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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Let's cool down a little here. An irresponsible tweet doesn't really constitute a "personal vendetta" (it's not even personal -- as far as I can tell she never knew their names). And while the post was (apparently, I don't know what the evidence here is) the proximate cause, you really can't say that she "got [him] fired", as she wasn't the employer nor did she advocate for his termination.

It's just a bad situation all around. Yes, people shouldn't be fired for bad jokes. Neither should they be pilloried by the community for losing their cool and tweeting about it.

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Nah, I say let's turn it up a couple of notches.

The more I think about it (after a day now), the more I realize this was an opportunity for her to become famous. Think about what does she do -- developer advocate, her site is called "butyouregirl", she does talking engagements. She is a no-name. Have you heard of her before? Doubt it. I haven't. Does the whole tech world know her name now and who she is -- "YES". Hello speaking engagements, hello millions of visitors to her blog, hello book deals about social gender issues in post modern technology landscape.

Besides this, I am sure she is aware what happened before at PyCon (there as a guy who had a picture of a nude woman in one of the talks and he was escorted out and rightly so), then Jesse Noller et. al. made a strong statement that they are very intolerant to this kind of stuff (and rightly so). But I think there in lies a golden opportunity -- one little message + shitty deceivingly taken photo -- and bam! momentary boost to the top.

She made penis jokes herself not too long ago. If that doesn't convince you of her motivations I don't know what will.

Unfortunately public reputation, shaming and humiliation goes both ways. Tech community if anything doesn't tolerate bullshit, bureaucracy, dishonesty, and bullying. The 4 parties that played along here:

   *) Adria
   *) SendGrid
   *) PlayHeaven
   *) PSF

Will ultimately have damaged their reputation.

I sure hope this person has an offer on the table by now.

>The more I think about it (after a day now), the more I realize this was an opportunity for her to become famous.

I think you nailed it. Her post about the incident is strangely long and melodramatic.

"I calculated my next steps." "It very much reminded me of Lord Of the Flies." "Yesterday the future of programming was on the line and I made myself heard."

Personal vendetta or not. A person that reacts to a private conversation (inappropriate or not) by posting hearsay about two co-workers to 1000s of followers the way she did is NOT a person I would want to work with, even less hire. She has at the very least shown very bad judgement and should not be commended nor rewarded for it.

What's private about a conversation taking place in a busy ballroom at a convention, within full earshot of (probably) dozens of people?

Actually according to Adria's blog post (linked elsewhere in the thread) the jokes were made in response to a comment about "forking" a repo from the person sitting next to them. They were riffing off of a conversation she was part of; assuming you believe her, that's "non-private" regardless of context.

This whole thread is making me sad.

From that same post I got that the two guys where talking, SHE interjected and then the joke was made by one of those guys (to me it isn't clear if she was still part of the conversation, but that's beyond the point).

To nit on terminology: testifying about what you heard yourself is not "hearsay", by definition.

I agree her judgement was bad and she shouldn't have posted the image (she has every right to post about the incident, though!).

But what I'm reading here is an awful lot of bile about this woman. She's being asked to answer for someone else's decision to fire someone (there's still no documentation or testimony about this fact, FWIW). She's being attacked for "setting back women's rights". She's basically being made the target for (what I perceive to be) a bunch of anti-feminist frustration among the male geeks. And that's... just really, really ugly; sorry.

She got pissed off and made a mistake, for which it would probably be a good idea to apologize. That's it. Everything else is on you guys.

It feels uncomfortable. I think the reaction here is much more harassing than any dongle/fork/whatever jokes two guys would have made in a conference.

From the comments I read thus far, it seems to me that most comment about "setting back women's right" come from women, not male geeks.

You mean personal conversation. Their conversation wasn't private, it was in the middle of a conference hall.

So now we have license to police other people's conversations if we are members of a protected group?

Good news! You also can police conversations. Even when you're not a member of a protected group. That's especially true when the conference has a clear policy on the sorts of topics allowed.

For example, it turns out white people don't have to just sit there when somebody's being racist. They can speak up just as much as a black person can.

