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This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup

ariannasimpson.com

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Re: This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup

#81

Post by sentenza »

ossreality wrote: post #61
ANTSANTS wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that says more about the Bitcoin community than it does anything about the tech community, though. I imagine the average Bitcoin user as more a fedora-toting internet troll than a crypto-enthusiast. If you look at various cryptocurrency forums, the average user barely knows anything about computers, has little interest in learning more, and just wants someone to hold their hand through the process of getting…

>I imagine the average Bitcoin user as more a fedora-toting internet troll than a crypto-enthusiast. Well, at least you disclosed that you're just projecting that image onto strangers you don't know. I can make up reasonable sounding things too! Bitcoin supporters are more likely to be libertarians and thus are more likely to respect individuality, boundaries and privacy. Thus, I'm shocked to hear of a bitcoin suppor…

Ok. Wait now. You both are generalizing regarding Bitcoin supporters.

Yes, libertarians are likely to endorse Bitcoin, but at this point I'm pretty sure that libertarians are a minority in the Bitcoin world, because the Bitcoin world now had its eternal september.

Re: This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup

#82

Post by ossreality »

sentenza wrote: post #81
ossreality wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I imagine the average Bitcoin user as more a fedora-toting internet troll than a crypto-enthusiast. Well, at least you disclosed that you're just projecting that image onto strangers you don't know. I can make up reasonable sounding things too! Bitcoin supporters are more likely to be libertarians and thus are more likely to respect individuality, boundaries and privacy. Thus, I'm shocked to hear of a bitcoin suppor…

Ok. Wait now. You both are generalizing regarding Bitcoin supporters. Yes, libertarians are likely to endorse Bitcoin, but at this point I'm pretty sure that libertarians are a minority in the Bitcoin world, because the Bitcoin world now had its eternal september.

(I was intentionally generalizing to make a point, nothing more, I don't want to speak for any groups of people in general!)

edit: To those that apparently don't grok, I explicitly wrote "Of course not" in the post, pointing out that I wasn't actually asserting a hard connection between bitcoin and libertarianism.

Re: This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup

#83

Post by patrickmay »

throwawaycoder wrote: post #64
slewis wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not on the author to say something. There were a handful of other people there who could have spoken up. Please, everyone, if you witness this type of rude behavior, speak up. We are all, male, female, undecided, both etc. responsible for improving treatment of non-males in tech. Take an active role.

It's not always easy to know what kind of relationship people are in. That's probably a reason why people tend to wait until it escalates beyond a certain point. If people would interfere too soon, feminists wouldn't be happy either. Because that kind of behavior would imply that women are weak and unable to take care of themselves.

The average man is five to six inches taller and forty or more pounds heavier than the average woman. Men are also physically stronger pound for pound.

I'd rather take a tongue lashing for being an interfering white knight wannabe than not say something and find out that the woman was too uncomfortable, for all the reasons being discussed in this thread, to extricate herself from the person bothering her.

Re: This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup

#84

Post by blhack »

Nobody deserves to be physically or verbally assaulted like that, and it's up to the rest of the community (at everything: hackathons, meetups, open hours, etc.) to deal with toxic people.

People in situations like this: please if somebody is making you uncomfortable, speak up. Maybe the guy putting his hand on your leg is your boyfriend? The "good people" in the room want to make you feel comfortable, but sometimes its hard to determine if somebody is a friend or not.

Re: This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup

#85

Post by revelation »

blairbeckwith wrote: post #20
runjake wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really turned off by these posts, too. I roll my eyes and mutter "Christ, not another one". But I'm a male who doesn't have to worry about being groped and I keep my hands to myself. But let me guess how the reality turns out for her: - She says something about it. - The guy who is misbehaving is probably physically bigger than her. She may feel fearful of speaking up. or - She speaks up and gets called a "prude"…

disclaimer: I'm on her side. I've never really understood the potential-physical-confrontation argument. It must be a very, very small minority of men who's first reaction to being embarrassed and shamed by a woman is to physically assault her in public?

Of course, by simple statistics, it is men that need to be afraid of being physically assaulted.

