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A Natural A/B Test of Harassment

developers.kongregate.com

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Re: A Natural A/B Test of Harassment

#71

Post by vacri »

hug wrote: post #23
andrewvc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're really selectively quoting those studies. From the first link (the pew poll): Young women, those 18-24, experience certain severe types of harassment at disproportionately high levels: 26% of these young women have been stalked online, and 25% were the target of online sexual harassment. In addition, they do not escape the heightened rates of physical threats and sustained harassment common to their male peers…

I haven't actually quoted anything, so I find it hard to believe I've selectively quoted. :) I think, in fact, you'll find that I didn't say that there was no difference, just that the differences weren't as large as I've seen claimed in various online discussions. I also made very sure to make sure that I pointed out the second study was both unscientific and poorly calibrated. The fact that you noticed that there w…

Using "a swear word" as the measuring stick for "abuse" is an unbelievably terrible methodology. "You're a feminazi, I've found your address, I'm going to hunt you down, rape you, and kill you" isn't abuse by this measure... unless you put 'fucking' in there somewhere.

Not to mention that the "I'm going to fucking rape you and kill you" sort of abuse is a tad harsher than the "fuck you, Mr President" sort of abuse.

Similarly, plenty of people swear as part of casual conversation and use swearing affectionately ("How the fuck are you?"). It's such a painfully bad methodology... word type does not necessarily indicate tone nor intent.

Looking a bit deeper, according to their methodology and looking at the word list, the following comments would be considered abusive: "you're gorgeous, wanna have sex" "vote for pedro, he's against smut" "join the campaign for testicle cancer research" "have you seen the vagina monologues yet?" "check out this picture of Harry with tennis balls" Interestingly, 'breast' is fine, but 'breasts' isn't - I guess that lets the breast cancer people discuss their issues?

Re: A Natural A/B Test of Harassment

#72

Post by wismer »

towaway5098 wrote: post #69
wismer wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A racist man says: "I'm not racist; I have black friends." Do you see what's wrong with that statement?

A Strawman? Guilty by association? Why don't you explain how that's not demeaning to thousands of people using #NotYourShield, who disagree? "I'm not racist; I have black friends." So you assume I'm white and doing this? That's an incredible assumption when you don't know anything about me personally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYqBdCmDR0M

Wow. Ok, I was afraid that this copypasta account was going to bring up "slam-dunk" fallacies to bring me to shame, however woefully misunderstood.

Let me spell it out for you - Just because some women happen to identify with the GooberGater movement doesn't mean that GooberGate is not, at the very LEAST, misogynistic in tone. If you can't understand that then there's nothing that anyone here can do for you.

Go back to /r/KotakuInAction. And tell the moderators there that they may want to drop their association with /r/dickgirls and /r/breakfemanazis

Re: A Natural A/B Test of Harassment

#73

Post by hug »

andrewvc wrote: post #64
hug wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Online harassment is not a small problem at all. It's a problem that definitely needs to be addressed, and women do see more of a specific type of harassment, which aligns nicely with what I said in my original post: "women clearly have it worse in terms of targeted sexual harassment." Like I said, it's interestingly overstated, though. Both you and andrewvc are engaging in the same type of cherrypicking I'm accused…

I think the thing you might not be aware of is that your posts are attempting to sidestep real issues. Instead of focusing the discussion around acknowledging and preventing abuse and discrimination, you're quibbling over whether women are harassed a whole lot, or a hell of a lot. Can you understand why that might seem like a diversionary tactic?

I can understand it looking like a derail. If this were a forum for the specific discussion of women's tech issues, I would never have brought it up, because it would be the wrong place.

What I'm trying to do is not say is "harassment hits everyone really hard, and I find is strange that articles about women being harassed hit the front page disproportionately more than articles about men being harassed."

This is not a commentary on "the real issue," it's a meta commentary. I can't see reason why there's not room for discussion on both within the comment threads.

Re: A Natural A/B Test of Harassment

#74

Post by ANTSANTS »

wismer wrote: post #63
towaway5098 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look to women in the industry and ask what they think. And not just the indies who are outside the industry. https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2jk2rq/ama_... If you have a twitter account, go ask #NotYourShield what women think of this as well. Don't just take any single persons word on this. Also, is this being downvoted because you don't want to read it?

A racist man says: "I'm not racist; I have black friends." Do you see what's wrong with that statement?

Another racist man says "hey black person, your opinions are invalid because you've internalized racism. Please, let me, a liberal white man, speak for you."

Re: A Natural A/B Test of Harassment

#75

Post by rcfox »

paulnechifor wrote: post #55

I thought better of HN before this. It looks like if you don't toe the line you get downvoted and your comments get [killed].

