On All That Fuckery
tinykat.cafe
tinykat.cafe
– “Programmers don’t look like that!” – “You’re fake. Some dude writes your content.” – “Are you a model or a coder?”
Bullies are not happiest people on the planet: some of them have been harassed or bullied by their parents, in schools etc. I discovered the hard way that when I pay back with the hate, it makes me feel bad and also feeds their hate. The hardest and probably wisest solution is to respond with love to those unhappy folks. Or not responding at all. It's very hard, but it works.
– Julia
It's so frustrating that after being in this industry for over 20 years nothing's really improved, and far too many arseholes are still getting a free pass for their arseholery.
Yes, everyone should be able to say whatever they want to say, but no one should be forced to hear it. The way we implement discussion forums, chats, issue trackers, wikis, etc. is perhaps giving too many privileges to the mob.
I am partial to the idea of someone getting to decide, in advance, who they can see or hear. Letting the mob in, and then muting or banning after the fact can be exploited too easily.
This seems like the popular wisdom online, but is it really something that's abused so much (at all, or relative to the problem it exists to solve)? I've seen many more places with people terrified of the concept of moderators abusing their powers and places that refused to ban outright harassment and bigotry because the moderators were too worried about being seen as power hungry than I've actually seen power abusing moderators issue too many bans. (If you count "refusing to kick out harassers" as a kind of power abuse through inaction though, then I've seen a lot of that. Maybe this reframing would be helpful in general online.)
I believe you can already block people on GitHub and it stops them from interacting with any of your repos, and that doesn't seem too exploitable or broken in my opinion. If anything, they need more features along these lines and what you mentioned.
I see that that could be done in a private group setting where everyone knows each other. In a forum for the general public though I have difficulty seeing how that could be done. Do you have any implementation details in mind?
For social communications, the main problem is: How do I find people I like or trust? That is a tough problem given constraints.
For network communications (IP), practically any two machines can communicate with each other, which opens up a number of serious security risks.
This isn't quite a correct characterization of the problem. The problem - rather in the style of your previous post - is that a given machine will listen to communications from any other machine, and often react to them. My usual go-to example is that most web browsers will happily execute completely arbitrary code from any random website they happen to stumble across.
There are practical reasons (eg opprotunistic scans for exploitable vulnerabilities) to keep machines isolated, but the root problem is not that your machines can send and recieve communications with arbitrary others, but that they choose to.
> How do I find people I like or trust?
I don't have a general solution to this one even in principle, but I've found it helps if you don't need to trust them. Proper anonymity or pseudonymity means I can have a perfectly comfortable conversation even in the depths of 4chan, and laugh in the faces of anyone who tries to threaten me.
the reason that both yourself and the parent of your comment seem to fail to realize is that the reason free speech must be protected unilaterally is that we will eventually have a bad actor in the seat of the person who decides what is or isn't hate speech.
'Hate speech' is too ambiguous, to a fault. 'Free speech' is too ambiguous to its' merit.
When Political-BadActor-#23 gets into the role of deciding what is or isn't hate speech, it will probably become very difficult to criticize or police the position of Political-BadActor-#23.
That's why it remains an imperfect system -- once overt censorship is introduced it's up to the censors to remain responsible, a feat never once demonstrated historically.
Who decides? Why were they chosen? How were they vetted? Is the vetting process continuous throughout their stay?
In other words: What checks and balances are in place to make sure they don't abuse the position for the advantage or disadvantage of a group due to personal motivation?
The idea of a constant lifetime blacklist/whitelist makes me envision a world filled with small echo-chambers, all supportive of their own ideas, and filled with ire towards anything they view as opposition.
It's unacceptable to set it as public.
If you post in public you are the same as a newspaper. You need to take all that on-board. From mental health of employees to security to legal. Newspapers don't just write stuff and shove it out there.
Back then, you was not supposed to "feed the trolls" so victims just left.
Trolling used to be more prank-ish but it would already at that time certainly devolve to doxxing and start affecting people's real lives. I remember it took me a long time to stop caring on not leaving traces that people could link to my real name, my real pictures or whatever online.
I remember people on online forums salivating when Google came out and was a much better search tool to link an username to an email and from there to your life outside the internet. It was scary to post something confronting these trolls because they could try to find you, they had enough free time for that.
