I really don't want to get into that.
Communities tend to cast out the ones that cause the most disturbance and disturbance is often not a person who aggravates some one but a person who gets aggravated allot, usually by many people and about many issues.
Most communities are self managing (and do it quite well) if you find your self out of place all the time and being constantly cast out and "harassed" even if you are in the right it might be worth the time to take a deep look at one self and understand how you can adapt better and what different actions you might be able to take to avoid that because clearly; dichotomy and my way or the high way doesn't work and even in cases when it does it won't work for long and at the end will might be your own undoing because there always will be a more progressive agenda that will just as easily hijack the current one as yours did before it.
I really miss the days when progressiveness was about open dialog, accepting others and most importantly being open to your own ideas being challenged as much as you challenge the ideas of others, today progressiveness especially in online communities boils down to some unholy checklist which gets updated every so often with the latest social fab being mandatory for maintaining membership privileges.
Note that one of the twists & turns in this sorry saga was that the same freebsd developer submitted a documented harassment complaint against Randi. The freebsd CoC was in effect by this time, but it doesn't seem like it was helpful.
I'm merely lamenting my past ignorance.
You don't have to like it(trans), or understand it; but you do have to accept it, and be accepting. And there's just no excuse or room for that kind of thing in a project. Maybe on 4chan and maybe on reddit, but not in an OSS project. Who the fuck acts like that? I just don't get it.
I read an article the other day about devastating, long-term harassment that one person suffered. She had a dream where she was physically attacked by a harasser -- stabbed with a knife. In this dream her primary feeling was one of overwhelming relief. Why? Because the harasser had done something so obviously wrong that her complaints could now not possibly be ignored. She woke up disappointed.
No, rooshv was dripping with sarcasm.
She refers to other people ("neo-nazi friends") with whom that person communicates on twitter / etc., one of whom is rooshv, who wrote that absurd "campaign to legalize rape" article.
He means it in the same way Jonathan Swift meant that cannibalism should be legalized and the Irish should be allowed to sell their children as food in "A Modest Proposal" [1].
No idea what happened to them, I assumed they grew up and the few that didn't, found their place at the very bottom of society that is not good for anything.
To them usually it's not really about genre, race or any particular property, their disturbed mentality causes them to look for ways to attack and inconvenience anyone they don't like for any reason. I actually think they're even looking for an excuse to find a target, because they are amused by the whole thing and it makes them feel good and important.
I can see how many of them would make it as gamers, I'm just surprised that a person like this would also make it as a FreeBSD committer.
I wonder why they silently forced him to turn his commit bit off, but they don't want to update their CoC or condemn this behaviour in public.
The stealth editing of the Trademark Policy to include this particular case (even though they missed the exception for old uses, which made that change pointless) also deserves some explanation, it's wrong.
I don't care about any argument of if she's ever committed, or if her code is any good; that's bike shedding and irrelevant to the fact that no HUMAN BEING should be treated this way, let alone in a leading open source project.
> The next communication from core asked me to stop talking about this publicly. They told me to tell everyone it was being solved through private mediation, and that the problem committer was on vacation for a week, so they didn’t want to do anything about it until he got back.
WHAT
> I had talked to someone from the FreeBSD Foundation earlier on the phone about what was happening. During this same conversation, they actually said “maybe you should be nicer.”
THE
> A week later, I received an email from this person threatening to involve the FreeBSD Foundation lawyers if I didn’t change my username immediately. They tried to pass it off as a trademark infringement
ACTUAL
> The FreeBSD Foundation had stealth added ‘usernames’ just prior to her sending that email, adding the word but not updating the date at the top.
FUCK
The shit she's had to go through makes me lose hope for humanity. While the way she's handled it has restored it. We need more people in tech like this, and I'm glad she's putting up such a fight.
It would be easy for anyone to just be a loudspeaker for change; but she's actually getting her hands dirty, talking to people, and engaging about it, and learning and sharing along the way. I seriously doubt most of us would have the gumption and fortitude to handle this the way she has.
That's a not-unreasonable policy when we're talking about a technical debate that becomes acrimonious It's a terrible policy when we're talking about threats or threatening behavior by one party against another.
