ICT has a huge problem. We've been collectively in denial about it for far too long. My cohort at compsci classes in uni was a class of ten, in an industry only 20-30 years deep at best and already the gender ratio was in decline. (This is the seventies)
I might say I think gamer culture is bound up in this but it's not just about that. Something very toxic is empowered by current s/W engineering.
I'm retiring inside ten years. I worry it won't be fixed before I leave the field.
It's what UK schools called IT when it entered the school curriculum. Not really sure what motivated the C, maybe it justified classes using the nascent web.
Communications. I used it, because "software engineer" is too specific, "engineer" is too broad, and we now have sociologists, artists, AI theoreticians, mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, VLSI design and layout specialists, systems management, network administration, protocol design....
ICT is a useful umbrella term. I do not believe it is UK specific or School specific.
Even if you completely removed all factors deterring women from going into CS tomorrow, drastically improved the gender ratio in courses beginning next year, it would still take years for that to affect the ratio in industry.
And then you still have to fix any issues pushing them out of industry once they're already there.
Yes, because we designed the internet and web "wrong".
I've commented with my opinion on this, here on HN, before. In my opinion, the world should have two internets: the current internet, and a "safe for life" internet.
The former would serve as a staging area and playground for new features. Just as the internet does today, it would provide, roughly speaking, no accountability and no security. My guess is that its main audience would be high-school seniors and college-age kids. In addition, you'd have a minority of techies, and — yes — some vile wingnuts.
The "safe for life" internet's network-layer would have baked-in authentication (eg: part of your IP is a user-id). It would have a protocol for notarization (ie: the ability to have a third party vouch for information. eg: the choice to tie your real name to your user-id, or remain pseudonymous). Its "web" markup would be far simpler and more semantic (no per-site styles, no dynamic features, no scripting).
When someone invents a very useful web feature/paradigm on the old internet/web, the new internet's web-standard could add special tags to support it. So, for example, the NewW3C could introduce a set of "store-front" tags with which one could create an entire online-store without any scripting. The NewW3C would include all sorts of functionality, eg: tags to host a Twitch-like site to stream video, with no JS whatsoever.
With this sort of accountability, the alternate internet would finally provide the ability to effectively moderate — bad actors wouldn't easily "respawn" a sockpuppet or bot account, to evade a ban. It would make commerce and data-sharing much safer (via the lack of dynamic features).
The situation today is absurd. What content do we want the web to promote: interesting photos of Japanese food, by a serious developer... or hackneyed ramblings by a bunch of 20-year old trolls? The internet we have today is "wrong" for most people.
Are you seriously proposing totalitarian internet? So let's think who would adopt it first. My guess: China, Russia, Belarus, maybe even North Koreans would finally join internet.
I should have stressed that the new network-layer would support the old internet. So, for example, a user might have a Firefox.app window open on their screen (connected via TCP/IP and displaying a normal HTTP website), and a also an AltBrowser.app (connected via AltTCP/IP and displaying a new AltHTTP website). Sort of like the Tor-paradigm, only if Tor required you to update your router's firmware.
I think, in such an environment, the old internet would still be the first choice of most 20-somethings (aside from when they online-shop). Why? Because young people tend to seek excitement, danger, conflict, boundary-pushing, etc.
The new internet likely would be the primary choice (probably the sole one) of oldsters, toddlers, parents, researchers, sensitive souls, retailers, and so on
I'd be skeptical of a safe-for-life Internet for one reason: safety. Experian, Target, OPM... we've seen countless times that very entities the average person does business with [un]voluntarily can't be trusted with a person's details or credentials. All it would take is for one corporation to mess up and someone else would own a person's one and only safe-for-life identity which, as you noted, means they'd own their victim online entirely. Even if there's an appeal process, since the safe-for-life ID would have to be worldwide, ostensibly it'd be even more difficult for victims than it is to get a new SSN. It's a nice thought, but I wouldn't be willing to trust anyone, especially an organization like Experian that I can't even opt out of, with the safety of what amounts to my professional and a fair amount of my personal online life.
That's an excellent point. I didn't address this aspect today, but I touched on it a little in a HN comment I posted a couple months back.
Ideally, the identity-side would be handled in a distributed way through a network of brick-and-mortar notary businesses. An account "for life" wouldn't be so iron-clad as to ruin someone's life. It would be onerous in the sense that one would have to pay a fee to the notary, and provide government ID to replace their account. At which point (after which the original, compromised user ID is marked as invalid).
The point you make re: security-issues with retailers is relevant, but it applies primarily to the businesses who notarize users, probably not the retailers.
As an example of the difference, the user could request the notary electronically confirm to the public that the user has a high school diploma, but not reveal any details re: from which school, or from which year. I haven't thought this through, but I could envision a "Mailboxes Etc" type business providing both notary, and PObox/reship services so that other retailers couldn't even find out a user's address.
I don't think you'd need a separate internet for that. You can have some kind of ID system where you can authenticate to a site with your ID. Some sites essentially use small credit card payments to do this already. This commonly helps prevent ban evasions in online games that cost money.
You could be right when it comes to the network "piece." The reason I proposed it is to enforce identification tied (indirectly) to a single human being, in perpetuity. It would also be attractive to make transmission of old-style web traffic over the new network difficult, to avoid the existing web subsuming the new one. There may be other ways to wind up with the same result. Ha! Maybe neither way is possible! The internet is so complex, it's hard to reason about.
This is an interesting idea, but it wouldn't have helped in this case. The trolling on Github was using a logged in account; this would exist within the "safe internet". The co-ordination of this occurred in 4chan, which would likely be in the "unsafe internet".
With your proposal, the trolling would still happen, but it might have been harder for her to track down where it was coming from.
Trolling is a societal issue, not a technological one.
The trolling on Github was using a logged in account
Except, if Github bans the user, that user (the actual human being, not their worthless handle) is gone — banned permanently. That's both a disincentive, and a rate-limiter.
Also, if the abuse is egregious enough (ie: a death threat), the troll is now in legal peril. The cost/benefit of reporting a troll to the police (even under a pseudonym) on the new internet is much more attractive. Currently, trying to track down an IP is fairly worthless. It's not tightly-coupled to a human being.
Trolling is a societal issue, not a technological one.
We disagree on this, but — let's be honest — there's no way to prove either position conclusively. I'm tempted to bombard you comparisons and contrasts from the various historical periods, but I doubt it would convince you. There are myriad counter-examples with which you could reply.
My take is that the internet, in its current form, enforces so little accountability, that it gives bad actors far more power than good actors.
Probably the user would have to dig out their birth cert, and visit the notary they originally used to get internet access. Then the notary would contact their ISP (or maybe they push the update to their public records, and the user asks their ISP to pull the update) with the replacement user ID.
Whatever the specifics, the basic idea is that there be a one-to-one relationship between a user and their account.
Wow that's a wonderful idea. I suggest we take it one step further and require users of the "safe" internet to include their age, height, weight BMI, gender, and race. Any posts made by cisgendered white men should be muted, flagged, and labeled as offensive. Posts made by weight-priviledged people should also be prefaced by a trigger warning. We should give any and all people of color and lgbt the ability to dox and flag users they don't like.
If we can come together as people and make this system a reality maybe it can eventually replace the old and "savage" internet. Then we can start banning any groups we don't like from the internet all together. SEIG HEIL!
Normally I don't support going to peoples employers for shit they do outside of working hours, but I am willing to bet that some of those fucknuggets were using work email addresses/accounts. If I was their boss I would want Kat/Github to reach out and let me know about this.
By using their work accounts, they are stating that the company condones their behaviour - and I suspect that isn't the case in the majority of cases. I would definitely want to know if any of my employees were engaging in this shit so I could explain in very simple terms why it is unacceptable - because they clearly don't get it on their own.
I wonder the consequences of having an account blocked or suspended if your employer used Github. And including your employer to an account you used for harassment would not, I think, be unfair grounds for "disciplinary action".
I don't know why people do this, but to figure out how to stop it, we need to understand it, don't we?
How?
How about, if any employer wants to hold one of these employees to account, how about requiring they make a video apology that begins with an admission of what they did, and an explanation of what was going on in their mind when they did it?
Anonymise the subject and make it public?
Give it to university psych departments for study?
In the US at least that makes them a liability ticking time bomb to an employer, especially if they go beyond mere "asshole jokes" like the bloat removal which deletes everything. Since if the employer got involved in a discrimination or sexual harassment lawsuit later knowing about it makes them look very willfully negligent and complicit in a lawsuit. The ironic thing about it being for a "wrong reason" is that the incentive doesn't depend upon character of the employer.
I went through a couple of these GitHub usernames, they are all first deleted, but there's some presence in other sites, and it's clear that none of them likely hold a regular job in any place of consequence. One of these accounts seems to spend time finding other female GitHub accounts and making condescending PRs while another was busy on far right subreddits crapping on various groups of people.
