Comment by shoeluckpotland | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shoeluckpotland | Hacker News Reader

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shoeluckpotland

I have a small theory about harassment in tech.

Posting from a throwaway, as I have been threatened myself.

I know many women in technology. Some have experienced some truly vile online harassment.

Almost all of which is conducted online, anonymously. Not in-person. Instead, it is rape threats via email. Tweets from pseudo-anonymous accounts. Almost never something that can be attached to a real person.

I do not doubt that women receive these threats.

What I doubt is the origin.

Classical hacker culture is very welcoming to hackers from all walks of life. It is, after all, a culture of misfits. People that were rejected from society for any number of reasons, and that found a home in technology.

This is not a culture of bullies, and tech people do not behave like hyper-misogynistic teenagers in-person, whether or not women are present. Socially awkward, sure, but outright hostile? Very unlikely.

We know that there is a small group of hyper-activists. They are well known for online bullying, going as far as to contact employers and families with threats. For lack of a better term, we're going to use the common internet definition: Social Justice Warriors (SJWs).

I think these people are the source of all this harassment and grief. The SJWs are the ones waging a harassment campaign against women in tech.

Think about it: Women are a minority in tech, one that is generally respected in-person.

You could never get people on-board with an extremist view on things like political correctness, gender quotas, that sort of thing... unless they felt like they were under attack by an actively hostile and misogynistic industry.

It is very easy to manufacture that feeling via anonymous rape and death threats. Build a sense of terror and hostility via online trolling, and then use that fear to bring women -- and a vocal number of their male defenders -- over to the side that promises to protect them.

It doesn't take a large conspiracy. Just a few dedicated trolls, and we even know they exist.

Same thing as the outrage over the "whites only" stickers that appeared overnight in Austin -- they were not posted by racists or the KKK, but by anti-racist activists.

Thoughts?

That's some fucked up gas-lighting dude.

Kathy Sierra explicitly called out one of her harassers weev and his posse (def not what you'd call a "Social Justice Warrior", and weev initially copped to harassing her and has been trying to deny it subsequently).

Places like 4Chan and KotakuInAction are not some fucked up false flag operation simply by virtue of the vast number of man hours involved.

And even ignoring all of the evidence that contradicts your theory, i'd like to point out how incredibly unsympathetic and unhelpful your theory is.

Even if there were some psychotic cadre of rabble rousers out there harassing others, IT WOULD STILL NOT BE OKAY IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM. And there would still be the very practical problem that people were being harassed.

There are people out there who are trying to address harassment on the internet with technological and social means, and despite the size of the challenge, this is something that needs to be addressed.

spot on.

Harassment is not okay. Never said it was. Nobody thinks it is.

But "calling someone out" means nothing. Tim Hunt was "called out", and mobbed out of his career on the basis of personal accusation alone, with zero actual wrongdoing.

Mob violence is bad, no matter who does it.

I asked for thoughts, because I want so see the evidence that contradicts this theory. Please, please, PLEASE show me some evidence that I am wrong.

I want to be wrong, because being right about this is scary as fuck.

Tim Hunt is a nobel prize winner. He already made his career. And the thing he was asked to resign from as an honorary position so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> Please, please, PLEASE show me some evidence that I am wrong.

I already did. Your theory doesn't make any sense because of how insanely labor intensive it is. Revenge porn sites, 4Chan, GamerGate, the Fappening, all of it is too involved and complex for even a determined group of false flag rabble rousers to execute on.

And again, on top of all of that, they would be harassing people, which would make them not people who believe in fighting harassment by definition.

So here's the crux of the matter. Even if your theory was true, all you're doing is distracting from the point, not addressing harassment or any of the possible ways harassment could be prevented.

p.s. given that you haven't actually engaged any of the points i've made i don't plan on writing you any more replies. I hope that you endeavor to do as Abraham Lincoln once said and "Be excellent to each other"

I think shoeluckpotland's original post was wrong to to call those involved in the posited conspiracy, faking both sides, SJWs. The giveaway there being 'faking both sides'. That's how I would see it. It doesn't make it any less horrible for a woman like Jessie being verbally attacked of course.

I thought the post was otherwise great, floating what I feel is an important idea to consider. I've never tried to write on HN before and I've never seen a post replaced with [flagged] before. How does that arise? Is it ever reversed?

Go to https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rdrake98 and set "showdead" to "yes". Then you'll still see posts that have been flagged and deaded.