My experience is that most dude-nerds are oblivious by default to those sorts of non-technical, purely human issues. It's made all the worse because their behavior is more-or-less indistinguishable from genuinely malicious behavior. From the perspective of the person being threatened, it doesn't make much practical difference whether they're doing it out of ineptitude or malice.
It saddens me to hear of times when that doesn't happen, particularly in such devastating ways that affect someone's life so fundamentally.
And here's a "discussion" on the matter between Randi, Colin and Johannes on /r/FreeBSD: https://archive.is/wH4Rg
If someone is regularly and routinely attacked (and all the bullshit about "Randi can't code" / "Randi hasn't contributed" is just obnoxious), it's reasonable for them to be pissed off and get angry. That doesn't somehow negate the fact that they were badly mistreated.
In hindsight, it's telling that people making the above comments are posting links to longreads and not citing anything specific--just seems like more of the misogynistic campaign.
Not to say that this is not the only or first time Randi has behaved like this or done this to someone if you are aware of her larger Online presence, for instance she did it to Vivek Wadhwa: http://www.stopthegrbullies.com/2015/06/01/randi-harpers-bul...
She said this about Anne Rice, the 74 year old female author of The Vampire Chronicles / Interview With A Vampire: https://twitter.com/randileeharper/status/605650789348995073 https://twitter.com/randileeharper/status/605736216625938432 https://twitter.com/freebsdgirl/status/605636162653417472
She even did this to Open Source developers like Ted Neward (who she wanted to "drive out of the industry" over a single inappropriate comment) and pulled his supposed "target" Iris Classon into it, upon which she had to defend both herself and him from Randi: https://twitter.com/randileeharper/status/535151831027302400 http://archive.is/g2556 http://archive.is/T9Hvm http://archive.is/9GUle
Another Open Source developer, who was chairman of the IGDA Puerto Rico and part of several Open Source communities, and was subsequently forced to step down from the IGDA any Python Cuba she did it to was Roberto Rosario: https://twitter.com/siloraptor/status/624257540948393988 https://twitter.com/siloraptor/status/625866078925647872 https://twitter.com/siloraptor/status/588123915488223232
What exposing someone who pretends to lead an "Online Abuse Prevention Initiative" while being one of the biggest abusers has to do with a "misogynistic campaign" you'll have to explain.
It's very basic DARVO. It's a pattern of pathological behaviour with this person of attacking/going after someone and calling everyone that calls it out "bullies" or "harassers".
For me, I think it comes down to who's outnumbered. I'm willing to give her the overall benefit of the doubt because I've seen the misogyny consistently over the past fifteen years I've been in the industry. I can't judge how much PTSD I would have after dealing with the harassment I've read just around this post she's made.
Incidentally, the original definition of the word "privilege" is "private law." I'll leave that to others to decide how that applies to granting one person the permission to engage in the same harassing behaviors she wants others punished for.
That's crossing the line of civility and you are actively making derogatory remarks of another HN member. who are you to judge her mental state? are you a doctor? Do you have a degree in psychology? No you don't.
You might read what happened and come to a different conclusion than what others have. That's fine. But you are making personal attacks with statements like that, and that has no place in this discussion. at all.
And here's the fundamental issue I see in all of these debates: the majority (here, young white males) tries to invalidate completely legitimate concerns because the person raising those legitimate concerns has done things that one can criticize.
You can see this rampantly in links that are provided to somehow negate her claim. "She's not a real contributor to FreeBSD, so her claims are invalid." "She gets angry at people, so her claims are invalid."
Look, Rodney King was not innocent of all crimes when he was badly beaten by the LAPD. Does that excuse those cops? Of course not. The only germane "counter-evidence" to Randi's post would be evidence that the FreeBSD has actually be incredibly and consistently welcoming to her. Because fundamentally her claim is that the FreeBSD community has been decidedly unwelcome to her. And yet all the "counter-arguments" here are repeated and painful reminders of how nasty and awful the "counter-arguers" are to her. It's mind-boggling.
Vivek Wadhwa wrote a book that she didn't like and upon being "criticized" even offered a free copy of it, she declined and told him to go die in a fire.
Anne Rice called attention to an article about this and she was declared a "bully" and a "harasser".
