Comment by xyzzyxy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xyzzyxy | Hacker News Reader

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Hi phil, appreciate the supposed candor here. I'm just an uninvolved HN observer interested in piecing together all the details of this dispute, here are some follow-up questions:

- The first public claim is that you engaged in targeted social-media harassment of an individual ('discatte') [1], linking various personally-identifiable information to their public profile without consent (name, email and gmail profile pic), and further intentionally misgendering/dead-naming them after being made aware that this was harmful. Do you have any sort of public response to these claims, denying or apologizing for this behavior?

- The second public claim is that the email report you sent to Sparkfun [2] was not simply a 'report' of harassing actions, but itself crossed the line into further harassing behavior ('hi jerks', 'you monsters', etc). Did you really, as claimed, copy the former employee's fiancee's current employer in these email threads as well? Any other context on why this unrelated employer needed to be brought into your dispute?

- Not only SparkFun, but it appears you were also banned from Fossoton [3] for CoC violations related to the dispute with discatte, correct? Any other context on this ban?

- It appears that you also sent another user harassing messages to their Etsy account [4] after objecting to your 'doxxing' of discatte's personal information and blocking you elsewhere, and they reported to you Etsy's trust and safety team. Any other context on this separate incident of alleged harassment?

[1] https://digipres.club/@discatte/115600253924804026

[2] https://gist.github.com/NPoole/df0ec196ac1db7e6eecfd2496b9b4...

[3] https://gist.github.com/NPoole/8e128edb6e32986755450da9285b5...

[4] https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/115599931317645220

I don’t know what’s going on here but it is super funny to link to [2] and only quote “hi jerks”

> nick has been telling people about the grand old time you two had at limor’s expense, my expense, and others. he says you sat around making memes about us, registering domains, the whole thing.

> you removed [limor’s] name on code. you scraped our site until it crashed and then emailed to get unblocked so your team could keep using our guides. you squatted on the adafruit name for usb stuff. that’s just a sample of the greatest hits. can you "compete" without doing this? did it even work?

Yes, the broader context of that email chain is a broad unloading of a 'greatest hits' of a decade of grievances against SparkFun (the meme site mentioned was made in 2017, by an employee who no longer works there).

I quoted the lines that seemed to most obviously tip that particular email exchange beyond a measured harassment report (as originally implied), crossing the line into what could be reasonably considered 'unappropriately aggressive behavior' (to quote the SparkFun CoC).

I would agree that the ex-employee's 'Sincerely, Fuck Off' was similarly aggressive, but less relevant since he's no longer an employee anyway, and it seemed pretty clear that he was the one being subject to targeted harassment in this instance (having accusations being forwarded to his partner's employer) rather than the other way around.

Not to split hairs here but it doesn’t look like he said it was a measured harassment report. Having worked customer service and HR, it’s somewhat common for people reporting harassment to be irate or even downright rude, especially when they feel that they’re being ignored.

The idea that calling someone a jerk is grounds for a company to ignore a serious complaint is, paradoxically, what some people describe as their reason for being rude.

Anyway I don’t know what’s going on here but “Sparkfun has ceased its business relationship with Adafruit because a guy called us jerks in a complaint about our CEO” would be hilarious

> it doesn’t look like he said it was a measured harassment report.

If splitting hairs, he originally framed the response as 'kill the messenger', implying there was no other reason for them be offended by it, misleading at least.

> Anyway I don’t know what’s going on here but “Sparkfun has ceased its business relationship with Adafruit because a guy called us jerks in a complaint about our CEO” would be hilarious

I agree, in isolation- it seems reasonable to end a business relationship with any rude or hostile partner regardless, but hiding such a decision behind a CoC rationale just for being called jerks would indeed border on 'hilarious'.

In this case, the claim is that the note was also sent to the ex-employee's partner's current employer, which enters less-hilarious territory towards borderline harassment, not a private HR complaint but public defamation.

Taken as one instance of a broader, ongoing pattern of targeted harassment of several individuals, the combined set of public complaints make the CoC reference not at all amusing.

> Taken as one instance of a broader, ongoing pattern of targeted harassment of several individuals, the combined set of public complaints make the CoC reference not at all amusing.

Having read more about all of this it sort of just seems like two dudes that hate each other.

