Why I don't use my real photo when messaging with customers on my website

I'm sorry, but I literally laughed out loud reading that one. It was gross to have to do natural language processing plus arithmetics?

#metoo

I hate it when people force me to do arithmetics early in the morning. So gross!

Seriously though, what I do hate is when money-hungry people hijack worthwhile movements for their own monetary gain.

I'm a bit confused, is this an example of harassment? I'd be pretty sure I was talking to a bot in one of those chat popups as well.

You lost me on this.

A single story like this doesn't prove anything, but the flood of stories just like that paint a pretty clear picture.

At some point you can no longer say: "This is an isolated incident".

The statement 'sexism is everywhere' does not mean 'almost all people are sexist'. Instead, it means 'almost all women suffer from sexist attitudes in most areas of their lives. If 10% of people are sexist, that is easily enough for all women to notice it. I'd guess the real threshold is more like 3% of people being sexist.

Despite what marketing people tell you about "creating a connection" or "showing that your company is made of real people", often a bit of distance and professionalism is best for your relationship with customers.

Because there have been multiple accounts of bad behavior, both subtle and not-subtle, at tech conferences (https://shift.newco.co/what-its-like-to-be-a-woman-at-a-tech..., https://blog.juliaferraioli.com/2014/08/do-you-even.html), but those aren't studies, they're just isolated experiences, so we can ignore those.

And there have been multiple accounts from women who won't use a feminine identity online due to harassment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3411627), and really talented women who have to endure sexist work environments (http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/12/04/meeting/), and, occasionally, even much more lively discussions from women on what it's like to work in tech (https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4ioxw9/as_i_sit_i...). But, again, these aren't studies, so we can ignore them.

Of course, there have been studies, including one that found feminine names in chats got 25 times more malicious messages (http://www.ece.umd.edu/News/news_story.php?id=1788), which would seem to support this woman's experience too ... but, surely, we can find some way to dismiss that, too, right?

The important part is that, every time a submission like this comes along, we rush to the comments section to try to shout it down.

There are surely some medium.com posts about experiences that other developers have had that we could upvote instead. Preferably, ones from developers who don't happen to be too feminine.

To take it to extremes, that abuse could entirely be the fault of one single person who frequents every forum on the internet (you suggested it was "just 12 year old boys"). That the cause of the problem is only a small subset of men in no way affects the fact that there is a problem that makes being a female tech-person a less pleasant experience than being a male tech person.

By itself, this article doesn't prove that, it's only one more data point in the vast unending ocean of data points that prove it.

> It could easily by that more attractive profiles results in more interactions and receive the same proportion of sexist responses.

You're imagining something fairly contrary to what the article said, and to what many other examples and studies have shown. The primary factor is the gender of the recipient, and while the article is not rigorous, it demonstrated a greater percentage of sexist comments for the more attractive female photo, and demonstrated a near zero percentage for the male photo.

> For all we know the sample could be entirely edgy 12 year olds.

That, um, doesn't count as sexism? If it's all 12 year olds, we still have a problem. Maybe a worse problem.

Out of curiosity, you seem to be arguing that sexism online might not exist, yet it's a huge problem, easily demonstrable and widely known. What's preventing you from acknowledging the issue?

The male co-founder is an attractive man. He did not receive nearly the same amount of sexual harassment. It's reasonable to suspect that the reason is gender. Your objection is true, it could be that way. But given all of the priors we has in this area, it's quite reasonable to lean towards a gender-bias in receiving sexual harassment.

If 12-year-olds are being sexist to be edgy, that's a problem in itself. Also, if it was people deliberately trying to be edgy, I'd expect way generic, or possibly racist, to be directed at Eric Lu, which does not seem to be the case.

Lucky you, I recently saw this 'interaction' between a guy and a girl on the street:

Guy: Hey cutie!

Guy: Hey sexy!

Guy: Hey girl, come over!

Guy: Hey bitch, come over here.

Guy: Go away you ugly bitch!

The girl just kept walking and the guy turned to more profanities. This wasn't in some shitty part of town, it was at the main station of one of the nicest cities in the Netherlands. It's not just the internet where stuff like this happens.

The causes of sexism is another subject. But the first step is to acknowledge sexism is going on in the first place.

Also the whole "strong statement requires an extraordinary amount of work" thing is entirely dependant on your outlook. I could just as easily say the opposite statement (that sexisim is minimal) and suggest that it requires extraordinary evidence to prove that. The degree to which you think something is extraordinary depends on your outlook and experience, it is rarely objective.

