Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online • Hacker News Board

Re: Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online

#21

Post by benten10 » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 2:35 PM UTC

jbob2000 wrote: post #14

There's nothing we can do. Her music reached hundreds of thousands of people, of course there will be some bad apples. As more and more people start using the internet, this is only going to increase. There's going to be 3.5 billion people on the internet soon, nobody can stop that tide. Celebrities have solved this problem by moving a step away from the population by using publicists and assistants to communicate. P…

Compare the second part you say to the following:

>IF I come and creep you out, stalk you, threaten harm to you and your family, maybe you should just change name and location, and go live in a different state.

Pre-empting the 'but this is internet, just stop looking at it', argument:

Essentially, how is it different from "if X group of people doesn't want to be harassed, they should just avoid their harassers, and not go to where they are". Replace the "X" with women, or persons of any race.

Re: Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online

#22

Post by dbg31415 » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 2:35 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #17

jbob2000 wrote: post #14

There's nothing we can do. Her music reached hundreds of thousands of people, of course there will be some bad apples. As more and more people start using the internet, this is only going to increase. There's going to be 3.5 billion people on the internet soon, nobody can stop that tide. Celebrities have solved this problem by moving a step away from the population by using publicists and assistants to communicate. P…

>> Perhaps people facing consistent harassment like this should try something similar? Or work under a pseudonym? Perhaps we need to get rid of pseudonyms. A lot of this behavior would stop if people had to be identifiable. Although that doesn't seem to stop them all - you see some real names and email addresses in there.

No. Look, anonymity is a wonderful thing.

Candide, The Silence Dogood Letters, even The Mill on the Floss wouldn't have been written had the authors had to use their real names. Way too many examples to count. Hard to imagine the Revolutionary war getting as much support state-side as quickly as it did without Common Sense, which was published anonymously. So you can probably say, "Without anonymity you wouldn't be in America."

Whatever the problem, the solution should just about never be "get rid of freedom." Having some sort of NSA-approved sign-on for the internet (AKA Facebook) would be horrible. Read 1984, or Fahrenheit 451, or any other book against authoritarianism. First you make a list, then you analyze, then you start crossing people off it...

Re: Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online

#23

Post by daleharvey » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 2:35 PM UTC

> There's nothing we can do

Yes there is, the first thing would be to not attempt to dismiss it

> "of course there will be some bad apples."

Or to victim blame

> Perhaps people facing consistent harassment like this should try something similar?

People facing similar harassment are all women, telling them to hide certainly isnt the answer

(apologies, was supposed to be a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10425590, I cant internet)

Re: Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online

#24

Post by dijit » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 2:36 PM UTC

This is a phenomenon I see a lot on social media honestly.

Go to any tweet of Emma Watson and try to read the replies without cringing. It's sobering enough to never, ever, ever! wish fame on anybody you love, let alone yourself.

The internet is a platform of speech for all with no restriction and it only takes 0.01% of the crazy, batshit or just fanatical people to make it seem like there is no hope for humanity.

I feel bad for her, being a female may make you feel somewhat less secure (I can't speak for woman-kind so I could be way off base), while male stars get the same kind of treatment- they're more likely to feel pretty sure that they can fend off any depraved attack when their body guards are not around.

For people that are not super rich but have a reasonable amount of spotlight, this can be the worst of both worlds.

Re: Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online

#25

Post by benten10 » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 2:36 PM UTC

aikah wrote: post #13

mulander wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be funny if they experience harassment out of being exposed as a harassing person. This seems something that could happen on the internet.

> Would be funny if they experience harassment out of being exposed as a harassing person. This seems something that could happen on the internet. Yeah, the whole vendetta thing certainly is "funny" /s That's exactly how people defending "righteous causes" end up being trolls and harassers themselves.

>That's exactly how people defending "righteous causes" end up being trolls and harassers themselves.

When one misuses their abilities to harass/intimidate others, some of their liberty should be taken away, wouldn't you agree?

Re: Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online

#26

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 2:37 PM UTC

jbob2000 wrote: post #14

There's nothing we can do. Her music reached hundreds of thousands of people, of course there will be some bad apples. As more and more people start using the internet, this is only going to increase. There's going to be 3.5 billion people on the internet soon, nobody can stop that tide. Celebrities have solved this problem by moving a step away from the population by using publicists and assistants to communicate. P…

Or perhaps creeps could try stop being creeps.

Re: Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online

#27

Post by bsenftner » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 2:40 PM UTC

6stringmerc wrote: post #7

What a terrible experience, yet I'm not surprised to know such things happen. I hope it's theraputic for her to get these out, and if she can turn the intimidation into some financial gains then so be it. Is there a way to discourage the behavior? It's a tough problem. As an anecdote, I just had a discussion with a female community college professor, PhD, one who had plenty of bench science experience before teaching…

Great comment, not sure why it was down voted. Cultures outside the US are often surprising.

Re: Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online

#28

Post by leppr » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 2:40 PM UTC

leppr wrote: post #15

k__ wrote: post #4

I read that (deep) learning algos can decide if a message is positive or negative. Could they learn if a message is a harassment so we could implement a automatic filter for such things? -- Edit -- I mean this is really bad and we should get these dudes to stop somehow. But it greatly reduced my anger looking into my inbox, when I stopped seeing spam in there. The spammers did never stop...

Wow, that's a genius idea, you must be a very smart person. Last week I heard on BBC Click that Google has open-sourced their deep learning algorithm, so now even people like me can code AI apps. It's actually such a good idea that I am going to start working on it right away for my personal usage as a userscript to hide negative comments and keep only the positive ones on sites like HN, because too often people resp…

Heh, before my comment gets downvoted to oblivion: the apparently too subtle point was that for the foreseeable future machines will be unable to detect this kind of passive-aggressive comments, and that trolls aren't dumb, they will just (deep) learn to be more subtle in their trolling (and so more damaging).

Re: Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online

#29

Post by JoeAltmaier » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 2:42 PM UTC

leppr wrote: post #28

leppr wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's a genius idea, you must be a very smart person. Last week I heard on BBC Click that Google has open-sourced their deep learning algorithm, so now even people like me can code AI apps. It's actually such a good idea that I am going to start working on it right away for my personal usage as a userscript to hide negative comments and keep only the positive ones on sites like HN, because too often people resp…

Heh, before my comment gets downvoted to oblivion: the apparently too subtle point was that for the foreseeable future machines will be unable to detect this kind of passive-aggressive comments, and that trolls aren't dumb, they will just (deep) learn to be more subtle in their trolling (and so more damaging).

Yeah even 12-year-olds can put swear words into their online names by using slang, special characters etc. If deep learning can be outwitted by a 12-year-old...

Re: Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online

#30

Post by k__ » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 2:42 PM UTC

leppr wrote: post #28

leppr wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's a genius idea, you must be a very smart person. Last week I heard on BBC Click that Google has open-sourced their deep learning algorithm, so now even people like me can code AI apps. It's actually such a good idea that I am going to start working on it right away for my personal usage as a userscript to hide negative comments and keep only the positive ones on sites like HN, because too often people resp…

Heh, before my comment gets downvoted to oblivion: the apparently too subtle point was that for the foreseeable future machines will be unable to detect this kind of passive-aggressive comments, and that trolls aren't dumb, they will just (deep) learn to be more subtle in their trolling (and so more damaging).

So it was a meta-joke about being passive-aggressive?