So I don't know when the internet was really that naive and innocent place, it had more innocence but this bad side of it was very present from the get go, at least in my experience.
What was amusing and fun to you and your friends drove people out of the industry, and is likely a very small part of why people lament imbalances in ethnicity and gender today.
Teenagers aren't great at understanding the consequences of their actions. I wasn't, you weren't, most of us aren't or weren't. It's hard to look back and realize that things you thought were in fun were not fun at all for the victims, but it's a good start.
https://www.somethingawful.com/news/were-all-gonna/
A writer for the SA website made fun a website of a mother who was grieving her stillborn children. Forget any opinion you might have about the mother or her presentation: this a woman who had several children die before she ever got to know them. It's potentially one of the most traumatic things that can happen to someone, and this writer decided to ridicule how this mother grieved:
>Your poison womb is making heaven too fucking crowded.
I hate myself that I thought this was funny. I hate that I used words to belittle the LGBTQ community. I hate that I was that edgelord that held to statistics about crime rates and intelligence as they related to race. I hate that I made fun of people for their sexuality. I hate that I discounted sexism, racism, and ableism.
It was never in good fun. Some people grow out of it and others don't. I am still working constantly to better myself and catch myself when I have prejudice thoughts.
Maybe it's got to do with the fact we're competing with everyone online for attention, and the issue could be helped if more activity was in smaller clusters, where people didn't have to resort to outrageous strategies to get attention because there's less competition. (Discord servers provide one specific example of what I'm thinking of.) But it seems like as long as the global cluster exists too, people will seek attention on it too for its greater rewards, unless there's something about the smaller clusters that's even more rewarding.
The internet lost the lesson some time ago because even bad attention is good attention when it comes to KPIs. More sharing is good sharing.
This stuff is deplorable, but for now it requires human eyeballs and judgement. Perhaps allow for more granularity on repo visibility and interactivity beyond public/private.
This is different. On Facebook, Twitter etc is that they're trying to use AI to automate detecting general speech. That's a hard problem. PRs and comments on GitHub aren't really general speech, which simplifies the issue, and GitHub already has access to billions of legitimate PRs to use as a dataset for training. It is at least worth exploring.
I'll also add that while I think such an automated system should be opt-out by default for public repos there absolutely should be an opt-out if people want to use one.
The former would serve as a staging area and playground for new features. Just as the internet does today, it would provide, roughly speaking, no accountability and no security. My guess is that its main audience would be high-school seniors and college-age kids. In addition, you'd have a minority of techies, and — yes — some vile wingnuts.
The "safe for life" internet's network-layer would have baked-in authentication (eg: part of your IP is a user-id). It would have a protocol for notarization (ie: the ability to have a third party vouch for information. eg: the choice to tie your real name to your user-id, or remain pseudonymous). Its "web" markup would be far simpler and more semantic (no per-site styles, no dynamic features, no scripting).
When someone invents a very useful web feature/paradigm on the old internet/web, the new internet's web-standard could add special tags to support it. So, for example, the NewW3C could introduce a set of "store-front" tags with which one could create an entire online-store without any scripting. The NewW3C would include all sorts of functionality, eg: tags to host a Twitch-like site to stream video, with no JS whatsoever.
With this sort of accountability, the alternate internet would finally provide the ability to effectively moderate — bad actors wouldn't easily "respawn" a sockpuppet or bot account, to evade a ban. It would make commerce and data-sharing much safer (via the lack of dynamic features).
The situation today is absurd. What content do we want the web to promote: interesting photos of Japanese food, by a serious developer... or hackneyed ramblings by a bunch of 20-year old trolls? The internet we have today is "wrong" for most people.
Edit: Here is a more serious reply.
I should have stressed that the new network-layer would support the old internet. So, for example, a user might have a Firefox.app window open on their screen (connected via TCP/IP and displaying a normal HTTP website), and a also an AltBrowser.app (connected via AltTCP/IP and displaying a new AltHTTP website). Sort of like the Tor-paradigm, only if Tor required you to update your router's firmware.
I think, in such an environment, the old internet would still be the first choice of most 20-somethings (aside from when they online-shop). Why? Because young people tend to seek excitement, danger, conflict, boundary-pushing, etc.
