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Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to me why "she can no longer be effective in her role at SendGrid"? She tweeted an inappropriate comment that someone made to her in a public forum. I genuinely don't understand why this would affect anyone's professional relationship with her.

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Do you mean this tweet from the conference: https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/312265091791847425

Or the other one with the photo? :)

As a developer, considering this, and the other damning stuff in her twitter stream, and her alleged previous track record at other conferences, I would not feel comfortable interacting with her.

So, whatever my reasoning, she's no longer going to be able to reach me, so she's kind of useless (to me) as an evangelist.

The one about the photo. I hadn't seen the tweet you linked.

Can you explain why you're not comfortable interacting with her?

The fear of arbitrary public shaming over the equivalent of a misheard comment and failed joke.

Her action, and the actions she followed that action up with, caused a huge rift in the developer community. Her job is to unite the developer community and help them access the product.

That's what I don't understand. What is this "rift"? What is the chasm, and why is anyone on the side across from her?

The action was the public humiliation of somebody she disagreed with (as he made a sexual joke and she found it inappropriate) rather than handling the matter quietly. The consequential actions included: leaving a number of her own sexual jokes on twitter, making her seem hypocritical, bringing her employer into the fray as agreeing with her actions (probably without their permission), posting a blog post where she advocated speaking to people about things that make somebody uncomfortable, which is not what she did and not saying sorry when she found out that her public shaming had gotten somebody fired.

Later, it was discovered that she has a history of escalating potentially high-friction issues instead of trying to resolve them. This did not win her any sympathy.

How is it humiliation to repost a joke someone made in public? If he's humiliated didn't he do that to himself?

Publicly humiliating somebody is the use of mob rule to get justice instead of the existing structure we have all consented to (ie, the PyCon staff.) It also does not permit the person being humiliated to get in his or her side of the story. Thus, while the men might have done something stupid, inappropriate or even shameful, the public humiliation was done by her because she escalated by inviting mob rule instead of using the official channels.

While using mob rule may be a reasonable second alternative if the existing structure is corrupt and unresponsive as it can change who is in power, it is not an acceptable first solution.

I find a certain amount of delicious irony in the idea that somebody who tried to shame people using mob rule wound up burnt by a different mob. Shame there was so much collateral damage.

nope. nobody made an inappropriate comment to her nor any females in that gathering. she tweeted a joke that was made in a private conversation which she overheard.

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