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Comment by contravariant | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice to have some labels on the bar graph.

I assume that orange represents the rude messages and blue the heckling, but for all I know it's the other way around. It's even possible that one column is for normal messages and one for rude/heckling messages, especially since I'm not entirely sure what the difference is between between rude/trolling and sexual-harassment/heckling (I'd understand if it were rude/sexual-harassment vs. trolling/heckling).

I would also be interested in whether there was any effect on the number of 'normal' messages.

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Hey this is Julia, the post’s author. Sorry there’s no legend; I kind of included it in the title of the graph but orange was “Rude or trolling messages” and blue was “Sexual harassment or heckling”

Did you consider that this maybe not be representative of a systemic bias against women across all demographics, rather, the demographic that searches for video meme makers on the internet is skewed towards horny rude teenage boys that bask in anonymity?

It's funny, I searched her article for 'systemic bias against women' and couldn't find the phrase...

No I do not. You should not draw rigorous scientific conclusions of any kind from this article, as I say in the post haha.

Sorry, if I missed this but did you see if the total volume of messages (good and horrible) went up or down based on the 4 profiles? Not that getting more notice from customers is a great trade for abuse but it might be some small silver lining.

Given that the title says "Rude or trolling messages (per week) and Heckling or sexual messages (per week)", I think that clearly means the left (orange bars) are rude or trolling, and right (blue bars) are heckling or sexual harassment. In other words, the title are the labels.

The titles are the labels, yes, but that's not exactly clear (and definitely not explicit), as shown by the fact that people were confused about it.

I don't know what did it but something changed inside me a number of years ago where now I have this uncontrollable reaction of disgust whenever I see graphs and charts like this. Maybe I've viewed too many "reports" from places like the Heartland Institute and Fox News.

Seeing charts with missing information or misleading/inaccurate heights for things kicks off my bullshit detector and throws me in defensive mode thinking, "what agenda are they pushing here?" There's an instant assumption of nefarious intent.

I can't be the only one, can I?

Well in this case you're on your own I'm afraid.

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

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