The new internet likely would be the primary choice (probably the sole one) of oldsters, toddlers, parents, researchers, sensitive souls, retailers, and so on
Ideally, the identity-side would be handled in a distributed way through a network of brick-and-mortar notary businesses. An account "for life" wouldn't be so iron-clad as to ruin someone's life. It would be onerous in the sense that one would have to pay a fee to the notary, and provide government ID to replace their account. At which point (after which the original, compromised user ID is marked as invalid).
The point you make re: security-issues with retailers is relevant, but it applies primarily to the businesses who notarize users, probably not the retailers.
As an example of the difference, the user could request the notary electronically confirm to the public that the user has a high school diploma, but not reveal any details re: from which school, or from which year. I haven't thought this through, but I could envision a "Mailboxes Etc" type business providing both notary, and PObox/reship services so that other retailers couldn't even find out a user's address.
With your proposal, the trolling would still happen, but it might have been harder for her to track down where it was coming from.
Trolling is a societal issue, not a technological one.
it wouldn't have helped in this case.
The trolling on Github was using a logged in account
Also, if the abuse is egregious enough (ie: a death threat), the troll is now in legal peril. The cost/benefit of reporting a troll to the police (even under a pseudonym) on the new internet is much more attractive. Currently, trying to track down an IP is fairly worthless. It's not tightly-coupled to a human being.
Trolling is a societal issue, not a technological one.
My take is that the internet, in its current form, enforces so little accountability, that it gives bad actors far more power than good actors.
Whatever the specifics, the basic idea is that there be a one-to-one relationship between a user and their account.
I know she pointed out some stuff in her article (she's a woman, mixed asian background, lists her pronouns on her page), but, usually, there's some sort of inciting incident that causes people to dogpile.
To ward off any non-constructive replies, I'll point out from the beggining that I'm not blaming her of anything, and the trolls are _obviously_ in the wrong here.
To ward off any non-constructive replies, I'll point out from the beggining that I'm not blaming her of anything, and the trolls are _obviously_ in the wrong here.
> she's a woman, mixed asian background, lists her pronouns on her page
Not sure if you're familiar with how toxic trolls tend to be, but any one of those things could be reason enough for some (most?) of them.
I wonder if pifafu was similarly harassed.
By using their work accounts, they are stating that the company condones their behaviour - and I suspect that isn't the case in the majority of cases. I would definitely want to know if any of my employees were engaging in this shit so I could explain in very simple terms why it is unacceptable - because they clearly don't get it on their own.
How?
How about, if any employer wants to hold one of these employees to account, how about requiring they make a video apology that begins with an admission of what they did, and an explanation of what was going on in their mind when they did it?
Anonymise the subject and make it public?
Give it to university psych departments for study?
But using a work account to harass someone is a completely new level of stupid.
This is a bit fishy. The email sender was asking her opinion on certain matters related to racial politics, and our dear author just accused him/them of "upholding white supremacy". This makes me lose sympathy for the author here.
In typical equity/inclusivity language, the breadth of White Supremacy goes a lot farther. It's similar in concept to Structural Racism -- It's not that the MRAsian emailer literally supports Nazis, it's that they're parroting political and societal points that were created as a result of the White Supremacy being the default state in the USA.
White Supremacy (i.e, Whites, and in particular, (rich) White Males being the defacto "person" that US policy and culture was/is created for) is essentially the state of the world after centuries of actions and policy based on the idea that the White Man is most deserving the fruits of the world, and that their place must be defended from colored people and women. White Supremacy will remain a fact until the long and hard work of including and raising all other people up to the same level of consideration and opportunity is complete, and society stops transmitting toxic memes which are rooted in it.
At least, this is how I understand it. (as a member of the most privileged class; happy to be educated by someone more knowledgeable than I)
Stay strong!
The amount of malice is just very sad
I hope that one day their employers (and really, their friends and family) end up finding out the kinds of things they have been saying. It's a lot harder to be a horrible racist bigot in real life than it is to be a semi-anonymous one on the internet.
That said, I would have liked to see more in the "so why me?" section. There are other Asian women in tech, and her "radical" profile honestly seems pretty mundane to me. It's definitely possible that she was just targeted at random like she suggests, but it would be nice if she linked the threads (in addition to screenshotting them) or otherwise provided some more context.
Interesting read.
I might say I think gamer culture is bound up in this but it's not just about that. Something very toxic is empowered by current s/W engineering.
