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Comment by josefresco | Hacker News Reader

"Pao had thousands of people calling her a ching-chong cunt."

Is this a known/established fact? I see in the article a paragraph about how she received thousands of positive notes/emails but nothing about the # or volume of hate. It may not be documented here, but I'm curious if it was actually as widespread as implied.

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The front page of Reddit was littered with derogatory Pao posts for days on end following the shutdown of /r/fph and firing of Victoria. I'm sure she also received a large amount of private hate messages too.

I saw the front page, and many (most?) were not of the "ching-chong cunt" variety. I witnessed a lot of misplaced hate (we now know is "misplaced" after the fact) but there's a difference between "flaming" someone and using racist/bigoted language.

I've read through many of the top threads on Pao over the past few weeks, and from my experience about 30% of all posts publicly used the word "cunt" to describe Pao.

Maybe it was only hundreds of people using ten accounts each, but you only have to look at her comment history to see all the messages.

Hundreds of people on ten accounts each having the capacity to look like thousands of people is part of the problem Ellen Pao's essay is trying to highlight.

We're still human beings, and even though we all abstractly know that throwaway accounts exist, when you're getting 10,000 PMs that say you suck, it matters. Besides, evidence from Twitter suggests that it's demonstrably more often an easily-led mob than hundreds of sock-puppets these days.

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