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Comment by nopit | Hacker News Reader

Why is crybullying so rampant in the tech community?

I'm often a jerk, and occasionally an asshole. If I do something bad and someone justifiably berates me over it or criticizes me over it, I pretty much have to acknowledge that it was something I did that has upset them. That's because I'm a white male, so I can't rationalize it away as them just being racist or sexist.

Some women and minorities (some, nowhere near a majority, but it only takes a few to stir up a lot of trouble) are also jerks and assholes, and when that draws criticism or anger or insults they can rationalize it away as them being attacked for their race or sex.

It's a lot easier on the ego and self-esteem to think that someone dislikes you because of something you have no control over such as your race or sex rather than because you have a terrible personality.

It is actually a fairly recent, systematic campaign across all industries. These actions are taking place across medicine, the scientific community and many others.

Because there is a lot of money and power, which attracts politics, of which "crybullying" is a tactical maneuver.

Also, it's a terrible word in an aesthetic sense. People don't try to bring much elegance to neologisms these days. Such a pity.

I'm generally interested in why you think it's a terrible word in the aesthetic sense? thx.

Because it conflicts with my sense of English aesthetics. Sorry for not supplying anything more interesting than that but it is what it is.

Edit: I thought a little further about it, and I can expand a bit. It's in the unhappy valley between too clever and not clever enough. Sort of like referring to Comcast as comcrap.

How about instead of crybullies we call them Corinthians.

> And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.

I think that was an affirmation of God's saving grace. It describes the ease of putting one's faith in God when suffering under great stress or pain or loss.

The 'grace' comes from the fact that God won't judge us for our sins because Jesus took our place in the courtroom. So rather than our being damned, Jesus saved us through His perfect sacrifice.

Crybullies are the persecutors, no? They're the ones to pray to God for deliverance FROM!

Well it's obviously not the originally intended message, but the idea is that "crybullies" get their strength from weakness, in the sense that it gives them a feeling of moral superiority due to victimhood. They then use this as a platform to attack opponents. "Punching down" is the worst sin in the modern liberal conception of morality, so if your peer group consists of those people (and that means, nearly everyone in the middle and upper classes of modern western society) then you can very effectively have someone shunned by the group if you paint them as an oppressor. It doesn't appear to matter how tenuous those claims are, if the purported victims are sufficiently weak.

I don't agree with your original analogy, but everything you've got here sounds spot on.

I think the significant change is that the tech community is growing to include other subcultures. And some of those subcultures bring new/different focuses on what's important to them.

Also, I think there's some amount of momentum behind the legitimate disclosure of unacceptable behavior. The fact that many women and minorities lately feel unashamed in admitting that they were oppressed/assaulted/etc is a net win. The perpetrators of that oppression and violence should get justice. But it probably brings with it some risk of attention-seekers and easily-offended folks too.

> The perpetrators of that oppression and violence should get justice

I don't see any justice in that story. Justice means the accused should have the right to defend himself and be confronted to his accuser. He often doesn't as "political tribunals" have already decided he already is guilty. Don't conflate "justice" with witch hunts.

Maybe you misunderstood what I meant. "The perpetrators of that oppression ..." referred to "... legitimate disclosure of unacceptable behavior...". So, concrete examples could help clear this up: disclosures of sexual assault [1] and occasions when law enforcement have killed unarmed minorities [2].

I referred to the fact that many women no longer feel embarassment or shame that would prevent an attacker from getting justice, or minorities with a policeman's justice -- I said that was a "net win." In earlier decades these legitimate evils might have gone un-punished, and that's bad.

But unfortunately with that good comes the potential bad that some folks are emboldened to cry wolf.

[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/heres-the-powerful-let...

[2] http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-police-deaths-20160707-s...

Hmm, so increasing diversity increases the level of friction and strife within a particular culture... What a novel concept.

Eventually the people who just want to build shit and get things done will have to splinter off again and go back into an uncool cultural ghetto.

This is my worry as well.

Universities are also debating this through safe spaces.

However, these events lead me to question if silencing the "bullies" is the only strategy in activist playbook? How is it different from a minority voice not being heard? If there is no common platform to interact with those "bullies", how else would you prove their belief's fallacious.

Because it works.

It's almost entirely contained in the javascript community.

And Ruby, and Python. Don't forget the guy that got fired from his job for making a "forking" joke at PyCon.

Ruby? Not as far as I know. Matz rejected the Contributor Covenant, and instated the PostgreSQL CoC. Maybe you meant Ruby On Rails? They have adopted the Contributor Covenant.

Some people appear to feel that any code of conduct is evidence of toxic SJW takeover.

Well, it is. They're the ones that push them through. It's classic bureaucratic maneuvering: it gives you a political hammer from which you can then further cement a position of authority by leveraging the threat of official censure.

See also the expansion of Title IX and the resulting chill on campus speech.

> It's almost entirely contained in the javascript community.

No it's not. Did you forget about the lambda conf already? it's everywhere in the Tech community, which is less and less about tech, and more and more about pushing some unrelated political drivel.

It was (and in many ways still is) an extremely sexist community, but over the last few years it has gotten better. My worry is that continuing to agitate when there's been obvious improvement is only setting things up for a backlash, which would be counterproductive -- however, I'm not sure many of the "activists" care (they're activists first, after all, so it's in their nature to keep pushing the envelope even when it's no longer profitable to the cause they're championing)

I see this assertion made often but never with any justification. Please provide evidence that we are a "extremely sexist community". I posit that the opposite is true, and provide the same level of evidence.

> It was (and in many ways still is) an extremely sexist community

The Tech community is sexist? Extremely sexist?

How so?

There's a world of difference between sexist and statistically gender-biased. Conflating the two is dangerous and ugly.

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