Do yourself a favor and don't contribute to another history of $regular_dude who got fired/life ruined because his account/name was similar to someone else's in the Internet.
US Cultural hegemony is inevitable, but please, try to contain this stuff in your anglo world, everytime it spills over other countries it's not an improvement.
She's already done step one - highlighted the issue - I had no idea this kind of behaviour was prevalent and if I ever caught one of my employees engaging in it, they'd be out the door.
This issues have been highlighted by at least a decade now, when I started to read english media and sites. If you had no idea, then congratulations, you saved yourself a lot of drama.
I don't think we should be normalizing using github for this kind of thing.
Ultimately, everything is downstream of culture, and if it becomes the norm that one uses Github for (essentially) Instagramming your food, then Github will become Instagram/Tumblr/whatever.
I don't expect anyone to agree with the point I'm making, I just want it to be noted so that in 5-10 years when Github succumbs and becomes a place that's not really used for code - or whatever other pathological outcomes the blue-haired ones create, nobody will say "wow, who could have predicted this!"
The person who submitted a pull request deleting everything to "fix bloat" did exactly the right thing. This should probably even be a site policy.
I keep thinking back of the days of the wild west of the internet, when I was a teenager. Back then, 'trolling' felt like it was done in 'good spirit', and it seemed as though everyone was sort of 'in on it', maybe because people shared similar values and knew there was no ill-intent behind the 'trolling' of the old days.
But at some point (and I suspect it has something to do with money, as always), it turned into a weird team-sport. And political. It's no longer acceptable and needs to end.
When was it? Because while my own internet childhood was innocent too, I later found out a lot of very serious harassment was going on at exact that time - me seeing side pieces of it but not knowing full extend of what went on.
Back then, you was not supposed to "feed the trolls" so victims just left.
Yeah, from reading the replies here, I am beginning to think that I frequented some rather harmless parts of the internet, while left-right-and-centre, people were getting seriously harmed. It's quite eye opening :/
When was that? Because that is not how I remember the internet from 96 onwards at all. Even more if you were involved in gaming communities, as an example: early MMOs were prime time for dogpiling.
Trolling used to be more prank-ish but it would already at that time certainly devolve to doxxing and start affecting people's real lives. I remember it took me a long time to stop caring on not leaving traces that people could link to my real name, my real pictures or whatever online.
I remember people on online forums salivating when Google came out and was a much better search tool to link an username to an email and from there to your life outside the internet. It was scary to post something confronting these trolls because they could try to find you, they had enough free time for that.
So I don't know when the internet was really that naive and innocent place, it had more innocence but this bad side of it was very present from the get go, at least in my experience.
You are right, I don't think it was ever naive, or ok.
Thinking about it, what we used to call Trolls back in the day (1998 ish gaming community boards) were just annoying users. They were considered shitposters and bans were handed out swiftly.
At the same time I'd say the discourse online was more coarse, less aware of political correctness, or racial / gender sensitivities.
It's hard to think back to the mindset of my former teenage self, but perhaps what's known as 'trolling' today didn't even exist back then. I've never seen someone get doxxed on the forums I frequented. But then, people were also paranoid enough to not let themselves be doxxed, perhaps? This is all so long ago.
It's good that you used a throwaway account, because I think you already know: it was never done in 'good spirit,' not for the victims of your abuse.
What was amusing and fun to you and your friends drove people out of the industry, and is likely a very small part of why people lament imbalances in ethnicity and gender today.
Teenagers aren't great at understanding the consequences of their actions. I wasn't, you weren't, most of us aren't or weren't. It's hard to look back and realize that things you thought were in fun were not fun at all for the victims, but it's a good start.
Well, I am trying to think back to my former self, back in those mid to late 90s days. It's hard to conjure up that mindset accurately.
However, I would say that there was certainly a lot of immaturity to go around. There was no doxxing, there was relatively little racism. But there was a lot of sexism.
I guess nerdy male-teenage dominated gaming forums of the 90s were places where women certainly did not feel welcome. I think re-reading what was said back then nowadays would probably be rather cringey. A lot of discovery of boundaries and exploration of social extremes occurred under the monicker of a kind of new-found freedom we'd been given as teenagers by the web. And that probably drove a lot of people (especially women) away. I think I lamented that fact back then, and I lament it now. It's always been my hope that I was part of inclusion rather than exclusion, but I probably failed at times, assuming an edgy 13-year old has no idea how to conduct themselves properly online.
Yet, back in the day I do not think harm was intended, even when harm was done. Nowadays I wonder whether harm is intended. I am no longer active on any communities really. I post so rarely. This is one of the exceptions, as I do find it an interesting topic. I would honestly love to know whether I actually hurt anyone online, ever. I hope I did not, but if I did, then all I can do is attempt to be more aware in the future. Which, naturally, 20 years later, I am and continue to be and try to improve. That journey never ends.
I was a little shit as a teenager and I hate that I was. Trolling was only "in good spirit" because I was a heartless asshole that completely lacked empathy for others. What comes to mind to me as the epitome of my teenage years was thinking this was funny:
A writer for the SA website made fun a website of a mother who was grieving her stillborn children. Forget any opinion you might have about the mother or her presentation: this a woman who had several children die before she ever got to know them. It's potentially one of the most traumatic things that can happen to someone, and this writer decided to ridicule how this mother grieved:
>Your poison womb is making heaven too fucking crowded.
I hate myself that I thought this was funny. I hate that I used words to belittle the LGBTQ community. I hate that I was that edgelord that held to statistics about crime rates and intelligence as they related to race. I hate that I made fun of people for their sexuality. I hate that I discounted sexism, racism, and ableism.
It was never in good fun. Some people grow out of it and others don't. I am still working constantly to better myself and catch myself when I have prejudice thoughts.
I think a lot of people online don't understand how to get attention besides by acting outrageous like this. Getting attention online by doing something good that everyone else is doing is really hard. A lot of people seek out the seemingly underemployed strategy of doing the outrageous things that others aren't.
Maybe it's got to do with the fact we're competing with everyone online for attention, and the issue could be helped if more activity was in smaller clusters, where people didn't have to resort to outrageous strategies to get attention because there's less competition. (Discord servers provide one specific example of what I'm thinking of.) But it seems like as long as the global cluster exists too, people will seek attention on it too for its greater rewards, unless there's something about the smaller clusters that's even more rewarding.
Thats exactly why you hand out bans or send the teenager to timeout - it teaches them that bad attention seeking is not desirable and not rewarded with attention.
The internet lost the lesson some time ago because even bad attention is good attention when it comes to KPIs. More sharing is good sharing.
Teenagers are complicated creatures. Admittedly, this stuff seems impossibly extreme? Maybe I am indeed rather naive. I must have frequented much more harmless online communities. I never understood the appeal of SA or 4Chan.
At the same time I can see how, as teenagers, people can get sucked into these communities, where edginess lures one in with some kind of false promise of 'freedom' from the rules of a society that appears to have rejected oneself. Even if that rejection may be self-imposed.
At some point it's just a competition for who can say the most horrific things. I don't know how one would counteract this.
The funny thing is, I also cringe at what I wrote online as a teenager, but I never took it to these extremes.
However, recognising it (and 'hating' oneself for it) is a first step in fixing the problem, hopefully.
I can't absolve the entirety of my behavior by the online communities I was a part of, but they definitely worsened and encouraged it. I wish I had better role models as a teen and maybe I wouldn't have acted that way. Unfortunately my parents weren't very involved in my life and I spent every moment I could on the internet to escape other problems in my life. I think I had a lot of anger and frustration and places like 4chan were an outlet for that. Clearly growing up with 4chan being your main cultural influence is not going to lead to a well adjusted young adult.
You should relax. It seems like you were doing it because disaster porn is funny. At least you are cognizant enough to realize this. A lot of SJWism is similar, except they don't do it for fun (though, they get enjoyment of some form from it)
How is gender bias, discrimination and online harassment US politics? Can you point out something in this discussion to me that gives you the impression that this is mainly about US politics? Because I was not under that impression at all.
You don't realize it, but all this toxicity is mainly an anglo thing. I regularly spend time around spanish, portuguese and some french internet and it's quite different.
When there's such drama, participants even use english words to describe this phenomena. It's a clear anglo cultural artifact that spilled over due to US cultural hegemony.
This is an english forum connected to a California venture firm that frequently discusses American tech companies and their workplaces, so of course you're going to find conversations about things relevant to that here.
I find it weird to see this when I rarely see comments so strongly arguing that a subject is too US-centric for HN in threads about stuff like the San Francisco housing market, American workplaces, or other aspects of online sites.
The words "macho" and "machismo" come from Portuguese. I've been told that Latino South and Central American machismo culture is very toxic compared "even" to US standards.
But then again, I didn't really put much stock in vague generalizations like this, or yours.
I think there's considerable evidence just from reading the news that Hispanophone, Lusophone, and Francophone countries are _far_ from free of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and transphobia. I don't think hate speech is somehow limited to Anglophone countries, and it would be extremely disingenuous to claim it is.
