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