Ted Neward never had any conversations with her when she asked for him to be "driven out of the industry" and Iris Classon pleaded to be left alone because Randi was trying to use her for her own purposes.
Roberto Rosario was put on a "list of harassers" by her because he followed the "wrong kind of people" on Twitter and got subsequently harassed and she tried to get him removed from speaking at conferences.
These people ARE HER VICTIMS, not the other way around. She initiates these things. Similar with the FreeBSD community, this is the first time Johannes Meixner has ever talked to her, his supposed wrongdoing previously was that he criticized "safe spaces" and "Code of Conducts" saying that he agrees with this: https://github.com/domgetter/NCoC
https://twitter.com/xmjEE/status/613083223086768128
Again she attacked him privately telling him to "go fuck himself", that he is a "piece of shit", a "privileged dumbass" and that he is supposedly "giving the project a bad name" while all he did was remaining calm and saying that he has different opinions: https://archive.is/9KGyX
He called this behaviour out after said Code of Conduct was implemented and the Foundation didn't choose to do anything in his favor, this is why he left: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.freebsd.advocacy/5404/
Randi is just trying to change cause and effect. Nobody was "beaten by the police" in this case and most of these people didn't even know of her existence before. SHE is the harasser/abuser in most of these situations, if you have any proof pointing out otherwise, please feel free to share.
Her post is about how she felt profoundly unwelcome in the FreeBSD community. Your response is not a counter-argument to her feeling unwelcome. As far as I can tell, your response is, "Randi did bad things." That's a non-sequitur. It's not a response to her feelings of being made to feel unwelcome.
If you had a germane response, I am guessing it would be, "Randi should feel unwelcome, because she is not a good person." If that's your response, you're not actually disagreeing with her. She said she felt unwelcome, you're basically saying, "Good. Yes. That's a good result."
Not to say that she hasn't provided any proof for many of the claims made.
How do "her feelings" in any way matter over the facts of the situation? This doesn't make sense, I can't discuss anything based on "other people's feelings".
Your first example is literally a bad amazon book review. Did you see what she said?
> The author Vivek Wadhwa spends his time harassing women on twitter when they try to call him out on his approaches to feminism. He's not interested in inviting conversation, but instead thinks it's acceptable to intimidate and silence women from his book's twitter account when criticism is directed at his personal account. He's using feminism to profit, and not because he actually believes in empowering women. This is despicable behavior, and it's been confirmed by multiple women at this point.
> If you want to read about how to empower women, actually buy a book that has a woman listed first on the cover, at the very least. Even the highlighted review on his website is by a man. Men that are actually trying to help feminism don't profit off of it, financially or with cred. They empower women's voices and amplify them. While this may be a collection of contributions by women, Vivek's behavior online casts doubt on his intentions.
> No, thanks. I already know what it's like to be an empowered woman in tech, and to have men like Vivek Wadhwa speaking down to me.
Yeah she's REALLY going after someone with that kinda language. You know want that is? that's her OPINIONS. She's not attacking him, calling him names, trying to intimidate him.
At no point did she say he was fat, ugly, should go join ISIS, that she's rape his ass with a dildo at his next book signing, or leave a project he's been involved with for years.
She's attacking his behavior, not his personhood. That's called being mature, and civil.
That you had all these links ready to go... leads me to question your bias towards the matter.
But nothing you posted is of any actual merit or counterpoint to what she's said in her post.
Then you might want to rethink your convictions regarding harassment and abuse, seeing as she's engaged in these things unrepentingly and repeatedly over time periods of years. As I've pointed out in the other comment above, none of these people had anything to do with her before she decided to attack them. Vivek Wadhwa among them least of all, he even offered her a copy of his book for free, which had many testimonials of "women in tech": https://twitter.com/randileeharper/status/522547854477246464
He was an avid activist of "getting more women into Tech" and wrote countless columns and the like (and his book in regards to it containing dozens of testimonials) before: http://blogs.wsj.com/accelerators/2014/01/22/vivek-wadhwa-st... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vivek-wadhwa/women-in-tech_b_5... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vivek-wadhwa/come-on-silicon-v...