To some extent, I would take it with a grain of salt. Anonymous internet accounts can be fabricated and controlled by groups or individuals. This is also something that should be taught, actively.

Do not let apparent social pressure have you concede rationality, truth.

But people tend to rationalize selectively, and only when it benefits their worldview. The parent comment made that clear, but you sidestepped that point. I don't think the downvotes are necessarily virtue signaling.

I was temped to downvote you, though. I live with a woman, and know many more, and I've been party to the sexism and harassment they deal with on a day to day basis. I've been party to people not believing what they say because of what's between their legs (eg "...take it for pure truth because a woman said it?"). I've been party to my wife being groped on a crowd, and seeing young teenage girls being catcalled by grown men. I've had female friends who have been raped. At this point, the evidence is more than anecdotal to me.

I find myself wondering, when I read comments like yours, if the people who make them have absolutely no connection with any women at all.

Humans are guided by stereotypes and superstition and not scepticism and scientific reason. And if there is an individual that is sceptical and demands scientific reason, they are punished socially for it. This makes homo sapiens look a bit bad in my eyes.

Unfortunately it is one of those things that women and sometimes men will have to sacrafice if they want to live in a free country.

(See burkas)

No more or less than it's ok to treat people as units of work in corporations. I rarely see sex-tech on HN anyway, plus not every feminist has a problem with porn.

I think the internet has just served to exposed something heinous that has been in our society for eternity. Plenty of men have held these attitudes from time immortal, it's just that the internet gives them an easier means to express those attitudes without consequence.

Instead, people here are looking for realistic fixes - like making the chat box not automatically open so only those who need support will go out of their way to get it. I think the author would have been much less likely to receive abuse if people were actually there to ask her questions about her service than because they had just searched for a way to to generate a shitty meme. I could be wrong about that, but it'd be an interesting thing to do an A/B test with I think.

Perhaps it makes more sense to put it into security terms - In the same way that it doesn't make sense to don't go around talking about how we could live in a dream world where bots don't scan the internet for weak SSH credentials all day, it doesn't make sense for us to go around talking about a dream world where sexism simply doesn't exist. The author found a good compromise to defend herself against that threat - many people on HN are just suggesting other possible defenses.

I dispute that statement. (I will admit that you can find some possible benefit to the majority from sexism. "Huge" is a much larger claim, though.)

I'm not the kind of person that routinely insults chatbots but if I'd see a portrait photo of a woman I'd likely assume it's a bot, simply because too many companies use fake photos of smiling women because someone told them it's good for business (though this article makes me wonder if that trend might finally change).

Might I suggest another round of trials but changing up the message when someone joins? It reads quite like a bot/automated system/interactive FAQ, as others point out.

I know that personally if I join one of those with a bot you can usually get a real human on the other end if you curtly answer questions and voice dissatisfaction with the bot answers (e.g. "this doesn't help") at which point it offers to give a human.

What I'm saying is I wonder how this gender effect would interact with a 'bot-like' variable—if people would react this way if the message was more along the lines of "hi, I'm Rachel and I'm a real human working for…'

Also, IRL anecdote. My ex-wife used to get heckled and cat-called all the time when walking alone (even pushing baby pram). Number of times it happened when she was walking with me? 0. I'm amused and saddened by all the incredulity on display here. I could have said "well I've never seen it, so it's not happening..."

EDIT> You have to be a special kind of ignorant or inexperienced to not have noticed that this is how people talk to women when there are no consequences.

If that's what they interpret, sucks for them.

I'm a guy, by the way.

Men and women experience and respond to online harassment in different ways. Overall, men are somewhat more likely to experience any form of harassing behavior online: 44% of men and 37% of women have experienced at least one of the six behaviors this study uses to define online harassment. In terms of specific experiences, men (30%) are modestly more likely than women (23%) to have been called offensive names online or to have received physical threats (12% vs. 8%).

By contrast, women – and especially young women – encounter sexualized forms of abuse at much higher rates than men. Some 21% of women ages 18 to 29 report being sexually harassed online, a figure that is more than double the share among men in the same age group (9%). In addition, roughly half (53%) of young women ages 18 to 29 say that someone has sent them explicit images they did not ask for. For many women, online harassment leaves a strong impression: 35% of women who have experienced any type of online harassment describe their most recent incident as either extremely or very upsetting, about twice the share among men (16%).

