Hacker News Reader

Comment by kbart | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's only me, but I don't see any "shame-fest" here. The article is facts based and points to concrete wrongdoings, not simply taking some moral stand.

"what is ultimately a relatively trivial, presumably non-criminal misdeed."

While it's not criminal behavior, it must be discouraged and punished as it does tremendous damage to competitive sports and other sportsmen by discouraging them ("What's the point? Everyone cheats anyway") or forcing them cutting corners themselves to stay competitive (see recent doping scandal).

View on HN

It doesn't take a million strong Internet mob to punish an individual behavior. This bandwagon/mob/piling-on instinct may have served us well in the wild west or in small villages of a few dozen to few hundred people, but is highly inappropriate in the digital realm where the "village" consists of billions of people worldwide.

I stand by this statement despite the single (possibly accidental) downvote. Mob justice is not justice.

> but I don't see any "shame-fest" here.

Did you read all the comments? Did you see she's closed her social media accounts?

I was talking about the article itself. I don't usually read comments bar selected few sites (HN included), because there are always trolls and haters. It's not the article's fault that we have such dire situation on the whole Internet.

I think you're missing the big picture. As said in the parent, other news are covering also the story with her real name and pictures.

It's a shame fest with media trying to give as much info on the woman they can. Not this article in particular, but the coverage of the story is borderline hateful. The Internet don't like cheater.

> other news are covering also the story with her real name and pictures

Should they blur her face and not use her name?

This is a good question. It's easy to ask people to be reasonable and not take it too far. But there will always be writers online who don't have that filter.

Social media loves a good witch hunt.

At most we can only really be directly critical on a case by case basis. And try to push back generally.

Should this particular blog post have blurred her face? If it's certain she will be identified in other races regardless if her pic is spread around then I agree, it would probably be wise to blur it to at least temper the hivemind.

This is more about personal responsibility than unrealistically expecting everyone to follow your world view.

> It's not the article's fault that we have such dire situation on the whole Internet.

On a related note, Milo Yiannopoulos got banned from Twitter for the actions of his followers. It's commonly cited throughout the media that he was banned for racism but he was actually blamed for some of his followers who jumped into the thread. At most from his 4-5 tweets during the incident you could say that he was insensitive, but he never crossed the line into racism or said anything particularly heinous.

This brings up good questions about the responsibility of people for their followers online. At what level are you responsible for drawing out this behaviour? Should they be regulating random people who comment on their blog post?

Note: not debating Milo in general, just the rationale for this one case of permanently banning a person from Twitter

Reply on news.ycombinator.com