He had to step back from arguing for that position because of the reaction of people like Randi to him: https://gigaom.com/2015/02/23/vivek-wadwha-steps-back-from-t...
No. You are depersonalizing her actions as "pushing back" against some impersonal force. What she actually did was engage in sustained harassment, bullying, and blacklisting campaigns against specific individual human beings.
But, it is just another example that the larger tech community has a problem. GamerGate et al, they are not fantasies. Women who want to create, same as any developer, getting SWAT teams sent to their homes, this stuff is real, and indicates a real problem.
Ask yourself, are you helping fix this behavior? Because if not, then you are part of the problem.
As someone who didn't really follow the whole controversy the past years, this was an eye-opener for me. Did it really get that bad?
Stop tolerating the intolerant! Also, I don't understand the point of GamerGate. As an outsider, all I see is two groups making themselves look really bad and everyone else loosing. You don't convince others by threatening and harassing them, something the extremes at both sides seem to do. Why?
By the way, note how she did not mention the harasser's username in her post.
In regards to your question, yes things got bad, unfortunately what is hard to see from the outside, is that the vast majority of the harassment was originally done by outside third parties who just wanted to troll two groups. They harassed some people (mostly women) then said they were part of GamerGate. This wasn't even remotely true, and they admitted to this. Unfortunately the other side got caught up in the harassment and the claim that was done by GamerGate to ever actually think, "Why would this person who is harassing me (which is illegal) mention they were part of GamerGate (which was originally about Games Media, and had literally nothing to do with women in tech)?"
Follow that up with lots of mudslinging on both sides, and neither side being that willing to 'dig-deep' into the facts, and you get a year long 'cyber-war' between two groups of people who probably have much more in common than they think.
Depending on the site you read, it's either a violation of journalism ethics, or GamerGate blowing something out of proportion again. In lieu of a citation, you can google it if you really want.
I didn't see that in the article, could you point us to that information?
However if I do provide sources (articles written by you and/or rooshv), tweets, whatever, then there is the implication I'm "stalking" you or him. I'd rather not get involved in any such drama.
To be clear, by history I meant that the two of you have both written/talked/tweeted about each other (in generally negative ways). My intent there was to agree with the person who commented about how this whole situation is a "shit sandwich".
I don't know anything about what happened here more than what's public, but it's totally imaginable to me that if you make that an ultimatum, and the project leadership hasn't given itself a reasonable way to do that, it's difficult for them to respond usefully.
Maybe the lesson here is that good projects should give their leadership the explicit ability and the political authority to do that, including for forums like IRC. There are many examples of projects / communities that are wonderful places until things go wrong. (This is, essentially, the argument for having a written code of conduct even though nobody would be violating it.)
Banning is a common response to harassment. Hacker News uses it, we even have multiple types of banning, including the shadowban and hellban. We know that "crucifixion" is hyperbolical language, and we can ordinarily forgive someone for being hyperbolical, but in this case it's simply an unreasonable exaggeration.
The same applies to your use of the term "ultimatum". That's an unreasonable exaggeration. It depicts the contents of the original article inaccurately. She detailed no consequences nor threatened retaliation in her request that a user be banned. You can call it a "demand" instead of a "request", but "ultimatum" is simply incorrect.
Honestly, I can understand and relate to both her request and the core developers' response, but I'm not convinced that a code of conduct is a prerequisite for banning abusive community members. Explicit political authority is great, but we shouldn't be automatically afraid to use implicit political authority.
What I mean to convey is that, if someone makes a demand that they're unwilling to compromise on or discuss, and you're are unable to satisfy the demand as stated, regardless of whether you want to seek a resolution along those lines, you have no good options. Of course in a healthy project there wouldn't be much need to discuss banning people who are harassing other community members. But mechanically it still has the downside of an ultimatum, even if the connotation of the term is wrong.
That is why I chose that word, and I apologize for not having been clearer about what I meant with it.
I do agree that greater willingness to use implicit political authority is generally a good thing for healthy projects. (Though maybe there is something complicated like not actually having technical control of the relevant IRC channels or something annoying like that, I don't know. In some open-source projects I'm active in, the core teams' ability to respond to harassment is somewhat weakened or at least rate-limited by using IRC servers, code-review forums, etc. run by unrelated teams, and I've seen people be hurt by abusers taking advantage of this technical limitation.)