Thanks.

Respectfully, I think your rhetoric doesn't help the situation. It's not "gas-lighting" to be skeptical of the prevailing narrative that tech is a misogynistic boys club. The thing is, the harassment that Jessie is facing could literally be one person, right? Do you deny that?

Absolutely no one suggested "was okay in any way shape or form", but the fact that you used all caps really drove the point home for everyone who wasn't sure.

It's like, you get shamed if you even suggest that this might possibly be attributed to something other than "misogyny in tech".

Skepticism is disbelieving something. Putting forward a conspiracy theory with literally no evidence (and evidence to the contrary) is not skepticism.

You didn't answer a key question:

The thing is, the harassment that Jessie is facing could literally be one person, right? Do you deny that?

I'm sorry, why is that question a relevant one?

Would it matter to the author whether it was one person or many in her specific case? Would it make the harassment any less troubling or alarming?

Would it matter to the general case, since the author's story of harassment is certainly not a unique one in our industry?

So what point would the answer to your question prove one way or the other? Not much. Which is also why OP's post is horseshit both from a rhetorical perspective and from a human perspective.

OP's theory is a minimization tactic. Oh, well the harassment is probably only one person. Oh, the harassment is probably by a troll or troublemaker who's trying to cause a gender war.

The author's case is not unique. In trying to minimize the source of harassment you are attempting to undermine the author's point.

She is being harassed for participating in our industry, and that is really fucked up. There are people in our industry who either believe this behavior to be acceptable, or they think they can get away with it.

So, once again, how about we dispense with the crack-pottery, either do something helpful or maybe just lay off the "add comment" button.

On the relevance of the question I saw one right away but I'll leave that until you make clear the various slurs you make do not apply to me here.

So you're interpreting my first three posts on HN as "trying to minimize the source of harassment"? Because that is a lie. If you persist in spreading it I'm likely to give up my embryonic life as a contributor here. I don't think you have any reason to do this to me or the OP, based on what he's written, but I get the idea. Nasty place to make a mark, despite the value I've accrued as lurker for a number of years.

The tentative interpretation of the OP makes the evil of the attack even worse than you think it is. Can't you see that? This doesn't make the OP's interpretation right but it's a clear consequence.

And nobody has answered another question of mine: the rules by which the OP has been suppressed and whether these can be reversed.

You're clearly not interested in actually engaging in a conversation, so, like i said before, i hope you can find ways to be excellent to others.

Have a good one.

That I found less annoying than your previous post. It's infuriating to be told that I'm not interested in actually engaging in a conversation when I'm sure that I am but it's less annoying than the implicatures in the previous one so thanks.

One thing it might be worth mentioning: my commercial experience of the software industry goes back to 1980. It's only with the advent of social media built on the Web that I've ever heard (those assumed to be) programmers express such horrific and hateful things to women. It incredibly bothers me.

Does that give some context for the kinds of things I'd be interested to discuss here?

I'd also still be grateful to know how exactly the OP became [flagged] though, thanks to jessaustin, I can now see it again personally.

Sure.

Everybody brings themselves and their assumptions to a conversation. All conversations are a negotiation over a shared space (however temporarily we may share that space).

I'm not calling into question whether you believe harassment is a bad thing or not (because frankly that's a pointless question to ask. Anybody who's asked point blank if they support harassment is going to say no).

The rhetorical structure of the conversation is what i am concerned about and steering the conversation around.

It is problematic from a rhetorical standpoint to debate whether or not the original author is being harassed by a single person or multiple people, because it distracts from the authors point, we can make no headway without further facts (which we are not privy to), and whether or not she's being harassed by a single person or multiple people is not pertinent to either the problems at hand or possible remedies.

So, then from a conversational point, one has to ask themselves what is the rhetorical purpose of asking the question? Is it intentionally to distract from the author's point? Is it to float & further the OP's theory? Is it morbid curiosity? Is it just carelessness or ignorance (and i mean that in the descriptive and non-pejorative fashion)?

Which of those are appropriate justifications for further pursuing the line of inquiry? I'd say none of them are, which is why i've been pretty vehement in knocking the foundation out from under them.

The door is always open for someone to supply a justification for why it matters and should be discussed, but skepticism isn't a good justification just the same way that pascal's wager isn't a good justification for believing in a Christian God.

You forgot the '#gamergate' at the end of your post.

Agreed. And this technique of divide and rule has been used elsewhere. The key word being rule.

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