I don't have the same impression. The issues are there, but there's much less tension and conflict. If you read news, you're mostly reading activists though.
1. Argentina has one of the highest femicide rates in the world.
2. Brazil elected Bolsonaro, who spends a lot of time spouting homophobic / misogynistic things.
3. France nearly elected Marine LePen last time around.
I'm not sure how one can pretend that only Anglophone countries have issues with misogyny, homophobia, and racism.
> I'm not sure how one can pretend that only Anglophone countries have issues with misogyny, homophobia, and racism.
The same way that people in Anglophone countries pretend that they don't have issues with misogyny, homophobia, and racism: by being on the safe side of those issues! Straight men in the ethnic majority are very easily, even naturally, unaware of any tension or issues, and find it easy to dismiss people highlighting the experiences of others as "activism."
I'm not saying that only the anglophone world has this issues. I don't know why you guys keep hammering it. It's not about the numbers, it's about relevance and how it's approached.
Argentina has a lot of issues, and women getting murdered is not of particular relevance among the high level of crime, the high level of corruption and the extremely difficult financial situation of argentinians, who can't even save money reasonably in their local currency, which may be a given for US, but it's a living hell for them. In facto, inflation is consistently the first problem for most argentinians in most polls.
Argentinians don't need to talk about BLM, because it's not relevant to them. Women in tech is probably one of the least problems for them. Energy and time are precious resources, and they need to be focused on important issues.
I think some of you guys just haven't got the empathy to imagine a different setting than your current one. Just being able to put money in a bank and forgetting about it is a luxury some people can't afford.
All of those harassments and trolling mainly happens as a back and forth between two streams of culture within the USA. And typically revolves around the topics of: "Black lives matter", "Racism", "Sexism in tech", "Transphobia" - all these things are internal US politics stuff.
From the perspective of where I live (Eastern Europe):
"Black lives matter" - We have very few black people living here. And very few problems with police in general. When something bad happens it typically happens to the police, not by the police.
"Racism" - we have no history of slavery nor racism, except being subjected to it. Even more - originally the word "slave" was derived from the word "slav".
"Sexism in tech" - there is no sexism in tech here. Tech is not even a prestigious field. People want to work in law, medicine and finance. Some can even be quite ashamed to admit they work in a technical field.
"Transphobia" - even such things as thinking about "sex" and "gender" as different concepts are quite US specific. i.e. where I live we typically refer to people by their sex, and don't even have a term for a separate concept like gender.
Yet these things are so pervasive on the internet. People even post their pronouns on twitter and (in this case) fill their GitHub profiles with that stuff. They can do it of course, it might even be a good thing to do. But I do not think this deserves a front page of HN. Hence why I am glad it was flagged.
To claim that any of the points that you have mentioned are merely political is absurd. Words themselves are apolitical, and to say "that's racist/sexist/etc.", is merely an observation, and does not represent a political opinion.
The author of the article is not trying to promote a political agenda, asking you to support "cause A" or "cause B", they are merely trying to document a traumatizing experience that they have had.
And even if it was US politics? A large chunk of HN users are from the US. And as you have given me your political opinion about transphobia being "US specific", so does the author of the article claim "This thing happened. That's bad."
Literally the first search I did was "police Poland" in a DDG news search on DDG and the third link was to earlier this month https://www.out.com/news/2020/8/10/polands-stonewall-police-... titled "Poland's Stonewall: Police Attack and Arrest Queer Protestors" :
> Nearly 50 people were arrested following the arrest of trans activist Malgorzata Szutowicz, better known as Margot, on Friday. The protests come amidst a rise in homophobic hate and rhetoric, and the recent re-election of President Duda who called LGBTQ+ rights a foreign ideology that seeks to destroy basic Polish values.
> Police were also investigating a separate case, in which a man on a balcony, next to a rainbow flag, grabbed his crotch during a World War II memorial march last weekend, Marczak said earlier. ...
> "No democratic country should allow the kind of incidents we saw, in which police enters people's private homes," [Rafał Trzaskowski] added, referring to police efforts to stop the balcony protester last weekend.
A DDG news search for "racism in Bulgaria" (literally my second search) includes this summary at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-50060759 about repeated racism by Bulgian football fans. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/20/bulgaria-sofia... points out "While racist abuse of players inside stadiums attracts attention outside Bulgaria, within the country it is the Roma who are the principal targets of thugs in black and men in suits."
A DDG news seach for "black lives matter Croatia" finds https://balkaninsight.com/2020/06/10/balkan-protesters-show-... where we read "Activists in Zagreb, Belgrade, Podgorica, Warsaw and Sofia rallied to show solidarity but also to point out the problem of racism and police violence in their own countries. ... Dozens of people took part in a protest march in the Montenegrin capital Podgorica on Monday evening. “There is no doubt that racists are also hiding among all our local Balkan fascists.“"
You find some articles via google search about things like "black lives matter" in Croatia and claim it is relevant there somehow. There was a BLM protest in Lithuania too (where I am from). There were maybe 10 black people in that protest. Half of them when interviewed said they were traveling through different countries (Estonia, Lithuania, Poland) to create and initiate those protest. Then if you look at the people who attended - mostly teenagers. When asked why they are attending this protest they came up with "to show solidarity for US". Which is to say - they are being fed US politics over the internet and found an opportunity to join an event here.
So that's how I see it. These US political things leak to other countries. Through media, through twitter and instagram, and now even through HN.
Are LGBTQ+ rights a foreign ideology that seek to destroy basic Polish values?
Is Malgorzata Szutowicz an Eastern European who thinks about "sex" and "gender" as different concepts?
I quoted a BLM protesters as saying they were there "to show solidarity but also to point out the problem of racism and police violence in their own countries", which includes racism against the Roma people.
Hammering it won't make your point across. Most of this issues are not really very relevant to those societies. What you're looking for is activists (now journalists) writing pieces, and drinking from US narratives.
People in other countries is worried because every time a problem is framed under anglo-narrative constraints it becomes distorted, unnecessarily confrontational, and it distracts media from talking about the real problems people care about.
BLM protests in particular were weird in many places. In my city there was a bunch of people (mostly whites) and it wasn't very well received, because there were other very pressing issues (like people dying by the thousands by a virus).
A BLM protest in East Europe looks partially ridiculous to me, the amount of black people in those countries and the police brutality is almost null. It is more an US problem.
In those countries there are more important issues to protest about, like what is happening in Belarus, and unfortunately is something that doesn't have the same news impact as the BLM protests.
>"Transphobia" - even such things as thinking about "sex" and "gender" as different concepts are quite US specific. i.e. where I live we typically refer to people by their sex, and don't even have a term for a separate concept like gender.
Another way of saying this is that Lithuania is currently either culturally or politically suppressing trans people, whether inherently or knowingly - I promise you trans people and their alternative identification exist there, too. You just dont see it and/or they are afraid to say so.
"Black lives matter" specifically is a slogan with a US background, yes, but European countries do have racism, sexism and trans-rights issues, and there is really no point in pretending otherwise. EDIT: that's not to say that there aren't overly strong US influences in some topics, just that "oh that's a US-only thing" does not apply here.
Ugh, slavs were quite racist against Jews in particular. Animosity against gypsies is clesr too, but treatment of Jews stands out in general. And currently, general opinions of many people in region are pretty racist ... it just does not come up until yoi discuss race.
Also, I would really like to kmow where slavic you are that there ia no sexism against women in tech or girls.
Amd i dont know slavic programmer ashamed of that, the job is pretty well paid.
I'm really disappointed to see it flagged, because this is a real issue in the tech industry and its online spaces. Especially with the widespread moves to work-from-home, it's extremely important that we have online spaces that are better than this.
It's insecurity. I browse /g/ sometimes and while there's some very talented and interesting engineers there, there's also a lot of people who are trying to get into programming because it's the path of least resistance for a socially awkward young white guy who spends 18 hours a day on a computer. I think these vitriolic threads mostly involve this latter group of users.
Unfortunately not everyone is disposed towards becoming a good programmer and these guys don't tend to have the best study skills or work ethic anyway, so they often struggle to acquire the skills that they believe are their only way of finding success in life. This causes them to lash out with great ferocity at people who are both technologically able and socially graceful - especially women and non-white people. It infuriates them that these normies with friendship groups and romantic partners and progressive political views are able to do the things that they are inclined to believe are the sole preserve of the lonely basement dwelling nerd, and do those things much better than they can. So they convince themselves that when a non-white woman gets hired in tech it's all the fault of the (((diversity thought police))) and that she's actually a technological incompetent, because to believe otherwise would shatter their world view and force them to come to terms with their own mediocrity.
To be honest, knowing what I know about 4chan, I would guess that's a white weeb. Of course, it could be a 16 year old girl from Osaka, but to a first order approximation literally everyone on /g/ is a white guy.