Making clear unambiguous graphs is incredibly hard so minor nitpicks like missing labels can hardly be called 'nefarious'.

I don't think it's either - it's just exposed what people always were but now there's zero friction to telling hundreds (thousands, etc.) of people your beliefs whereas before you'd, what, write to a paper and maybe it got published and 600 people would see it.

Why ?

People know that their actions will never come back to them. An anonymous but long-standing account will see less of this than a throw-away account.

In fact HN is a lot nicer than a number of verified name forums.

It's a tradeoff. There are both good and bad things with anonymity and real name policies:

1. Anonymity: people can express themselves without anxiety, but that gives space to assholes to be assholes (barring other control mechanisms).

2. Real names: lots of people will hold back due to anxiety that what they say may come back to haunt them years later [1]. The more timid assholes will inhibit themselves as well, but not all assholes are timid. The main people who will participate (asshole and non-asshole) will have the personality types that DGAF.

In short: anonymity is somewhat more favorable to assholes, but also more favorable to good discussion. I also prefer it, because I'm the kind of person who will just shut up in a deanonymized space.

[1] In ways they may have never even imagined at the time.

OPSEC is hard. Even people for whom it's a matter of life and death fail at it routinely. Angry trolls even more so. Your first message may be anonymous, but by your third message there's a good chance someone dedicated could find you if they cared enough.

So if you go to The_Donald, a bunch of the views expressed are just teenagers being awful (or normal teenagers basically), but the adults who line up with their views don't realize they how many of their peers are children.

It can definitely normalize that viewpoint and spread into the wider adult conversations. I also have noticed a few times on Reddit when someone says something insanely terrible, I will check their history to see if they are a White Nationalist or what else they are interested in, and dozens of times every post in their history is about video games. And the only time the venture out of the video game bubble it is with bizarrely hateful political commentary.

Maybe its an anomaly and if I clicked all the good posters history's they would be about video games too.... but it's starting to feel like there may be a genuine and unique culture developing around gaming that is distinctly racist, homophobic and celebrates almost any form of cruelty.

And I say that as someone who is in their 30's and still LOVES video games.

(With that said, there are certain behaviours e.g. support for fascism that seem to be associated with having large numbers of anon accounts.)

And I question whether anonymity is really the root of this behavior, or if it's just the bravado of crowds. The negativity and bile spouted on Facebook never fails to astound me, and people say things that would be exile-worthy in any normal conversation.

I see quite a lot of the latter, but I try to play on well moderated servers and servers with votebans.

Context is interesting, but it just means that overall, you’re only sometimes acting like a jerk.

You might just be a jerk.

Examine what you're saying here. You're saying because YOU don't feel bad when you do it to others, it's okay. And because people retaliate, that makes your initial act of rudeness ok, as if that's what the other party wanted.

Just because someone returns your behavior doesn't mean they LIKE that sort of behavior, or are even okay with it.

> It's nice to vent and I don't think other players in PUBG care at all.

How would you know if they did care?

When I see rude chat messages, I just instantly block that person.

Its not enjoyable and it makes it hard to use chat to coordinate the team.

You're right about how in some context trash talk is expected & part of the game, but maybe it'd be better to play games in which one doesn't practise insulting, mocking & killing others. Maybe it'd be better to play games which encourage our better virtues rather than our worse vices. Maybe the world would be a better place if we pretended to love one another rather than hate one another.

Although this thread is so loaded it seems that any suggestion of the possibility of a benign explanation is met with being downvoted into oblivion like you... so let me finish with "this is terrible and all men are bad", there I think I've covered myself.

Rather than addressing the real fact that women are treated as sexual objects by men generally, whether in thought or anonymous action in message chat boxes, this sort of comment turns it into an issue of "polite conversation". To me it seems as an (although it seems inadvertent) attempt to divert the attention from the real issue towards a non issue of "poor taste in jokes".

I still like particularly dark, demented, and a "punching down humor".

I've always felt a certain level of dishonesty amongst individuals who use polite discourse as a means of communication. There also seems to be a hint of classism in maintaining polite discourse.

I certainly recognize the sort of behavior you're describing, and it makes intuitive sense that online gaming would worsen it with anonymity and dehumanized opponents.