It's kind of hard to figure out what to do. Harassment is obviously something I would speak out against. But when we define "harassment" to be whatever a minority member in earshot finds offensive things become murky. Perhaps I should constantly poll nearby women at a conference - "ma'am, has anybody said anything recently which you find offensive?"

There is such a thing as unacceptable behavior. But the measure of that is not whether some member of a protected group was offended. Nobody has the right to never be offended in a public place.

Where I live conferences are considered a workplace so our strict equal opportunity and sex discrimination acts apply. Under these acts, crude conversation and jokes are considered to contribute to a hostile working environment. In the event the someone (male or female) is offended, intimidated, or humiliated they are at liberty to file a sexual harassment claim. The intent of the harasser is irrelevant. It can be a single incident or repeated behaviour and the victim is not required confront their harasser. The parties need not even be employed by the same entity.

Of course these very same laws require that the claim is filed confidentially, and the kind of public shaming we've seen here is itself considered harassment.

If PyCon had been held here the only party with their noses clean would the conference organisers.

Reporting on something we've directly experienced isn't hearsay and they weren't her co-workers. As women we need to be able to speak in public forums about our experiences without this sort of extreme harassment as the result.

To me it seems the harassment (I hope you mean DDoSing her website, not this thread and the discussion it caused) is in response to the publication of the photo, not the fact that she spoke out.

It went further than that, though. http://butyoureagirl.com/14015/forking-and-dongle-jokes-dont...

This gives a lot of context and was very helpful, thank you.

From this article:

"I saw a photo on main stage of a little girl who had been in the Young Coders workshop. I realized I had to do something or she would never have the chance to learn and love programming because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so."

Seems a tad melodramatic as a reaction to a private conversation. Seems to go with the Joan-of-Arc complex:

https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/313442430848487424

From the same blog post you just quoted:

> I agreed with [the guy behind me] ... He said he would be interested in forking the repo [...] That would have been fine until the guy next to him... began making sexual forking jokes

I don't see how that constitutes a private conversation. The joke was apparently interjected into a discussion she was already part of.

Now, I still don't think the "public shaming" attempt was a good idea, and I certainly wouldn't support firing the guy (if that actually happened; again, no evidence at hand!). But I'm seeing the anti-Adria crowd here really bending over backwards to make this her fault. I think it's entirely reasonable to be offended by this, nor is it unreasonable to tweet or blog about it. That she got a little too hot-headed and posted a picture seems to be all anyone wants to talk about.

She says: "I agreed with him so I turned around and said so." So she interjected herself into this private conversation, and it is not clear if the other guy's allegedly sexist comments were to her in response to what she said, or if they were just directed to his friend privately.

> That she got a little too hot-headed and posted a picture seems to be all anyone wants to talk about.

Because that's what got the guy fired. If she had just posted a tweet complaining, or just made a blog post talking about how those kinds of comments were offensive, people would have learned but nobody's life would have been ruined. Instead she choose to post their picture online AND continue to make a big deal about it. That's a personal vendetta.

Cross-posting my held-in-moderation comment to her post here:

"I calculated my next steps." => I'm sorry but that just feels wrong.

You actively tried to harm these guys (and succeeded). I'm pretty sure they weren't "calculating" their bad jokes to hurt your feelings.

Instead of an absurdly long post you should probably just have mentioned their bad taste, apologised for getting somebody fired and tried to resolve this issue as peacefully as possible instead of blowing it up.

No, the future of programming wasn't on the line yesterday. Yes, you made yourself heard but in way that (so far) has only done harm to this community.

Thinking before you act is a good idea. As she mentioned, she didn't feel like part of the community so it's not really her job to police the event. Her description of the organizers' reaction seems pretty OK. I don't see how she can be held responsible for a guy being fired, that seems like an overreaction by the company.

Am I the only one who gets a CloudFlare captcha (from two completely different German IP addresses ) when trying to access the blog?

  Your IP address based on the country, region or network has been flagged by the website owner.
  Completing the challenge above proves you are a human and gives you temporary access. You can ask the website owner to permanently whitelist you.

