"A lot of the comments were about the post’s grammar and structure; far fewer were about the actual content."
Of course they were. There is a despicable passive-aggressive smugness that is far too common, involving demonstrating one's superiority by sniping at the medium (no pun intended) instead of addressing the message; it allows one to show off without having to take any risks. I've found it very common in circles in which many participants spent their formative years being clever and being told how clever they are.
Aside from the other bits mentioned in the article isn't 'comments about the post's grammar and structure' one of the most valuable pieces of feedback? I am not sure why they would call it out as a bad thing. If you are trying to send ideas and the person trying to receive the ideas is having more trouble trying to decode how you sent it rather than work with the idea being sent you have a problem. When you get earnest critical critique that is more rewarding any day than a +1 or like on facebook, since you know exactly what needs to be done for next time.
As a writer, I completely agree with you. Solid feedback about grammar, sentence structure, and even tone of voice would have been super helpful.
That said, not all feedback is meant to be constructive - that can come across clearly, even on the internet. It's unfortunate that a young woman, clearly still in high school, felt torn down instead of built up.
The most important feedback I'd like to send to the young women who publish with us is that there's room for your voice and your opinion, and you'll be treated with respect.
You're definitely right that we can't share our ideas if we don't effectively communicate them. I know I deeply appreciate when people take the time to respond with comments to help make what I've shared better. +1 are always great, but comments are better :)
For me, how we write is as important as what we right - both need to be good enough to successfully communicate our ideas.
I also want to share that I often encounter copy-editing responses that I see as cover for bias. Not all copy-editing feedback is a cover for bias, but much of what I see is - I think this happens because it is easier and less risky to comment, critique or outright attack the form of a position rather than engaging with the with substance of the position.
The kind of bias I'm referring to, and the sort of responses it can lead to is described in this article:
For me, how we write is as important as what we right
I see what you did there, and it suggests a playfulness that means a question I was crafting about the literalness of that statement can be dumped. If anything, you've demonstrated that the wrong word in the right place can carry an enormous subtext. This, though, is a layer beyond merely correct spelling.
I am not sure why they would call it out as a bad thing.
It is a bad thing when it is used as a way to belittle someone. As a way to smugly dismiss their argument without having to actually examine it. That's bad, and it's common, and it's often done with a childish, passive-aggressive meanness of spirit. There's nothing inherently wrong with helping someone communicate better; it becomes a bad thing when it's used as a way to belittle someone and dismiss their argument on grounds that have nothing to do with the actual argument.
In this very thread, clifantic makes it clear that s/he will ignore what someone has to say if they are bad at expressing it.
one of the most valuable pieces of feedback?
Not nearly as valuable as feedback about the actual message, I would say. Even Shakespeare couldn't turn falsehood into truth by beauty of expression.
I don't know what grammar points they were discussing, since the post was taken down, but usually when I see comments about grammar on the internet, they're about pretty egregious mistakes - usually the kind that very, very uneducated people make.
Here's the thing that you "I'm not writing a college essay!" people seem to miss - for a lot of us, keeping track of the difference between "your" and "you're" or "their", "there" and "they're" takes literally zero concentration. I'd go so far as to say that a majority of native English speakers have never, ever (since elementary school, anyway), mixed those words up accidentally. These aren't mistakes that non-native English speakers make either. Keeping track of proper grammar is, by far, the least difficult part of expressing thoughts in written form. If you're prone to making mistakes like that... you probably aren't very smart. And what you have to say probably isn't very profound. You really shouldn't be writing, you should be reading. You shouldn't be talking, you should be listening.
> "You really shouldn't be writing, you should be reading"
So basically you are the type of person that caused the problem being discussed here.
There is a difference between someone making mistakes and someone feeling the need to point them out in public or private, or to judge who should be writing.
Maybe they should be reading more. But who are you or any other anonymous person to comment on that. If you don't have anything nice to say...
Sure. There are people who are actually incapable of learning how to tie their own shoelaces, too. We (rightly) pity those people, but we don't turn to them for deep intellectual insights.
Here's one datapoint, as a native English speaker I used to mix up "your" and "to" and still always mix up "it's", use "alot", etc. I learned English orally so in my brain they are literally the same words. Over time I've learned to distinguish them.
I think you vastly overestimate how many people are aware of these things. The people that are aware, are only aware because of experience with assholes like you. You don't need to show off how clever you are that you know some pointless rule.
Like Jesus, how fucking arrogant and smug you must be to say "you probably aren't very smart" over a trivial grammar mistake. There may be some correlation between spelling errors and intelligence, but certainly not a 100% correlation.
I'm going to double down here - you, Houshalter, are not very smart. Smart people don't make those mistakes, and they aren't trivial. Smart people don't learn English "orally" as their native language. Illiterate people do.
While I don't support harassment in any way, isn't it an inevitability when posting something on a public forum?
I've gotten plenty of comments telling me to "kill myself", despite being a male and despite being an adult. I'm not saying that my level of harassment is comparable to that of a young lady coder, but I am saying that it's not exclusive to any one demographic.
I think there's your answer. I'm also male and adult, but I've been online long enough to know what the dark side of the internet is like. Like you, I also don't take these things as personally.
But why should be only accept the lowest common denominator of "inevitability"? Why should me being okay with something mean that everyone should be okay with it?
Just like fame, harassment is inevitable for public figures. What the OP is trying to say that it's not just a female thing, it happens to males just as much.
It reminds me of this bodybuilder on Youtube, i believe Scooby was his name, about as tall and muscular as they come and he still got harassed to the point where he had to leave his house.
A lot of male cultures are heavily centered around ball-busting and giving each other shit. You grow up in that, a lot of what is characterized as low-grade internet harassment doesn't even register.
I'm a male, and I grew up with ball-busting, and some of the "low-grade internet harassment" I've seen women subjected to most definitely does register with me.
I'm not entirely sure why I'm getting downvotes for this, but I guess I've had a knack for that in the last couple days. With any luck I'll lose my downvoting privileges soon.
I didn't say we should "accept" anything, and I don't endorse harassment of anyone, and I'd greatly prefer people didn't tell to go "kill themselves" (a commonly cited case of harassment).
That said, it's not like it's a big secret that jerks exist on the internet. Anyone who posts something publicly should expect some hate. I'm not saying it's right, I'm not saying it's fair, and I'm not saying I agree with it, but you'd have to be insane to deny it happens.
I'm not entirely sure why I'm getting downvotes for this
Because you didn't kowtow sufficiently for some people. One might think that an unambiguous start like "While I don't support harassment in any way" would be enough to defuse the emotional downvoters, but apparently not.
This is why I generally don't upvote gender or sexuality-related stories on HN, even if I agree with the author or think the premise is important: time and again contrary (politically incorrect or insufficiently supportive) opinions are punished and rational discourse goes out the window. The Brendan Eich kerfluffle is an excellent example.
The fact that you had to even start your post with a disclaimer saying that you disapprove of behavior that a typical person would disapprove of anyway should be an indicator of how irrational HN can be at times. It should have gone without saying, yet here it wasn't even good enough.
It is politically convenient to pretend that anyone who has a realistic view of the internet re: the deep shittiness of some denizens must also be complicit in such shittiness. This facilitates emotional resonance when discussing said shittiness which allows those in positions of leadership to gain some form of power over people who are vulnerable to the emotional manipulation
It's not a good idea to talk about this sort of thing. Those who use it tend to have no compunction using the accrued power for vigilantism
We should try to find a way to at least reduce the inevitable harassment if we believe it worthwhile to increase public participation of those who are more prone to harassment.
It may be that solving this problem is impossible, but I think it is good to try.
Are they drawing a conclusion that, because the majority of the visitors came through the Hacker News link, that Hacker News users are the source of the negative commentary? Seems like conjecture at best.
It is a dangerous thing to put yourself out there to the public. It takes a lot of courage to do it and often you get no response at all. I agree we should strive for a better community I'm merely thinking out loud. I've seen more and more outlets removing or minimizing comment sections because of what kind of content they fill up with.
The only reason I can think of that would not be exactly what I expect from HN is because it got flagged and hidden before too many of the usual kind of commentators showed up. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12115921)
That is true you can get a probability of it being true from the information provided. But it still doesn't make it true, or true for the entire community. I guess I don't like the implication that I, as a commentator on Hacker News, am now grouped along with a person or persons I wouldn't want to be associated with.
There has to be some kind of phrasing for that. I put myself in a group, a member of that group does something atrocious I don't agree with, the world at large vilifies the group and I feel defensive because I put myself in that group.
There is a phrasing for it: It's called "prejudice". It sucks.
But if you don't want to be grouped with the haters and creeps then you had better stand up and say so. Call out the creeps and haters among us and tell them their shit isn't okay.
Stand up and say something. The problem isn't that this kid can't tell whether the creeps trying to get at her are from HN or not. The problem is the creeps.
I think it's a truism that if you put yourself out there on the internet, you're going to be harassed. Full stop.
It won't matter if you're male, female or other. If you're tall, short, skinny, young, old, fat, white, black, green. If English is your first or your 10th language. If you confuse their and they're. There's always going to be a subset of people out there who are going to attack you no matter what.
Are some subsets of characteristics more susceptable to abuse than others? Yes. Try being overweight and admitting to that on any message board.