But in practice? As a teenager I watched people say "I hope you get cancer" or worse on the field, in the locker room, or even in the cafeteria. Or jump straight to knowingly personal mockery, or just beat somebody up because it was fun to hurt them. And it doesn't necessarily go away when people get out of school. "That guy likes a different sports team than me, let me tell him how he should die painfully" is something people think and act on every day.

It's still quite possible that online gaming sparks this behavior from times and moments it would happen otherwise. I certainly don't mean to presume anything about you personally - you know your own story better than any generalization.

But as a social pattern? I worry that we're mostly upset about online gaming and cyberbullying because they're new and different. We tolerate an amount of cruelty and violence outside of those settings that I think we're very slow to acknowledge that maybe the digital harm has just made more visible something we've been dealing with for a long time.

My point is merely that anonymity simply magnifies the same things we would see in non-anonymous settings.

The reason only the female is harassed I think has a very simple explanation, only men behave this way.

Why the same men don’t behave e.g racist or otherwise harassing the male identity can’t say. Best guess there is that these men are simply threatened by women, especially those that are attractive or successful. But I’m way out of my comfort zone of even man-guessing now.

I didn’t intend to detract from the fact that these men are assholes or say sexism isn’t the issue here.

> expresses the belief that what someone does anonymously does not reflect their character or their underlying attitudes towards women. It's just an "asshat" "short anonymous interaction". Boys will be boys. This isn't real. Don't read too much into it! Women, a bit too sensitive are we?

That's not at all what I was trying to say! I genuinely do believe that the attitudes expressed are genuine. My point was that the anonymity is what lets these guys get over the treshold of expressing them (so why anonymous chats seem more full of misogynist assholes than elsewhere). And I do believe their attitudes towards women is so bad that they don't even understand how bad it is. And that's a sad reflection on society. I didn't mean to express that as a "boys will be boys"-excuse on their part.

> What you do when you don't think twice is a reflection of some truth about you (your character, your biases, your raw attitudes, your inner values, your insecurities and inadequacies) or about the culture you are a part of. It's usually both. The comments Julia received are not random insults. They are misogynist. Misogyny doesn't appear out of thin air.

Yes. This is much closer to the point I'm trying to make. This should be the top comment. Were were you earlier? (I have not missed the irony of my parent post being written quickly and anonymously and obviously without afterthought, so it must reflect my character and biases then...)

> Many comments claim that Julia's experience is the result of some small number of trolls, not reflective of the vast majority of men, or of male tech culture.

Whether these interactions were in fact a small number of people I think wasn't clear from the article but I'm willing to bet that statistically it would look the same if repeated. You could make all kinds of statistics (like were the bad guys more willing to interact at all, etc) but I don't think it makes a difference to the point of the article.

I think there are huge problems with male/tech culture. I'm going to argue that the vast majority of men would never behave like this regardless of what beliefs we hold. But the fact that even a few behave like this is of course a problem that not only lies with a few. All of us create a culture which in turn creates these assholes. So even if we think we aren't assholes ourselves, we more than likely are part of making a culture of assholes.

Early on people said "There are no girls on the internet," and the sentence was supposed to embody the anonymity of the internet and the renaissance notion that a person should be judged by the merits of their arguments and not the labels attached to them. Someone claims to be a girl? No, you are talking to a middle aged dude having a chuckle. Maybe I have rose tinted glasses here, maybe it was always jerks saying there are no girls on the internet.

It morphed into "Tits of GTFO," because, given the anonymity of online dialogue, it seemed to some pernicious few that the only reason to mention being a woman was to seek attention.

Online dialogue grew vitriolic, "Its only the internet," trolls would throw at anyone trying to inject civility and good manners into flame wars. "I f'ed your mom," became a bit of a goto for a general passing derailment since it got to most people. If OP mentioned any detail about themself, (racial, gender, age, relationship status, mental issues) this was used to make more specific insults. Moderators struggled to keep up.

The networks got faster, streaming voice became possible on games. Voice isn't anonymous. The online dialogue started giving away details (age, sex, socioeconomic background), when team mates in pick up groups got frustrated with one another they started to reach for the sexist, the racist, the particular insults. Women learned not to speak up in chat to avoid the onslaught.

A lot of us became inured to that "12 year old claiming to have banged our mom last night", but those ridiculous insults take on a nastier edge when that "12 year old" knows details about your life. If you regularly game with women, you will see it. The mere fact that people believe there are so few women gamers is due to their fear of speaking up, there are more than there appear to be on the surface.

