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Comment by soheil | Hacker News Reader

I am trying to verify its legitimacy, how can you silently accept such a critical post on face-value, no I don't work there. Giving voice to false claims intensifies their illegitimate power and in societies that this prevails that same power can be used by propagandists to advance their goal, so it's not about Uber it's about giving homage to truth, as every person's responsibility should be.

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I've not accepted it as genuine at all; I'm saying that regardless of if it's real or not, the point here is that if it was it wouldn't surprise us..

I'd really really like it if we could get to the point where if stories like this came out for any company, we would be more surprised by them..

As for the illegitimate power (I'm not even sure what that is...) and propagandists comments; I don't really see how this fits into twist of those..

It's a story about some bad behaviour at a big tech company.. Is it a big deal? Individually; nah. As a general trend in tech that I've certainly experienced; yeah. Is it part of a propagandists plot to turn your country into a communist superstate and increase their "illegitimate power" -- I doubt it..

> I'm saying that regardless of if it's real or not, the point here is that if it was it wouldn't surprise us …

It would certainly surprise me. I simply cannot imagine working with the sort of folks Amy describes. I'm not saying that such folks don't exist — it's a big world — but that I have never in my almost two decades of work in our field run into them.

Now, maybe that means I haven't run into them. I can accept that. And maybe it means that Uber is particularly bad in this regard. I can also accept that.

I don't know if this story is true or false: I honestly don't. It's probably worth investigating; certainly, after Susan Fowler put her name on some allegations of despicable behaviour it probably is.

If there are pockets of our field where this is considered normal, they need to be eliminated. But it does not accord at all with my experience of trends in our field.

> As a general trend in tech that I've certainly experienced

What do you mean by that? Do you mean you've experienced an upswing in these incidents, or an upswing in the number of news stories about these sorts of incidents?

There are numerous incidents where broad media coverage of unsubstantiated claims cause public outrage over exaggerated incidents. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_controver... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria for examples.

Perhaps trend was the wrong word. I simply meant that for all the female employees and coworkers I've had over the last few years, almost all of them have confided a story such as this to me when we discuss women in tech.

Now, maybe that's part of life. I'm sure most of the males I've worked with have a story about being bullied or getting into a horrible fight with a coworker at least once, and perhaps by putting women experiencing these things into a certain category we're also part of the problem..

shrug -- I just don't like seeing people I like or am responsible for in some way getting a hard time; hopefully I won't see much more of it.

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