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Comment by hoopism | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.).

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