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Comment by bmelton | Hacker News Reader

In particular, what I'm saying is that "fighting fire with fire" is a far cry from "taking the high road."

In another comment, oskarth posits that she "did everything right" by not going to her supervisor, so as to avoid "turning it into drama".

How does this not turn it into drama? Isn't that what supervisors are for? I understand the inclination to avoid being the snitch, but all this does is set her up for equally serious rebukement by management if and when it does get escalated there, and prevents her from having a leg to stand on.

Whether or not it is as offensive as the other, I think we all know that it was intended to be at least as annoying.

What she's effectively done is the digital equivalent to "I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you." while holding her finger one inch from the face of her co-workers. That's fine and dandy, but she doesn't get to respond like a two year old and also expect me to think highly of her actions.

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Right. By calling them both "fire" you're drawing an equivalence between a bot posting sexist jokes and a bot posting feminist quotes. Or more simply, an equivalence between sexist and non-sexist behavior. See the problem?

Honestly, no.

They're both, in and of themselves, wrong. I therefore look down on both parties almost equally. I'm not saying that what she did is any more wrong than the actions that prompted it, however, it certainly isn't right, and that's why I don't consider it appropriate.

Regardless of equating it to 'fire', which I certainly didn't intend for anyone to take literally as it is an idiom, I'd think my synopsis at least appropriately defined the situation.

She knowingly tried to out-annoy her co-workers to get them to resolve the issue, and expects that to somehow smooth things over?

Perhaps it's a stupid thing to be arguing about, but you'll have to forgive me if I save my applause for someone not seeking the most annoying way toward peaceful resolution.

I'd say that when comparing sexist and non-sexist behavior, only one of them is necessarily wrong. That being the former in case you're missing it.

Indeed, by posting feminist quotes rather than something equally but oppositely sexist, I'd say she de-escalated the situation. So she in fact did not take the most annoying way out.

What do you think is wrong about writing an IRC bot that responds to "that's what she said" with quotes from famous women?

I'm curious. Because the only answers I can imagine are (a) you think writing IRC bots is wrong, (b) you think that displaying quotes from famous women is wrong, or (c) engaging in public discourse that politely and indirectly calls attention to sexist behavior is wrong.

I'll wait. I'd really love to hear more of your opinion on this.

Regardless of what is said out loud, I believe the author's intent was to annoy her tormentors into submission.

I do not think that writing IRC bots is wrong (though I would consider them irritating), I do not think quotes from famous women is necessarily wrong (though one could suppose a non-curated list could potentially go awry).

I don't have a problem with polite discourse, but I don't think that's what this was. I assume that she was polite when she brought it up before, when she was ignored. Had she stopped there, or gone to a superior, or an HR department, then I believe she would have been in the right.

Again, I'm not saying that what she did was offensive. Just that it wasn't the high road. It isn't the right thing to do.

She isn't Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus, she's just trying to turn their own antics against them. As a prank, I'd applaud it. As a means of peacably resolving an uncomfortable situation, I consider it a failure, at best.

You've said at least a few times that you think the bot was designed to annoy, but I'm still curious as to what you think was or was intended to be annoying (let alone impolite) about it. Is there a way, in your eyes, that she could have been more polite without saying nothing at all?

Well, the intent to annoy is an impolite notion.

Aside from handling it with management instead of escalating the prank war, I don't see a lot of terribly polite ways above and beyond what she'd already done.

As for why I think it was intended to annoy, I suppose from my perspective at least, that's the obvious conclusion.

A bot annoyed her, so she wrote her own. From the text in the blog post, she seems to take pleasure in the annoyed reactions of her co-workers. That she got the annoyed reaction, and then sought to find a way to daemonize the script so that she could annoy them more thoroughly.

Those to me indicate a person who is being malicious, but is trying not to sound like they are.

Regardless, if there's anything I take umbrage with, it's that she thinks that this will help solve her issue, in any small way.

It's hard to look pragmatically at what might seem like justice, but looking for a similar analogy, if you've seen or read "The Help", the actions done to that poor pie were the result of a vengeful woman.

I'm not saying either woman didn't have cause to be upset, or angry, or that they might not have been driven to vengeful acts.

What I am saying though, is what I started off saying. Two rights don't make a wrong. I understand people sympathizing with her. She was done wrong. I get it. As a people though, we're supposed to be better than that.

Oh, wow. You are the false equivalency master.

The problem here is not that the bot is annoying, the problem is that the bot is sexist. Responding to sexist remarks with something that signifies that those remarks are sexist is not the same as making sexist remarks. Whether or not those two bots are annoying is a different issue that is now used as an excuse to rationalize hating on the second bot.

How can you be so blind to that? I’m sitting here in disbelief.

It's not that I'm blind to that, it's that I don't consider it a good enough excuse to go around pestering one's co-workers.

The other thing is that there are more than two parties in this situation. There is the guy who put the TWSS bot in place, and there's this person, who put the anti-TWSS bot in place.

Let's assume you're the third person (or fourth, fifth, whatever). You didn't put any bots in place. You're just going to work every day trying to turn your startup into a profit center. You're head's down, nose to the grindstone, and you would like to have used the IRC channel as an effective means of communicating with your co-workers so that you can be efficient.

Sure, you maybe considered the TWSS bot a distraction. Now, you've got an IRC channel that's half as useful as it was.

You didn't do anything wrong, but now you're suffering the effects of pranks from both parties.

If I were the third, fourth, or fifth person, I wouldn't want my co-workers to feel like they were working in a place where they weren't welcome. Because it's by having great co-workers and a collegial environment that I expect to make my startup work.

Also, you're putting your thumb heavily on the scale here. Adding a bot that responds to "TWSS" jokes hardly makes an IRC channel "half as useful as it was".

I'm not the person above, but I have an analogy that might help understand the point he's trying to make. Suppose that you are a software developer that sits in a communal area along with other developers. One day, someone decides to hook up a siren to the continuous integration server to make a siren sound whenever someone breaks the build. Most people think it's funny, but I think the sound is annoying and don't like it. To solve this, what I do is make something that triggers off the siren going off, and turn off the house lights and have a disco ball spin round while the siren is going off.

I think the principle thing is that the trigger condition is the thing that you don't like that is the "wrong" thing in this situation, regardless of the fact that the end result is a quote that is harmless and might even spark good conversation. I think it is a matter of "the ends don't justify the means". The reality is that any kind of bot like this is going to be noise in the channel, even if they are "fun".

You realize that this analogy misses the key point, which is sexism in the workplace, right? Her problem was not that there was a bot. Her problem was that there was a bot that made jokes she found sexist, and that her coworkers ignored her requests to take it down.

And my point is that the sexism in the workplace doesn't matter at all for what the analogy was saying. Ideally what would have happened is that they made the bot, then she asked for them to stop, and then they would have stopped. I mean, if someone emails the entire company an anti-semitic joke, that's bad. The response shouldn't be to send the entire company an email about the plight of the Jews in the holocaust. If a group of people are watching the sports illustrated swimsuit model thing in the break room, the appropriate response isn't to turn on a documentary of the women's civil rights movement up to the same volume in the same room to drown it out. My whole point is that while the original thing is wrong because it's offensive to people, the response is wrong too because it's childish.

What makes you think it was intended to be, or is, annoying?

Then what does it intend to be that she hopes to use such property to fight back at TWSS bot?

How about interesting, informative, illustrative, or perhaps enlightening?

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