It sucks, but it's reality. I firmly approve of the use of pseudonyms (or even better "anonymous"); it's the only thing that will make people focus on the content, not your physical characteristics.
I'm truly sorry this young woman had to learn this fact in this way. I hope she continues her work with the elderly, and continues to write under a pseudonym. I wish she didn't have to, but the reality is people will respect what she has to write more if she does.
> It won't matter if you're male, female or other.
Unfortunately some are more likely to be harassed than others. I don't know a male writer who has been consistently, systematically harassed. I don't know a female writer who hasn't been.
(For avoidance of doubt I know several writers of both genders.)
How about a white male youtube personality? Boogie is harassed with every video he puts up. How about Total Biscuit, who receives death threats pretty regularly from anti-gg folks.
Of course there are male media personalities who are harassed, and (maybe?) female media personalities who aren't. The point is that no rational person could possibly claim that the frequency and severity is the same for writers/hosts/etc. of both genders.
I never claimed that the ratios are the same. I even pointed out in my op that they will be different for different groups.
I'm claiming it doesn't matter - if you put yourself out there, you're opening yourself up to be attacked. And the only way to avoid that is to be anonymous, and let your opinions and arguments stand on their own merits.
Anything else has been historically shown to fail. Blizzard's real name policy? Failed to stop the trolls. Community Guidelines? Trolls don't care. A sternly worded letter? Just lets the trolls revel in their success.
It will matter. If you're white and male you may be harassed but you won't receive even a fraction of the volume of hate, of death threats, of rape threats, that you will if you are a woman or a person of color. Do not pretend it's otherwise.
1-5% of the world's population consists of Sociopaths and others with mental disorders which mean they just don't care about whether such activities are right or wrong. Another 25% or so are minors, who also don't understand why this may be bad.
How do you address those populations on a way which hasn't been attempted (and failed) before?
I don't know, but I don't think much has been tried (in the grand scheme of things... the internet is still relatively new compared to other long-standing social institutions).
And isn't the entire premise of Hacker News / YCombinator that there are people and companies that can do things in a new / better / more efficient way? Why should that mentality be limited solely to making money?
I'm white, male, and middle aged. I once shared this point of view.
As is, being female, especially if reasonably attractive, is the probably single highest indicator of online harrasment.
I've had spam and harrrassment from my social media, my opinions on blog, and it's been low-level background noise and mainly related to opinion. I was perfectly relaxed about trolls, and fed them when I was in the mood.
Living with partner who had similar online profiles, blog, not wildly differing opinions, and rather less techie with less traffic was, to say the least, illuminating. Especially as I thought her the more engaging writer - I tend to write too much.
Barely a day went by without some jerk making sexual comments or sending a d* pic, then trying to track down all her accounts to fire friend requests in all. Sometimes it felt really creepy. The Middle East and Asian countries seemed especially likely to generate the "nice pic, number please" sex-object garbage.
That's in addition to the normal comments, arguments and conversations. No surprise to learn that she was the first to start locking down privacy and losing enthusiasm, and hasn't kept a blog for years now.
My suggestions to mitigate this issue are as follows:
1) Educate readers that it is not ok to harass your Authors (or anyone really) but I get that your job is to protect your people.
2) Protect your authors through anonymity and teaching them good online habits. Pen names for younger authors is a great idea. Especially for first time authors who don't like the limelight and don't want to deal with the direct messages they will inevitably receive. And if you have a first time author coach them on the kinds of responses they can expect. Some negative reviews will get through unless you go to anonymous so education has to be part of that.
3) Join in the fight against online harassment. I don't have any links but this is a problem and people need to know that bullying (online) isn't OK.
4) Edit your posts. Grammar is much harder to make fun of if the mistakes aren't there. This is not a justification of others actions but a suggestion on how to avoid this specific type of bullying.
5) Be active in the HN comments and point out that specific comments aren't addressing content but instead just being nit picky. This could fall into the gratuitous negativity section of the HN guidelines but that's kind of a stretch.
EDIT: The following are options but things you should not do. I tried to make that clear with the comments associated with these two options but I didn't make it clear enough. Don't do the following two unless you want to completely change your community.
6) This is optional but you can implement a login feature that requires people to link to facebook and then you can monitor your readers activity. It will loose you a ton of traffic but if it's really that important to you this is a way you can limit who can read your articles and thereby protect your authors. I don't think this is a good idea personally but it is an idea, only you can decide to lock down your content like that.
7) Public shaming, which IMO should be avoided at all costs, but if someone is harassing someone else this can turn the tables. It also leads to witch hunting and perpetuates a whole different problem that should be avoided at all costs.
Online communities have jerks. No matter where you go you'll find them. HN is no exception. This community does not ban people from reading articles or monitor it's users outside of this site, so HN as an organization can't enforce this other than to spread the message and show people it's not OK.
My suggestion is try 1-5 for now and see how it goes.
That would be a closed community with double plus good big brother surveillance. I seriously doubt a choir preaching to same choir would have any value at all.
I didn't mean to imply monitor. I meant to say keep a history and mediate. AKA, if you have a message board and someone says something offensive you can get rid of that user. Monitor to me implies mitigating users based on ML, history/mediate requires human intervention.
I don't think this is a good idea personally but it is an idea, only you can decide to lock down your content like that.
No I don't stand by it. It's an option, they asked for options. This is a bad one, but it depends on how serious they are about protecting their authors.
It feels like the entire community is being blamed because she received unwarranted attention from one reader? isn't this a common problem for people who put themselves out in public? Why wouldn't using a pen name suffice?
Why should a woman be forced to forego the kind of writing credit that helps build her CV, while her male peers aren't forced to do the same? It's patently unfair to say "if you don't like it, write anonymously" when men are far less likely to receive this treatment than women.
I'm not disagreeing with your statement, and the harassment of authors is definitely not ok.
But it's worth saying that pen-name !=anonymous. For most publications, you can put articles you write under a pen-name and have the publication verify your pen-name for CV purposes.
Anytime you put yourself out there, a not-insignificant portion of the commenters will have negative things to say. I think there is a lesson about getting thicker skin. And yes, there is no doubt that being a woman in the internet, especially a young woman, gets worse criticism and creepiness. It's a tough world
Have you considered that this might instead be a lesson in not contributing to the problem of harassment? Hacker News prides itself on an atmosphere of civil discourse - and that's reflected in our guidelines. We're not Reddit and we certainly aren't 4chan.
We as a community dropped the ball by allowing this to happen.
I'm not approving what happened. I don't think we are going to solve this issue, as it's a problem on every website everywhere and no one has been able to keep a forum anonymous and civil at the same time without heavy handed moderators policing all speech and manually approving every comment. The easier solution is to say to yourself, "by posting this on the internet some people may be mad at me and voice their displeasure, but it's a risk I'm willing to take".
It is very easy for you and I to throw up our hands and say the online trolling problem will never be solved, because we don't generally experience it in full force. We have the ability to shrug off comments that are unconstructively critical of us, because they only come very occasionally and are drowned out by positive comments.
Meanwhile, there are new voices that want in on the conversation - maybe they're young, or female, or minorities. They are routinely getting shouted down by our community, and here we are, admitting that they wouldn't face the same ire if they obscured their experience/gender/race by writing under psuedonyms.
I will do my part. I will downvote trolls, and I'd encourage others to do the same.
It's great that you will downvote comments and encourage other to do the same. This is what non-trolls have been doing forever and that will not solve the problem on its own. The best solution is to either accept reality and ignore the haters, or even better, think up some novel, innovative solution to crack the nut of online trolls. But that is very, very hard and no one has yet succeeded. Facebook does well because no one is anonymous. Reddit is a cesspool for the opposite reason, where each subreddit is only as strong as the moderation team and the users regularly flagging content.
It's not a technical problem - it's a community problem. Some of us are happy to admit defeat and ignore bad behavior against marginalized groups, rather than actively responding to it, because it doesn't affect us nearly as deeply.
This is the story of Reddit's 4chanization and it could be the story of HN too, if we don't make a point of caring about our guidelines.
I personally like the anonymization that the internet provides via handles, because it allows ideas to stand stronger in seclusion than be propped up by reputation.
I support this discourse and hope the author of the original article will feel confident to write again.
I have no idea how to solve the monstrous problems related to internet harassment. It is well out of hand, especially as regards women on the internet (see: Anita Sarkeesian).
I think a discourse definitely needs to happen. But maybe the only solution lies in the education and mental health systems. But again, I don't know. Wish I knew, wish I could do more to help. Wish my gender weren't responsible for the vast majority of the harassment, violence, and threats of violence.
Best of luck. Please keep posting about this topic and looking for and experimenting with solutions. Progress can only be made by people like you taking the time to try to do something about an urgent problem like this.
Thank you so much for your support! I was thinking about mental health solutions while responding to an earlier comment on Medium. It's easy to talk about short term protection like anonymizing content, but I'm so frustrated that we're accepting hate and harassment as inevitable.
I wonder if there's more we can be doing in schools to teach good conduct and respectful discussion on the internet.
I think you're right about trying to indoctrinate a more respectful future generation of net users. But the current environment, which no one would say is healthy, is what public personas need to be prepared for. I always modulate my writing with the Internet in mind, which is probably why I don't write as much.
Is there anything that can be done to bolster the new public personas and strengthen them? Perhaps having a moderated comment section for new or unseasoned authors might be work well. Maybe only allowing an authors name to appear when the post count is under a certain threshold. Then the name and photo, then name photo and Twitter or other contact method. Overrides possible of course.