I saw all of the dead comments, and my first thought was that the mods had probably done a good job of cleaning up the vitriol. I was curious though, so I enabled showdead, and while I'm not sure that I agree with many of the dead comments, most of them are not noise. It's clear that there has been some emotional voting going on.

Re: A Natural A/B Test of Harassment

#76

Post by [deleted] »

jzwinck wrote: post #57

Disclaimer: I agree there is a real social problem here. The rest of this message is solely about statistics (inspired by the language of statistics used in the article, like "A/B Test," "statistical significance," and "99.9% confidence level"). The article opens with an analysis of messages to one male and one (self-selected) female from a community which has a large male majority. Most people in the world are heter…

[deleted]

Re: A Natural A/B Test of Harassment

#77

Post by gohrt »

timmclean wrote: post #46
yummyfajitas wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In either case i lose 1-3 seconds of my day pressing delete (note that I have received threats of sexual violence, and delete worked on them too). So yes. If you feel differently I'd be curious to hear why.

The psychological impact of "I'll drink your blood out of your c--- after I rip it open" [1] is very different from that of recruiter spam. [1] https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/504718160902492160

Wow, Twitter allows this content on their network?

Re: A Natural A/B Test of Harassment

#78

Post by Pxtl »

chiaro wrote: post #2

A 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…

I tend to think Gamergate was a brewing culture war that was just looking for a spark to start the fire. Gamer culture has had a persecution complex for well over a generation, particularly with respect to the press - even the gaming press. Being repeatedly insulted and attacked by the media has made them circle their wagons instinctively. Combined with a substantial fraction of gamers that are intensely misogynistic and this ugliness was practically inevitable.

The problem is that gamers picked a fight with SJWs, which are effectively their own mirror image - the same obsessiveness and mean-spirited put-downs and in-group high-fives. I mean, the fact that the SJWs are right is almost immaterial - in the words of The Big Lebowski: "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole". Online social justice groups have a knack for utterly alienating and insulting everyone they could ever hope to convince, even those who broadly agree with them.

Combine that with Gawker media's spectacular ability to stir the pot, and a few prominent right-wing culture-war bloggers feeding the gamer-gaters' persecution complex, and we're seeing outright radicalization.

You isolate and insult a guy and then give him an online culture of like-minded outcasts and they start encouraging each other to do drastic things. There are obvious parallels to other movements of angry young men...

It's a perfect storm, and it's only going to get worse before it gets better since anybody who's trying to talk the gamergaters down from the ledge has to have infinite patience for their monomaniacal rationalizations. They see themselves as the defenders of rationality surrounded by SJWs who fling glib insults... and gaming is founded on endlessly grinding against a pointless task for fun.

It's profoundly sad to see so many gamers rally behind that gamergate banner. To see harassment and threats and ruining women's lives become the public image of core gamer culture.

I'm really worried that this is going to get worse before it gets better. The "us vs. them" mentality of the hardcore gamer world is too old and well-established, and everybody else involved is either feeding into it or is drowned out by the din.

Re: A Natural A/B Test of Harassment

#79

Post by [deleted] »

wismer wrote: post #72
towaway5098 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Strawman? Guilty by association? Why don't you explain how that's not demeaning to thousands of people using #NotYourShield, who disagree? "I'm not racist; I have black friends." So you assume I'm white and doing this? That's an incredible assumption when you don't know anything about me personally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYqBdCmDR0M

Wow. Ok, I was afraid that this copypasta account was going to bring up "slam-dunk" fallacies to bring me to shame, however woefully misunderstood. Let me spell it out for you - Just because some women happen to identify with the GooberGater movement doesn't mean that GooberGate is not, at the very LEAST, misogynistic in tone. If you can't understand that then there's nothing that anyone here can do for you. Go back…

[deleted]

Re: A Natural A/B Test of Harassment

#80

Post by gohrt »

knowtheory wrote: post #45
defen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The extreme nutshell version is that a female indie game developer supposedly slept with a male video game journalist, and this supposedly let to favorable coverage for her game that would not have happened otherwise. The surface phenomenon is that a lot of people united under the banner of #gamergate to protest this breach of journalistic ethics. The dark side is that it seems like it's really just a bunch of people…

Those are the stated reasons. It's worth noting no such review was ever written for Zoe Quinn's game. GamerGate has now doxxed and threatened a number of women in the gaming world (developers, critics, actresses) and Phil Fish the creator of Fez. They publicly organize to drive advertisers away from publications which disagree with them or call Gamergate out as misogynistic or threatening.

The thing that confuses me (as a non-"Gamer" netizen) is that I am constantly bombarded with the "meta' arguing and hand-wringing about "GamerGate" on HN etc, but have yet to see anything actually from the core activity of the "movement" or whatever.
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