And I think it is—unfortunately—normal for a healthy community to discuss banning users who harass others, because users who harass others are everywhere, until they are kicked out.
The only reason this individual should have been punished by FreeBSD folks for this alleged harassment is if it was against FreeBSD rules, it occurred in FreeBSD channels or forums, and there was a consensus among other people that it actually constituted harassment.
Otherwise, you just have a weapon you can wield to silence all civil discourse (because everyone has a job or a hobby somewhere they don't want to lose) you don't like by claiming you feel unsafe or harassed.
And after reading the sources mentioned in this thread, your and Randi's description of events is, to put it very mildly, one-sided. You may win some support from the people who don't dig down, but you're alienating allies with these tactics. I was a proud supporter and ally for about ten years, but over the past year or so I've grown more and more disillusioned. More and more it seems like there's nothing worth fighting for. I would certainly not want to appear to support the hatefulness and bullying Randi has engaged in publicly over this and other issues.
FreeBSD is, frankly, better off without the politics and drama.
FreeBSD is, frankly, better off making these people feel threatened and dehumanized.
It is ironic that you would make this argument. Identity politics as they have now become represent a kind of second coming of Nietzschean nihilism, where our sacred civic religion of human rights has self-overcome and transformed into the supremacy of the unbridled ego: all things must be seen through the interpretative framework of the subjective ego, and all things must be fully supportive of the ego or regarded as an enemy that must be totally and utterly destroyed. No logical argument is acceptable because any argument per se represents not rhetoric but a personal attack on the ego itself that must be responded to with overwhelming force. The ego must always answer "why am I unhappy" with "because of someone else - not because of me! Never because of me!" Inevitably every ally, supporter, and friend over time becomes an enemy, because even the closest and best of friends cannot (and should not) be continuously supportive of every thought, word, and action. That is, the natural consequence of this type of thinking is that it is impermissible, verboten, for anyone to speak for, let alone stand against, the ego.
The fact of the matter is you do not care the slightest whit for my feelings. That is why it is acceptable in your mind for you and Randi to slur, bully, and insult people, and render them into sociopathic strawmen (or neo-nazis) but not for anyone to respond in kind. You will be fighting a war that never, never ends, because part of your fundamental identity is that of an oppressed victim. No matter how the people in your external environment change, you will never feel differently, you will never not feel oppressed.
> FreeBSD is, frankly, better off making these people feel threatened and dehumanized.
This is an example of you scurrying to turn my post into a personal attack against you, because you cannot see outside of that interpretive lens.
What I said was this: FreeBSD should be in the business of enforcing their rules on their developers, which should apply only to FreeBSD venues and not outside of them. The rules should not be a hammer for people to wield against each other, but something reasonable people agree on. Just because you feel threatened and dehumanized, which could be caused by literally anything, depending on the person, and both of which are weasel words to start with, is no reason for anyone to take action. None whatsoever. If a majority of reasonable people see that an abuser is using specific language that credibly, physically threatens you, then there would certainly be grounds for real action by FreeBSD such as immediate excommunication from everything to do with FreeBSD, and actively assisting with the law enforcement side of the case.
More concretely, Randi herself violated (and violates) the FreeBSD Code of Conduct regularly. If CoCs are to mean anything at all, they should apply to everyone equally. FreeBSD did treat her in a very weaselly way with the trademark deal, but the real story is most likely that FreeBSD did not want to be associated with Randi and they believed that draping the request in legal trademark terms was more likely to be successful than telling her either privately or publicly they did not want to be associated with her behavior.
> BTW, being picked on and trolling cis men poses the exact scenario as threatening women, minorities, with death, rape, etc.
Nobody said this. This is just another attempt to turn this discussion into an us vs them battle. It is strange to me that you appear to hold in such high consideration people's feelings, but you seem utterly unable to understand my thoughts and feelings.
You can be yourself and fight for your rights without making the world a worse and more hateful place. That's not what is happening here. If someone calling you a "tranny" is dehumanizing (which is absurd on any objective level, since there are people such a the woman who lives across the street who prefers to be referred to as a tranny when the subject of transgendered people comes up), that does not make it OK for Randi to tell people to "go set yourself on fire", it makes her just as awful.