Maybe, but if you fix your comments on skin color your are as racist as those peoples. Even she makes that error, attributes a comment to East Asian and later call it White Supremacy, the most extreme racism i saw in the past was in Africa, second India third Russia.
Seeing as she keeps mentioning how she thinks they're Asian men while apparently linking some of them to their real identities through GitHub, well, I don't think it's that hard to put 1 and 1 together in this case.
I have seen super toxic dude who also was pretty good at programming. (All his failures were social non-technical.) Being talented does not guarantee non toxicity.
His ideology was atrocious. (He was actually physically violent to all his girlfriends and build worldview where he was the good one.)
I don't deny that such people exist. There's always outliers. But those who are gifted and capable are not usually as inclined towards hate as those who are not.
But those who are gifted and capable are not usually as inclined towards hate as those who are not.
They are. They just hate different groups. People with low cognitive ability tend to hate groups based on things like sexuality or race. People with higher cognitive ability hate others based on the choices they make such as which political party someone supports.
Hate features universally across the spectrum of intelligence.
It takes very few nasty harassers to harass the vast majority of "targets," since harassment is not a 1:1 activity.
In my anecdotal experience, the most gifted and capable end up with the poorest socialization from early on in life, and are therefore more likely than average to either not understand the profound negative effects of things they say, or to not care.
> "But those who are gifted and capable are not usually as inclined towards hate as those who are not."
I have some passing familiarity with academia and with FAANG companies. Try doing something something that risks a professor getting publications/tenure or risks an FAANG employee their next bonus/promotion and you'll find out rather jarringly why that belief is pure fantasy.
You're employing the tactic of "poisoning the well", which is a pre-emptive personal attack. Many programmers are introverts, and you calling them antisocial basement dwelling nerds is just a hostile stereotype. There is no way extroverts are inherently better than introverts. I don't like the false dichotomy you're implying. Also, making people "guilty" by association. Also, dehumanizing while taking high moral ground.
Downvoting you, and I'm saying this openly because I despise cowardly anonymous ostracism present on sites like this. Sometimes I wish all downvoting was done with stating the reason.
There were civil ways you could have described these behaviors, but you didn't. For example covert narcissisim, passive aggressive. I have some covert narcissist traits, but at least I'm trying.
I didn't mention introversion and I didn't imply all introverts are antisocial basement dwelling nerds. I'm just describing a particular class of /g/ users and the attitudes they hold.
They’re bitter unemployed men of many ages and races who are not marketable and feel they will be excluded from society regardless of any technical proficiency they have or could hope to gain.
This has been flagged, and I would like to speak to why it shouldn't have been. HackerNews is a site for hackers, and among hackers there is still a wide cohort of people who will absolutely deny that women face (and more generally, marginalised people) do not face hate for who they are. This ought to stay up, just so we have another very visible example of what tonnes of people go through.
> Those trolls or “kids” as few people names them, are in most cases HN target audience. :)
Not that I've spent a meaningful amount of time on any "chan", but based on my limited understanding just reducing HN and 4chan into "tech sites" is insufficient.
Again, the flaggings are the obvious signal of what interests people here. Why enforce arbitrary moderation on top?
Example: I flag, on every opportunity, posts related to US politics. It's not because I'm "hurt" or annoyed by US politics, it's because I have close to zero interest in them and don't want that to be a content category that takes up space in HN from the actual interesting stuff.
I bet many feel the same for posts about social issues like this, whether it's morally right or wrong.
This social issue is tied with IT, HN and communities/companies alike. It shouldn’t be flagged because it’s hard for many, it should be talked about. Women in tech are treated like second class citizens.
But maybe i spent too much time in tech social media and I see those patterns regularly. Eg. Abuse woman online, if she starts talking about it, discredit her skills, and try to humiliate as much as possible, presenting it as a snowflake kind of attitude.
You write: "having the sufficient amount of flaggings suggests that hackers do not find this interesting".
I think you have misread the dynamics. To start, most people don't flag something just because it's not interesting. I don't - do you?
The piece describes coordinated harassment against the author, by software developers.
How many people does it take to flag something on HN? How many people are involved in that coordinated harassment. Can you therefore conclude that the flagging is not part of that broader coordinated harassment? I ... don't think so.
This coordinated harassment is part of a larger subculture of harassment against women in tech. As an example, 13 years ago Kathy Sierra withdrew from online life due to harassment. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Sierra#Harassment_and_wi... 'Scoble said "[W]henever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn't happen if the interviewee were a man."'.
As the piece points out, silence - and flagging is an attempt to silence - is one of many tactics used by harassers.
Given the context, you might therefore ask why "hackers do not find this interesting". Is it because a non-trivial number of hackers are sexist, and empathize with the harassment against women in tech, so flag in order to silence?
Or is it because hackers are tired of reading about how sexist the tech field is and want HN as their safe space? Or they feel powerless to change things so flagging is a way of sticking their head in the sand?
Or, really, you should rephrase the question entirely. Don't interpret flagging as a signal for interesting/not interesting, but see it as signal for "should not be on HN" - of which 'not interesting' is only a (small, IMO) part of it.
You're completely right - I misworded the "interesting" part, when I did in fact mean "on-topic."
However, I don't think it changes my ultimate point. All the same, an (assumedly) big enough populace decided this was not on topic.
You make a number of good points, which I won't argue with, except this one:
> Given the context, you might therefore ask why "hackers do not find this interesting". Is it because a non-trivial number of hackers are sexist, and empathize with the harassment against women in tech, so flag in order to silence?
I you're forgetting a very significant populace of "I have a millions issues I could worry about at any given point and just cannot provide meaningful resources to worry about this specific one."
I don't flag topics just because I can't provide meaningful resources to it. Do you?
Flagging may prevent others who might have those resources from contributing, yes? So flagging is not a neutral personal expression but a public negative expression, yes?
I still believe the interesting question is why did a big enough population decided this was not on topic enough to flag it, rather than ignore it.
Well, I'm drifting way into the sea of armchair psychology here, but a part of "I don't have resources to care" also translates often to "I don't want to see anything related to this."
Especially on the web, which tends to be fast-paced system 1 / reptile-brain media for many. Scroll, click, skim read, back, (not interesting topic - flag), f5, repeat.
There's an option to hide stories - it also hides comments for those stories on the new comments page. That's the appropriate action to take for stories one simply doesn't want to see, if one cannot muster the intestinal fortitude to simply ignore them and move on.
I'm not intending to be aggressive towards you personally, but Hacker News as a community because I consider flagging abuse to be really toxic behavior, particularly when a better alternative to it exists.
I'm not sure you can draw that conclusion. A significant number of people "flagging" something as uninteresting _to them_ does not necessarily indicate that it is uninteresting to "hackers". People have all sorts of reasons for flagging, but they should normally be positive ones e.g. "this violates some guideline and here's why", not "I do not find this interesting and therefore no-one else will".
A "sufficient amount of flaggings" does not suggest that "hackers do not find this interesting." It suggests that some percentage of users find it un-interesting, or want all of us to avoid it, which is not the same thing.
I also think the mods should manually unflag this. The events in the article are interesting, and the issue of trolling is currently a hot-topic in tech. I could understand people flagging it if she went overboard making political prescriptions, but her essay is pretty tame on that front.
I also think this shouldn't be flagged. What I personally dislike on sites like this is that anonymous downvoting often works like anonymous ostracism. Many times when some of my comments are downvoted I would at least like to know why I was downvoted. Perhaps there should be a way to post anonymous comments for the purposes of downvoting someone.
More generally, rating all comments and submissions on a scale is wrong for some topics. In some cases there's no right or wrong way to do it, only tradeoffs and context. The +/- voting system has simplistic appeal, but is also a bit archaic.
I absolutely agree. It does constantly get used around here just to silence the narrative of something the downvoter doesn't like. I'd posture it mostly gets used for that, and a small fraction of the time is it used correctly or does it serve a "good faith" action.
> among hackers there is still a wide cohort of people who will absolutely deny that women face
That was one of the points of the trolls which is right: this woman is not a hacker. The way they go about it obviously is puerile, but the point still stands.
Charlie Gerard made a Github Action recently that uses tensorflow's toxicity classifier to block some of the more horrible PRs and comments on repos - https://github.com/charliegerard/safe-space - it'd be good if Github could roll something like that out across the entire platform.
While neat, this seems like an even more protracted version of the Scunthorpe problem just waiting to happen. We already know mass-automation of morals is problematic (see YouTube, Twitter, Facebook et al's attempts).
This stuff is deplorable, but for now it requires human eyeballs and judgement. Perhaps allow for more granularity on repo visibility and interactivity beyond public/private.
We already know mass-automation of morals is problematic (see YouTube, Twitter, Facebook et al's attempts).
This is different. On Facebook, Twitter etc is that they're trying to use AI to automate detecting general speech. That's a hard problem. PRs and comments on GitHub aren't really general speech, which simplifies the issue, and GitHub already has access to billions of legitimate PRs to use as a dataset for training. It is at least worth exploring.
