Code Like a Girl: Harassment of Our Authors Is Not OK | Hacker News Reader

Code Like a Girl: Harassment of Our Authors Is Not OK

medium.com

38 pointsDinahDavis21 comments

Being a person who worked to attain an English degree, I like to think I take the meaning of words with a bit of seriousness that might otherwise be considered going overboard. It's natural to be a critic, and, in turn, be open minded to other people's thoughts, positions, and logic.

What the linked article describes, in linguistic terms, is not harassment. At least not without examples. Harassment is a specific type of human interaction - it's negative, very much so. While there may have been actual harassment of the young author, what was quoted is not a description of harassment.

In plain English, the quote says "I received contacts by people I'm not comfortable being in contact with" and that is, to me, a worthwhile concern to have as a young person engaging in the online realm. Be it social, professional, or otherwise. When I had a dating profile that said "Not interested in under XX age or if you have children" and I got contacted by people who were in one of those categories, that's not really harassment - it could've potentially gotten to that point if I had responded or said some kind of derogatory comment - but it's a social interaction.

Writing online or in any public forum is a form of attention seeking. The internet is, after all, a communications platform at its root. However, this article frames unsolicited contact on open internet platforms as harassment, and that is not fair to the English language.

I'm not clamoring for specifics, nor disputing that the interaction(s) may have been uncomfortable. If there was legitimate harassment, that's a valid point and should not be cheapened, and an example, or "comments of a ____ nature" would simply be helpful. I've had my fair share in real life and online. What I am a stickler about is using loaded words inappropriately, because it does a disservice to everyone involved: It misleads readers and it brings the author's motive for such word selection into question. It hurts an otherwise constructive dialog.

Exactly. What is clear is that the young person did not want the attention. So for Dinah Davis to write another article grinding her axe seems rather insensitive.

And then to jump to "I am beyond angry and disgusted that this has happened."?!? Based on what?!?

Could it be that her parents saw the posts and asked their daughter to put a stop to it? Would you still be "angry and disgusted"?

Maybe she's from a culture where its not OK?

Or, maybe she just didn't feel comfortable with it and very politely asked to delete it. And instead it was turned into something more.

I did consider that and thought about whether or not I should post. I knew that posting would bring more attention to it, but I also felt that by not posting I was allowing things like this to continue and that is not ok. I felt there was value in standing up for someone who decided to write for our publication, and was approached in an unwanted way. At least this way there are thousands more people that are aware that situations like this happen.In the future, we will try to protect our young posters against this by anonymizing their content.

That last sentence is a really good, solution-oriented and reasonable approach. In reflecting on this post-post I recalled how ZeroHedge would use a 'default' name (Tyler Durden) for posts. If one could be used for "Voice From A Young Person" or something to that extent, I think that can be a good outlet and ring-fencing of personal information. Good luck!

Maybe the article is missing some information, but why wouldn't older people be allowed to talk to young people? I'm relatively young (24) and for my entire life, I've been talking with old people to gain knowledge. Why wouldn't this be ok?

The post is tagged "sexual assault" by the publisher, so I assume there was some sort of lewd messages. That would make it not ok.

It is really hard to tell from the article if there was criminal behavior by members of our community targeting an underage girl or if she got a bunch of followers that happened to be older men and freaked out.

I think that's an important distinction. We all know it's not ok to solicit underage people. I'm not sure if it's still ok for older people to talk to younger people.

There is no mention of "sexual assault" or even "sexual" in the submitted story, not sure where you get that from.

"unwanted attention" simply means (for me at least) that someone gave you attention, that you didn't expect. I would assume that people expect that to happen when you write in a public place and also submitting it to places like HN and elsewhere.

If this really is about "sexual harassment" and not saying "Hi, cool story" via Twitter, then I can understand the frustration and it's obviously not ok.

But the article doesn't make this clear and I don't want to make the assumption either...