You do realize that many of your critics will point to statements like this and use them against you. So why make them?
What?
If a co-worker started disparaging me on Facebook and sharing private chat logs publicly... they'd be reprimanded at the very least, and if the behavior continued they'd be gone.
This is exactly why companies have HR policies.
>Don’t tell people to stay quiet about abuse. This removes them from their support network of friends and family.
Didn't they just tell her to stop talking about it in public, though? And really what mechanism does anyone have to force her to do this?
>If you’re a dude, don’t reach out to women leaving other open source projects saying “join us here!”
On the surface, that sounds like she wants men to...not be welcoming? This is, perhaps, poorly worded.
>You have no idea if women in the community have problems or not. Women will talk to other women about the quality of the community. But it’s also just really bad taste. Instead, find someone in your community that is also part of that minority group to reach out. They’ll know more about potential issues than you will.
Not sure how this follows from the previous sentence. How is it in bad taste to reach out to someone in a welcoming way? Does this mean that I, as a straight white male, should only communicate with other straight white males?
She probably doesn't mean it this way, but boy, am I confused.
>Publicly stand behind the women in your community, or eventually they will leave and write a post just like this.
I find it amusing that someone who has written a tool that allows you to filter out a specific block of individuals (as trollish as they may be) can write this post at all. The cynical side of me thinks the attitude shown here is, "Hear me, but here's a way you can systematically ignore people that I fundamentally disagree with".
I often feel like tolerance and progressivism has wrapped all the way around to discrimination. Am I wrong to feel that is part of what's happening here?
EDIT: I'd like to make it clear that I'm genuinely not trying to troll. If I'm being wrongheaded, then please show me how my thinking is wrong.
Give me your twitter handle, and your employer's email address, and I'll send 800 death threat tweets and I'll spend weeks bombarding your employer with stuff.
One thing that is often said to the victims of trolls is "just ignore it" (we see that in this thread), so she wrote a tool that allows her to just ignore it and you're telling her that she's wrong.
I am certainly not saying that she should ignore harassment. Let me be clear: harassment is not okay.
But I couldn't help reflecting on the irony that she has also produced a tool that allows you to filter out an entire category of people on twitter.
There's no good mechanism for this case, either.
There is an appeals process, it turns out.
Sad to hear that some Twitter users are not making the best use of its features. It's very easy to create a list of Nero and his flying monkeys, and you can add people to a list without following them.
You can keep the list private so nobody knows you're even doing it.
It's also much more efficient. In the normal use of Twitter (dipping into a stream), you are highly unlikely to see most of any account's tweets. With a list, you can see all the tweets you want whenever you want.
(Sorry this is off-topic, but it might help someone who hasn't used the Lists feature, which Twitter hides away.)
sorry if this is off-topic :\
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820149 and marked it off-topic.
I invite you to see how Hacker News responds to an inherent problem with misogyny in open source. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819778 … https://twitter.com/LilyLemmer/status/682688557018828802
Admittedly really curious to see how the HN community responds to this. https://twitter.com/randileeharper/status/682683554447265792
I think it's interesting watching how HN responds to posts like this, because they are kind of political, and HN is a good representation of how a lot of people in tech feel. I'll get a lot of support on Twitter (because I've blocked most of the trolls), and 140 characters isn't very much to leave a detailed response, anyways.
I like seeing thoughtful criticism, and the HN community is (mostly) good at that. It's why I don't excessively comment in these discussions, except maybe to clear up a point here and there. HN brings up points I haven't thought about, and I don't want necessarily to be part of the discussion about things I've written except as an observer.
In short: you're worried about the wrong people.
Edit: I enabled 'showdead':
I see I made a mistake. You're not worried about the wrong people. You are them!
EDIT: Someone else having a counter opinion to yours shouldn't make you feel so threatened, lighten up.
The rest of it is generally consistent with what's been reported about this elsewhere, including on /r/KotakuInAction. But I'm not going to point you at each individual piece of evidence when there are things literally linked in the article that you didn't see.