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