> I have no idea how to solve the monstrous problems related to internet harassment. It is well out of hand, especially as regards women on the internet (see: Anita Sarkeesian).
Please, she certainly profited from the "harassment". She is a provocateur, not unlike Ann Coulter. Does she deserve death threats ? of course not, but its not like provocation isn't part of her business, that's how she got exposure and all her money. She isn't an ideologue, her pal Macintosh came up with that scheme. The irony is that she fired him ...
Fighting harassment is the opposite of collectivism. It seeks to allow each individual the greatest opportunity to express themselves freely, as themselves.
It is harassment--and the apologists for harassment--who advocate for a collectivist approach to society, in which individuals must cloak their true identities if they dare to challenge the herd, or be punished.
>Fighting harassment is the opposite of collectivism. It seeks to allow each individual the greatest opportunity to express themselves freely, as themselves.
... by curtailing the freedoms of other individuals, in the name of group wellbeing.
Regardless of whether harassment is collectivist or not, I was simply pointing out that feeling guilty for actions of people in a similar demographic group to you (an overtly collectivist action) is currently wildly popular.
Simply by virtue of participating in the same communities as others from our demographic group - in this case, Hacker News readers - we are part of a collective.
We can enforce our guidelines and keep the discussion civil, so everyone involved feels comfortable bringing new ideas to the table. Or we can let HN slip in the direction unmoderated communities usually go; rife with trolling, undue negativity, and direct harassment.
Whether or not to cast that downvote and show the trolls the door [1] is a choice we each have to make, but I for one feel an obligation to help build a civil community.
The opposite of collectivism is not unconstrained individual freedom. Strong private property rights can hardly be considered collectivist, yet they constrain your freedom: you can only make decisions about the property you own. My property rights constrain your freedom to (for example) walk across my land, harvest my crops, or use my computer.
When a woman expresses herself in a substantive way, and gets 100 responses telling her to get back in the kitchen, get raped, etc., it is the harassers who are employing group-first thinking: something like, "she's a woman, so she should shut up and just do what I want all women do."
Gender-based harassment is essentially homogenous. Suppressing such harassment prioritizes the unique expression of an individual over the horde. This is analogous to how laws against assault and battery improve individual freedom of movement, despite constraining your freedom to punch people in the face whenever you want.
Anyway, the poster at the top of this subthread didn't even say he felt guilty. He just said, "Wish my gender weren't responsible for the vast majority of the harassment, violence, and threats of violence." That's just stating a personal opinion about a fact.
It isn't that I hold myself responsible. It is that my association within the group called 'men' is frustrated by the behavior and attitudes of many of those whom I encounter. I also wish as a whole, we were better and less menacing.
To everyone suggesting that women likely to be harassed should "learn to write under pen names":
Men who write articles of any quality about helping elderly people learn to code might take some shit on message board comments, but none of them become the target of organized harassment campaigns.
The notion that women should write under pen names while men freely and safely claim credit for any random achievement is a perfect example of how this industry allows itself to be rigged against women. Women aren't even supposed to identify themselves --- when they do, they're just allowing themselves to be victimized by the forces of nature, which apparently include mobs of misogynist trolls.
> which apparently include mobs of misogynist trolls
What's the evidence of this? If these trolls aren't using real identities I'd be skeptical if it were more than one person. Maybe even someone who knows her personally if they're dedicated this much energy.
It doesn't matter. The suggestions are repeated and clear: a woman putting herself out in public talking about her work is begging for harassment. Women should write under pen names, so we can learn from their work and they can trade any credit or career improvement for "not dealing with harassment". That is not a deal men are required to make.
I'm not OK with this. Nobody should be OK with this.
It does matter. Are we going to let one basement dwelling loser ruin the internet as a whole for everyone? Are we going to empower anonymous commenters to pit people against each other?
It may be ignorant of me to suggest blowing these trolls off and not paying them attention - but it isn't insincere or sexist. I'd like to hear your solution.
Apparently: yes. That's what we're saying when we say that a solution to this problem is that women should stop taking credit for their work, their writing, and their opinions.
That's not what I'm saying at all. More like, ignore the trolls and keep doing your thing. I know "growing thicker skin" is not the ideal solution - but what else is there?
It's not a valid solution. Is it an improvement to the current situation, or a step on the path to finding a solution? If not, what are you suggesting as the next step to make things better? Because I don't feel like I know enough about the nature and motivation of the harassment to make a useful suggestion.
"The discussion" really needs details on any concrete proposals for combating this problem. This is not a social problem - harassers are a tiny minority. The fundamental problem is managing fan-in. Since we've all become micro-celebrities, we've all got miniature versions of the problems famous people have always had but without the resources to protect ourselves (PR agents, bodyguards, etc).
It behooves the people proclaiming "something must be done" to detail what exactly they'd like to see happen. Otherwise we just have an emotional mob seeking any convenient scapegoat.
Specific constructive ideas appear to be lacking, and in their place vague allusions and shouting down of people who do concretely point out how individuals can try to protect themselves. I think what most "detractors" are worried about is an alignment with the government desire to remove anonymity from the Internet, which seems to be implied as some kind of solution even though it should be a complete non-starter.
And when someone does talk -- routinely -- about constructive action that can be taken in the here and now, it is largely ignored. You can start here for some of what I have to say on the topic of how to promote gender parity online:
Yes, that same link is posted elsewhere in this discussion. So far, it has gotten zero upvotes (or downvotes) or replies. Because, as usual, it is getting mostly ignored.
People making the kinds of comment you have just made seem to not actually want solutions. They seem to want a convenient excuse for dismissing the criticism entirely.
I have been working hard to bring solutions, not complaints, for quite a few years. It is mostly ignored.
If you actually want real change, you could start by paying more attention to the things I suggest, acting on them and promoting my writing. But I imagine that won't happen at all.
I did read that in your prior comment [0]. And I fully agree.
But I will say, despite my agreement with it, that post of yours does not actually address this current subject of outrage. It is true that one component of harassment is the pervasive social attitudes held by the majority, and thus can be changed through social integration. But concentrated harassment also comes from a small minority that are either deliberately trolling, or so socially mistuned as to use a comments section as if it were a bar. All of the outreach and awareness is not going to change this latter group - think of Pascal's Wager for a date.
It's not that I don't "want" a solution to the latter. It's that I don't see how one, as envisioned, can exist. Education and awareness can shrink the quantity. Centralized sites with heavy moderation can shrink the quantity [1] [2]. Maybe even personal filtering-assistants could shrink the quantity. But at some level of fan-in it is still going to be present and require that people build their own mental defense.
[0] FWIW, I clicked the up arrow on that comment, and this one as well. But my votes don't actually count because it was determined that I upvote "low quality" comments - a year or two ago, anti-circlejerk comments were forced to really snipe.
[1] You have a post about rejecting offers for dates on HN. I don't believe I have ever seen such a proposal on HN (and I'm showdead=yes). I'm not refuting your experience, just contrasting - an event can be objectively extremely rare, yet still quite personal, intense, and resentment-forming.
[2] Furthermore, this ignores alternative avenues of contact - I don't think Medium passed along all this harassment itself. Which is why ambiguous "something" can't not imply some greater control over the wider Internet.
I wrote my post about "Don't ask me for a date" in reponse to a specific comment that did not outright come out and use the term date. I left the comment out of my post and have no plans to describe it further because I am not interested in naming and shaming the individual that inspired my reaction. There have been other incidents where it became clear to me that the individual's interest in me was romantic in nature. I wouod be hard pressed to prove that to anyone. Nonethless, I have found it useful to blog about such things. It has changed my experience of HN for the better.
I have studied social phenomenon both formally and informally for a lot of years. In a nutshell, you do not need to announce that egregiously bad things are not okay when you establish a standard of real respect. Of course, that won't stop all of it. But the overall character of the experience can be modified.
Regardless of the specific content, that comment stuck with you enough to become a thing. Otherwise it would have been brushed off, forgotten about, and we wouldn't be talking about it. I was only pointing out how something can be objectively very rare, yet still personally intense.
> Of course, that won't stop all of it
This is the crux of my point. The egregious things are already outliers - I don't think hitting on someone has ever been within the HN community standards, and your anecdata implies the ratio is better than 1:10,000. At that rarity, it's going to be awfully hard to even analyze how to shrink that number further.
Rereading the original post, it seems like the specific unwanted behavior in this case is having random (male) readers try to friend a young woman on Facebook with hopes of hitting on her. If that ratio were actually under say 1:1000, I don't know that we'd even be here as a species.
If either situation were limited to a small town, there would be a manageable number of occurrences over a longer time with a wider social sphere to police them. But at Internet scale, a small chance times a stateless flash mob causes an immediate intense issue.
It wasn't a single comment and some of the more egregious things that have been said to me on HN were deleted before the edit window closed. In fact, accounts were recently banned by the mods over a particularly ugly and sexually explicit personal attack against me (which was deleted before the edit window closed).
I don't believe the overall pattern of behavior where women get male attention that is motivated primarily by sexual interest is remotely as rare as you are suggesting. We would not be having this conversation at all if that were the case.
Women do get treated differently than men online. I am hardly the only one that sees that.