I'm retiring inside ten years. I worry it won't be fixed before I leave the field.
ICT is a useful umbrella term. I do not believe it is UK specific or School specific.
People who don't realize that "communication" is an exchange of information, therefore already included in "information technology"?
And then you still have to fix any issues pushing them out of industry once they're already there.
All that aside and not trying to go really in depth into that whole pocket theory of mine, it's the same as in real life, it's just amplified. You can't do a whole lot about other's opinions about you, or what they say to you and if you're online and you become a target for any reason it just becomes something you have to deal with on your own terms.
It's nasty, it's petty and it's a hurtful thing to continually attack someone else, but it's the internet. All celebrities deal with the way they are talked about online in their own terms. You do understand all the mainstream Brad Pitts, Britney Spears and whoever get death/sexist/racial harassment all the time as well I assume. It's being a public persona that now becomes the problem. You are willingly putting yourself out there where essentially millions of people can online swarm you. It's a responsibility to have all your personal information online, and to talk about what you like, who you are, hobbies and passions and associate these things to your identity on platforms in which millions can hate/obsess/harass.
I think it's a very serious mental and social problem, a load that is taxing the entire human psyche right now. It's obvious to me what this is doing to humans, with everyone trying to be a public celebrity for likes and fans. I don't think it's good.
Not trying to defend the bullies but people shit talking on Internet is pretty common thing. If you decide to share your photos and lifestyle, that is if you open the gate to your private space, you have to account for consequences. People mocked other people before the dawn of Internet and unless there's verifiable harm being done I think this should fall under freedom of speech. It was her decision to go public with her private life. I don't see any way to fix this except being tied into mind rewriting program like in Clockwork Orange. If people mock you behind your back, that's life. You may as well ignore them.
How? I mean, what do you suggest?
> It's a white supremacy problem.
US Cultural hegemony is inevitable, but please, try to contain this stuff in your anglo world, everytime it spills over other countries it's not an improvement.
Not hiring people like this is a way to fix the culture.
That's far from accurate. There have been many major discussions.
It's true that some people feel that those topics are underrepresented, but that's because every topic is felt to be underrepresented, including the most common topics. It seems to be a consequence of frontpage space being such a scarce resource [1]. Sometimes people even end up with the idea that the most-commonly-discussed topics are actually being "aggressively removed from discussion" [2].
It's true that users sometimes flag articles that don't deserve to be flagged. We sometimes turn flags off on those. We don't always do that, because not every article on a given topic (e.g. misogyny or racism) is equally likely to support a meaningful discussion.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Last year a troll at my company Slacked his friend a horribly misogynistic remark about a women’s mentorship group meeting. But by mistake, he sent it on the general channel. Within minutes he was fired and escorted out the door by security.
They have accounts on Github. Does Github not have any sort of code-of-conduct? If not, why not?
Unfortunately not everyone is disposed towards becoming a good programmer and these guys don't tend to have the best study skills or work ethic anyway, so they often struggle to acquire the skills that they believe are their only way of finding success in life. This causes them to lash out with great ferocity at people who are both technologically able and socially graceful - especially women and non-white people. It infuriates them that these normies with friendship groups and romantic partners and progressive political views are able to do the things that they are inclined to believe are the sole preserve of the lonely basement dwelling nerd, and do those things much better than they can. So they convince themselves that when a non-white woman gets hired in tech it's all the fault of the (((diversity thought police))) and that she's actually a technological incompetent, because to believe otherwise would shatter their world view and force them to come to terms with their own mediocrity.
You see what your doing here right?
>This one in particular stood out to me because it's a very specific type of harassment I've received my whole life, usually from East Asians.
Maybe call your commonsense prejudice?
https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/7qt0h5/4chan_pol_mee...
His ideology was atrocious. (He was actually physically violent to all his girlfriends and build worldview where he was the good one.)
They are. They just hate different groups. People with low cognitive ability tend to hate groups based on things like sexuality or race. People with higher cognitive ability hate others based on the choices they make such as which political party someone supports.
Hate features universally across the spectrum of intelligence.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8qwwzp/who-you-hate-depen...
It takes very few nasty harassers to harass the vast majority of "targets," since harassment is not a 1:1 activity.