I also got one. I think it's just ddos right now from everywhere.

I think it's just the much lauded cloud flare showing their true colors.

Indeed -- defending a blog (effectively, and for free) against a moderate DDoS :)

I'm not so sure how effective their defense is: I get a memory error on that page now.

I realized I had to do something or she would never have the chance to learn and love programming because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so.

I'm finding it hard to reconcile this with the idea that women as a group aren't weak and in need of white knight protectors.

It sounds more like she was personally offended yet wanted "to be a hero", where elsewhere she recognizes that "It takes three words to make a difference:“That’s not cool.”"

I can sympathize with being uncertain about how to react to a situation when people are being rude, and it's often overlooked that calm personal confrontation is actually very difficult. But I think a good heuristic would be to save the heroics for when you meet a villain--and that doesn't seem to be the case here. Most rude people are just oblivious and too comfortable to suspect that people around them aren't.

BS. I'm getting sick and tired of people not taking responsibility for their actions.

Now I do agree with you somewhat. I doubt she saw this "joke" as an opportunity to screw someone over (at least I hope so. If she did, then all bets are off); but that doesn't excuse her wrong. Her actions caused this guy to be fired. She needs to own it. Apoligize, Offer amends and move on.

Note where you stop in the causal chain: with the woman.

You could blame the millennia of sexism that set up the situation. You could blame the gender-imbalanced context: it's easy for humans to be insensitive to minority views. You could blame the guy's parents and teachers for not raising him right. You could blame the guy for saying something inappropriate. You could blame his friends for not reigning him in. You could blame Adria for reporting what he said in public. Or you could blame his boss, the person who actually fired him.

Ask yourself: why is she the one you chose to focus on?

"Ask yourself: why is she the one you chose to focus on?"

You're right. The guys need to own-up for their stupidity too. Oh that's right, they never got the chance. She didn't confront them. She snapped a picture and tweeted.

And I agree about their employer. In fact, I'd love to know who the employer was?

Just because a woman is to blame does not prove sexism. It is quite reasonable to say that she holds most of the responsibility in this situation by not reacting to the comments in a professional way. The jokes were hardly sexist and more anatomical and if that bothers he she could have dealt with it in a different way. But I guess I am sexist too for having the opinion that she handled the situation incorrectly right?

So we need to remain eternally vigilant of the thousands of years of sexism during our day-to-day dealings? We need to be constantly thinking of the women and minorities in the room before we say anything? How is this being gender-neutral?

You don't need to be constantly thinking of women and minorities in the room before you say anything. But if you say something offensive to women or minorities, they might take offense, surprisingly enough. And yeah, this is the reason for ethnic and women studies classes in the school setting. Understanding a little bit about sexism and racism is a good way to remove them from your lifestyle and speech patterns.

> How is this being gender-neutral?

These actually don't have anything to do with gender neutrality, btw. But it is pretty considerate. And if you don't think you need to be constantly considerate of diversity when speaking around a lot of people, you need to rethink that.

> But if you say something offensive to women or minorities, they might take offense, surprisingly enough.

Possibly. Or, they could be cool with it. Or, they could refrain from passing their judgment to the rest of the world and inform me that what I said was offensive. The thing is, this is less about being aware of women and minorities and more about knowing if there are any people in the room who are easily offended by scatological humor.

In my experience, refraining from scatological humor in public settings is an uncontroversial mode of behavior for the most part. I wouldn't call the incident at hand scatological, though, but maybe I'm jaded.

You should always think about the impact of what you're saying. What is the point of saying something but to have an effect on your listeners?

I believe it was you who simply did not think about the impact of your words when you compared the situation to that of 2 gay men discussing "virgin asshole". I think you need a moment of introspection on your own commentary.

I did think about it. I have thought about it since, and will think about it tomorrow. I may have gotten it wrong.

But to be clear, as I have written circa 15 times at this point, I was not comparing the situations. I understand why people might think that, but I didn't say it. I apologize for not being explicit about that, as it has caused a great deal of distraction from my actual point.

