One Week of Harassment on Twitter | Hacker News Reader

One Week of Harassment on Twitter

femfreq.tumblr.com

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The most recent episode of This American Life (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/i...) has Jezebel writer Lindy West reach out and talk to one of her trolls who created a page celebrating her father's death and claiming she was a disappointment to him. He sent her an apology after realizing there was an actual person on the other end of his trolling and they actually have a remarkably civil conversation about the incident. It's highly worth listening to.

"The most common response was not remorse or defensiveness but surprise. They were startled that I could hear what they’d been saying."

This phenomenon can be found all over the place. Follow some of the cycling hate on twitter some time. People fantasizing about literally killing people with their cars. Why? Because they lost 12 seconds on their 30 minute commute?

It's a weird disconnection. The 'targets' are moms, dads, sisters, brothers, friends... people. I just don't get it. Why are some people so lacking in empathy?

Scary to think that the venn diagram of young gamers and future programmers is pretty substantial.

The ratio of men/women in college was pretty abysmal. This may not be the exact cause, but it certainly doesn't help the cause. Truly is a shame that so much talent is driven to other fields due to lack of basic social skills.

I honestly don't think that a lack of social skills is to blame. I'm not the most social creature and that sort of behaviour horrifies me.

I think it is more likely a lack of empathy, combined with the view that the internet is somehow not the "real world" and an entitlement complex of incomprehensible size.

Perhaps we define social skills differently... or it's just the wrong word (probably).

But I do think a lot of the aggression towards women stem from insecurity and lack of ability to comfortably converse with opposite gender. Those in my mind are social skills.

I would agree that the symptomatic cause of the current situation is insecurity, but not about "talking to girls". It's fear of losing what you consider to be yours. Whether or not you have any sort of right to it--and I think it is very safe to say that, no, young white males do not have an inherent right to be catered to by all aspects of the game market--doesn't matter, you think it's yours and they're taking it and that means it's OK to call the cops and get a SWAT team sent to somebody's house. (Apparently.)

The fear that the universe is zero-sum is the major way that regressive elements maintain societal control. The rich guy takes nine cookies, elbows the middle-class guy, and says "hey, the poor guy's gonna steal your cookie!", and the middle-class guy hops to. It applies here just the same--if you're so unable to get outside of your head to entertain the idea that maybe games not targeted directly at you could maybe, just maybe, expand your horizons a bit and make your life better, while making life better for other people...well, you freak out, and apparently you don't stop freaking out.

Personally, as a straight white dude, I am marvelously unthreatened by the idea that people make games for people who aren't me. I encourage it. But then, I have the basic reading comprehension to not try to say with a straight face that "gamers are dead" was a pejorative rather than market analysis, so I was probably never in the wheelhouse for the hatemongering.

I know nothing about gaming, gaming culture and gamergate. So I can't speak to any of the underlying issues involved.

I am only speaking to the manner in which presumably a few people decided to address a women online.

I'd say there is also an element of evil.

All you have to do is watch the HN comments on any thread that (even tangentially) mentions women. There's no shortage of of existing programmers / old gamers that are virulently hostile.

Definitely. I'm involved here because I think of HN as my people. But it's an embarrassment to me elsewhere. Sort of like that one cranky old relative who can be perfectly nice but also will spew out some unbelievable shit.

Yup. As I've said before, I've considered leaving because this place generally seems to accept utterly reprehensible behavior. I don't understand why aggressive sexism (and racism too, though that's not this thread) is tolerated on Y Combinator's doorstep. I told dang when I spoke to him about this that I think not eighty-sixing racists and sexists will self-select out the people who aren't, and that's a real bad look for YC.

I've flagged more posts in this thread than I have at any point on HN, by a lot. It's kind of amazing.

> I've flagged more posts in this thread than I have at any point on HN, by a lot. It's kind of amazing.

There's some inconsistency with flagging. If the comment is flagged it turns to [flagkilled] at which point it can't attract any more downvotes. But some posts are not bad enough to flag, but very unpopular, and people can just keep downvoting those posts - even after the post can't be edited any more.

It'd be nice if the edit period was as long as the downvote period. And it'd be nice if a [flagkilled] post was still able to be downvoted, or it automatically attracted some downvotes when it dies or somesuch.

The Venn diagram of young gamers and the entire population is pretty substantial, so I'd be cautious about overvaluing this correlation.

...and I'd actually say that for programmers the percentage of people who were young gamers is lower that for the rest of the population (or at least their gaming looked a bit different, focused on different genres etc.).

Anonymous free speech can sure bring out some ugly things in people. Freedoms, though, often cut both ways, protecting important and significant behaviors but also sometimes allowing sad and pathetic ones.

I think it would be delicious punishment if the author of each of those tweets were forced to read them out loud, in front of their mothers, sisters, wives, friends, bosses, coworkers, and children. If someone's willing to send messages like that to a real life person, they should see how people in real life react to their hate spew.

There was a woman video game reviewer who messaged the mothers of boys who sent her hateful messages on Facebook, which was entertaining.

https://twitter.com/Charalanahzard/status/538144080534847489

As makers and participants in internet culture, I think it's incumbent on all of us to find ways to minimize the downsides of anonymity and pseudonymity while maximizing the benefits. Because otherwise, the baby's getting thrown out with the bathwater.

Note, for example, that Facebook doesn't allow any anonymity, and Quora only allows it with tight controls. I think the long-term trend is to get rid of it, which would be a shame.

People are fine being ignorant bigots under their real names on Facebook.

http://www.salon.com/2014/12/10/whats_up_with_the_rag_head_w...