In my anecdotal experience, the most gifted and capable end up with the poorest socialization from early on in life, and are therefore more likely than average to either not understand the profound negative effects of things they say, or to not care.
I have some passing familiarity with academia and with FAANG companies. Try doing something something that risks a professor getting publications/tenure or risks an FAANG employee their next bonus/promotion and you'll find out rather jarringly why that belief is pure fantasy.
Downvoting you, and I'm saying this openly because I despise cowardly anonymous ostracism present on sites like this. Sometimes I wish all downvoting was done with stating the reason.
There were civil ways you could have described these behaviors, but you didn't. For example covert narcissisim, passive aggressive. I have some covert narcissist traits, but at least I'm trying.
There's just one thing I would like to bring your attention to.
I'm a white guy, born and raised in Europe, in an almost all-white country (+ Vietnamese and Gypsy minorities, but basically no big racial tensions). In my 20-thousand-people hometown there was a black guy and everyone knew him by name, because he was THE black guy. My country had been through fourty years of communism, then had a revolution and then went through a slow, uphill struggle to become a modern country where people vote in free elections every few years, have MacBooks and drive BMWs too fast. The living standard isn't exactly like Germany or the Great Britain, but we manage.
And yet, every time I go online, there are people talking about "white supremacy". About "white privilege". People blaming the whites for slavery and wars, people saying whites are responsible for everything bad that has ever happened to the blacks. There are people who get so offended about everything they slightly disagree with, who are so sensitive and self-righteous, they wouldn't even be taken seriously in my country.
To a white person whose ancestors never took part in any colonialism or slavery, the internet feels pretty hostile and just as judgemental as those 4chan weirdos. I don't like feeling guilty and being judged just because I don't support BLM, don't condemn Trump or don't care for "diversity" in companies whose products I use.
I don't vote in your elections, I'm not the one who doesn't greet your black neighbor, I didn't install an obscure bipartisan system in your country.
I don't feel guilty, yet every time I try to express any of those opinions online I get downvoted into oblivion by a US-centric virtue signalling mob.
I understand the world is a complicated place and I kind of let it fly, but there are people getting slowly pushed over the edge by the hostility and shaming.
Here's a link [0] to a news site discussion under a BLM related article. The opinions expressed there are pretty much in unison with what I hear from people around me.
[0] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=cs&tl=en&u=https%3...
I think the harassment is sad and reprehensible, I'm just speculating there's much more behind it than her politics.
Regretfully, I used 4chan a lot over the last decade, and I strongly agree with the author's description of it and most of its users. It really is enough for someone to catch the attention of trolls on the /g/ board if they say that there exists attention-seeking woman who is a fake programmer and who says bigotry is wrong who needs to be taken down a peg.
For one, I really don't get offended over Americans discussing American history and society in terms relevant for American society.
For the other, I don't understand why you living in completely different region with very little knowledge of America should talk about BLM. You can ship that discussion entirely if you wish.
But when you join to take side with little knowledge of issues involved, the yeah, should not be surprised that people downvoted you.
Ironically, you're posting this on a California-specific site where even other US people complain of too-local content and discussion.
Among top non-regional sites, one that has more Europeans than Americans is 9GAG—but I doubt it that it's very interesting to grownups.
Based on that, having the sufficient amount of flaggings suggests that hackers do not find this interesting.
I see why it is important to highlight this, but don't see a reason why HN is the right place for it.
Not that I've spent a meaningful amount of time on any "chan", but based on my limited understanding just reducing HN and 4chan into "tech sites" is insufficient.
Again, the flaggings are the obvious signal of what interests people here. Why enforce arbitrary moderation on top?
How do you know?
Example: I flag, on every opportunity, posts related to US politics. It's not because I'm "hurt" or annoyed by US politics, it's because I have close to zero interest in them and don't want that to be a content category that takes up space in HN from the actual interesting stuff.
I bet many feel the same for posts about social issues like this, whether it's morally right or wrong.
But maybe i spent too much time in tech social media and I see those patterns regularly. Eg. Abuse woman online, if she starts talking about it, discredit her skills, and try to humiliate as much as possible, presenting it as a snowflake kind of attitude.
All of this is typical “nice guy” kind of shit.
I think you have misread the dynamics. To start, most people don't flag something just because it's not interesting. I don't - do you?
The piece describes coordinated harassment against the author, by software developers.
