101–110 of 311 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I had a nickel for every death threat I've received on the Internet I'd be rich. Death threats from Internet brigade squads are wildly different from actual death threats you need to worry about. Hence the downplaying.
How do you tell the difference?
I'm currently working in a team that is 50% women, and I'm amazed at how many stories they have of previous work experiences and the culture of acceptance in medium sized companies. I hope Jessie doesn't give up. Not only for the sake of our industry, but also for the sake of girls who want to make it in this industry and not have to put up with what jessie has had to put up with. Her (or any person) having to leave…
This absolutely needs police action. Regardless of what your stance is on unwanted sexual attention, sending death threats is not acceptable.
I think police action may be more difficult than us taking responsibility ourselves. Should be both.
Every time I see posts like this, I see people commenting on it with varying statement to the effect of "that's a shame, but most people in tech aren't like that", or "I'm so tired of seeing posts like this, quit making a fuss." And that makes me so angry. Sure, maybe not everyone in the industry is an arsehole. But enough people are, and those people are vocal enough, that a significant number of people feel disgust…
You have evidence to back this up? Honest question.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This absolutely needs police action. Regardless of what your stance is on unwanted sexual attention, sending death threats is not acceptable.
Agreed. What Jessie is dealing with is classic internet trolls. They don't give a damn about "Women in Tech", her or anything else. All that interests them is finding a target to dig a reaction out of "for the lulz". They do it because it gives them little endorphin pops to think about how upset their victim must be and because it's very low risk. That's all there is to it. If there was any perception of risk in thei…
While I'm hardly a rigorous ethnographer of the Internet's cesspits, my (often firsthand) observations suggest that "for the lulz" was never as significant a motivation as it was made out to be, and it's less so now than then.
Too, trolling "for the lulz" tends to show a pretty typical pattern of high intensity combined with short period -- people doing it just for fun tend to get bored and wander off after a little while, save in the relatively rare case of a high-value "lulzcow" who can be trolled over and over to good effect (i.e., producing responses which lulz trolls consider funny.)
Meanwhile, the attacks directed at our female colleagues seem to vary widely in intensity, but to occur over a relatively long period; sometimes it ebbs, and sometimes (as for example in the wake of increased public prominence, such as a conference presentation) it hits high tide, but pretty much all our colleagues who've chosen to speak up about it have described it as an overall ongoing thing.
That's not a characteristic pattern of lulz trolls; for one thing, they don't have the staying power, and for another, lulz trolls actually do go away if you don't feed them. Instead, that's a pattern characteristic of people who are doing what they do, not for its own sake, but as a tactic to advance some purpose -- in this case, I think a reasonable surmise is that they actually are trying to drive women away from the industry, by making it just not worth putting up the bullshit involved in staying in it.
Every time I see posts like this, I see people commenting on it with varying statement to the effect of "that's a shame, but most people in tech aren't like that", or "I'm so tired of seeing posts like this, quit making a fuss." And that makes me so angry. Sure, maybe not everyone in the industry is an arsehole. But enough people are, and those people are vocal enough, that a significant number of people feel disgust…
> Every time I see posts like this, I see people commenting on it with varying statement to the effect of "that's a shame, but most people in tech aren't like that", or "I'm so tired of seeing posts like this, quit making a fuss." I'm tired of people whining in a blog post instead of calling the police. Death threats and violence threats like this are unacceptable. CALL THE POLICE. After a couple of high-profile case…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Those sorts of messages -- even in isolation -- have real-world, often physical, consequences. No, in the vast majority of cases they don't. Trolls gonna troll, sorry. I'll bet we can count on one hand the number of times Internet death threats have led to actual deaths. There's a reason authorities don't investigate or prosecute stuff like this. >This attitude that sexual harassment is only harmful if it's a physic…
You're trying to move the goalpost here, and folks are right to not let you do it. If you think abusive behavior is OK, show some courage of your convictions and just say it outright. Don't sit here playing word games that make you look like a coward.
I don't think abusive behavior is OK, I just don't think Internet PMs or e-mails even register above 1 on the 10-point scale of things that are abusive. Sexual assault at a conference is reprehensible and must be dealt with; abusive private messages are an uncomfortable consequence of participating in an anonymous distributed network.
Just google "Kathy Sierra" and see why.
Every time I see posts like this, I see people commenting on it with varying statement to the effect of "that's a shame, but most people in tech aren't like that", or "I'm so tired of seeing posts like this, quit making a fuss." And that makes me so angry. Sure, maybe not everyone in the industry is an arsehole. But enough people are, and those people are vocal enough, that a significant number of people feel disgust…
> Every time I see posts like this, I see people commenting on it with varying statement to the effect of "that's a shame, but most people in tech aren't like that", or "I'm so tired of seeing posts like this, quit making a fuss." I'm tired of people whining in a blog post instead of calling the police. Death threats and violence threats like this are unacceptable. CALL THE POLICE. After a couple of high-profile case…
What evidence do you have that the police will do something? We could look at people like Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian, who I feel confident we'll agree have experienced massive and credible death threats. They report the threats they get to the police and FBI. Who's in jail as a result?
Men that harass women for being in the tech field are juvenile. If anyone talks to my daughter like that, or sends her messages like that...God help them.