I'm not saying that the occurrences themselves are rare to the recipients of them. But when viewed in the context of how many people one is actually interacting with, the fraction of boneheaded anti-social behavior is small.
My ratios were meant as lower bounds. As in, I would expect at least 1 in 1000 readers to attempt to friend the author [0], especially as such an action can be plausibly denied as just friendly professional networking. In reality that number is much higher [1], but I'm using a conservative estimate to make the point that even if it is this rare, multiplied by a huge audience still creates an issue.
[0] I certainly wouldn't do so myself and I'm not condoning the behavior either. I'm just saying that there are going to be at least this many asshats.
[1] In fact I now see that the original post only had 3k views, so I should revise that to 1:100 - without contradiction.
That delivery.. It needs work. It comes across as "promote my blog or you don't really support change" where the blog also links to donations and your store. Your arguments would go much further if you just bulleted them. Here's my takeaways:
- Women need to create accounts and participate in voting
- Post more articles by women
- Have candid and honest conversation. Don't condescend
I almost think not being condescending and promoting an article because the author is female is contradictory. An article should stand on its own merit. This is really a tech/startup forum. It'd be great if gender didn't matter here, right?
I am aware that was not the best approach. The problem is that there seems to be no approach that is acceptable. I have tried many of the things that men get told to do and which clearly get results for at least some of them. I have tried many of the things other people have specifically suggested to me. None of it seems to accomplish much of anything.
Furthermore, when men try to make money here, that's a-okay. But it's a problem if I try to monetize my work -- not just here, anywhere. Everyone seems to object to a woman wanting money for her work. Everyone seems to think women should do things out of the goodness of their hearts. Then I also get told I am crazy for suggesting that there is any connection at all between my gender and my persistent poverty.
It's really rather maddening.
You aren't supposed to condescend to anyone here. Asking that women not be condescended to is not asking for special treatment. It also doesn't mean you cannot critique their work.
I don't discount that being female may indeed make it more difficult to be taken seriously, but as another commenter pointed out, the vast majority of people have no idea whose comment they're reading/replying to (insert joke here about nobody knowing you're a dog on the Internet).
In my experience most male forum members have exactly the same experience. It is simply very difficult to be taken seriously, to have people invest the time to read and honestly consider your ideas, and just to get visibility at all, regardless of gender!
I appreciate you're actually taking the initiative to propose concrete actions to make our community more inclusive.
However, your writing reeks of egotism. This is not a gendered thing. I and many others simply can't take seriously anyone who writes, "If you actually want real change, you could start by paying more attention to the things I suggest, acting on them and promoting my writing. But I imagine that won't happen at all."
> The suggestions are repeated and clear: a woman putting herself out in public talking about her work is begging for harassment.
This is not what is being said.
I think you have found a very small number of comments and extrapolated them to take a side on the argument you want to have.
And I think in doing so you are confusing the issue and hope of progression.
Firstly, what I am seeing said in these comments and in other articles and circles is that harassment is something that happens, something that is worse if you are seen as vulnerable, and many suggesting that more women are seen as more vulnerable than men.
As a response to that a lot of people are suggesting that perhaps vulnerable people should use pen names. The response to this is that pen names hamper the point of writing.
Nowhere have I seen serious claims that they were "begging for harassment".
What I have seen are people who receive hate simply for 'being ginger' in photo's on Reddit. People who are harassed and followed in the street for being obese or mentally ill. People who are teased and chased or excluded for being weaker or slower. People who receive hate for making political comments on Facebook or twitter. I have seen these people have real problems with those that harass them following and abusing them from site to site, stripping them of their self-worth.
These are the things I am not OK with.
I am also not OK with you marginalising the problems of others (which in this case appears to be any vulnerable person sporting a penis).
I'd personally rephrase the issue as "if you think you are going to get harassed, whether you are male, female, or in between, you should write under a pen name".
I don't know who gets harassed more, men or women, but I'd definitely guess women. That being said, the advice is pretty standard for everyone.
not at all what I said or implied. I think this harassment is terrible, just like I think IRL mugging is terrible. I wouldn't ever suggest someone walk through a shady neighborhood IRL without protection (mace, etc) because they shouldn't "surrender"
The internet is still a dangerous place for everyone. If you want to pretend it's not, have fun and let me know how that works out for you.
I don't think you meant to imply it. I don't think anyone means it. But that's what they're saying. Men get to take credit without fear (they simply do: look at the front page of this site every day).
When it comes to getting hired or funded, being able to point to acclaimed articles, podcasts, code, etc. is an advantage. With a pen name, you have to get people to trust that the pen name = you to claim that street cred.
>none of them become the target of organized harassment campaigns.
That's quite dismissive of men who have become the target of harassment campaigns.
>The notion that women should write under pen names while men freely and safely claim credit for any random achievement is a perfect example of how this industry allows itself to be rigged against women. Women aren't even supposed to identify themselves --- when they do, they're just allowing themselves to be victimized by the forces of nature, which apparently include mobs of misogynist trolls.
There are plenty of men who cannot safely claim credit for their writings, though the reason is usually ideological rather than rooted in their identity. If you, as a man or a woman, post something which is found disagreeable by a large majority of your peers in 2016, someone will come after your job. Someone will try to find out where you live. To ignore this problem and solely focus on the fact that women receive snide, misogynist comments sometimes when they write innocuous articles seems intellectually dishonest.
I am dismissive of the idea that men become the targets of similar harassment campaigns, yes. If there is a way for me to articulate more dismissiveness, let me know, I'll do that too.
No, and while I agree with neither Eich's politics nor what happened to him, I somehow find myself having no trouble holding those beliefs in my head at the same time as I do the ones I've expressed on this thread.
"men become targets of similar harassment campaigns"
was the case.
Not
"men become targets of similar harassment campaigns because of their gender"
If you want to qualify away from beliefs towards physical properties then fine. Lets turn around and look at those harassed for their hair colour. How about skin colour? Origin? Things other members of their family have done?
> If you want to qualify away from beliefs towards physical properties then fine. Lets turn around and look at those harassed for their hair colour. How about skin colour? Origin? Things other members of their family have done?
I do not understand why this is not sufficient to preempt your comment.
In case it is not here are some example I have found alongside their google search terms:
The idea that men being accused of "mansplaining"† is meant to equate to organized harassment campaigns against women pretty much sums this whole issue up.
Thank you. If I had myself suggested people believed that, I'd be accused of caricaturing. But we'd both know: I wouldn't have been.
† (or "patronizing", a word that means literally the exact same thing and has somehow been used for centuries without mortally injuring our manly feels)
>The idea that men being accused of "mansplaining"† is meant to equate to organized harassment campaigns against women pretty much sums this whole issue up.
No and that isn't what I said. That was in reference to a certain demographic of people that do target men specifically because they are men and men are equivalent to being the devil, since their beliefs are borderline a religion to begin with I feel fine in making that equivalence.
>I am dismissive of the idea that men become the targets of similar harassment campaigns, yes.
Similar here is what is often called a "weasel word" -- to make the whole thing subjective and impossible to disprove (since nobody knows what would be "similar" enough to satisfy the un-disclosed similarity criteria -- in other words, sort like the "no true scotsman" fallacy).
If we omit that word, the truth is simply this: men who write or men who post online in general also can and often do become targets of harassment campaigns. Especially on the internet, where harassment comes as easy as writing a swearing/threatening/derogatory comment and mobs are quick to jump on mass attacks.
Their attackers may not call them "bitches" and "sluts" (so in that sense it's not "similar") but they do call them tons of other things, including things that they don't call women (e.g. "faggot").
Here are some examples grabbed from literally the first page of Google search:
Overall, men are somewhat more likely than women to experience at least one of the elements of online harassment, 44% vs. 37%. In terms of specific experiences, men are more likely than women to encounter name-calling, embarrassment, and physical threats.
One blogpost (civilly) critical of Sarkeesian and her supporters offers a fully sourced compilation of online comments wishing death, rape, mutilation and deadly diseases upon Jack Thompson, an activist critical of violent and sexual content in videogames—as well as death threats directed at male videogame developers who ran afoul of their fans.
Meanwhile, role-playing game designer James Desborough claims to have been viciously threatened for defending the use of sexual violence as a plot element in games.
And film blogger Alex Sandell (Juicy Cerebellum) has described receiving not only a deluge of hate mail but threatening phone calls—sometimes in the middle of the night, and sometimes made to his relatives—after writing negative reviews of the first two Lord of the Rings movies.
In the political sphere, several conservative male writers and activists have been targeted for rape and death threats, with their phone numbers publicly posted, after producing a documentary critical of the Occupy movement.
Right-wing bloggers involved in the bizarre war with leftist activist Brett Kimberlin that David Weigel recently chronicled in The Daily Beast have faced scary cyber-harassment from some of Kimberlin’s supporters, including graphic fantasies of violent revenge, lurid sexual slurs, and accusations of child pornography. (Particularly disturbing examples are documented in a blogpost by First Amendment advocate Ken White.)
On the other side, Charles Johnson, who runs the blog Little Green Footballs, relocated to a gated community because of threats he received after breaking with the right and embracing more liberal politics.
