Comment by corysama | Hacker News Reader

Comment by corysama | Hacker News Reader

There is a small culture of people online who make a hobby of harassment. They don't have an agenda. They aren't representative of anything. They're not distinguished by being part of any particular industry, race, sexuality or economic status. They are simply selfish individuals.

They do it because it gives them little endorphin pops to think about how upset their victim must be and because it is a very low risk activity. That's all there is to it. They don't particularly care about "women in tech" or "women in gaming" to any extent beyond the fact that the controversy gives them a hook they can latch on to dig a reaction out of their victim. Or infinitely better: the press!

The only way to prevent this activity is to attach a small but concrete level of risk to it. Quoting the article that chuckcode linked about Reddit's "Violentacrez":

> "My wife is disabled. I got a home and a mortgage, and if this hits the fan, I believe this will affect negatively on my employment," he said. "I do my job, go home watch TV, and go on the internet. I just like riling people up in my spare time."

> There is a small culture of people online who make a hobby of harassment. They don't have an agenda. They aren't representative of anything. They're not distinguished by being part of any particular industry, race, sexuality or economic status. They are simply selfish individuals

I wish more people understood this. It is a big problem with no solution. We can keep spamposting these tropes of #gurlgamers and #womenintech but the problem isn't really that these arenas are overtly hostile to women. The problem is that if you are in these arenas you are just more visible to the type of people that enjoy harassing people. I think doxxing is one of the biggest sins on the internet. Anonymity and privacy are fundamental pieces of American and Internet culture.

Doxxing someone is really the only way to stop these things happening, and even then they must actually care about what society thinks of them. Also, if you are wrong you could ruin an innocent persons life. So no easy solutions. Explaining tolerance and these angry women first campaigns alienate people from the causes. They don't harass women and are normal people. The people that actually do bad things couldn't care any less about this "education" and the flamewars this stuff starts make it all the more funny to them.

This is an insanely hard problem to solve, and it might actually not be possible to fix. The answer might be to have thick skin and hire a security company to put alarms and cameras in your house. It isn't fair to someone like the subject of this article that is an intelligent, attractive, hard working person to be punished for having these attributes, but it is an answer even if not a great one.

There are no social problems so large that we can't fix them once we develop the will to do so.

> It is a big problem with no solution. [...]

I imagine a lot of the country felt that way about civil rights in the early 1960s. Then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1968 ... And while it's nowhere near solved, people don't regard cross-burnings and lynchings as matter-of-fact daily occurrences anymore.

> This is an insanely hard problem to solve, and it might actually not be possible to fix.

I imagine folks in the mid-1960s thought exactly that of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation; that folks in the 1860s thought exactly that of reuniting the states after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_war; and that folks in the 1760s thought that of the whole "How can we get the King to listen to us and help us manage our colony in our best interest?" until we did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution

There are no social problems so large that we can't fix them once we develop the will to do so. We don't develop the will until we admit that these problems are tractable.

So let's fix it.

Completely agree that this is a fixable problem that we must resolve before some "responsible" institution comes along and trades our freedom on the internet for security.

I do think that there is an interesting twist for humanity though as we try to move into a virtual space. Much of the social norms that are hard wired into people to allow us to get along involve actual facial and other cues only accessible in person. It will likely take some training and some time figure out how to deal with each other remotely. There is a lot of work in psychology looking at things like "social identity theory" that people have applied to internet interactions (with some colorful summaries [1]).

I do think that many folks will be surprised in the future to find that the internet isn't quite as anonymous as they think. There are only 7 billion or so of us and google and others could process everything we've ever written in an afternoon. Certainly a lot of folks have been surprised to find that their emails aren't very secure and can hang around for a long time. If you wouldn't say something to somebody in person then it usually isn't a good idea to say it online as well with possible exceptions for concern for your own personal safety when constructively criticizing the powerful.

[1] https://vgresearcher.wordpress.com/2015/05/29/the-greater-in...

Thanks for the link, chuckcode. Skimmed a bit and added to the "read before bedtime" pile.

There's a lot of interestingness around anonymity vs. pseudonymity. From what I've read and experienced, it comes down to how much you value a particular identity in a particular context; from there, it's all about framing incentives around the identity that you value. Violentcranz didn't value the online persona enough that online incentives mattered; when he was outed by a journalist, he valued the real life incentives enough to stop the online behavior.

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