I'll also add that while I think such an automated system should be opt-out by default for public repos there absolutely should be an opt-out if people want to use one.
I never stop being amazed by how much time and energy people will put into being awful to other people.
It's so frustrating that after being in this industry for over 20 years nothing's really improved, and far too many arseholes are still getting a free pass for their arseholery.
It's getting worse. It used to be socially inadequate highly educated geeks who thought it was funny and/or couldn't really cope with anything other than highly intelligent white males. Now it's far broader than that. Logically because non-phd's can (luckily) work with computers and enter the industry now, but it has the good and bad side effect that people who I would not have to mingle with and who would've never made it to software developer 30 years ago, now suddenly are clients/colleagues etc. This means a rather large (and growing) share of racists, bigots, white supremacists (I thought those were some kind of fringe types living in the woods but then suddenly some rather good coder starts to talk politics to you...) and such. And a lot of guys I know act like they see women coders as equals, but from their subtle (and not so subtle sometimes) actions show they really don't, even while she might have superior skills/experience.
GitHub and internet overall is full of neckbeards and retards hiding under “cute” barely legal anime girls avatars and “uber skills”. But most of them are angry, desperate, and with hate to everyone for their own fails in life. Social media give them more chances to pour out their insults, and feel anonymous.
How to fight it? Probably only by bringing such things to the light and shame them publicly. Unfortunately, such people always have their companions who feel the attack in the same way as they do and set off in "defense" mode by ruthless attack on everyone as shown perfectly by Reddit and some "communities" on Twitter.
It's a pity there is no "contact person's mother" service that would have ended such internet attacks very quickly. :)
Start banning people, and keep banning until discourse improves. Ban all those users who put in those stupid pull requests. Then add firewall rules blocking every VPN and their entire ISP subnet. Burn it all down. Show them who controls the system. Then there will be tolerance and respect.
This is 4chan we are talking about. Most of them wont need a github account until they grow old enough to work. They will only see it as a successful troll and move on to their next target.
> Then add firewall rules blocking every VPN and their entire ISP subnet.
So you start targeting random people that weren't involved while the trolls watch from the sideline munching on popcorn. Yes, that will show them.
Yeah. And ban you too. And every other complainer and objecter. Participation is a privilege, not a right.
Also, punishing the entire group is very effective in the military. I am surprised how consistently the unit will turn on the offender, rather than the individuals who are making up the rules and administering the punishments. I think my proposed strategy will work.
> Also, punishing the entire group is very effective in the military.
So how does banning an ISP subnet equate to punishing 4channers?
> I am surprised how consistently the unit will turn on the offender
That implies that you communicated the reason for the ban and there is actually a consistent group aware of what is going on. Randomly banning vpns and ISP subnets does not imply that.
Unpopular opinion time: nothing to see here but mean kids.
Ok, so you insist: some chan kids, triggered by social justice activist (totally lame in their book), went to her github account and made some "funny" PRs. Quality of life impact on victim: zero.
Victim, being a social justice activist went to chan to search for discussions about herself. Found kids being mean. I for one am surprised how tame the shit talk is.
Her conclusion: WHITE SUPREMACY!!!!!1111oneoneone
Really? This is how chans where, are and will always be. If you ever get involved with them in any way they will talk shit about you. They "attack" each other all the time too. That's how chan kids behave.
I never saved evidence about my "victimization" on chans because I just laughed about it. But if I did I would have hundreds of screenshots that where a lot more graphic then this (murder porn level) and I am a white cis male (now old too). This has absolutely nothing to do with social justice and everything with mean kids.
So—because you're used to worse abuse you think it's fine others are subjected to abuse? It seems like you're just opting out of any social responsibility.
If you read my post you can see I mentioned I was the target for chan trolling/abuse/attack (whatever you want to call it) while being a white cis man. Also they attack each other inside the chans while being god knows what every one of them. It has nothing to do with white supremacy or misogyny but with mean kids that will attack anyone.
Excellent post. Whenever I see the full extent of harassment that an acquaintance endures it usually turns out to be far more than I assumed. So if someone you know is dealing with this keep in mind that there is probably a lot more than they are initially letting on.
I think the call for action by teams/management to ensure sufficient support (including time off) is a really important one. Lots of organisations are investing time and effort into trying to build a more diverse workforce, but the bulk of that attention tends to be in hiring, rather than retaining and supporting minority groups in the workforce.
The behavior demonstrated by the mob is utterly abhorrent, and we should all oppose it as vigorously as possible.
But the "suggestions" section is not constructive.
> When these events happen to your employees, are you investing actual money to support them?
I'm sorry, but you don't even know the human beings on my team.
> It's easy to dismiss these trolls as incel 4channers that we shun and don't associate with. Lol no. These are your people. They work at your companies and write your code. They are harassing or doxxing your other employees. This toxic behavior is still very much a part of your tech culture, and you keep rewarding it.
Well, after building an airtight case for incredibly gross behavior on the part of the mob, you lost me completely. The implication is that "incel 4channers" are mainstream programmers. They are not. Not even close. I have worked with hundreds, and not one of them is like this. This is the vocal minority that the internet enables to speak out of proportion to their numbers, and make us all miserable. And the phenomenon of a vocal malignant minority is present in every domain, so why are we making this about our colleagues in the tech community?
No normal adult with a job, maybe a family, maybe a pet, and a million other things to do has time for this. They are either children, or bitter social and emotional pariahs.
I'm extremely sorry this talented programmer had to deal with them, but becoming bitter only fuels their sense of importance.
> No normal adult with a job, maybe a family, maybe a pet, and a million other things to do has time for this.
This is simply not true. "Normal", regular people do this too. I remember a while back a Finnish journalist wrote an article about meeting one of his online abusers[1], who had - on a Finnish copy of 4chan - wished that an immigrant would stab him and his whole family to death. Turned out the offender was a regular family man with a job and young children. He could not offer an explanation for his words and was not politically active.
These boards, their super hateful environment, and the presumed anonymity can get even a normal person to sling online hate. Even this person in the article said that his public persona in his normal life was completely different and not representative of his online comments.
As an employer or manager frankly it's neither your responsibility nor your business to investigate how your reports are spending their personal time.
First of all, don't lose any sleep over it. If one of your guys is a huge troll it's not your fault that you didn't know. These assholes are going to look like everyday normal people in RL. Secondly don't go snooping on your employees without cause. This should go without saying.
plenty of these people leaving super hateful comments all around the internet are just everday, nice friendly people who choose to say whatever the fuck they want on a forum or chan. It seems a lot of people throughout this very thread, would rather reduce them all to a certain ideology or hardcore stereotype all 4chan users as only white males. You couldn't be more wrong about that. Tons of people get on there and talk a bunch of trash like it's a video game and then go back to their "life."
> Well, after building an airtight case for incredibly gross behavior on the part of the mob, you lost me completely. The implication is that "incel 4channers" are mainstream programmers. They are not. Not even close. I have worked with hundreds, and not one of them is like this.
1. citation needed
2. The fact that people active on Github (i.e. with active work accounts, according to the article) were part of this would suggest that your overall point is probably wrong. Maybe your point about the small sample of people you've worked with is true, but I'd be surprised. After all, how would you know - you think that your colleagues would openly share that they're secretly a racist/sexist/whatever internet troll?
>No normal adult with a job, maybe a family, maybe a pet, and a million other things to do has time for this. They are either children, or bitter social and emotional pariahs.
This is an understandable assumption, but it's wrong. I spend a lot of time on 4chan, and I even know who some of these people are in real life. Some of them are adults with jobs, families who support them (though none have children), and circles of IRL like-minded friends.
It is comforting to believe that none of the people you've worked with would ever do anything like this.
It is also probably incorrect.
People are usually not very open about their bad behavior, and if they were, that would say much about their perception of you.
I worked with a drug addict who had, more than once, shot up while in the office. I only learned this after he died of an overdose. When I expressed my shock at his use of drugs, several other employees expressed their shock at my shock. It turned out that those of us who were known for smoking a lot of weed had some knowledge of his drug use, while those of us he perceived as squares had no clue at all.
So kudos for being the kind of person the nasty abusers don't want to tip their hand to, but don't assume you haven't worked with nasty abusers.
Of course it's possible, just as it's possible for someone to be an abusive partner when their conduct at work with colleagues is normal.
But what do you do with that information? What is the action you want from this?
Because it seems like the only thing I can do is make it clear it's not tolerated, which seems a little... bizarre... given that it's not happening. Let's all be mindful, aware, and empathetic. But saying they are "on my team" is an unhelpful assertion with neither evidence nor utility in solving this social phenomenon.
Your initial comment was very dismissive, and I believe you erred in your assumptions. So one action I would want is for people to not be so dismissive when you hear about the very real and very widespread experiences of victims of online abuse.
> No normal adult with a job, maybe a family, maybe a pet, and a million other things to do has time for this. They are either children, or bitter social and emotional pariahs.