I do think the insults become more frequent when the jerks know you are a woman. They also know you are inured to the generic insults. Few women are inured to rape threats I think. I'm a bit surprised Eric didn't get racist comments in the OP's unscientific study.

I'm happy you haven't experienced the internet as I have, it has always been a nasty place and a lot of us sat by and pretended like it was different than real life as if there weren't real live humans behind the keyboards. I've been guilty of that. I still don't know what to do when I encounter such nastiness, much to my dismay.

That's not what their data is showing. That would be a valuable break-out to see.

What their data is showing is number of messages. If you look at the chats, it appears they're counting multiple abusive messages (one minute to the next and many within the same minute stamp) from single actors.

If one jerk sends eight abusive messages in one minute, they're counting all of those in the order of a magnitude you're referring to. It makes sense the abusive actors will send as many abuse messages as they can as quickly as they can, as one would expect that to get shut-down.

Simply put, the abuse they're showing, which is about ~14 rude + harrassment messages per week to Julia, could easily consist of just two or three individual jerks sending a burst of messages (which again appears to be the case based on the screenshots). By their numbers, they're getting ~4,500 visitors per week. Out of those, it appears that about 0.1% or less of those visitors are likely a problem.

That said, what surprised me the most about the whole article was learning that sometimes there are in fact real people behind those random annoying chat boxes. I've always assumed I'd only get a self-help bot to reply so I would've never used them.

Psychology would be so much easier if we could directly observe other people's thoughts...

But many of the examples in the blog I could never ever imagine to write. No happy man or women would. Thus I'm interested who would? Are there any (aggregated) trends?

That there are idiots is a given. Neverthelesss, I would still present a down to earth real picture (not from you personally of course, but also not some stock foto or robot). Reason: if you spend the time/cost to provide high-quality personal assistance (opposed to some random chat-center no-help) you might as well show it (and filter out the idiots - you wouldn't want to provide services to them anyway!).

The rationale is given by Ling herself here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xZZ1c7diUI

I've written my own theory of the site (it is ... something else...) at Ello:

https://ello.co/ferdiz/post/p3wjs7hvw0zq-7qdrmyvea

(Also submitted to HN a ways back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9574350 )

Nutshell:

One of the costliest elements for a car sales outlet is tire-kickers: people who come by, look at vehicles, tie up a salesperson's time, and don't buy anything. More to the point, they never planned to buy anything....

The auto dealership (online or off) wants to sort out the tire-kickers as quickly as possible. If you aren't currently and really shopping for a car, you're a liability. And the chances are the salesperson's missing out on one of the four people who might actually have a real interest in buying that day. The goal is to sort you as quickly as possible.(

Ling'sCars.com is optimized for driving away people who don't really, really, REALLY want to buy a car.*

Not saying you want to drive people away. But you also probably want to not spend much time interacting with anyone that's not really interested in your product.

Huh, okay. (Why bring up some other site?)

> Our website is a video editing tool, so we decided ..

I don't quite follow - how does that fact justify using this particular dark UI pattern?

You should check out Inspectlet.

I believe that sexual harassment is a serious problem women have to deal with, thanks to excellent studies like the one done by Pew on survey data in 2014(http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/). Calling this "absolutely convincing evidence" not only undermines your position(because it's easy to poke holes at it), but also diminishes the accomplishments of people who do put in the work to quantify and qualify harassment on the Internet.

I keep seeing this word being used, and I don't think it's apt. I don't think we're seeing "dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women", much less "hatred of women".

I think it's much closer to the truth to say that people everywhere are extremely interested in and enamored of women, but that women provide some kind of easy target for expression of bad feelings or trolling.

As a former troll, I can say nobody really wants to mess with Eric Lu because there's just no troll juice there. A guy would just laugh at those "mean" comments. I certainly have laughed at comments like that. Nobody wants to troll me because the comments just can't get any purchase.

So, please, let's stop with the myth that people hate women. People love women, guys have been dying for women since forever, and it's certainly not because they have contempt for them or hate them. There's clearly a discriminatory thing going on here, but its root is not hatred of women.

>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

This breaks the HN guideline against calling names in arguments, as well as the one that asks you to read other comments charitably (i.e. strongest plausible interpretation).

To drop a term like that in a comment here is not really engaging with the other commenter, just trying to make them or their argument look bad. That leads to much lower-quality discussion, so please resist the temptation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't think that is "fascism".

This breaks the site guidelines badly. Please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this again, regardless of how wrong you feel someone else is.