It should be clear from the reaction here on HN that your comments were widely regarded as heteronormative at best.

I think in fact that people understood you were trying to "invoke a feeling of sexual threat" and that you did this by making blatantly homophobic remarks.

I also think you should realize that even if it was not your intent to analogize, there is still an inherent comparison being made between the two situations. If they are not at all comparable, then Adria Richards must be examined according to the circumstances outlined in this thread. It appears to be the consensus among both male and female posters (including yourself) that it is unlikely that the situation could have made her feel sexually threatened. That being the case, you are simply defending the fact that she could have. This is irrelevant. Is it fair for me to feel threatened by you because you made a homophobic remark which, unlike the comments made in the presence of Ms. Richards, was actually perceived by the community to be reprehensible? Frankly, no - and I think it is a failure on your part to evaluate her situation critically rather than defending people's ability to be offended by anything they deem offensive.

EDIT: Typo.

I don't like this train of logic. How can I read minds? What if I bring up something about my dog, and trigger someone in the room who was the victim of a dog attack?

So dick jokes are off the table, I get that. What about "your mom" jokes? Or blonde jokes? What is the invisible line that I dare not cross?

You read minds the traditional way: by asking people. And by paying attention to their reactions when you are talking.

In this case, the line was pretty visible: the conference has a code of conduct.

Probably because she is engaging in hypocritical behavior that lead to a significantly negative impact on another member of the community?

my rage at the boss who fired him is only matched by my boggledness that more people are choosing to blame adria than are choosing to blame the person actually responsible.

Standing up to a PC lynch mob is incredibly risky. I don't blame the boss, I blame the person who sent the mob.

From a recent wired article:

"The court of public opinion is an alternative system of justice. It’s very different from the traditional court system: This court is based on reputation, revenge, public shaming, and the whims of the crowd. Having a good story is more important than having the law on your side. Being a sympathetic underdog is more important than being fair. Facts matter, but there are no standards of accuracy. The speed of the internet exacerbates this; a good story spreads faster than a bunch of facts."

I think the focus is on her because it seems like she's the one with the most power in this situation. Like telling a teacher "Tommy hit me", at that point, the authority figure has to treat it as a worst case scenario.

It could be she didn't realize how much juice she had, but with 9k followers, that seems a little far fetched.

At a guess, it appears that sexism is a specific instance of "People with power wielding it against people who don't have it, in a manner which the community finds morally questionable." Which seems to be what people are judging her for; not that she retaliated, but her escalation. Perhaps it's a good thing, the whole situation brings to mind the saying about "An armed society is a polite society."

In the end, I'd guess every party involved is going to wish this had never happened, and spend years carefully watching every word they say, and learning the first rule of InfoSec; Never Say Anything.

he was an idiot and said something idiotic. She was vengeful and out to get someone in trouble, publicly.

If she had reported it to the conference staff and just tweeted what she had done, without identifying them i don't think anyone would be focusing on her, and it would be a non-story.

There is a world of difference between the actions.

> You could blame the guy for saying something inappropriate.

It wasn't inappropriate.

Isn't the guy getting fired a symmetrical example of failing to take responsibility for one's actions? Presumably (and I'll say again: there remains NO actual evidence about this termination) he was fired for making an offensive joke in public. And he works for an employer that finds that to be a termination-level offense.

Now, presuming he knew that: shouldn't he, too, be "taking responsibility" for his actions instead of blaming some girl with a blog?

I just don't see where that logic goes. Everyone can be at fault here. But it seems like you (and most other men here) only want one person's head. That strikes me as distasteful.

To point out the overlooked -- it's equally possible someone at his job tried to talk to him about the issue, and he reacted in a heavily negative way, refused to apologise, or otherwise acted in a way that triggered the actual termination.

Since we don't have the facts, we don't know, and folk are assuming the company over-reacted because it fits into the proffered narrative.

Actually there's a comment from the guy somewhere in another thread where he apologizes for his behaviour. I didn't see anything like that coming from Adria.