One male victim of cyberstalking, British expatriate novelist James Lasdun, told his story in the 2013 memoir, Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. Lasdun’s stalker, a former creative-writing student whose romantic overtures he had rejected, not only barraged him with abusive messages but emailed his colleagues accusing him of stealing her work, preying on female students, and even setting her up to be raped; she posted similar slanders on websites including Amazon.com and Wikipedia. But an experience like Lasdun’s gets no political sympathy; indeed, the review in The New Yorker chided him for failing to admit his “crush” on the woman and his role in leading her on.
[a] study, conducted by the British think tank Demos, was limited to a fairly small sample of British celebrities, journa...
It sounds like this is just sneer, not an argument.
It's tough in the real world (which is bigger than tech) for everybody.
Bullying and harassment on the internet is a fact for both women and men (as it is in real life for that matter. Male geeks, for example, hardly get much love in high school from the "football team" type guys, and same for geeky/unpopular females from the schools "a-list").
Women have the historical baggage of sexism and double standards to fight against, which has been closing down since the 60s.
Men who are not of the macho/alpha-male type (that is, most of us tech geeks) have the macho/violence/"bro"/anti-"faggot" etc crap to put up with, which doesn't get much attention, but is a real problem too.
It is possible (and I'd say, preferable) to acknowledge both, and their unique mechanics, without flying any flags for one or the other.
Again with the weasel word ("meaningful") and the "no true scotchman" thing...
Is it only meaningful when it gets physical?
Or are violence threats and death threats, internet mob justice, bullying and the like is not "meaningful harassment" if it happens to men?
And why would that be?
Is that because most attacks on men are mere jokes, or maybe most men are thick-skinned Rambos that just brush them off?
And, the corollary, is that because most attacks on women are real-world threatening, or most women are little delicate creatures that can't take a verbal/written attack?
I find it hard to agree with either idea.
Maybe there's some other possible intended meaning behind this "meaningful harassment" notion that I've missed?
I'm not interested in the noodling semantic argument. Don't bullshit me. You're not getting anywhere with it.
I stand by everything I've said on this thread. Anyone who suggests men in this industry deal with harassment of the same kind women do should be embarrassed. Will, inevitably, be embarrassed. I'll happily sign my own name to that.
The patronizing correction isn't needed given they had it right the first time. The second time was likely an uncaught typo.
>in other words, sort like the "no true scotsman" fallacy).
Further, you don't seem interested in any form of conversation. I can't say you're posting in good faith - but rather have already made your mind certain of something with no intentions of discussing it. Calling others names and taking the moral high ground, even when that moral high ground has little to no basis in reality and you've been given evidence otherwise.
One of the differences is that men get far more constructive attention than women. This helps offset the negatives. There is more payoff for men who put themselves out there.
Have you recently done any of the following on HN:
Engaged a woman in good faith discussion?
Upvoted her comments, submissions, or written work?
Addressed the substance of her points instead of nitpicking minor issues or focusing on her gender in some way?
Engaged with her in a manner that in some way enhanced her public reputation as a professional or otherwise enhanced her professionally?
These things happen routinely for men on HN. I think they are far less common for women.
I am not afraid to stick my neck out, but I am unusual for a woman in many ways, yet I am still finding it enormously frustrating. The degree to which expressing myself gets hatred, sexual harassment or dismissal vastly outweighs the degree to which anything I do gets taken in any way seriously. The sad thing is that I suspect my experiences are dramatically more positive than what is typical for a woman online.
> Have you recently done any of the following on HN:
How are we to know? People here are just usernames. If there are any substantial number of women here, then I've certainly had the same mix of positive and negative interactions with them as anyone else on this site (I'm green because someone changed the password to my account, and I didn't have an e-mail registered to it).
There are few enough people that explicitly mention their gender here, and I'd always assumed it wasn't an issue (within this community, at least). It's sad to hear that you're having trouble.
>Have you recently done any of the following on HN:
Probably. I engage commenters -- and because of the handles (which I don't even check before commenting) I seldom know whether they are men or women (or LGBT), and basically I don't even care whether they are X or Y sex or not, as long as they have something interesting to say, or say something that I disagree with and want to comment on.
I'm an equal opportunity "somebody is wrong on the internet" commenter.
>These things happen routinely for men on HN. I think they are far less common for women.
Maybe because woman are much fewer than men on HN? I engage with both men and women on somewhat equal frequency on other forums and media, e.g. Facebook.
Just to provide a point of encouragement so we don't lose hope as an industry, there are fields where sexual harassment is far, far worse. For example, from what I hear groping, taunting, and other misbehavior are extremely common in restaurant kitchens. In automotive repair shops, a woman cannot deliver shipments without leering eyes, whistles, and obscene propositions.
My point is this: at least our industry recognizes a problem and is slowly doing something about it. So don't stop just because it seems overwhelming to fix the issue; we've already come a long way and can continue to progress.
Yeah but who's fault is that? You sound like you are blaming the people here, or the people suggesting she use a pen name, or "this industry". But none of those people are the ones trolling her online. It only takes one asshole in a group of thousands to do this, you can't blame the majority. And there is nothing we can do other than continuing the fight to protect anonymity online.
It's the fault of the people trolling her, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing that others can do. Among the things that others can do is speak up and say that this behavior isn't okay, which is what both tptacek and the original article are doing.
No I see the article and the parent comment especially, being angry at people who have nothing to do with it and are just trying to help. Blaming the majority for the actions of a tiny minority.
If you post content on the internet, it's not reasonable to expect that no one will find issues, disagree, or even directly confront you over the content you post. While outright, persistent harassment is undeniably a problem, the 'solutions' proposed to solve it invariably impose onerous restrictions on freedom.
If 'harassment' is to be filtered content, then you must appoint someone to decide what is harassment and what is not. This person (or algorithm) will select what they view as harassment based on their ideological position. It's a far simpler and less dangerous task to block or ignore unwanted information than it is to filter every tweet, email, and status update and decide if it qualifies as 'harassment' or not.
This is a problem that transcends identity. There is an urge to control the discourse. It shows up when basement-dwellers harass a medium author for posting an article they find goes against their ideals, and it shows up when people like Curtis Yarvin are denied entry to conferences because they post political opinions that others disagree with. Some indie game devs get harassed to the point where they feel too unsafe to stay in their homes, and some indie devs have people persistently trying to make them unemployed and unemployable.
How about you "do the yourself a favor" and proofread your comments?
I'm sorry, I just meritoriously criticized you in a way that was still rude as hell. That was completely my fault. Just like the young woman mentioned in the blog post: no matter how thick your skin, you don't deserve unkind jabs at your grasp of the English language.
146 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadOf course they were. There is a despicable passive-aggressive smugness that is far too common, involving demonstrating one's superiority by sniping at the medium (no pun intended) instead of addressing the message; it allows one to show off without having to take any risks. I've found it very common in circles in which many participants spent their formative years being clever and being told how clever they are.
That said, not all feedback is meant to be constructive - that can come across clearly, even on the internet. It's unfortunate that a young woman, clearly still in high school, felt torn down instead of built up.
The most important feedback I'd like to send to the young women who publish with us is that there's room for your voice and your opinion, and you'll be treated with respect.
You're definitely right that we can't share our ideas if we don't effectively communicate them. I know I deeply appreciate when people take the time to respond with comments to help make what I've shared better. +1 are always great, but comments are better :)
For me, how we write is as important as what we right - both need to be good enough to successfully communicate our ideas.
I also want to share that I often encounter copy-editing responses that I see as cover for bias. Not all copy-editing feedback is a cover for bias, but much of what I see is - I think this happens because it is easier and less risky to comment, critique or outright attack the form of a position rather than engaging with the with substance of the position.
The kind of bias I'm referring to, and the sort of responses it can lead to is described in this article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fact-checking-is-largely...
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts on this. I really appreciate it.
Sean Yo
I see what you did there, and it suggests a playfulness that means a question I was crafting about the literalness of that statement can be dumped. If anything, you've demonstrated that the wrong word in the right place can carry an enormous subtext. This, though, is a layer beyond merely correct spelling.
It is a bad thing when it is used as a way to belittle someone. As a way to smugly dismiss their argument without having to actually examine it. That's bad, and it's common, and it's often done with a childish, passive-aggressive meanness of spirit. There's nothing inherently wrong with helping someone communicate better; it becomes a bad thing when it's used as a way to belittle someone and dismiss their argument on grounds that have nothing to do with the actual argument.
In this very thread, clifantic makes it clear that s/he will ignore what someone has to say if they are bad at expressing it.
one of the most valuable pieces of feedback?
Not nearly as valuable as feedback about the actual message, I would say. Even Shakespeare couldn't turn falsehood into truth by beauty of expression.
Here's the thing that you "I'm not writing a college essay!" people seem to miss - for a lot of us, keeping track of the difference between "your" and "you're" or "their", "there" and "they're" takes literally zero concentration. I'd go so far as to say that a majority of native English speakers have never, ever (since elementary school, anyway), mixed those words up accidentally. These aren't mistakes that non-native English speakers make either. Keeping track of proper grammar is, by far, the least difficult part of expressing thoughts in written form. If you're prone to making mistakes like that... you probably aren't very smart. And what you have to say probably isn't very profound. You really shouldn't be writing, you should be reading. You shouldn't be talking, you should be listening.
So basically you are the type of person that caused the problem being discussed here.
There is a difference between someone making mistakes and someone feeling the need to point them out in public or private, or to judge who should be writing.
Maybe they should be reading more. But who are you or any other anonymous person to comment on that. If you don't have anything nice to say...