How many people does it take to flag something on HN? How many people are involved in that coordinated harassment. Can you therefore conclude that the flagging is not part of that broader coordinated harassment? I ... don't think so.
This coordinated harassment is part of a larger subculture of harassment against women in tech. As an example, 13 years ago Kathy Sierra withdrew from online life due to harassment. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Sierra#Harassment_and_wi... 'Scoble said "[W]henever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn't happen if the interviewee were a man."'.
As the piece points out, silence - and flagging is an attempt to silence - is one of many tactics used by harassers.
Given the context, you might therefore ask why "hackers do not find this interesting". Is it because a non-trivial number of hackers are sexist, and empathize with the harassment against women in tech, so flag in order to silence?
Or is it because hackers are tired of reading about how sexist the tech field is and want HN as their safe space? Or they feel powerless to change things so flagging is a way of sticking their head in the sand?
Or, really, you should rephrase the question entirely. Don't interpret flagging as a signal for interesting/not interesting, but see it as signal for "should not be on HN" - of which 'not interesting' is only a (small, IMO) part of it.
However, I don't think it changes my ultimate point. All the same, an (assumedly) big enough populace decided this was not on topic.
You make a number of good points, which I won't argue with, except this one:
> Given the context, you might therefore ask why "hackers do not find this interesting". Is it because a non-trivial number of hackers are sexist, and empathize with the harassment against women in tech, so flag in order to silence?
I you're forgetting a very significant populace of "I have a millions issues I could worry about at any given point and just cannot provide meaningful resources to worry about this specific one."
Flagging may prevent others who might have those resources from contributing, yes? So flagging is not a neutral personal expression but a public negative expression, yes?
I still believe the interesting question is why did a big enough population decided this was not on topic enough to flag it, rather than ignore it.
Especially on the web, which tends to be fast-paced system 1 / reptile-brain media for many. Scroll, click, skim read, back, (not interesting topic - flag), f5, repeat.
More generally, rating all comments and submissions on a scale is wrong for some topics. In some cases there's no right or wrong way to do it, only tradeoffs and context. The +/- voting system has simplistic appeal, but is also a bit archaic.
That was one of the points of the trolls which is right: this woman is not a hacker. The way they go about it obviously is puerile, but the point still stands.
"women (and more generally, marginalised people) face hate for who they are."
People are mainly talking about US politics here. And look at the discussion. Every different opinion is downvoted and dead.
When there's such drama, participants even use english words to describe this phenomena. It's a clear anglo cultural artifact that spilled over due to US cultural hegemony.
I find it weird to see this when I rarely see comments so strongly arguing that a subject is too US-centric for HN in threads about stuff like the San Francisco housing market, American workplaces, or other aspects of online sites.
But then again, I didn't really put much stock in vague generalizations like this, or yours.
Regardless, point taken, it's not a US-centric problem.
1. Argentina has one of the highest femicide rates in the world. 2. Brazil elected Bolsonaro, who spends a lot of time spouting homophobic / misogynistic things. 3. France nearly elected Marine LePen last time around.
I'm not sure how one can pretend that only Anglophone countries have issues with misogyny, homophobia, and racism.
The same way that people in Anglophone countries pretend that they don't have issues with misogyny, homophobia, and racism: by being on the safe side of those issues! Straight men in the ethnic majority are very easily, even naturally, unaware of any tension or issues, and find it easy to dismiss people highlighting the experiences of others as "activism."
Argentina has a lot of issues, and women getting murdered is not of particular relevance among the high level of crime, the high level of corruption and the extremely difficult financial situation of argentinians, who can't even save money reasonably in their local currency, which may be a given for US, but it's a living hell for them. In facto, inflation is consistently the first problem for most argentinians in most polls.
Argentinians don't need to talk about BLM, because it's not relevant to them. Women in tech is probably one of the least problems for them. Energy and time are precious resources, and they need to be focused on important issues.
I think some of you guys just haven't got the empathy to imagine a different setting than your current one. Just being able to put money in a bank and forgetting about it is a luxury some people can't afford.
From the perspective of where I live (Eastern Europe):
"Black lives matter" - We have very few black people living here. And very few problems with police in general. When something bad happens it typically happens to the police, not by the police.
"Racism" - we have no history of slavery nor racism, except being subjected to it. Even more - originally the word "slave" was derived from the word "slav".