She has thousands of followers. She is in a powerful position and she abused it. Just because she wasn't the employer doesn't mean her goal wasn't something along these lines. Why else would you post a clear picture of their faces up to a public lynch mob?

What's the abuse? She described what happened right next to her.

Taking a picture of two people without their permission and posting it on the internet eventually causing one of them to get fired doesn't seem like abuse to you?

Why didn't she tell them to just be quiet? That's what normal people do.

As a matter of fact, if you read her blog post about all of this, she recommends the same thing:

What has to change is that everyone must take personal accountability and speak up when they hear something that isn’t ok. It takes three words to make a difference:

“That’s not cool.”

However, she appears to have not followed her own advice. I think it probably would have turned out differently if she had, though.

The conference organizers ask you to not handle it yourself: see https://us.pycon.org/2013/about/code-of-conduct/harassment-i..., where it says:

"Report the harassment incident (preferably in writing) to a conference staff member"

If she had asked them to quiet down, it could have turned into a pissing match. Or maybe they would have complied. You never know how it's going to play out.

It does say in the code of conduct that you shouldn't handle it yourself. Also, due to "offensive verbal comments related to gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, religion, sexual images in public spaces" I'd agree that what these men were doing was against the code of conduct.

However, she did report it to pycon. She tweeted about: "Can someone talk to these guys about their conduct? I'm in lightning talks, top right near stage, 10 rows back". She also says that she "began to contacting the PyCon staff via text message".

What she didn't have to do is take pictures of them without their permission and post their pictures on her public twitter feed. That is the part that steps over the line in my opinion.

Agreed. What she did was sub-optimal.

yes, report it to the conference staff, not post it to twitter for the world to see. a world of difference there.

Please be kind and indicate where conference organizers ask you to:

1) post the picture on a world wide forum (twitter)

2) contact them via public channel (twitter)

Thank you

Other commenters here noted this before you did, without the false courtesy.

We're all adults, there's absolutely no reason to take it to the internet when simply mustering a little courage and saying something will do.

She took the cowardly way out and a man was fired for it. And that's assuming it was even true.

Taking pictures at conferences and posting them on Twitter happens all the time. That's definitely not abuse. Quoting what people say at conferences also happens all the time. So that's not abuse. She was not involved in the firing; if that's abuse, it's not hers.

She explained why she didn't just tell them to be quiet on her blog. But here's my take:

It is not her job to teach people how to behave properly in public. It is their job to behave properly. And it's the conference organizers' job to maintain a safe space, one where everybody is behaving according to conference standards. And when they heard about the problem, they jumped on it.

How is a borderline offensive joke impacting the concept of a "safe space" in any way?

Context matters what you are trying to prove is a false equivalence. She chose to post them up on her personal wall of shame that has thousands of followers with a clear picture of both their faces and without their permission. Anyone with any experience on the internet understands how potentially ruining social media can be. Look at the recent Steubenville scandal (these people actually deserved it though). If you want to use something as powerful as social media as a tool for justice you better be ready to take responsibility if you are on the wrong side.

I also agree that the company that fired the person should also be held responsible for caving in to social pressure so easily. They are both responsible for the outcome.

Of course she was involved in the firing. She supplied publicly searchable documentation that made the employer fatally vulnerable to every "hostile environment" lawsuit that would follow until they fired the guy. Adria Richards is professionally offended and vindictive and no space can remain safe for others after admitting her.

Using status to distribute pictures and quotes of conference attendees in an attempt to publicly shame them for conduct that she clearly misinterpreted as sexist, and also to force her own values onto others, is pretty much the definition of abuse (of both power and public trust).

By defending her and using phrases like "maintain a safe space," you make it sound like quietly speaking innocuous words is of any legitimate concern or consequence. In reality, Adria's behavior was far, far worse and did, in fact, have serious consequences that will adversely affect an individual's career.

Her description of events was so vague that it caused me to misidentify the person she was talking about from the photo, and I wasn't the only one.

Don't say "lynch" now! Don't you know, the word lynching implies racial overtones?!?

https://twitter.com/smarx/status/313939094902292480

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