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Comment by Kurimo | Hacker News Reader

I support this discourse and hope the author of the original article will feel confident to write again.

I have no idea how to solve the monstrous problems related to internet harassment. It is well out of hand, especially as regards women on the internet (see: Anita Sarkeesian).

I think a discourse definitely needs to happen. But maybe the only solution lies in the education and mental health systems. But again, I don't know. Wish I knew, wish I could do more to help. Wish my gender weren't responsible for the vast majority of the harassment, violence, and threats of violence.

Best of luck. Please keep posting about this topic and looking for and experimenting with solutions. Progress can only be made by people like you taking the time to try to do something about an urgent problem like this.

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Thank you so much for your support! I was thinking about mental health solutions while responding to an earlier comment on Medium. It's easy to talk about short term protection like anonymizing content, but I'm so frustrated that we're accepting hate and harassment as inevitable.

I wonder if there's more we can be doing in schools to teach good conduct and respectful discussion on the internet.

I think you're right about trying to indoctrinate a more respectful future generation of net users. But the current environment, which no one would say is healthy, is what public personas need to be prepared for. I always modulate my writing with the Internet in mind, which is probably why I don't write as much.

Is there anything that can be done to bolster the new public personas and strengthen them? Perhaps having a moderated comment section for new or unseasoned authors might be work well. Maybe only allowing an authors name to appear when the post count is under a certain threshold. Then the name and photo, then name photo and Twitter or other contact method. Overrides possible of course.

I often wonder why there's only one internet. Is it elitist to want to be a part of a more selective net? Are there alt-net movements today?

>Wish my gender weren't responsible for the vast majority of the harassment, violence, and threats of violence.

You are an individual not nameless member of a gang called 'men'. Its strange to hold yourself accountable for some random person on the internet.

Unfortunately, collectivism is in vogue at the moment.

Fighting harassment is the opposite of collectivism. It seeks to allow each individual the greatest opportunity to express themselves freely, as themselves.

It is harassment--and the apologists for harassment--who advocate for a collectivist approach to society, in which individuals must cloak their true identities if they dare to challenge the herd, or be punished.

>Fighting harassment is the opposite of collectivism. It seeks to allow each individual the greatest opportunity to express themselves freely, as themselves.

... by curtailing the freedoms of other individuals, in the name of group wellbeing.

Regardless of whether harassment is collectivist or not, I was simply pointing out that feeling guilty for actions of people in a similar demographic group to you (an overtly collectivist action) is currently wildly popular.

Simply by virtue of participating in the same communities as others from our demographic group - in this case, Hacker News readers - we are part of a collective.

We can enforce our guidelines and keep the discussion civil, so everyone involved feels comfortable bringing new ideas to the table. Or we can let HN slip in the direction unmoderated communities usually go; rife with trolling, undue negativity, and direct harassment.

Whether or not to cast that downvote and show the trolls the door [1] is a choice we each have to make, but I for one feel an obligation to help build a civil community.

[1] https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/free_speech.png

The opposite of collectivism is not unconstrained individual freedom. Strong private property rights can hardly be considered collectivist, yet they constrain your freedom: you can only make decisions about the property you own. My property rights constrain your freedom to (for example) walk across my land, harvest my crops, or use my computer.

When a woman expresses herself in a substantive way, and gets 100 responses telling her to get back in the kitchen, get raped, etc., it is the harassers who are employing group-first thinking: something like, "she's a woman, so she should shut up and just do what I want all women do."

Gender-based harassment is essentially homogenous. Suppressing such harassment prioritizes the unique expression of an individual over the horde. This is analogous to how laws against assault and battery improve individual freedom of movement, despite constraining your freedom to punch people in the face whenever you want.

Anyway, the poster at the top of this subthread didn't even say he felt guilty. He just said, "Wish my gender weren't responsible for the vast majority of the harassment, violence, and threats of violence." That's just stating a personal opinion about a fact.

It isn't that I hold myself responsible. It is that my association within the group called 'men' is frustrated by the behavior and attitudes of many of those whom I encounter. I also wish as a whole, we were better and less menacing.

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