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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that this is just the latest in a long series of episodes of harassment which Randi has experienced -- it's not just another case of gamers taking their competition offline, which is the most common swatting backstory I hear about these days.

Rather than allowing herself to be driven out of the field as many other women have been[1], Randi is fighting back and recently founded the Online Abuse Prevention Initiative (http://onlineabuseprevention.org/), which aims to help people protect themselves from harassment and to help tech companies and law enforcement to better respond to this problem.

If anyone expected this to stop Randi, they're sorely mistaken. I know Randi as a FreeBSD developer, and she is one of the most fearless people I've ever met.

[1] Not intended to cast aspersions on those women who have been driven out; if I faced the same experience I too would have been driven out of this field.

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It's interesting to note that no SWAT contact actually occurred.

It's interesting to note that what you just said is completely false.*

http://gamepolitics.com/2015/04/06/ggautoblocker-creator-and...

How deep does the conspiracy go?

* Unless you are differentiating police contact from SWAT contact... which is a pretty irrelevant difference in this scenario.

Please don't belittle victims of crime by describing their experience as "just another case of gamers taking their competition offline". People of both gender experience harassment in life, and at times it goes into the realm of becoming victim of crimes. It should not matter what gender you are or your chosen profession in life, by belittle it you are causing direct harm to other human beings.

Please stop.

Please assume good faith when it comes to subtleties of wording like this. Just because you feel the post could be interpreted as belittling doesn't imply that that was the author's intent.

I read cperciva as criticising the commonly given justification of online abuse. Many people say it's not actually harassment and that it's just mean comments or that it's just an extension of online competitiveness.

I read cperciva as condemning that and using this example to show that all online harassment edit[is / can be] severe.

> I read cperciva as criticising the commonly given justification of online abuse.

Are you sure? His opening 'graph is:

"It's worth noting that this is just the latest in a long series of episodes of harassment which Randi has experienced -- it's not just another case of gamers taking their competition offline, which is the most common swatting backstory I hear about these days."

This seems to me to say: "This isn't a one-off incident; it's yet another terrible incident in a very long string of related harassment incidents."

He goes on to say that Randi has done a huge amount of work to actively combat online abuse.

I don't see where cperciva makes the claim that all online harassment is severe. (Truly, not all online harassment is severe. When my boss uses email to get on my case for overdue deliverables, that's online harassment; but it's a) minor and b) justified.) [0] :)

[0] Or, look at like 80% of what happens in Eve Online for boatloads of examples of minor online harassment.

I guess it depend on how you want to interpret it, and a clarification from cperciva would be nice.

To me it was as a statement that because the long series of episodes of harassment which Randi has experienced, this specific case is much more than all those gamers who complain about getting swatted, as their problem is just another case of gamers taking their competition offline. That this case is different from the norm (as Manishearth phrase it bellow), and thus worthy of notice in contrast to the problems of "gamers".

To me, that is belittling. Maybe cperciva meant the opposite, that swatting is a real crime and not something to be perceived as just "gamers taking their competition offline", but it was not the impression I got from that comment.

I think you are right, there aren't any good reasons to do a SWATing and there isn't anyone who deserves to be the target of one. But I guess almost everybody, including cperciva, believes this.

I guess if you said 'Please be careful not to' instead of "Please don't belittle" you would get less argument. Instead of assuming a particular intention, point out how you read the phrase and ask if that was intended.

Good advice and thus upvoted. Its a fair point, and just because this article mentioned gamergate, it doesn't mean some people would belittle one group of victims on order to make an other set of victim more likeable. It should have seemed more strange, and thus promoted a investigating question rather than an assumption.

Please don't belittle victims of crime by describing their experience as "just another case of gamers taking their competition offline".

Not what I intended at all. Perhaps it would have been clearer if I had written "yet another case"; my point was that this was not like most swattings and readers shouldn't pattern-match and assume they know what was going on.

This isn't belittlement, it is -as was stated- the most common motive for SWATting. Angry 14-year-olds [0] (whether they're raging about getting pwnt in Call of Duty[1], or doing it for the lulz on *chan) are the vast majority of the folks who engage in SWATting.

I urge you to carefully re-read the comment that you criticized. It's pretty clear to me that cperciva has no intention of belittling anyone.

[0] Either chronologically or developmentally

[1] Or whatever

Belittling or trivializing is exactly what the word "just" makes the comment look like. If you can't see it, maybe try it with phrases like "it's just another case of harassment" vs. "it's another case of harassment".

It's not made any better by describing it as "gamers taking the competition offline". Two problems; first, it's making it appear as some kind of a natural extension of playing a game / watching a game stream. Hey, it's just some competition, boys will be boys! Second, it's too symmetrical, basically spreading the blame between both the perp and the victim. Again if you can't see this, what would you say about describing this case as "some Twitter users taking their gender politics discussions offline"?

There's some context that you're omitting in your analysis. cperciva says:

"It's worth noting that this is just the latest in a long series of episodes of harassment which Randi has experienced -- it's not just another case of gamers taking their competition offline, which is the most common swatting backstory I hear about these days."

(Emphasis mine.)

Asshole gamers calling in real-life SWAT because they can't handle feelings of inferiority is the most common reason for SWATting that I hear of.

I hold the opinion that giving police fraudulent information in order to summon SWAT on someone's house is HIGHLY inappropriate and -often- very dangerous[0]. While cperciva doesn't explicitly express his opinions on SWATting, the remaining 'graphs in his comment would lead one to believe that he also thinks that SWATting is serious business, regardless of motive.

[0] Not to mention, yanno, illegal.

I find it interesting how much analysis has been given to the tone of cperciva's comment. There is an awful lot of this going around lately.

What is the goal commenters in such threads are pursuing? To correct a wrong or misunderstanding? To show someone as biased or bigoted (or to advocate the other way)? Who are we training, and what is it we are teaching? Could it be done a better way?

Is the error cperciva may have made large or small? Does it have an impact? If insignificant, why does so much effort need to be expended? Otherwise, why are there not articles to reference on the issue? (Or are there?)

To be completely blunt, this all seems incredibly passive aggressive to me. I'm not talking about sexism--again, I'm simply referring to all of the meta analysis on communication and tone.

I am honestly curious, and my questions are not for dramatic effect. Could this all be short-circuited by a "I doubt the OP meant to trivialize XYZ, [...]" and be done with it?

I'd suggest it's a case in point for why the principle of charity is so vital to useful communication.

The trouble is that people's standard for whether or not a post is awful (belittling/sexist/etc..) tends to be whether or not they feel it can plausibly be interpreted that way. This is the wrong standard - we should judge a post awful when there's no other way to interpret it.

I made what looked like to me as an obvious interpretation, and then others made the opposite interpretation and said theirs was the obvious one.

Some discussion about the words in the comment is thus nice, as it hopefully helps everyone to understand why both interpretations are valid (or in extreme cases, reach a consensus on a single interpretation). I find in particular jsnell comment interesting, as it let me know how much value I unconscious applied into the phrase "just another".

They said nothing about gender, and wasn't belittling it -- they were saying that Randi's story was different from the norm, that's all.

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