I don't think the issue is 'any contact', it's specifically "Harassment of our Authors" and "unwanted attention". This indicates that it's inappropriate content, regardless of the source, and it also may not have stopped when asked, hence harassment. It may also be specifically from older men in this case, but the behavior isn't appropriate for anyone. This needs to stop.

I think you're severely missing the point of the article if you think the messages she was getting boil down to "older people trying to talk to young people"

I think they're insinuating that this 16-year-old girl is getting unwelcome attention from older men in a way that a 16-year-old boy would not. If I had to guess, I would imagine many of them take the form of "Wow, you're very smart for your age, and very pretty too!"

I'm assuming that they didn't want to go into detail, not that they meant to imply that older people and younger people shouldn't talk.

Try again. It's more like, "hey baby, I want to rape you while you're sleeping then fuck you in the ass while you cry ... fucking bitch, why don't you want it?"

That's not a direct quote from my inbox, but it's close.

You raise an interesting point...

As an adult male there is a bit of a stigma around men mentoring younger women. At least in the U.S. we often assume a sexual context when we see older men with younger woman (older could mean 20 vs 16 not necessary a huge gap) when it often times may actually be a professional interest. I know of many men who will not mentor younger woman because "how it will look" to others and their significant others. Which is really unfortunate.

On the other hand, I have also seen many many situations which I'd call sexual harassment. Which is also unfortunate (to say the least) and discourages woman from participating in STEM.

There is not enough context here to know which it was. I'm guessing the later.

Creepy guys send unsolicited messages to girls on the internet... How is this worthy of a blog post or an upvote?

Can those who are downvoting this explain why?

The blog post was, to me, like someone complaining about stupid comments on the internet. The digital equivalent of tilting at windmills.

If there's a real discussion here maybe it's around FB's spam filter.

Yeah. It's bad. I feel sorry for her. I can't say I'm surprised. But what am I supposed to do with this information?

The implication is that HN is to blame, since there were some "negative comments" on here. (Un)fortunately the majority of those comments seem to have been deleted[1] so there is no opportunity for us to review the facts and form our own opinion.

Without that context, the author's message seems only to be that HN is a bad place that fosters negativity and sexism.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12112888

No it's not ok, but you're publishing to a worldwide audience and I'm sorry if this is a tired argument that pro women (myself included) people are tired of hearing, but there are ALWAYS going to be a certain subset of creeps you have to deal with. Believe me it's a privilege to be male that the vast majority of males don't fully appreciate, myself included until very recently, that we don't generally have to deal with this kind of garbage, but I genuinely can't envision a future where this isn't the case.

That does suck too because I'd love to see more women getting into STEM, especially coding.

Deleted comment

There are a ton of not okay things that exist in the world that we all deal with daily (frankly women deal with more).

I'm not pro-harassment, I'm simply arguing for reality.

Speaking as an lady old fart on the Internet, it wasn't nearly this bad 15, 20 years ago. I've spent literally decades in some of these Internet communities, and the level of disrespect women receive on the Internet has skyrocketed in the past 10 years. Used to be that shit like doxing was incredibly rare; now it's an everyday occurrence and has to be factored into most women's social media.

There's also a lot to be said for standing up and saying, "hey, this isn't okay behavior." Because it won't change unless this kind of behavior is brought into the spotlight and their perpetrators left to scurry like roaches.

> Speaking as an lady old fart on the Internet, it wasn't nearly this bad 15, 20 years ago.

That I will definitely agree with, but the demographics were much different. Back then the Internet was almost entirely professional companies and university students. Now it's literally everyone, and that means you get roughly the same ratio of shitty people to normal people, amplified by the fact that all you need to start a twitter account is an email address.

I get that a lot of people have issues with Facebooks real name policy, but forgetting the problems than transgender folk have with getting Facebook to let them use the name they want, it has done a great deal to curb harassment on that platform.

IMHO you can have a good community, you can have an anonymous community, but with regular people in the mix you can't have both.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com