For you. People think differently, and something that comes natural to you does not come natural to others.
I find it hard to take that argument seriously
I think you vastly overestimate how many people are aware of these things. The people that are aware, are only aware because of experience with assholes like you. You don't need to show off how clever you are that you know some pointless rule.
Like Jesus, how fucking arrogant and smug you must be to say "you probably aren't very smart" over a trivial grammar mistake. There may be some correlation between spelling errors and intelligence, but certainly not a 100% correlation.
I've gotten plenty of comments telling me to "kill myself", despite being a male and despite being an adult. I'm not saying that my level of harassment is comparable to that of a young lady coder, but I am saying that it's not exclusive to any one demographic.
I think there's your answer. I'm also male and adult, but I've been online long enough to know what the dark side of the internet is like. Like you, I also don't take these things as personally.
But why should be only accept the lowest common denominator of "inevitability"? Why should me being okay with something mean that everyone should be okay with it?
It reminds me of this bodybuilder on Youtube, i believe Scooby was his name, about as tall and muscular as they come and he still got harassed to the point where he had to leave his house.
This, sadly, is just not true. One anecdote does not a pattern make.
http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/gender-societ...
http://www.refinery29.com/2014/10/76682/women-internet-haras...
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/30/5-facts-abou...
I didn't say we should "accept" anything, and I don't endorse harassment of anyone, and I'd greatly prefer people didn't tell to go "kill themselves" (a commonly cited case of harassment).
That said, it's not like it's a big secret that jerks exist on the internet. Anyone who posts something publicly should expect some hate. I'm not saying it's right, I'm not saying it's fair, and I'm not saying I agree with it, but you'd have to be insane to deny it happens.
Because you didn't kowtow sufficiently for some people. One might think that an unambiguous start like "While I don't support harassment in any way" would be enough to defuse the emotional downvoters, but apparently not.
This is why I generally don't upvote gender or sexuality-related stories on HN, even if I agree with the author or think the premise is important: time and again contrary (politically incorrect or insufficiently supportive) opinions are punished and rational discourse goes out the window. The Brendan Eich kerfluffle is an excellent example.
The fact that you had to even start your post with a disclaimer saying that you disapprove of behavior that a typical person would disapprove of anyway should be an indicator of how irrational HN can be at times. It should have gone without saying, yet here it wasn't even good enough.
It's not a good idea to talk about this sort of thing. Those who use it tend to have no compunction using the accrued power for vigilantism
It may be that solving this problem is impossible, but I think it is good to try.
The only practical solution I can see would be total de-anonymization of the Internet. I don't think anyone wants that, though.
It is a dangerous thing to put yourself out there to the public. It takes a lot of courage to do it and often you get no response at all. I agree we should strive for a better community I'm merely thinking out loud. I've seen more and more outlets removing or minimizing comment sections because of what kind of content they fill up with.
The HN commentary was very negative, and very much not what I usually expect to see on HN. I was rather surprised at the tone.
That HN post was flagged and removed fairly quickly if I remember right - perhaps from the tone of dicussion.
There has to be some kind of phrasing for that. I put myself in a group, a member of that group does something atrocious I don't agree with, the world at large vilifies the group and I feel defensive because I put myself in that group.
But if you don't want to be grouped with the haters and creeps then you had better stand up and say so. Call out the creeps and haters among us and tell them their shit isn't okay.
Stand up and say something. The problem isn't that this kid can't tell whether the creeps trying to get at her are from HN or not. The problem is the creeps.
Fight the right battle dude.
It won't matter if you're male, female or other. If you're tall, short, skinny, young, old, fat, white, black, green. If English is your first or your 10th language. If you confuse their and they're. There's always going to be a subset of people out there who are going to attack you no matter what.
Are some subsets of characteristics more susceptable to abuse than others? Yes. Try being overweight and admitting to that on any message board.
It sucks, but it's reality. I firmly approve of the use of pseudonyms (or even better "anonymous"); it's the only thing that will make people focus on the content, not your physical characteristics.
I'm truly sorry this young woman had to learn this fact in this way. I hope she continues her work with the elderly, and continues to write under a pseudonym. I wish she didn't have to, but the reality is people will respect what she has to write more if she does.
Unfortunately some are more likely to be harassed than others. I don't know a male writer who has been consistently, systematically harassed. I don't know a female writer who hasn't been.
(For avoidance of doubt I know several writers of both genders.)
I'm claiming it doesn't matter - if you put yourself out there, you're opening yourself up to be attacked. And the only way to avoid that is to be anonymous, and let your opinions and arguments stand on their own merits.
Anything else has been historically shown to fail. Blizzard's real name policy? Failed to stop the trolls. Community Guidelines? Trolls don't care. A sternly worded letter? Just lets the trolls revel in their success.
The fact is, any harassment, any number of death threats is bad. Period. 1 or 100 won't matter when someone is wishing violence upon you.
How do you address those populations on a way which hasn't been attempted (and failed) before?
And isn't the entire premise of Hacker News / YCombinator that there are people and companies that can do things in a new / better / more efficient way? Why should that mentality be limited solely to making money?
As is, being female, especially if reasonably attractive, is the probably single highest indicator of online harrasment.
I've had spam and harrrassment from my social media, my opinions on blog, and it's been low-level background noise and mainly related to opinion. I was perfectly relaxed about trolls, and fed them when I was in the mood.
Living with partner who had similar online profiles, blog, not wildly differing opinions, and rather less techie with less traffic was, to say the least, illuminating. Especially as I thought her the more engaging writer - I tend to write too much.
Barely a day went by without some jerk making sexual comments or sending a d* pic, then trying to track down all her accounts to fire friend requests in all. Sometimes it felt really creepy. The Middle East and Asian countries seemed especially likely to generate the "nice pic, number please" sex-object garbage.
That's in addition to the normal comments, arguments and conversations. No surprise to learn that she was the first to start locking down privacy and losing enthusiasm, and hasn't kept a blog for years now.
From what I can gather since, this is common.
1) Educate readers that it is not ok to harass your Authors (or anyone really) but I get that your job is to protect your people.
2) Protect your authors through anonymity and teaching them good online habits. Pen names for younger authors is a great idea. Especially for first time authors who don't like the limelight and don't want to deal with the direct messages they will inevitably receive. And if you have a first time author coach them on the kinds of responses they can expect. Some negative reviews will get through unless you go to anonymous so education has to be part of that.
3) Join in the fight against online harassment. I don't have any links but this is a problem and people need to know that bullying (online) isn't OK.
4) Edit your posts. Grammar is much harder to make fun of if the mistakes aren't there. This is not a justification of others actions but a suggestion on how to avoid this specific type of bullying.
5) Be active in the HN comments and point out that specific comments aren't addressing content but instead just being nit picky. This could fall into the gratuitous negativity section of the HN guidelines but that's kind of a stretch.
EDIT: The following are options but things you should not do. I tried to make that clear with the comments associated with these two options but I didn't make it clear enough. Don't do the following two unless you want to completely change your community.
6) This is optional but you can implement a login feature that requires people to link to facebook and then you can monitor your readers activity. It will loose you a ton of traffic but if it's really that important to you this is a way you can limit who can read your articles and thereby protect your authors. I don't think this is a good idea personally but it is an idea, only you can decide to lock down your content like that.
7) Public shaming, which IMO should be avoided at all costs, but if someone is harassing someone else this can turn the tables. It also leads to witch hunting and perpetuates a whole different problem that should be avoided at all costs.
Online communities have jerks. No matter where you go you'll find them. HN is no exception. This community does not ban people from reading articles or monitor it's users outside of this site, so HN as an organization can't enforce this other than to spread the message and show people it's not OK.
My suggestion is try 1-5 for now and see how it goes.
You really stand by "monitor your readers activity"?
I don't think this is a good idea personally but it is an idea, only you can decide to lock down your content like that.
No I don't stand by it. It's an option, they asked for options. This is a bad one, but it depends on how serious they are about protecting their authors.
But it's worth saying that pen-name !=anonymous. For most publications, you can put articles you write under a pen-name and have the publication verify your pen-name for CV purposes.
We as a community dropped the ball by allowing this to happen.
Meanwhile, there are new voices that want in on the conversation - maybe they're young, or female, or minorities. They are routinely getting shouted down by our community, and here we are, admitting that they wouldn't face the same ire if they obscured their experience/gender/race by writing under psuedonyms.
I will do my part. I will downvote trolls, and I'd encourage others to do the same.
This is the story of Reddit's 4chanization and it could be the story of HN too, if we don't make a point of caring about our guidelines.
I personally like the anonymization that the internet provides via handles, because it allows ideas to stand stronger in seclusion than be propped up by reputation.
I have no idea how to solve the monstrous problems related to internet harassment. It is well out of hand, especially as regards women on the internet (see: Anita Sarkeesian).
I think a discourse definitely needs to happen. But maybe the only solution lies in the education and mental health systems. But again, I don't know. Wish I knew, wish I could do more to help. Wish my gender weren't responsible for the vast majority of the harassment, violence, and threats of violence.
Best of luck. Please keep posting about this topic and looking for and experimenting with solutions. Progress can only be made by people like you taking the time to try to do something about an urgent problem like this.
I wonder if there's more we can be doing in schools to teach good conduct and respectful discussion on the internet.