This is provably untrue, and that bad assumption is driving you to miss out on opportunities to be mindful, aware, and empathetic. So please, try to actually be mindful, aware, and empathetic.
That is where she goes really wonky with the white supremacy bit and "Fix this shit these are your devs/employees" like what is any manager to do? Go home with people and do a deep seated documentary on each employee, pry into their personal lives and attempt to root out anyone with ideology that she doesn't like? It's fine to not like bigotry and racism, however it's not fine to tell everyone else what they can think or believe. Huge issue right now. You cannot legislate morality. Period.
> No normal adult with a job, maybe a family, maybe a pet, and a million other things to do has time for this. They are either children, or bitter social and emotional pariahs.
This might be a comforting thought for you, but it is just not true.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadInteresting read.
I might say I think gamer culture is bound up in this but it's not just about that. Something very toxic is empowered by current s/W engineering.
I'm retiring inside ten years. I worry it won't be fixed before I leave the field.
ICT is a useful umbrella term. I do not believe it is UK specific or School specific.
People who don't realize that "communication" is an exchange of information, therefore already included in "information technology"?
And then you still have to fix any issues pushing them out of industry once they're already there.
Stay strong!
The amount of malice is just very sad
The former would serve as a staging area and playground for new features. Just as the internet does today, it would provide, roughly speaking, no accountability and no security. My guess is that its main audience would be high-school seniors and college-age kids. In addition, you'd have a minority of techies, and — yes — some vile wingnuts.
The "safe for life" internet's network-layer would have baked-in authentication (eg: part of your IP is a user-id). It would have a protocol for notarization (ie: the ability to have a third party vouch for information. eg: the choice to tie your real name to your user-id, or remain pseudonymous). Its "web" markup would be far simpler and more semantic (no per-site styles, no dynamic features, no scripting).
When someone invents a very useful web feature/paradigm on the old internet/web, the new internet's web-standard could add special tags to support it. So, for example, the NewW3C could introduce a set of "store-front" tags with which one could create an entire online-store without any scripting. The NewW3C would include all sorts of functionality, eg: tags to host a Twitch-like site to stream video, with no JS whatsoever.
With this sort of accountability, the alternate internet would finally provide the ability to effectively moderate — bad actors wouldn't easily "respawn" a sockpuppet or bot account, to evade a ban. It would make commerce and data-sharing much safer (via the lack of dynamic features).
The situation today is absurd. What content do we want the web to promote: interesting photos of Japanese food, by a serious developer... or hackneyed ramblings by a bunch of 20-year old trolls? The internet we have today is "wrong" for most people.
Edit: Here is a more serious reply.
I should have stressed that the new network-layer would support the old internet. So, for example, a user might have a Firefox.app window open on their screen (connected via TCP/IP and displaying a normal HTTP website), and a also an AltBrowser.app (connected via AltTCP/IP and displaying a new AltHTTP website). Sort of like the Tor-paradigm, only if Tor required you to update your router's firmware.
I think, in such an environment, the old internet would still be the first choice of most 20-somethings (aside from when they online-shop). Why? Because young people tend to seek excitement, danger, conflict, boundary-pushing, etc.
The new internet likely would be the primary choice (probably the sole one) of oldsters, toddlers, parents, researchers, sensitive souls, retailers, and so on
Ideally, the identity-side would be handled in a distributed way through a network of brick-and-mortar notary businesses. An account "for life" wouldn't be so iron-clad as to ruin someone's life. It would be onerous in the sense that one would have to pay a fee to the notary, and provide government ID to replace their account. At which point (after which the original, compromised user ID is marked as invalid).
The point you make re: security-issues with retailers is relevant, but it applies primarily to the businesses who notarize users, probably not the retailers.
As an example of the difference, the user could request the notary electronically confirm to the public that the user has a high school diploma, but not reveal any details re: from which school, or from which year. I haven't thought this through, but I could envision a "Mailboxes Etc" type business providing both notary, and PObox/reship services so that other retailers couldn't even find out a user's address.
With your proposal, the trolling would still happen, but it might have been harder for her to track down where it was coming from.
Trolling is a societal issue, not a technological one.
Also, if the abuse is egregious enough (ie: a death threat), the troll is now in legal peril. The cost/benefit of reporting a troll to the police (even under a pseudonym) on the new internet is much more attractive. Currently, trying to track down an IP is fairly worthless. It's not tightly-coupled to a human being.
We disagree on this, but — let's be honest — there's no way to prove either position conclusively. I'm tempted to bombard you comparisons and contrasts from the various historical periods, but I doubt it would convince you. There are myriad counter-examples with which you could reply.My take is that the internet, in its current form, enforces so little accountability, that it gives bad actors far more power than good actors.
Whatever the specifics, the basic idea is that there be a one-to-one relationship between a user and their account.
If we can come together as people and make this system a reality maybe it can eventually replace the old and "savage" internet. Then we can start banning any groups we don't like from the internet all together. SEIG HEIL!
By using their work accounts, they are stating that the company condones their behaviour - and I suspect that isn't the case in the majority of cases. I would definitely want to know if any of my employees were engaging in this shit so I could explain in very simple terms why it is unacceptable - because they clearly don't get it on their own.
How?
How about, if any employer wants to hold one of these employees to account, how about requiring they make a video apology that begins with an admission of what they did, and an explanation of what was going on in their mind when they did it?
Anonymise the subject and make it public?
Give it to university psych departments for study?
But using a work account to harass someone is a completely new level of stupid.
How? I mean, what do you suggest?
> It's a white supremacy problem.
US Cultural hegemony is inevitable, but please, try to contain this stuff in your anglo world, everytime it spills over other countries it's not an improvement.
Not hiring people like this is a way to fix the culture.
Ultimately, everything is downstream of culture, and if it becomes the norm that one uses Github for (essentially) Instagramming your food, then Github will become Instagram/Tumblr/whatever.
I don't expect anyone to agree with the point I'm making, I just want it to be noted so that in 5-10 years when Github succumbs and becomes a place that's not really used for code - or whatever other pathological outcomes the blue-haired ones create, nobody will say "wow, who could have predicted this!"
The person who submitted a pull request deleting everything to "fix bloat" did exactly the right thing. This should probably even be a site policy.
oh i knew it, another whiny-bitchy post ehmke-style. take your sjw bullshit to some other place, preferrably 6ft underground.
Back then, you was not supposed to "feed the trolls" so victims just left.
Trolling used to be more prank-ish but it would already at that time certainly devolve to doxxing and start affecting people's real lives. I remember it took me a long time to stop caring on not leaving traces that people could link to my real name, my real pictures or whatever online.
I remember people on online forums salivating when Google came out and was a much better search tool to link an username to an email and from there to your life outside the internet. It was scary to post something confronting these trolls because they could try to find you, they had enough free time for that.
So I don't know when the internet was really that naive and innocent place, it had more innocence but this bad side of it was very present from the get go, at least in my experience.
What was amusing and fun to you and your friends drove people out of the industry, and is likely a very small part of why people lament imbalances in ethnicity and gender today.
Teenagers aren't great at understanding the consequences of their actions. I wasn't, you weren't, most of us aren't or weren't. It's hard to look back and realize that things you thought were in fun were not fun at all for the victims, but it's a good start.
https://www.somethingawful.com/news/were-all-gonna/
A writer for the SA website made fun a website of a mother who was grieving her stillborn children. Forget any opinion you might have about the mother or her presentation: this a woman who had several children die before she ever got to know them. It's potentially one of the most traumatic things that can happen to someone, and this writer decided to ridicule how this mother grieved:
>Your poison womb is making heaven too fucking crowded.
I hate myself that I thought this was funny. I hate that I used words to belittle the LGBTQ community. I hate that I was that edgelord that held to statistics about crime rates and intelligence as they related to race. I hate that I made fun of people for their sexuality. I hate that I discounted sexism, racism, and ableism.
It was never in good fun. Some people grow out of it and others don't. I am still working constantly to better myself and catch myself when I have prejudice thoughts.
Maybe it's got to do with the fact we're competing with everyone online for attention, and the issue could be helped if more activity was in smaller clusters, where people didn't have to resort to outrageous strategies to get attention because there's less competition. (Discord servers provide one specific example of what I'm thinking of.) But it seems like as long as the global cluster exists too, people will seek attention on it too for its greater rewards, unless there's something about the smaller clusters that's even more rewarding.
The internet lost the lesson some time ago because even bad attention is good attention when it comes to KPIs. More sharing is good sharing.
People are mainly talking about US politics here. And look at the discussion. Every different opinion is downvoted and dead.
When there's such drama, participants even use english words to describe this phenomena. It's a clear anglo cultural artifact that spilled over due to US cultural hegemony.
I find it weird to see this when I rarely see comments so strongly arguing that a subject is too US-centric for HN in threads about stuff like the San Francisco housing market, American workplaces, or other aspects of online sites.
But then again, I didn't really put much stock in vague generalizations like this, or yours.
