Comment by bmelton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmelton | Hacker News Reader

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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".

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