Is there anything that can be done to bolster the new public personas and strengthen them? Perhaps having a moderated comment section for new or unseasoned authors might be work well. Maybe only allowing an authors name to appear when the post count is under a certain threshold. Then the name and photo, then name photo and Twitter or other contact method. Overrides possible of course.
Please, she certainly profited from the "harassment". She is a provocateur, not unlike Ann Coulter. Does she deserve death threats ? of course not, but its not like provocation isn't part of her business, that's how she got exposure and all her money. She isn't an ideologue, her pal Macintosh came up with that scheme. The irony is that she fired him ...
You are an individual not nameless member of a gang called 'men'. Its strange to hold yourself accountable for some random person on the internet.
It is harassment--and the apologists for harassment--who advocate for a collectivist approach to society, in which individuals must cloak their true identities if they dare to challenge the herd, or be punished.
... by curtailing the freedoms of other individuals, in the name of group wellbeing.
Regardless of whether harassment is collectivist or not, I was simply pointing out that feeling guilty for actions of people in a similar demographic group to you (an overtly collectivist action) is currently wildly popular.
We can enforce our guidelines and keep the discussion civil, so everyone involved feels comfortable bringing new ideas to the table. Or we can let HN slip in the direction unmoderated communities usually go; rife with trolling, undue negativity, and direct harassment.
Whether or not to cast that downvote and show the trolls the door [1] is a choice we each have to make, but I for one feel an obligation to help build a civil community.
[1] https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/free_speech.png
When a woman expresses herself in a substantive way, and gets 100 responses telling her to get back in the kitchen, get raped, etc., it is the harassers who are employing group-first thinking: something like, "she's a woman, so she should shut up and just do what I want all women do."
Gender-based harassment is essentially homogenous. Suppressing such harassment prioritizes the unique expression of an individual over the horde. This is analogous to how laws against assault and battery improve individual freedom of movement, despite constraining your freedom to punch people in the face whenever you want.
Anyway, the poster at the top of this subthread didn't even say he felt guilty. He just said, "Wish my gender weren't responsible for the vast majority of the harassment, violence, and threats of violence." That's just stating a personal opinion about a fact.
Men who write articles of any quality about helping elderly people learn to code might take some shit on message board comments, but none of them become the target of organized harassment campaigns.
The notion that women should write under pen names while men freely and safely claim credit for any random achievement is a perfect example of how this industry allows itself to be rigged against women. Women aren't even supposed to identify themselves --- when they do, they're just allowing themselves to be victimized by the forces of nature, which apparently include mobs of misogynist trolls.
What's the evidence of this? If these trolls aren't using real identities I'd be skeptical if it were more than one person. Maybe even someone who knows her personally if they're dedicated this much energy.
I'm not OK with this. Nobody should be OK with this.
It may be ignorant of me to suggest blowing these trolls off and not paying them attention - but it isn't insincere or sexist. I'd like to hear your solution.
It behooves the people proclaiming "something must be done" to detail what exactly they'd like to see happen. Otherwise we just have an emotional mob seeking any convenient scapegoat.
Specific constructive ideas appear to be lacking, and in their place vague allusions and shouting down of people who do concretely point out how individuals can try to protect themselves. I think what most "detractors" are worried about is an alignment with the government desire to remove anonymity from the Internet, which seems to be implied as some kind of solution even though it should be a complete non-starter.
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/06/promoting-ge...
Yes, that same link is posted elsewhere in this discussion. So far, it has gotten zero upvotes (or downvotes) or replies. Because, as usual, it is getting mostly ignored.
People making the kinds of comment you have just made seem to not actually want solutions. They seem to want a convenient excuse for dismissing the criticism entirely.
I have been working hard to bring solutions, not complaints, for quite a few years. It is mostly ignored.
If you actually want real change, you could start by paying more attention to the things I suggest, acting on them and promoting my writing. But I imagine that won't happen at all.
But I will say, despite my agreement with it, that post of yours does not actually address this current subject of outrage. It is true that one component of harassment is the pervasive social attitudes held by the majority, and thus can be changed through social integration. But concentrated harassment also comes from a small minority that are either deliberately trolling, or so socially mistuned as to use a comments section as if it were a bar. All of the outreach and awareness is not going to change this latter group - think of Pascal's Wager for a date.
It's not that I don't "want" a solution to the latter. It's that I don't see how one, as envisioned, can exist. Education and awareness can shrink the quantity. Centralized sites with heavy moderation can shrink the quantity [1] [2]. Maybe even personal filtering-assistants could shrink the quantity. But at some level of fan-in it is still going to be present and require that people build their own mental defense.
[0] FWIW, I clicked the up arrow on that comment, and this one as well. But my votes don't actually count because it was determined that I upvote "low quality" comments - a year or two ago, anti-circlejerk comments were forced to really snipe.
[1] You have a post about rejecting offers for dates on HN. I don't believe I have ever seen such a proposal on HN (and I'm showdead=yes). I'm not refuting your experience, just contrasting - an event can be objectively extremely rare, yet still quite personal, intense, and resentment-forming.
[2] Furthermore, this ignores alternative avenues of contact - I don't think Medium passed along all this harassment itself. Which is why ambiguous "something" can't not imply some greater control over the wider Internet.
I have studied social phenomenon both formally and informally for a lot of years. In a nutshell, you do not need to announce that egregiously bad things are not okay when you establish a standard of real respect. Of course, that won't stop all of it. But the overall character of the experience can be modified.
> Of course, that won't stop all of it
This is the crux of my point. The egregious things are already outliers - I don't think hitting on someone has ever been within the HN community standards, and your anecdata implies the ratio is better than 1:10,000. At that rarity, it's going to be awfully hard to even analyze how to shrink that number further.
Rereading the original post, it seems like the specific unwanted behavior in this case is having random (male) readers try to friend a young woman on Facebook with hopes of hitting on her. If that ratio were actually under say 1:1000, I don't know that we'd even be here as a species.
If either situation were limited to a small town, there would be a manageable number of occurrences over a longer time with a wider social sphere to police them. But at Internet scale, a small chance times a stateless flash mob causes an immediate intense issue.
I don't believe the overall pattern of behavior where women get male attention that is motivated primarily by sexual interest is remotely as rare as you are suggesting. We would not be having this conversation at all if that were the case.
Women do get treated differently than men online. I am hardly the only one that sees that.
My ratios were meant as lower bounds. As in, I would expect at least 1 in 1000 readers to attempt to friend the author [0], especially as such an action can be plausibly denied as just friendly professional networking. In reality that number is much higher [1], but I'm using a conservative estimate to make the point that even if it is this rare, multiplied by a huge audience still creates an issue.
[0] I certainly wouldn't do so myself and I'm not condoning the behavior either. I'm just saying that there are going to be at least this many asshats.
[1] In fact I now see that the original post only had 3k views, so I should revise that to 1:100 - without contradiction.
- Women need to create accounts and participate in voting
- Post more articles by women
- Have candid and honest conversation. Don't condescend
I almost think not being condescending and promoting an article because the author is female is contradictory. An article should stand on its own merit. This is really a tech/startup forum. It'd be great if gender didn't matter here, right?
Furthermore, when men try to make money here, that's a-okay. But it's a problem if I try to monetize my work -- not just here, anywhere. Everyone seems to object to a woman wanting money for her work. Everyone seems to think women should do things out of the goodness of their hearts. Then I also get told I am crazy for suggesting that there is any connection at all between my gender and my persistent poverty.
It's really rather maddening.
You aren't supposed to condescend to anyone here. Asking that women not be condescended to is not asking for special treatment. It also doesn't mean you cannot critique their work.
Thank you for replying.
In my experience most male forum members have exactly the same experience. It is simply very difficult to be taken seriously, to have people invest the time to read and honestly consider your ideas, and just to get visibility at all, regardless of gender!
I appreciate you're actually taking the initiative to propose concrete actions to make our community more inclusive. However, your writing reeks of egotism. This is not a gendered thing. I and many others simply can't take seriously anyone who writes, "If you actually want real change, you could start by paying more attention to the things I suggest, acting on them and promoting my writing. But I imagine that won't happen at all."
This is not what is being said.
I think you have found a very small number of comments and extrapolated them to take a side on the argument you want to have.
And I think in doing so you are confusing the issue and hope of progression.
Firstly, what I am seeing said in these comments and in other articles and circles is that harassment is something that happens, something that is worse if you are seen as vulnerable, and many suggesting that more women are seen as more vulnerable than men.
As a response to that a lot of people are suggesting that perhaps vulnerable people should use pen names. The response to this is that pen names hamper the point of writing.
Nowhere have I seen serious claims that they were "begging for harassment".
What I have seen are people who receive hate simply for 'being ginger' in photo's on Reddit. People who are harassed and followed in the street for being obese or mentally ill. People who are teased and chased or excluded for being weaker or slower. People who receive hate for making political comments on Facebook or twitter. I have seen these people have real problems with those that harass them following and abusing them from site to site, stripping them of their self-worth.
These are the things I am not OK with.
I am also not OK with you marginalising the problems of others (which in this case appears to be any vulnerable person sporting a penis).
I don't know who gets harassed more, men or women, but I'd definitely guess women. That being said, the advice is pretty standard for everyone.
The internet is still a dangerous place for everyone. If you want to pretend it's not, have fun and let me know how that works out for you.
Women don't.