Regardless, point taken, it's not a US-centric problem.
1. Argentina has one of the highest femicide rates in the world. 2. Brazil elected Bolsonaro, who spends a lot of time spouting homophobic / misogynistic things. 3. France nearly elected Marine LePen last time around.
I'm not sure how one can pretend that only Anglophone countries have issues with misogyny, homophobia, and racism.
The same way that people in Anglophone countries pretend that they don't have issues with misogyny, homophobia, and racism: by being on the safe side of those issues! Straight men in the ethnic majority are very easily, even naturally, unaware of any tension or issues, and find it easy to dismiss people highlighting the experiences of others as "activism."
Argentina has a lot of issues, and women getting murdered is not of particular relevance among the high level of crime, the high level of corruption and the extremely difficult financial situation of argentinians, who can't even save money reasonably in their local currency, which may be a given for US, but it's a living hell for them. In facto, inflation is consistently the first problem for most argentinians in most polls.
Argentinians don't need to talk about BLM, because it's not relevant to them. Women in tech is probably one of the least problems for them. Energy and time are precious resources, and they need to be focused on important issues.
I think some of you guys just haven't got the empathy to imagine a different setting than your current one. Just being able to put money in a bank and forgetting about it is a luxury some people can't afford.
From the perspective of where I live (Eastern Europe):
"Black lives matter" - We have very few black people living here. And very few problems with police in general. When something bad happens it typically happens to the police, not by the police.
"Racism" - we have no history of slavery nor racism, except being subjected to it. Even more - originally the word "slave" was derived from the word "slav".
"Sexism in tech" - there is no sexism in tech here. Tech is not even a prestigious field. People want to work in law, medicine and finance. Some can even be quite ashamed to admit they work in a technical field.
"Transphobia" - even such things as thinking about "sex" and "gender" as different concepts are quite US specific. i.e. where I live we typically refer to people by their sex, and don't even have a term for a separate concept like gender.
Yet these things are so pervasive on the internet. People even post their pronouns on twitter and (in this case) fill their GitHub profiles with that stuff. They can do it of course, it might even be a good thing to do. But I do not think this deserves a front page of HN. Hence why I am glad it was flagged.
The author of the article is not trying to promote a political agenda, asking you to support "cause A" or "cause B", they are merely trying to document a traumatizing experience that they have had.
And even if it was US politics? A large chunk of HN users are from the US. And as you have given me your political opinion about transphobia being "US specific", so does the author of the article claim "This thing happened. That's bad."
I do not believe your statement is correct.
Literally the first search I did was "police Poland" in a DDG news search on DDG and the third link was to earlier this month https://www.out.com/news/2020/8/10/polands-stonewall-police-... titled "Poland's Stonewall: Police Attack and Arrest Queer Protestors" :
> Nearly 50 people were arrested following the arrest of trans activist Malgorzata Szutowicz, better known as Margot, on Friday. The protests come amidst a rise in homophobic hate and rhetoric, and the recent re-election of President Duda who called LGBTQ+ rights a foreign ideology that seeks to destroy basic Polish values.
Or from https://euobserver.com/justice/149112 :
> Police were also investigating a separate case, in which a man on a balcony, next to a rainbow flag, grabbed his crotch during a World War II memorial march last weekend, Marczak said earlier. ...
> "No democratic country should allow the kind of incidents we saw, in which police enters people's private homes," [Rafał Trzaskowski] added, referring to police efforts to stop the balcony protester last weekend.
A DDG news search for "racism in Bulgaria" (literally my second search) includes this summary at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-50060759 about repeated racism by Bulgian football fans. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/20/bulgaria-sofia... points out "While racist abuse of players inside stadiums attracts attention outside Bulgaria, within the country it is the Roma who are the principal targets of thugs in black and men in suits."
A DDG news seach for "black lives matter Croatia" finds https://balkaninsight.com/2020/06/10/balkan-protesters-show-... where we read "Activists in Zagreb, Belgrade, Podgorica, Warsaw and Sofia rallied to show solidarity but also to point out the problem of racism and police violence in their own countries. ... Dozens of people took part in a protest march in the Montenegrin capital Podgorica on Monday evening. “There is no doubt that racists are also hiding among all our local Balkan fascists.“"
You find some articles via google search about things like "black lives matter" in Croatia and claim it is relevant there somehow. There was a BLM protest in Lithuania too (where I am from). There were maybe 10 black people in that protest. Half of them when interviewed said they were traveling through different countries (Estonia, Lithuania, Poland) to create and initiate those protest. Then if you look at the people who attended - mostly teenagers. When asked why they are attending this protest they came up with "to show solidarity for US". Which is to say - they are being fed US politics over the internet and found an opportunity to join an event here.
So that's how I see it. These US political things leak to other countries. Through media, through twitter and instagram, and now even through HN.
Is Malgorzata Szutowicz an Eastern European who thinks about "sex" and "gender" as different concepts?
I quoted a BLM protesters as saying they were there "to show solidarity but also to point out the problem of racism and police violence in their own countries", which includes racism against the Roma people.
People in other countries is worried because every time a problem is framed under anglo-narrative constraints it becomes distorted, unnecessarily confrontational, and it distracts media from talking about the real problems people care about.
BLM protests in particular were weird in many places. In my city there was a bunch of people (mostly whites) and it wasn't very well received, because there were other very pressing issues (like people dying by the thousands by a virus).
In those countries there are more important issues to protest about, like what is happening in Belarus, and unfortunately is something that doesn't have the same news impact as the BLM protests.
Another way of saying this is that Lithuania is currently either culturally or politically suppressing trans people, whether inherently or knowingly - I promise you trans people and their alternative identification exist there, too. You just dont see it and/or they are afraid to say so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Lithuania
Also, I would really like to kmow where slavic you are that there ia no sexism against women in tech or girls.
Amd i dont know slavic programmer ashamed of that, the job is pretty well paid.
The fact that this article was marked flagged after 20 minutes sort of confirms the point of the article's author.
What does [flagged] mean?
It means that users flagged a post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on Hacker News.
Moderators sometimes add [flagged] for the same reasons, and sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair.
Unfortunately not everyone is disposed towards becoming a good programmer and these guys don't tend to have the best study skills or work ethic anyway, so they often struggle to acquire the skills that they believe are their only way of finding success in life. This causes them to lash out with great ferocity at people who are both technologically able and socially graceful - especially women and non-white people. It infuriates them that these normies with friendship groups and romantic partners and progressive political views are able to do the things that they are inclined to believe are the sole preserve of the lonely basement dwelling nerd, and do those things much better than they can. So they convince themselves that when a non-white woman gets hired in tech it's all the fault of the (((diversity thought police))) and that she's actually a technological incompetent, because to believe otherwise would shatter their world view and force them to come to terms with their own mediocrity.
You see what your doing here right?
>This one in particular stood out to me because it's a very specific type of harassment I've received my whole life, usually from East Asians.
Maybe call your commonsense prejudice?
https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/7qt0h5/4chan_pol_mee...
His ideology was atrocious. (He was actually physically violent to all his girlfriends and build worldview where he was the good one.)
They are. They just hate different groups. People with low cognitive ability tend to hate groups based on things like sexuality or race. People with higher cognitive ability hate others based on the choices they make such as which political party someone supports.
Hate features universally across the spectrum of intelligence.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8qwwzp/who-you-hate-depen...
It takes very few nasty harassers to harass the vast majority of "targets," since harassment is not a 1:1 activity.
In my anecdotal experience, the most gifted and capable end up with the poorest socialization from early on in life, and are therefore more likely than average to either not understand the profound negative effects of things they say, or to not care.
I have some passing familiarity with academia and with FAANG companies. Try doing something something that risks a professor getting publications/tenure or risks an FAANG employee their next bonus/promotion and you'll find out rather jarringly why that belief is pure fantasy.
Downvoting you, and I'm saying this openly because I despise cowardly anonymous ostracism present on sites like this. Sometimes I wish all downvoting was done with stating the reason.
There were civil ways you could have described these behaviors, but you didn't. For example covert narcissisim, passive aggressive. I have some covert narcissist traits, but at least I'm trying.
Based on that, having the sufficient amount of flaggings suggests that hackers do not find this interesting.
I see why it is important to highlight this, but don't see a reason why HN is the right place for it.
Not that I've spent a meaningful amount of time on any "chan", but based on my limited understanding just reducing HN and 4chan into "tech sites" is insufficient.
Again, the flaggings are the obvious signal of what interests people here. Why enforce arbitrary moderation on top?
How do you know?
Example: I flag, on every opportunity, posts related to US politics. It's not because I'm "hurt" or annoyed by US politics, it's because I have close to zero interest in them and don't want that to be a content category that takes up space in HN from the actual interesting stuff.
I bet many feel the same for posts about social issues like this, whether it's morally right or wrong.
But maybe i spent too much time in tech social media and I see those patterns regularly. Eg. Abuse woman online, if she starts talking about it, discredit her skills, and try to humiliate as much as possible, presenting it as a snowflake kind of attitude.