"Sexism in tech" - there is no sexism in tech here. Tech is not even a prestigious field. People want to work in law, medicine and finance. Some can even be quite ashamed to admit they work in a technical field.
"Transphobia" - even such things as thinking about "sex" and "gender" as different concepts are quite US specific. i.e. where I live we typically refer to people by their sex, and don't even have a term for a separate concept like gender.
Yet these things are so pervasive on the internet. People even post their pronouns on twitter and (in this case) fill their GitHub profiles with that stuff. They can do it of course, it might even be a good thing to do. But I do not think this deserves a front page of HN. Hence why I am glad it was flagged.
The author of the article is not trying to promote a political agenda, asking you to support "cause A" or "cause B", they are merely trying to document a traumatizing experience that they have had.
And even if it was US politics? A large chunk of HN users are from the US. And as you have given me your political opinion about transphobia being "US specific", so does the author of the article claim "This thing happened. That's bad."
I do not believe your statement is correct.
Literally the first search I did was "police Poland" in a DDG news search on DDG and the third link was to earlier this month https://www.out.com/news/2020/8/10/polands-stonewall-police-... titled "Poland's Stonewall: Police Attack and Arrest Queer Protestors" :
> Nearly 50 people were arrested following the arrest of trans activist Malgorzata Szutowicz, better known as Margot, on Friday. The protests come amidst a rise in homophobic hate and rhetoric, and the recent re-election of President Duda who called LGBTQ+ rights a foreign ideology that seeks to destroy basic Polish values.
Or from https://euobserver.com/justice/149112 :
> Police were also investigating a separate case, in which a man on a balcony, next to a rainbow flag, grabbed his crotch during a World War II memorial march last weekend, Marczak said earlier. ...
> "No democratic country should allow the kind of incidents we saw, in which police enters people's private homes," [Rafał Trzaskowski] added, referring to police efforts to stop the balcony protester last weekend.
A DDG news search for "racism in Bulgaria" (literally my second search) includes this summary at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-50060759 about repeated racism by Bulgian football fans. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/20/bulgaria-sofia... points out "While racist abuse of players inside stadiums attracts attention outside Bulgaria, within the country it is the Roma who are the principal targets of thugs in black and men in suits."
A DDG news seach for "black lives matter Croatia" finds https://balkaninsight.com/2020/06/10/balkan-protesters-show-... where we read "Activists in Zagreb, Belgrade, Podgorica, Warsaw and Sofia rallied to show solidarity but also to point out the problem of racism and police violence in their own countries. ... Dozens of people took part in a protest march in the Montenegrin capital Podgorica on Monday evening. “There is no doubt that racists are also hiding among all our local Balkan fascists.“"
You find some articles via google search about things like "black lives matter" in Croatia and claim it is relevant there somehow. There was a BLM protest in Lithuania too (where I am from). There were maybe 10 black people in that protest. Half of them when interviewed said they were traveling through different countries (Estonia, Lithuania, Poland) to create and initiate those protest. Then if you look at the people who attended - mostly teenagers. When asked why they are attending this protest they came up with "to show solidarity for US". Which is to say - they are being fed US politics over the internet and found an opportunity to join an event here.
So that's how I see it. These US political things leak to other countries. Through media, through twitter and instagram, and now even through HN.
Is Malgorzata Szutowicz an Eastern European who thinks about "sex" and "gender" as different concepts?
I quoted a BLM protesters as saying they were there "to show solidarity but also to point out the problem of racism and police violence in their own countries", which includes racism against the Roma people.
People in other countries is worried because every time a problem is framed under anglo-narrative constraints it becomes distorted, unnecessarily confrontational, and it distracts media from talking about the real problems people care about.
BLM protests in particular were weird in many places. In my city there was a bunch of people (mostly whites) and it wasn't very well received, because there were other very pressing issues (like people dying by the thousands by a virus).
In those countries there are more important issues to protest about, like what is happening in Belarus, and unfortunately is something that doesn't have the same news impact as the BLM protests.
Another way of saying this is that Lithuania is currently either culturally or politically suppressing trans people, whether inherently or knowingly - I promise you trans people and their alternative identification exist there, too. You just dont see it and/or they are afraid to say so.