I'm not OK with it. Nobody should be OK with it.
Nobody is saying it's OK. We are saying that's just how it is.
That's quite dismissive of men who have become the target of harassment campaigns.
>The notion that women should write under pen names while men freely and safely claim credit for any random achievement is a perfect example of how this industry allows itself to be rigged against women. Women aren't even supposed to identify themselves --- when they do, they're just allowing themselves to be victimized by the forces of nature, which apparently include mobs of misogynist trolls.
There are plenty of men who cannot safely claim credit for their writings, though the reason is usually ideological rather than rooted in their identity. If you, as a man or a woman, post something which is found disagreeable by a large majority of your peers in 2016, someone will come after your job. Someone will try to find out where you live. To ignore this problem and solely focus on the fact that women receive snide, misogynist comments sometimes when they write innocuous articles seems intellectually dishonest.
"men become targets of similar harassment campaigns"
was the case.
Not
"men become targets of similar harassment campaigns because of their gender"
If you want to qualify away from beliefs towards physical properties then fine. Lets turn around and look at those harassed for their hair colour. How about skin colour? Origin? Things other members of their family have done?
> If you want to qualify away from beliefs towards physical properties then fine. Lets turn around and look at those harassed for their hair colour. How about skin colour? Origin? Things other members of their family have done?
I do not understand why this is not sufficient to preempt your comment.
In case it is not here are some example I have found alongside their google search terms:
* "Ginger driven to suicide" http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2507153/Bullied-ging...
* "footballer harassed racial" https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2013/may/13/racism...
* "father harassed by" http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-28/sandy-hook-massacre-vi...
Not as often as women, but that wasn't the claim being made.
And yes, some authors have been "selected for the sin of being a man".
Thank you. If I had myself suggested people believed that, I'd be accused of caricaturing. But we'd both know: I wouldn't have been.
† (or "patronizing", a word that means literally the exact same thing and has somehow been used for centuries without mortally injuring our manly feels)
No and that isn't what I said. That was in reference to a certain demographic of people that do target men specifically because they are men and men are equivalent to being the devil, since their beliefs are borderline a religion to begin with I feel fine in making that equivalence.
Similar here is what is often called a "weasel word" -- to make the whole thing subjective and impossible to disprove (since nobody knows what would be "similar" enough to satisfy the un-disclosed similarity criteria -- in other words, sort like the "no true scotsman" fallacy).
If we omit that word, the truth is simply this: men who write or men who post online in general also can and often do become targets of harassment campaigns. Especially on the internet, where harassment comes as easy as writing a swearing/threatening/derogatory comment and mobs are quick to jump on mass attacks.
Their attackers may not call them "bitches" and "sluts" (so in that sense it's not "similar") but they do call them tons of other things, including things that they don't call women (e.g. "faggot").
Here are some examples grabbed from literally the first page of Google search:
Overall, men are somewhat more likely than women to experience at least one of the elements of online harassment, 44% vs. 37%. In terms of specific experiences, men are more likely than women to encounter name-calling, embarrassment, and physical threats.
http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/
One blogpost (civilly) critical of Sarkeesian and her supporters offers a fully sourced compilation of online comments wishing death, rape, mutilation and deadly diseases upon Jack Thompson, an activist critical of violent and sexual content in videogames—as well as death threats directed at male videogame developers who ran afoul of their fans.
Meanwhile, role-playing game designer James Desborough claims to have been viciously threatened for defending the use of sexual violence as a plot element in games.
And film blogger Alex Sandell (Juicy Cerebellum) has described receiving not only a deluge of hate mail but threatening phone calls—sometimes in the middle of the night, and sometimes made to his relatives—after writing negative reviews of the first two Lord of the Rings movies.
In the political sphere, several conservative male writers and activists have been targeted for rape and death threats, with their phone numbers publicly posted, after producing a documentary critical of the Occupy movement.
Right-wing bloggers involved in the bizarre war with leftist activist Brett Kimberlin that David Weigel recently chronicled in The Daily Beast have faced scary cyber-harassment from some of Kimberlin’s supporters, including graphic fantasies of violent revenge, lurid sexual slurs, and accusations of child pornography. (Particularly disturbing examples are documented in a blogpost by First Amendment advocate Ken White.)
On the other side, Charles Johnson, who runs the blog Little Green Footballs, relocated to a gated community because of threats he received after breaking with the right and embracing more liberal politics.
One male victim of cyberstalking, British expatriate novelist James Lasdun, told his story in the 2013 memoir, Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. Lasdun’s stalker, a former creative-writing student whose romantic overtures he had rejected, not only barraged him with abusive messages but emailed his colleagues accusing him of stealing her work, preying on female students, and even setting her up to be raped; she posted similar slanders on websites including Amazon.com and Wikipedia. But an experience like Lasdun’s gets no political sympathy; indeed, the review in The New Yorker chided him for failing to admit his “crush” on the woman and his role in leading her on.
[a] study, conducted by the British think tank Demos, was limited to a fairly small sample of British celebrities, journa...
It's tough in the real world (which is bigger than tech) for everybody.
Bullying and harassment on the internet is a fact for both women and men (as it is in real life for that matter. Male geeks, for example, hardly get much love in high school from the "football team" type guys, and same for geeky/unpopular females from the schools "a-list").
Women have the historical baggage of sexism and double standards to fight against, which has been closing down since the 60s.
Men who are not of the macho/alpha-male type (that is, most of us tech geeks) have the macho/violence/"bro"/anti-"faggot" etc crap to put up with, which doesn't get much attention, but is a real problem too.
It is possible (and I'd say, preferable) to acknowledge both, and their unique mechanics, without flying any flags for one or the other.
Is it only meaningful when it gets physical?
Or are violence threats and death threats, internet mob justice, bullying and the like is not "meaningful harassment" if it happens to men?
And why would that be?
Is that because most attacks on men are mere jokes, or maybe most men are thick-skinned Rambos that just brush them off?
And, the corollary, is that because most attacks on women are real-world threatening, or most women are little delicate creatures that can't take a verbal/written attack?
I find it hard to agree with either idea.
Maybe there's some other possible intended meaning behind this "meaningful harassment" notion that I've missed?
I'm not interested in the noodling semantic argument. Don't bullshit me. You're not getting anywhere with it.
I stand by everything I've said on this thread. Anyone who suggests men in this industry deal with harassment of the same kind women do should be embarrassed. Will, inevitably, be embarrassed. I'll happily sign my own name to that.
>in other words, sort like the "no true scotsman" fallacy).
Further, you don't seem interested in any form of conversation. I can't say you're posting in good faith - but rather have already made your mind certain of something with no intentions of discussing it. Calling others names and taking the moral high ground, even when that moral high ground has little to no basis in reality and you've been given evidence otherwise.
Have you recently done any of the following on HN:
Engaged a woman in good faith discussion?
Upvoted her comments, submissions, or written work?
Addressed the substance of her points instead of nitpicking minor issues or focusing on her gender in some way?
Engaged with her in a manner that in some way enhanced her public reputation as a professional or otherwise enhanced her professionally?
These things happen routinely for men on HN. I think they are far less common for women.
I am not afraid to stick my neck out, but I am unusual for a woman in many ways, yet I am still finding it enormously frustrating. The degree to which expressing myself gets hatred, sexual harassment or dismissal vastly outweighs the degree to which anything I do gets taken in any way seriously. The sad thing is that I suspect my experiences are dramatically more positive than what is typical for a woman online.
How are we to know? People here are just usernames. If there are any substantial number of women here, then I've certainly had the same mix of positive and negative interactions with them as anyone else on this site (I'm green because someone changed the password to my account, and I didn't have an e-mail registered to it).
There are few enough people that explicitly mention their gender here, and I'd always assumed it wasn't an issue (within this community, at least). It's sad to hear that you're having trouble.
Probably. I engage commenters -- and because of the handles (which I don't even check before commenting) I seldom know whether they are men or women (or LGBT), and basically I don't even care whether they are X or Y sex or not, as long as they have something interesting to say, or say something that I disagree with and want to comment on.
I'm an equal opportunity "somebody is wrong on the internet" commenter.
>These things happen routinely for men on HN. I think they are far less common for women.
Maybe because woman are much fewer than men on HN? I engage with both men and women on somewhat equal frequency on other forums and media, e.g. Facebook.
My point is this: at least our industry recognizes a problem and is slowly doing something about it. So don't stop just because it seems overwhelming to fix the issue; we've already come a long way and can continue to progress.
If 'harassment' is to be filtered content, then you must appoint someone to decide what is harassment and what is not. This person (or algorithm) will select what they view as harassment based on their ideological position. It's a far simpler and less dangerous task to block or ignore unwanted information than it is to filter every tweet, email, and status update and decide if it qualifies as 'harassment' or not.
This is a problem that transcends identity. There is an urge to control the discourse. It shows up when basement-dwellers harass a medium author for posting an article they find goes against their ideals, and it shows up when people like Curtis Yarvin are denied entry to conferences because they post political opinions that others disagree with. Some indie game devs get harassed to the point where they feel too unsafe to stay in their homes, and some indie devs have people persistently trying to make them unemployed and unemployable.
I'm sorry, I just meritoriously criticized you in a way that was still rude as hell. That was completely my fault. Just like the young woman mentioned in the blog post: no matter how thick your skin, you don't deserve unkind jabs at your grasp of the English language.