Male tech conference founder is behind popular woman coding influencer account | Hacker News Reader

Male tech conference founder is behind popular woman coding influencer account

404media.co

80 pointsminimaxir24 comments

This is a funny fail of SecOps where there were many crumbs.

He was also doing the sockpuppeting bit on Hacker News, although unclear if that OP was in on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23929980

I guess that's the comment you actually wanted to post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24301570

No, that's the comment mentioned in the article.

The one I linked is the oldest "low-effort comment on a link to my content" sockpuppet trick in the book.

Ah, I didn't notice the URL (https://sizovs.net)! So yeah, classic sockpuppeting indeed.

It's unclear why Sizovs does such a half-assed job of this sock puppetry, leaving so many clues.

Why wouldn't you give your sockpuppets git commits under their own names, and original comments, not cribbed from anywhere, or at least not from your own posts.

The sloppiness could point to this being the result of a mental problem rather than a calculated ploy to deceive people. Or both.

On the other hand, he kept running it mostly successfully for years despite having been banned from some sites. Why put in more effort? I imagine after a while you start to be overconfident, too.

Fraud is everywhere unfortunately and will continue to wash out at an alarming rate as strong people take a stand. The future will certainly see massive disclosures as data availability spreads and gets fed into 'intelligent' technology. As with everything in life, experience is one's greatest educator and this story is no surprise to me. Is anyone aware of a public free to search site that can list these people along with the appropriate evidence?

I have direct personal experience with this as a former business partner had created a female LI profile, she was neither ugly nor non educated, and she was VP of Sales if I recall but if he is reading this, which I deduce he will, he is more than welcome to correct me. Many male folks within the industry reached out for non industry talks and he, the maintainer of this fake female LI account, ended up using this data against them for his own personal gain. Having read the comments within maybe it did start as a bare bones marketing approach but just got out of hand? Ironically today I saw the code theft article as well, that is something he also has experience with. I too have all the evidence in 'logs' that backs my claim against that person and for him there is no prison time but in this digital world he does have to live with his past choices.

"as strong people take a stand" Reads like an ESG-esque word salad. Not a fan.

there’s a lot to unpack there, even beyond the creep with the sockpuppets.

> Harkins told 404 Media he saves server logs indefinitely “when dealing with sockpuppets.”

meaning always because you can’t know in advance. which would help explain the quotes, because it is a really odd statement.

No. When I ban sockpuppets I excerpt and save relevant logs from their abuse. Older material is discarded by logrotate: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters-ansible/blob/a9beccc573...

I save these logs because people who sockpuppet and get banned often try to sneak back on under other names. Some odd quirk of the psychology. I realize saving all logs indefinitely might help in spotting them, but the marginal improvement in accuracy isn’t worth the significantly increased potential for loss in a data breach.

Was no one suspicious of just the hair? I'd kill to have hair like that. Maybe that's the root of his issue.

Dupe from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38435481

Not a dupe: it's a materially different followup from that story, with new context not available in that Twitter thread.

I can't wait for him to proclaim that people are misgendering him as an escape route. What a shit bag. But, clearly, in touch with the way the world works right now.

>What a shit bag

I'm torn on this one. On one hand, actually selling conference tickets is incredibly shitty and fraud-y. But sloppily reposting your own tech influencer crap posing as some beautiful AI-generated girl and gaining orders of magnitude more attention is brilliant, and probably not even a TOS violation as social media seems to accept avatars.

I have to admit I'm swayed by your argument. It is diabolical but seems unsettling.

Yeah, let’s congratulate him on coming up with yet another way for men drown out women in tech. It’s not enough that they get harassed everyday by scumbags? No, let’s make everyone start second guessing anyone in tech social media circles that dares to let it be known that they’re a woman.

There’s a typo in the article, it should be https://lobste.rs/ rather than .ers

and then complains of being "cancelled"

https://twitter.com/eduardsi/status/1728447955122921745

some people are literally unbelievable

Not just cancelled, but calls it a lynching too.

Can’t even do fraud these days without people saying it is bad to do fraud. It’s political correctness gone mad!

I'm not defending fraud: if fraud is made, then you pay for it (either economically or via prison). On the other hand, having thousands of people on the internet call you everything because of a mistake. I don't know, I definitely wouldn't like to be judged by Twitter users if I make a mistake in my life (that's why I don't have Twitter/IG/etc. It's so scary to be judged in 0.5 seconds by thousands all over the world).

The best he could have done is to apologize, though, and handle it legally.

a mistake is an accident... this probably required more effort than actually finding women to speak at the conference... it was willful and harmful

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