A Natural A/B Test of Harassment
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A Natural A/B Test of Harassment
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Re: A Natural A/B Test of Harassment
#2A shame the point needs to be repeatedly made. A five minute foray into the wasteland that is twitch chat will show some pretty stark differences between how men and women become targets for trolling and vitriol.
While some of the concerns of the whole gamergate mess were perhaps reasonable at some point in time, the whole thing has disappeared under a huge number of people who see their any supposed righteousness as license to indulge in the pettiest of attacks that aligns them with segments of society I'd foolishly thought we'd largely left behind.
Seriously, if you're looking for some injustices in the world to help make your life meaningful, you can do a hell of a lot better than "ethics in video game journalism", vitriolic element or no.
Re: A Natural A/B Test of Harassment
#3> It’s pretty easy to look at these messages and see young males acting out in hopes of attention. But what societal and psychological dynamic is at play that they target a female at such a disproportionate rate to a male?
Could be a million things. How about testosterone, the sexualization of just about everything online and on TV, and the courage brought on by anonymity on the internet? Of course, asking what "societal and psychological dynamic is at play" shows a very clear naivite on Ms. Greer's part. That is an impossibly difficult question to answer. And like all other overly-broad, overly-difficult questions, it will never be taken seriously.
> Running these numbers through a statistical significance test confirms what should be obvious to anyone following Gamergate: with a 99.9% confidence level it is harder to be a woman than a man in the game industry, independent of what you say or do.
Maybe, but let's not forget what incident started Gamergate: Zoe Quinn; an entitled, unethical, and hypocritical developer (female or otherwise).
Furthermore, I'm sure it's more difficult to be woman pilot, a woman programmer or a woman CEO than their male counterparts. This has been known for a while now. I'm not sure why Gamergate et al. think they stumbled across some novel sociological phenomenon.
Re: A Natural A/B Test of Harassment
#4> It’s pretty easy to look at these messages and see young males acting out in hopes of attention. But what societal and psychological dynamic is at play that they target a female at such a disproportionate rate to a male? Could be a million things. How about testosterone, the sexualization of just about everything online and on TV, and the courage brought on by anonymity on the internet? Of course, asking what "soci…
Gamergate claims to be about journalistic integrity. I hear the names of women, but never the male journalists.
> Maybe, but let's not forget what incident started Gamergate: Zoe Quinn; an entitled, unethical, and hypocritical developer (female or otherwise).
You're spreading the same lies.
Re: A Natural A/B Test of Harassment
#5> It’s pretty easy to look at these messages and see young males acting out in hopes of attention. But what societal and psychological dynamic is at play that they target a female at such a disproportionate rate to a male? Could be a million things. How about testosterone, the sexualization of just about everything online and on TV, and the courage brought on by anonymity on the internet? Of course, asking what "soci…
Gamergate claims to be about journalistic integrity. I hear the names of women, but never the male journalists. > Maybe, but let's not forget what incident started Gamergate: Zoe Quinn; an entitled, unethical, and hypocritical developer (female or otherwise). You're spreading the same lies.
I'm not spreading any lies. It's incontrovertible that Zoe Quinn had a relationship with a Kotaku editor (a male that has also been shunned publicly). In any other industry, this would be grounds for conflict of interest.
Let's not kid ourselves, there is definitely a problem with the lack of women in tech, but Zoe Quinn is not the role model you want.
Re: A Natural A/B Test of Harassment
#6> It’s pretty easy to look at these messages and see young males acting out in hopes of attention. But what societal and psychological dynamic is at play that they target a female at such a disproportionate rate to a male? Could be a million things. How about testosterone, the sexualization of just about everything online and on TV, and the courage brought on by anonymity on the internet? Of course, asking what "soci…
Gamergate claims to be about journalistic integrity. I hear the names of women, but never the male journalists. > Maybe, but let's not forget what incident started Gamergate: Zoe Quinn; an entitled, unethical, and hypocritical developer (female or otherwise). You're spreading the same lies.
> Gamergate claims to be about journalistic integrity. I hear the names of women, but never the male journalists.
And let's not forget: most of the women who have been attacked have little to nothing to do with journalism. Felicia Day is an actress, for crying out loud!
Re: A Natural A/B Test of Harassment
#7I came to a very different conclusion from the data than the authors. The difference in the numbers was not substantively different (an absolute difference of about 1%) and much, much lower than I would have expected. The difference could easily be explained by other differences between the two founders other than sex and perhaps this could be pointed as evidence that once we removed those factors this small difference would evaporate entirely.
Re: A Natural A/B Test of Harassment
#8What interests me about these discussions is that the common perception seems to be that women face a level of harassment hugely disproportionate to that experienced by men, however studies don't show such a large gap.
There was a recent study by Pew[1] that shows the differing levels of harassment faced by men and women in various communities. Unsurprisingly, online gaming was skewed massively towards being more welcoming to men.
Unfortunately since the actual survey questions don't seem to be available, there's not too much in the way of insight you can make from the Pew poll.
There's also this decidedly non-scientific study of Twitter[2] which shows male celebrities receive more "abuse" on Twitter than female celebrities, where "abuse" means "something tweeted @ them with a swear word in it."
All of this, non-scientific as it is, makes me wonder if the common perception about women having it so much worse online is actually true. I will note, however, that anecdotally women clearly have it worse in terms of targeted sexual harassment.
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[1] http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/
[2] http://www.demos.co.uk/press_releases/demosmalecelebritiesre...
Re: A Natural A/B Test of Harassment
#9> It’s pretty easy to look at these messages and see young males acting out in hopes of attention. But what societal and psychological dynamic is at play that they target a female at such a disproportionate rate to a male? Could be a million things. How about testosterone, the sexualization of just about everything online and on TV, and the courage brought on by anonymity on the internet? Of course, asking what "soci…
Gamergate claims to be about journalistic integrity. I hear the names of women, but never the male journalists. > Maybe, but let's not forget what incident started Gamergate: Zoe Quinn; an entitled, unethical, and hypocritical developer (female or otherwise). You're spreading the same lies.
There was a post responding to yours which claimed it was 'incontrovertible truth' that Zoe Quinn got favourable coverage from a Kotaku writer she was in a personal relationship with. This is false.
It's now deleted, but I wanted to set the record straight anyways. These kinds of baseless rumours are really annoying because the misinformation is repeated over and over and over again.
"On March 31, Nathan published the only Kotaku article he's written involving Zoe Quinn. It was about Game Jam, a failed reality show that Zoe and other developers were upset about being on. At the time, Nathan and Zoe were professional acquaintances. He quoted blog posts written by Zoe and others involved in the show. Shortly after that, in early April, Nathan and Zoe began a romantic relationship. He has not written about her since. Nathan never reviewed Zoe Quinn's game Depression Quest, let alone gave it a favorable review."
http://kotaku.com/in-recent-days-ive-been-asked-several-time...
Re: A Natural A/B Test of Harassment
#10Is this a lot? I've probably hat to press my "delete" and "report spam" buttons 10-20x this week due solely to "I need a Scala ubermenschen".
So while there seems to be a statistically significant gap between men and women, the problem in this case hardly seems clinically significant. 36 over 5 years is barely a little over 1 per 2 months.