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One Week of Harassment on Twitter

femfreq.tumblr.com

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Re: One Week of Harassment on Twitter

#61

Post by sehr »

itistoday2 wrote: post #57

This doesn't seem like tech news. Flagged.

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Re: One Week of Harassment on Twitter

#62

Post by epistasis »

itistoday2 wrote: post #57

This doesn't seem like tech news. Flagged.

I'm not a huge gamer, but this is really important to me in terms of tech hiring. It's a serious problem that I didn't know about until graduate school. One of the few women working on file systems was the type that in addition to being friendly and charming, did not tolerate any shit, and would actually speak out about it. Since those days my eyes have been opened about the small percentage of people that do terrible things to women in tech without men ever seeing the terrible things that happen.

I wish that this post had stayed up on the front page longer, so that more people could see 1) what terrible shit goes on in this world, and 2) how a tiny minority of people try to minimize or excuse it in comment threads, and 3) how they get downvoted into oblivion as they should.

These three bits of evidence point out that the solution to tech's problems are pretty easy in that they are not endemic and broadly spread to everyone in the field. There's a tiny but very vocal minority of terrible people, and by either changing their behavior or not hiring them, a whole bunch more people would be willing to work in the field.

Seriously, if anybody thinks that these tweets at FemFreq are not so bad, just quit your job and find some other field to work in. That type of person is hurting us all. Alternatively they could grow a spine and not be so hateful.

Re: One Week of Harassment on Twitter

#63

Post by wpietri »

cdr wrote: post #19
hoopism wrote: post #4

Scary to think that the venn diagram of young gamers and future programmers is pretty substantial. The ratio of men/women in college was pretty abysmal. This may not be the exact cause, but it certainly doesn't help the cause. Truly is a shame that so much talent is driven to other fields due to lack of basic social skills.

All you have to do is watch the HN comments on any thread that (even tangentially) mentions women. There's no shortage of of existing programmers / old gamers that are virulently hostile.

Definitely. I'm involved here because I think of HN as my people. But it's an embarrassment to me elsewhere. Sort of like that one cranky old relative who can be perfectly nice but also will spew out some unbelievable shit.

Re: One Week of Harassment on Twitter

#64

Post by wpietri »

ctur wrote: post #5

Anonymous free speech can sure bring out some ugly things in people. Freedoms, though, often cut both ways, protecting important and significant behaviors but also sometimes allowing sad and pathetic ones. I think it would be delicious punishment if the author of each of those tweets were forced to read them out loud, in front of their mothers, sisters, wives, friends, bosses, coworkers, and children. If someone's wi…

As makers and participants in internet culture, I think it's incumbent on all of us to find ways to minimize the downsides of anonymity and pseudonymity while maximizing the benefits. Because otherwise, the baby's getting thrown out with the bathwater.

Note, for example, that Facebook doesn't allow any anonymity, and Quora only allows it with tight controls. I think the long-term trend is to get rid of it, which would be a shame.

Re: One Week of Harassment on Twitter

#66

Post by wpietri »

For those who don't normally have "showdead" turned on, it's worth doing so for this article. A) I'm grateful that HN's more active moderation is taking out some of the trash. And B) it's worth noting the details of the sort of awfulness that's getting moderated here. This isn't just a gamer problem.

Re: One Week of Harassment on Twitter

#67

Post by ssijak »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #59
ssijak wrote: post #55

One of the tweets on that date (26.1) on femfreq channel was about some influential "angry" youtubers slandering her and in those bunch she also put ThunderFoot who is really OK guy who posts videos about astronomy, chemistry, atheism, etc. That guy also received hundreds of threats (including death threats) from feminists and religious people but you will never see that on the news and he will not label all groups o…

" after 2 years she made only one video of that series" In actual fact, she's come out with several, and as a backer I'm perfectly ready to accept "delays from pressure of constant abuse and death threats" as a fair reason for delay.

My bad, she covered 2 topics after 2 years and recently she covered the third from her list on the Kickstarter. So, by now after ~2.5 years she made "Damsel in Distress", "Ms. Male Character" and "Woman as Background Decoration". For me that is taking way to long to fulfil kickstarter promises, knowing that she even got 25x amount of money (and more from other sources and asking for more all the time), because she is actively engaged in other public activities (conferences, activism, giving speeches, lectures, etc.). She basically converted this to her full time job and not one time project. She can do whatever she wants of course and you can back her even if she do not fulfil her promise ever, I just find problem in the fact that whenever someone puts out some valid criticism of her work and methods he or she (yes there are many woman gamers or non gamers who disagree with Anita) gets silenced and labeled as hater for no proper reason. And those people are also harassed on the net and get threats but you never see that in the media, I do not get why, problems can not be solved without honest look on both sides of any argument.

Re: One Week of Harassment on Twitter

#68

Post by eropple »

wpietri wrote: post #63
cdr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you have to do is watch the HN comments on any thread that (even tangentially) mentions women. There's no shortage of of existing programmers / old gamers that are virulently hostile.

Definitely. I'm involved here because I think of HN as my people. But it's an embarrassment to me elsewhere. Sort of like that one cranky old relative who can be perfectly nice but also will spew out some unbelievable shit.

Yup. As I've said before, I've considered leaving because this place generally seems to accept utterly reprehensible behavior. I don't understand why aggressive sexism (and racism too, though that's not this thread) is tolerated on Y Combinator's doorstep. I told dang when I spoke to him about this that I think not eighty-sixing racists and sexists will self-select out the people who aren't, and that's a real bad look for YC.

I've flagged more posts in this thread than I have at any point on HN, by a lot. It's kind of amazing.

Re: One Week of Harassment on Twitter

#69

Post by geoelectric »

hoopism wrote: post #4

Scary to think that the venn diagram of young gamers and future programmers is pretty substantial. The ratio of men/women in college was pretty abysmal. This may not be the exact cause, but it certainly doesn't help the cause. Truly is a shame that so much talent is driven to other fields due to lack of basic social skills.

The Venn diagram of young gamers and the entire population is pretty substantial, so I'd be cautious about overvaluing this correlation.

Re: One Week of Harassment on Twitter

#70

Post by itistoday2 »

sehr wrote: post #61
itistoday2 wrote: post #57

This doesn't seem like tech news. Flagged.

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it…

I agree very much. I didn't find this interesting, nor did it gratify my intellectual curiosity. Glad it's off the front page.

Would be terrible if HN devolved into a mess of posts about how dumb and hateful random comments are on the internet and turned into another outrage generating machine (just like the TV news you mentioned).

BTW, here's a nice HN alternative that someone pointed me to recently (for those of us that are sad to see what HN is devolving into):

https://lobste.rs

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