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Comment by bloat | Hacker News Reader

The victim defines it.

I feel insulted by that statement.

Communication is a rather complex matter and having any single party decide what a given message is supposed to mean misses the point (see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-sides_model).

Even simple societies end up appointing judges (impartial or not) to provide an outside view on a conflict, instead of letting the participants decide on any claim's merit.

I have never seen the four-sides model before. That's a fascinating way to decompose a message and its potential receipt. Thanks for sharing!

That's totally fair. However I feel that considering the current state of harrasment on Twitter, a simple definition is appropriate and will be more effective in practice than a more nuanced approach. I certainly hope Twitter and its trolls clean up their act to a state when we would have the luxury of using impartial judges.

I just don't think "the victim defines it" is a simple definition. It's short, but actually a nightmare to enforce.

twitter _does_ have a definition to work with, referred to from their ToS (https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169997-abusive-behavi...), which sounds pretty clear and simple to me and covers most if not all of what femfreq cited.

So this sounds like "merely" a compliance issue on twitter's side.

I get your overall point, but in turn you've overlooked the Relationship layer - basic compassion means that the victim gets to make the call as to if something hurt them.

If someone is stabbed, do you require empirical measurements of their injury before you accept their pain?

How do you define the victim here? People are responding to someone who said a) they play games which give them extra points for murdering women (this is provably false) b) they hate women. Do you consider insulting a group to be harassment as well?

The theory states that person A is in a state on all 4 sides and encodes that into a message. That message is transmitted (in case of twitter: verbal only, no other cues), and then decoded onto the 4 sides by person B. By then, it can mean something else entirely because encoding and decoding aren't idempotent. They likely don't even weight the 4 sides in the same way.

Now, it's hard for me to imagine a less threatening interpretation of "Someone will rape and kill you" (to paraphrase most of the femfreq collection) than what the average person would make of it, but the rule I responded to was made a general assertion.

If the victim defines its status universally, the best way to live is to shut down all communication, since the sender has exactly _0_ control how things end up being received.

"The victim defines it" means that a simple "hello" can be considered abuse. Given the right circumstances, that might even be true (to stick to the theme: stalker contacting victim), but western society (that twitter probably subscribes to) doesn't typically hand out sanctions without having a third party determine the circumstances. Taking your the stabbing example, accepting the pain (and calling the ambulance) is one thing. Throwing the assailant in jail has a higher standard.

The discussion is about sanctions which are closer to the latter than "accepting their pain".

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