Like for example the Adafruit guy’s complaint that the Sparkfun guy was presently posting about the domain and meme thing was objectively correct, Sparkfun guy posted a screenshot of it in his thread about the Adafruit guy (it stood out because the ‘Gen X hackers want to be Spider Jerusalem’ bit made me laugh out loud. Amazing burn, no notes)

https://chaos.social/@North/115602564578051206

It’s all kind of funny because

Are these dudes going to stop hating each other? Probably not.

Will they stop talking about each other? Probably not.

Will Sparkfun cutting off Adafruit make them stop hating or talking about each other? No.

Will this decision help customers of either company? Maybe? I would guess no but we’ll see I guess.

Like it seems like they should either hire reps so they don’t have to personally interact or just sue each other.

Where I come from, calling the employer of a spouse of the person you're beefing with is such a low down scumbag move, nobody would be particularly surprised if it culminated in a hot blooded murder. Anybody who engages in tactics like that is scum. If both sides of a dispute act like that, I hope they both succeed in destroying each other.

These are uncorroborated, unevidenced accusations, which is probably why they went unquoted

user: xyzzyxy created: 2 hours ago ... ok, so you created it for this...

the individual you reference had already been removed from multiple retro and maker communities prior to this dispute for documented behavior. i contacted them privately using an email address they themselves used on the site they used, specifically to ask for a stop to the pile-on and to see whether there was a constructive way to resolve their grievance. their email included their first name, which i used in direct reply. there was no campaign, no public exposure of private information, and no intent to harm. labeling that interaction as “doxxing” is a distortion that collapses any private contact into wrongdoing.

with respect to sparkfun, yes, i sent a direct email to the founder, and ceo (and contacts i have there) calling out what i believe is a long-standing bully culture tolerated at the top. calling a company out for behavior is not harassment, even when the language is blunt. during this same period, fake accounts using my handle appeared and mass-reporting was clearly underway. my real account was likely caught up in that. retroactively attributing moderation actions for saying their first name on their email is inaccurate.

the various bans you cite did not occur after some calm, independent review of facts. they occurred in the middle of coordinated reporting, they said so.

as for etsy, i asked a seller who was publicly accusing me of “doxxing” a question: would placing an order would expose my personal information? that was it, there was a sticker in my cart already, i know this maker's work. etsy declined to take action that i know of, i just an etsy order, no ban (i did not buy the stickers). recharacterizing that as harassment is another example of inflation through repetition.

what your summary consistently excludes is the long, documented history of nate’s behavior and the impact it has had on employees, collaborators, and partners over many years. i dealt with that for a decade. i am not doing that anymore. drawing a line cost us purchasing a closed source board that only sparkfun makes, so we're doing an open source version.

> user: xyzzyxy created: 2 hours ago ... ok, so you created it for this...

Yes, indeed, given the claims of targeted harassment of random participants this thread is dealing with, I preferred to avoid being personally targeted next just for being another random participant. Others will have to trust that I'm not previously involved, just a HN observer trying to make sense of the details of this dispute now that it spilled over here.

> their email included their first name, which i used in direct reply. there was no campaign, no public exposure of private information, and no intent to harm. labeling that interaction as “doxxing” is a distortion that collapses any private contact into wrongdoing.

Maybe I missed something, but this wasn't a simple reply to a private email as you seem to imply- it was a public social media post linking their name to their account (which they had specifically avoided for privacy purposes), not edited/removed after it was made clear that the exposure of that information was harmful to them, and the misgendering/dead-naming was repeated in subsequent communications after it was made clear that this behavior was unwanted. Is any of that inaccurate?

> what your summary consistently excludes is the long, documented history of nate’s behavior and the impact it has had on employees, collaborators, and partners over many years. i dealt with that for a decade.

Not having been involved at all, I know nothing about the 'long, documented history' of grievances between you all, but if there are missing details that would help further clarify what the dispute here is really about, feel free to go beyond a 'vague public accusation' and share them directly.

> the individual you reference had already been removed from multiple retro and maker communities prior to this dispute for documented behavior.

Their response when you made this claim in November was “what communities?????”. Are you perhaps mixing them up with someone else? (Source: https://digipres.club/@discatte/115595517911363679.)

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