Re: This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup

#86

Post by sentenza »

ossreality wrote: post #82
sentenza wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. Wait now. You both are generalizing regarding Bitcoin supporters. Yes, libertarians are likely to endorse Bitcoin, but at this point I'm pretty sure that libertarians are a minority in the Bitcoin world, because the Bitcoin world now had its eternal september.

(I was intentionally generalizing to make a point, nothing more, I don't want to speak for any groups of people in general!) edit: To those that apparently don't grok, I explicitly wrote "Of course not" in the post, pointing out that I wasn't actually asserting a hard connection between bitcoin and libertarianism.

Fair enough.

Re: This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup

#87

Post by vellum »

slewis wrote: post #37
meritt wrote: post #3

> In my mind, it’s a little preposterous that if I want to do so, however, I have to be ok with being felt up and indirectly insulted. To the author: You're right, it's unacceptable but you know how to fix it? You say something at the point in which it occurs. Nip it in the bud. Running off to write yet another gender-division-in-the-tech-world blog which will be read, primarily, by the sort of folk who already agree…

It's not on the author to say something. There were a handful of other people there who could have spoken up. Please, everyone, if you witness this type of rude behavior, speak up. We are all, male, female, undecided, both etc. responsible for improving treatment of non-males in tech. Take an active role.

There were a handful of other people there who could have spoken up.

If you don't know who any of these people are, or how they know each other, it's hard to tell what's going on. Having said that, I'm all for banning gropers from meetups.

Re: This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup

#88

Post by ariannahsimpson »

lincolnq wrote: post #8

Great examples of what not to do. I would guess that many of these are fairly easy mistakes to make if you haven't been inoculated. For most people, I think a single article like this is enough to "inoculate" -- to make the reader substantially more aware of potential mistakes / hidden assumptions in their social interactions, and likely change their behavior. Yet we still read lots of stories like these. I guess dis…

Yep, that was my objective. I hope it helps someone, at some point. Goal was not to bitch aimlessly.

Re: This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup

#89

Post by throwawaycoder »

hosh wrote: post #77
throwawaycoder wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This story made me realize that eventually we will get some sort of "FemCoin", though. Anybody who continues to use Bitcoin will be labeled a sexist and be made a social pariah. The reason is that women didn't have a fair chance to get into Bitcoin in time because the community was so hostile. Therefore all the Bitcoin wealth is unfairly shifted to white men. Edit: turns out Femcoin already exists https://bitbucket.o…

That's interesting. What you are suggesting is that, with lower barriers of entry to create new currencies, we will see a rise in forking economies just as open source and distributed source control allowed open source communities to maintain forks. Leaving aside that, however, notions of "fairness" is flawed. Fairness for me means that a hostile community self-destructs under its own weight of hostility, not that "B…

There are already a lot of forks of Bitcoin, some even moderately successful.

Actually independent of feminism I have long wondered if other cryptocoins might supersede Bitcoin exactly for the reason of fairness. Assume the world wakes up to Bitcoin in a couple of years. Then the BTC wealth will be very unequally distributed. Why should people start using BTC if they are poor in it? They could as well say "hey, cryptocurrencies are swell, but let's use another one were nobody had a headstart".

I guess part of dogecoins success story is that everybody got rich in dogecoin quickly (1 Million doges per minute). A lot of people who didn't like Bitcoin like dogecoin.

Re: This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup

#90

Post by ameister14 »

slewis wrote: post #37
meritt wrote: post #3

> In my mind, it’s a little preposterous that if I want to do so, however, I have to be ok with being felt up and indirectly insulted. To the author: You're right, it's unacceptable but you know how to fix it? You say something at the point in which it occurs. Nip it in the bud. Running off to write yet another gender-division-in-the-tech-world blog which will be read, primarily, by the sort of folk who already agree…

It's not on the author to say something. There were a handful of other people there who could have spoken up. Please, everyone, if you witness this type of rude behavior, speak up. We are all, male, female, undecided, both etc. responsible for improving treatment of non-males in tech. Take an active role.

I get where you're coming from, but it's been my experience that unless the behavior crosses a significant line, it's best not to intervene without more information.
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