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Comment by ericabiz | Hacker News Reader

I am female, and have run my own B2B SaaS as well as currently managing chat (as part of marketing) for another B2B SaaS.

I have seen all sorts of comments like the ones mentioned in the article, and I hate to say it, but many of them came after we got profiled in places like Hacker News (and other tech websites, too, to be fair.)

One that had a referrer as a thread on Hacker News kept insisting I couldn't be a real person, and wanting me to do basic math like 2+3 "before he would talk to me." It was gross.

I put my own face as an avatar on my current client's chat without thinking twice. Less than 24 hours later, my first interaction on the chat was harassment. Their product is an enterprise B2B SaaS.

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> One that had a referrer as a thread on Hacker News kept insisting I couldn't be a real person, and wanting me to do basic math like 2+3 "before he would talk to me." It was gross.

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.

Apparently in this context it is.

Basically, if I read dang correctly it is not possible to disagree, because a) she identified as being female, and b) said it was gross, c) it was mentioned in the context of abuse.

I feel like HN just jumped the shark.

No, what dang said was, "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." No reasonable person could possibly interpret this as meaning, "it is not possible to disagree, because a) she identified as being female, and b) said it was gross, c) it was mentioned in the context of abuse."

You are just trolling, and I am only responding because dang's comment may not be visible to other people reading this thread.

Ok, humor me. What is the strongest plausible interpretation of:

"One that had a referrer as a thread on Hacker News kept insisting I couldn't be a real person, and wanting me to do basic math like 2+3 "before he would talk to me." It was gross."?

(I am not trolling. Disagreeing with your point of view is not the same thing as trolling.)

A stronger plausible interpretation is that the commenter has indeed seen many instances of harassment like the ones in the OP—which was obviously her main point; that as a SaaS founder she knows about chatbots, and would have no problem with a prospective customer who just wanted to make sure a human was at the other end (obviously it would be in her business interests to engage with such a user); and that she had additional reason to believe that the person asking her "2 + 3" etc. wasn't doing so in good faith, since she wrote "kept insisting" and "it was gross".

Now obviously I don't know what happened there, but the above interpretation is not only plausible, it's almost inevitable if you begin by assuming that the other person is just as smart as you are. Instead you began by being a jerk, assumed stupidity on the part of the other, and threw in additional insults. If you behave like that on Hacker News again we will ban you.

>Instead you began by being a dick

I'd like to point out that using this word to imply certain traits (commonly stereotyped to male behaviors) is not much different from calling someone a pussy to imply weakness/sensativity/etc.

I don't want to touch the flamebaity aspect of this but the word 'dick' was too harsh and not one I usually use in moderation comments. I changed it to the slightly more modulated 'jerk'.

Maybe some context would help. Since I knew many of the folks visiting our website would assume our live chat was a chatbot, the initial message in our chat said "Hi, I'm Erica! I'm a real person, and one of the founders of [name of my company.] What questions can I answer for you today?"

I put that in there specifically to circumvent people asking if this was a bot.

The person who kept asking me to answer simple math questions had the context of this being the initial interaction. Furthermore, he didn't stop at asking once. He continued to repeatedly ask me to answer math questions, and when I asked him to please ask a question about our product or service, he would refuse and smirk about how I was obviously a bot because I refused to play his game.

It was this repeated questioning that turned it into harassment, from my perspective. And this single interaction was part of a pattern of harassment, both sexual and otherwise, that I've seen manning B2B SaaS chats.

I can also attest that men who've run the same live chats, at the same companies, with their avatars and real names do not get this sort of harassment at all. In fact, they have been shocked at the level of harassment received by simply having a female face and/or name.

> I put that in there specifically to circumvent people asking if this was a bot.

Nice idea, but nothing prevents one from writing a bot that starts conversation with "I'm a real person" so that people would type their questions to a cheap bot instead of demanding to speak to an expensive human. Thus not all people trust this. Plus of course not all people read anything that is written as a chat header, because the assume it is a boilerplate filler like "we value your feedback and eager to help you" blah blah, no relation to my actual question so I won't read it.

That of course presents a problem - how do you prove you're human if a bot could always be doing the same thing? I don't really know :)

And yes, chatbot designers frequently use pictures of attractively looking women to make the customer more likely to engage with a bot. Which trains the users in a predictable way, unfortunately.

> One that had a referrer as a thread on Hacker News kept insisting I couldn't be a real person, and wanting me to do basic math like 2+3 "before he would talk to me." It was gross.

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.

Since the parent mentioned that in the context of an overall pattern of harassing comments, you're in the wrong here. Not only have you broken this site guideline:

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

... you've also been just plain rude. (Edit: and by adding the "money-hungry" slur, crossing into bannable incivility.) Please don't do these things on HN.

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

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