All of this is typical “nice guy” kind of shit.
I think you have misread the dynamics. To start, most people don't flag something just because it's not interesting. I don't - do you?
The piece describes coordinated harassment against the author, by software developers.
How many people does it take to flag something on HN? How many people are involved in that coordinated harassment. Can you therefore conclude that the flagging is not part of that broader coordinated harassment? I ... don't think so.
This coordinated harassment is part of a larger subculture of harassment against women in tech. As an example, 13 years ago Kathy Sierra withdrew from online life due to harassment. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Sierra#Harassment_and_wi... 'Scoble said "[W]henever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn't happen if the interviewee were a man."'.
As the piece points out, silence - and flagging is an attempt to silence - is one of many tactics used by harassers.
Given the context, you might therefore ask why "hackers do not find this interesting". Is it because a non-trivial number of hackers are sexist, and empathize with the harassment against women in tech, so flag in order to silence?
Or is it because hackers are tired of reading about how sexist the tech field is and want HN as their safe space? Or they feel powerless to change things so flagging is a way of sticking their head in the sand?
Or, really, you should rephrase the question entirely. Don't interpret flagging as a signal for interesting/not interesting, but see it as signal for "should not be on HN" - of which 'not interesting' is only a (small, IMO) part of it.
However, I don't think it changes my ultimate point. All the same, an (assumedly) big enough populace decided this was not on topic.
You make a number of good points, which I won't argue with, except this one:
> Given the context, you might therefore ask why "hackers do not find this interesting". Is it because a non-trivial number of hackers are sexist, and empathize with the harassment against women in tech, so flag in order to silence?
I you're forgetting a very significant populace of "I have a millions issues I could worry about at any given point and just cannot provide meaningful resources to worry about this specific one."
Flagging may prevent others who might have those resources from contributing, yes? So flagging is not a neutral personal expression but a public negative expression, yes?
I still believe the interesting question is why did a big enough population decided this was not on topic enough to flag it, rather than ignore it.
Especially on the web, which tends to be fast-paced system 1 / reptile-brain media for many. Scroll, click, skim read, back, (not interesting topic - flag), f5, repeat.
More generally, rating all comments and submissions on a scale is wrong for some topics. In some cases there's no right or wrong way to do it, only tradeoffs and context. The +/- voting system has simplistic appeal, but is also a bit archaic.
That was one of the points of the trolls which is right: this woman is not a hacker. The way they go about it obviously is puerile, but the point still stands.
"women (and more generally, marginalised people) face hate for who they are."
This stuff is deplorable, but for now it requires human eyeballs and judgement. Perhaps allow for more granularity on repo visibility and interactivity beyond public/private.
This is different. On Facebook, Twitter etc is that they're trying to use AI to automate detecting general speech. That's a hard problem. PRs and comments on GitHub aren't really general speech, which simplifies the issue, and GitHub already has access to billions of legitimate PRs to use as a dataset for training. It is at least worth exploring.
I'll also add that while I think such an automated system should be opt-out by default for public repos there absolutely should be an opt-out if people want to use one.
It's so frustrating that after being in this industry for over 20 years nothing's really improved, and far too many arseholes are still getting a free pass for their arseholery.
How to fight it? Probably only by bringing such things to the light and shame them publicly. Unfortunately, such people always have their companions who feel the attack in the same way as they do and set off in "defense" mode by ruthless attack on everyone as shown perfectly by Reddit and some "communities" on Twitter.
It's a pity there is no "contact person's mother" service that would have ended such internet attacks very quickly. :)
> Then add firewall rules blocking every VPN and their entire ISP subnet.
So you start targeting random people that weren't involved while the trolls watch from the sideline munching on popcorn. Yes, that will show them.
Also, punishing the entire group is very effective in the military. I am surprised how consistently the unit will turn on the offender, rather than the individuals who are making up the rules and administering the punishments. I think my proposed strategy will work.
So how does banning an ISP subnet equate to punishing 4channers?
> I am surprised how consistently the unit will turn on the offender
That implies that you communicated the reason for the ban and there is actually a consistent group aware of what is going on. Randomly banning vpns and ISP subnets does not imply that.
Ok, so you insist: some chan kids, triggered by social justice activist (totally lame in their book), went to her github account and made some "funny" PRs. Quality of life impact on victim: zero.
Victim, being a social justice activist went to chan to search for discussions about herself. Found kids being mean. I for one am surprised how tame the shit talk is.
Her conclusion: WHITE SUPREMACY!!!!!1111oneoneone
Really? This is how chans where, are and will always be. If you ever get involved with them in any way they will talk shit about you. They "attack" each other all the time too. That's how chan kids behave.
I never saved evidence about my "victimization" on chans because I just laughed about it. But if I did I would have hundreds of screenshots that where a lot more graphic then this (murder porn level) and I am a white cis male (now old too). This has absolutely nothing to do with social justice and everything with mean kids.
How exactly does the latter disproves the former? The are independent claims.
What does [flagged] mean?
It means that users flagged a post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on Hacker News.
Moderators sometimes add [flagged] for the same reasons, and sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair.
But the "suggestions" section is not constructive.
> When these events happen to your employees, are you investing actual money to support them?
I'm sorry, but you don't even know the human beings on my team.
> It's easy to dismiss these trolls as incel 4channers that we shun and don't associate with. Lol no. These are your people. They work at your companies and write your code. They are harassing or doxxing your other employees. This toxic behavior is still very much a part of your tech culture, and you keep rewarding it.
Well, after building an airtight case for incredibly gross behavior on the part of the mob, you lost me completely. The implication is that "incel 4channers" are mainstream programmers. They are not. Not even close. I have worked with hundreds, and not one of them is like this. This is the vocal minority that the internet enables to speak out of proportion to their numbers, and make us all miserable. And the phenomenon of a vocal malignant minority is present in every domain, so why are we making this about our colleagues in the tech community?
No normal adult with a job, maybe a family, maybe a pet, and a million other things to do has time for this. They are either children, or bitter social and emotional pariahs.
I'm extremely sorry this talented programmer had to deal with them, but becoming bitter only fuels their sense of importance.
The best revenge is living well.
This is simply not true. "Normal", regular people do this too. I remember a while back a Finnish journalist wrote an article about meeting one of his online abusers[1], who had - on a Finnish copy of 4chan - wished that an immigrant would stab him and his whole family to death. Turned out the offender was a regular family man with a job and young children. He could not offer an explanation for his words and was not politically active.
These boards, their super hateful environment, and the presumed anonymity can get even a normal person to sling online hate. Even this person in the article said that his public persona in his normal life was completely different and not representative of his online comments.
[1] https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2019/05/30/nettivihaa-tyossaan... (in Finnish)
EDIT: Found it in English: https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2019/11/06/face-to-face-with-a...
But say that guy works for me, and he is hiding his behavior well.
What am I supposed to do with that possibility?
First of all, don't lose any sleep over it. If one of your guys is a huge troll it's not your fault that you didn't know. These assholes are going to look like everyday normal people in RL. Secondly don't go snooping on your employees without cause. This should go without saying.
1. citation needed
2. The fact that people active on Github (i.e. with active work accounts, according to the article) were part of this would suggest that your overall point is probably wrong. Maybe your point about the small sample of people you've worked with is true, but I'd be surprised. After all, how would you know - you think that your colleagues would openly share that they're secretly a racist/sexist/whatever internet troll?
This is an understandable assumption, but it's wrong. I spend a lot of time on 4chan, and I even know who some of these people are in real life. Some of them are adults with jobs, families who support them (though none have children), and circles of IRL like-minded friends.
It is also probably incorrect.
People are usually not very open about their bad behavior, and if they were, that would say much about their perception of you.
I worked with a drug addict who had, more than once, shot up while in the office. I only learned this after he died of an overdose. When I expressed my shock at his use of drugs, several other employees expressed their shock at my shock. It turned out that those of us who were known for smoking a lot of weed had some knowledge of his drug use, while those of us he perceived as squares had no clue at all.
So kudos for being the kind of person the nasty abusers don't want to tip their hand to, but don't assume you haven't worked with nasty abusers.
But what do you do with that information? What is the action you want from this?
Because it seems like the only thing I can do is make it clear it's not tolerated, which seems a little... bizarre... given that it's not happening. Let's all be mindful, aware, and empathetic. But saying they are "on my team" is an unhelpful assertion with neither evidence nor utility in solving this social phenomenon.
> No normal adult with a job, maybe a family, maybe a pet, and a million other things to do has time for this. They are either children, or bitter social and emotional pariahs.
This is provably untrue, and that bad assumption is driving you to miss out on opportunities to be mindful, aware, and empathetic. So please, try to actually be mindful, aware, and empathetic.
Thanks.
This might be a comforting thought for you, but it is just not true.
I'm sorry... what?? I find this utterly confusing. Why are unskilled devs at GitHub allowed to push code to production?