Facebook introduced a new feature; created an ad with a Sikh man; racists everywhere.

Sure, some people are fine being ignorant bigots in the town square at high noon, too. But that doesn't mean that people are equally comfortable being bigots no matter the circumstance. And even if the amount of bigotry were identical whether anonymous or not, it doesn't mean that people won't perceive anonymity as the problem because of the broken social feedback loop.

That said, I think anonymity actually is an enabler here. The KKK knew exactly what they were doing with those hoods.

I agree about real name policies, but my goal is to make anonymity unnecessary most of the time.

This is disgusting. It's also disappointing how little most games (CoD, for example) have done to cut back on back behavior. I've seen players on some games just spew hate and nasty taunts in games with no repercussions. At most, they get banned from servers that care to moderate. Often there's not even a mechanism for reporting other players globally. The lack of oversight allows a culture of trolling and nastiness to thrive.

Twitter could also do more to proactively prevent troll accounts and monitor tweets without waiting for someone to report it. I'd be a little more sympathetic to startup-stage Twitter figuring it out, but they're to the point where I'd expect something better.

Those who raise the "free speech" argument fail to realize that these are private companies. Companies like EA and Twitter are well within their rights to limit what is broadcast on their servers and networks. You can say what you like (within some reasonable constraints), but that doesn't give you the right to have it amplified through someone else's work.

For those who don't normally have "showdead" turned on, it's worth doing so for this article. A) I'm grateful that HN's more active moderation is taking out some of the trash. And B) it's worth noting the details of the sort of awfulness that's getting moderated here. This isn't just a gamer problem.

> I'm grateful that HN's more active moderation is taking out some of the trash.

I don't see it that way. I read those comments and there's very little vitriol in there. There's a lot of legitimate counter arguments being made that are being flag killed. You're essentially being grateful that HN's moderation is stifling any attempt at disagreement with their own political views.

Huh. An anonymous dude who thinks that feminism is the enemy is fine with bigotry. Who could have guessed?

It would be entirely possible for Twitter to create various community driven feedback mechanisms, they just don't want to.

Plenty of online communities have various moderation systems, including HN that hugely reduce the potential for abuse, trolling and bullying - and most don't require your real identity.

They have community driven feedback mechanisms. When a user is flagged sufficiently often, they're pretty much gone.

Of course this is now abused against (some) X people and by (some) X people (for X being pretty much any cause or philosophy that creates uproar and with-us-or-against-us camps).

I personally don't like the woman, but while scrolling down the list, the contrast between these people and the people i know online and in real life is so stark that i can only wonder:

Who are these people and where do they come from?

They seem to be everywhere.

The twitter usernames are public, and reading a sample of those biographies looked to me like everything from 13 year old boy to female middle aged graphics designer.

And even though these comments look very much the same, these seem to be actual accounts with normal use, not some troll battalion.

This post appears to have been flagged incorrectly. I'm sure we've been using a bunch of words that would raise a flag, when in reality we're just talking about the content and important but sensitive issues.

Could some fix that? Remove the flag?

It's illegal to make death threats offline. It should be online too.

It is, but there's a bunch of legal doctrine to say what actually counts as a threat. Also, SCOTUS has a case before it now that will further refine the issue, specifically about online behavior.

It just keeps scrolling...

This doesn't seem like tech news. Flagged.

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

I agree very much. I didn't find this interesting, nor did it gratify my intellectual curiosity. Glad it's off the front page.

Would be terrible if HN devolved into a mess of posts about how dumb and hateful random comments are on the internet and turned into another outrage generating machine (just like the TV news you mentioned).

BTW, here's a nice HN alternative that someone pointed me to recently (for those of us that are sad to see what HN is devolving into):

https://lobste.rs

I'm not a huge gamer, but this is really important to me in terms of tech hiring. It's a serious problem that I didn't know about until graduate school. One of the few women working on file systems was the type that in addition to being friendly and charming, did not tolerate any shit, and would actually speak out about it. Since those days my eyes have been opened about the small percentage of people that do terrible things to women in tech without men ever seeing the terrible things that happen.

I wish that this post had stayed up on the front page longer, so that more people could see 1) what terrible shit goes on in this world, and 2) how a tiny minority of people try to minimize or excuse it in comment threads, and 3) how they get downvoted into oblivion as they should.

These three bits of evidence point out that the solution to tech's problems are pretty easy in that they are not endemic and broadly spread to everyone in the field. There's a tiny but very vocal minority of terrible people, and by either changing their behavior or not hiring them, a whole bunch more people would be willing to work in the field.

Seriously, if anybody thinks that these tweets at FemFreq are not so bad, just quit your job and find some other field to work in. That type of person is hurting us all. Alternatively they could grow a spine and not be so hateful.

The entire internet is full of this. Every comment section every forum its just absolute anywhere and everywhere someone can post text. Anyone who makes any statement on the internet will receive hate, the more famous you are the more you receive.

What are you saying with your comment? That we should just accept this despicable hatred? That this is normal?

I hate to be that guy, but when you see the twitter account, you only have some reports of tweets like this, that's not how the situation is going to be improved. I agree it's outrageous to see people like this, but their twitter account is effectively completely useless to promote their message, I have to scroll down ~100 tweet to have something useful about video games. Their twitter account is effectively doing some publicity to this kind of message by posting only this kind of content.

Please do a constructive comment instead of downvoting me, I'm not posting any spam here. I just fail to see how only posting this kind of tweets is going to promote their cause in any ways, just have a look at their twitter account.

I think people are confused about what you're trying to say. I myself am a little lost.

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