Also, I would really like to kmow where slavic you are that there ia no sexism against women in tech or girls.
Amd i dont know slavic programmer ashamed of that, the job is pretty well paid.
The fact that this article was marked flagged after 20 minutes sort of confirms the point of the article's author.
What does [flagged] mean?
It means that users flagged a post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on Hacker News.
Moderators sometimes add [flagged] for the same reasons, and sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair.
What does [flagged] mean?
It means that users flagged a post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on Hacker News.
Moderators sometimes add [flagged] for the same reasons, and sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair.
But the "suggestions" section is not constructive.
> When these events happen to your employees, are you investing actual money to support them?
I'm sorry, but you don't even know the human beings on my team.
> It's easy to dismiss these trolls as incel 4channers that we shun and don't associate with. Lol no. These are your people. They work at your companies and write your code. They are harassing or doxxing your other employees. This toxic behavior is still very much a part of your tech culture, and you keep rewarding it.
Well, after building an airtight case for incredibly gross behavior on the part of the mob, you lost me completely. The implication is that "incel 4channers" are mainstream programmers. They are not. Not even close. I have worked with hundreds, and not one of them is like this. This is the vocal minority that the internet enables to speak out of proportion to their numbers, and make us all miserable. And the phenomenon of a vocal malignant minority is present in every domain, so why are we making this about our colleagues in the tech community?
No normal adult with a job, maybe a family, maybe a pet, and a million other things to do has time for this. They are either children, or bitter social and emotional pariahs.
I'm extremely sorry this talented programmer had to deal with them, but becoming bitter only fuels their sense of importance.
The best revenge is living well.
This is simply not true. "Normal", regular people do this too. I remember a while back a Finnish journalist wrote an article about meeting one of his online abusers[1], who had - on a Finnish copy of 4chan - wished that an immigrant would stab him and his whole family to death. Turned out the offender was a regular family man with a job and young children. He could not offer an explanation for his words and was not politically active.
These boards, their super hateful environment, and the presumed anonymity can get even a normal person to sling online hate. Even this person in the article said that his public persona in his normal life was completely different and not representative of his online comments.
[1] https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2019/05/30/nettivihaa-tyossaan... (in Finnish)
EDIT: Found it in English: https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2019/11/06/face-to-face-with-a...
But say that guy works for me, and he is hiding his behavior well.
What am I supposed to do with that possibility?
First of all, don't lose any sleep over it. If one of your guys is a huge troll it's not your fault that you didn't know. These assholes are going to look like everyday normal people in RL. Secondly don't go snooping on your employees without cause. This should go without saying.
1. citation needed
2. The fact that people active on Github (i.e. with active work accounts, according to the article) were part of this would suggest that your overall point is probably wrong. Maybe your point about the small sample of people you've worked with is true, but I'd be surprised. After all, how would you know - you think that your colleagues would openly share that they're secretly a racist/sexist/whatever internet troll?
This is an understandable assumption, but it's wrong. I spend a lot of time on 4chan, and I even know who some of these people are in real life. Some of them are adults with jobs, families who support them (though none have children), and circles of IRL like-minded friends.
It is also probably incorrect.
People are usually not very open about their bad behavior, and if they were, that would say much about their perception of you.
I worked with a drug addict who had, more than once, shot up while in the office. I only learned this after he died of an overdose. When I expressed my shock at his use of drugs, several other employees expressed their shock at my shock. It turned out that those of us who were known for smoking a lot of weed had some knowledge of his drug use, while those of us he perceived as squares had no clue at all.
So kudos for being the kind of person the nasty abusers don't want to tip their hand to, but don't assume you haven't worked with nasty abusers.
But what do you do with that information? What is the action you want from this?
Because it seems like the only thing I can do is make it clear it's not tolerated, which seems a little... bizarre... given that it's not happening. Let's all be mindful, aware, and empathetic. But saying they are "on my team" is an unhelpful assertion with neither evidence nor utility in solving this social phenomenon.
> No normal adult with a job, maybe a family, maybe a pet, and a million other things to do has time for this. They are either children, or bitter social and emotional pariahs.
This is provably untrue, and that bad assumption is driving you to miss out on opportunities to be mindful, aware, and empathetic. So please, try to actually be mindful, aware, and empathetic.
Thanks.
This might be a comforting thought for you, but it is just not true.