Dr. Emma A. Jane, a UNSW Senior Lecturer in the School of the Arts & Media, says online violence can refer to a range of dialogs and acts that occur at the gender, technology and violence nexus.
"Examples of online violence include hate speech, sexually violent dialog, plausible rape and death threats, stalking, large groups attacking individuals, the malicious circulation of targets' personal details online (known as "doxing"), and the uploading of sexually explicit material without the consent of the pictured subject ("revenge porn")," Dr. Jane says.
If you think of it kind of like the idea of "poverty is violence" maybe that helps make it make some sense.
I am not going to read through this. I have some sympathy for why and how stuff like this gets written, but I think stuff like this tends to be more part of the problem than part of the solution.
I believe what they are going for is the idea that hostility you run into online has real world consequences. We dismiss the idea that "words on a screen" can have impact, but lots of men have no problem using Hacker News to make money but it is not a female-friendly space and even being fairly prominent as a woman here is more downside than up. It has not proven to be a good networking opportunity for me and I am given all kinds of crap for trying to talk about that, even in comments like this one intended to simply elucidate a problem space for someone scratching their head.
There is no good way to talk about such things, so they get entrenched and it causes real and serious problems for women and other marginalized peoples.
I'm spending less time here generally and may be in the process of "leaving" HN, more or less, because this is not a solvable problem and my motives for putting up with this shit are possibly disappearing. Without compelling reason to put up with it, I seem to be spending less time here and more time elsewhere.
So that's likely to leave HN with more crap like this piece and, hey, you get what you want. No one wanted to hear my take and I'm tired of trying to build bridges while getting kicked in the teeth and lumped in with man-hating self-proclaimed feminists for the crime of trying to make my life work.
I'm not trying to be offensive here but you are a self-admitted longtime homeless person with a community college certificate and an unfinished BA in "Environmental Studies" with a concentration in... Housing. Your Github consists of a readme.
The reason HN isn't a good networking opportunity for you is a lack of qualifications and personal achievements. I guarantee if you put in the work, learned a programming language, got in some commits of actual code to FOSS projects people actually use on a day to day basis and made a cool tech demo to Show HN, it would suddenly be a very useful networking opportunity for you.
I don't think any spaces should be hostile to women who arrive in earnest. But your lack of equal contributions to the valued posters here make me think you are not operating in earnest.
If you are a woman, an awful lot of men treat you like you are nothing but a pussy to fuck and their entire interaction boils down to deciding if they would like to fuck you in specific or not and whether they want to fuck you or not, it's all downside for the woman. If they want to fuck you, they will be using you and mistreating you. If they don't want to fuck you, you will not be treated like a human being. You will be ignored, at best, or treated with open hostility.
I've spent a lot of years trying to "just be a human being" on the internet and, just like off the internet, the vast majority of men I run into find out I am a woman, wonder to themselves if they would like to sleep with me and regardless of the answer, the outcome is I will never, ever, ever, ever be treated like a human being. I will be treated only like a walking, talking sex object who utterly doesn't matter and has nothing whatsoever of value to add other than maybe sex and doesn't deserve any respect, any intellectual outlets, any friends, any money, etc. unless I am sleeping with some man who has an adequate income.
> the vast majority of men I run into find out I am a woman, wonder to themselves if they would like to sleep with me and regardless of the answer, the outcome is I will never, ever, ever, ever be treated like a human being
This does not follow. As a heterosexual man I too wonder what it would be like to sleep with most women I meet that are in the fertile age range. This is less of an idiosyncratic personality trait than one built in by millions of generations of ancestors that all successfully bred. It does not imply that I consider those women to be less than human. In my own mind at least, it does not demean the women I speculate about.
But, in a nutshell, I am dirt poor and cannot seem to escape poverty in spite of apparently being the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board of HN. Plenty of men have no problem using HN to network and make money. For me, it's mostly been a dead end in that regard.
And I get a zillion personal attacks and excuses when I say that, but if it is "just me" then explain to me where all the women "doing it right" are. Because I appear to manage to fit in here better than average in spite of my gender, yet cannot turn it into an adequate income even though that's an explicit goal of mine.
So when five million mostly men step over my body in the gutter and go "Meh, not my problem she can't afford to eat. It's not like I'm sleeping with her." it's pretty freaking dehumanizing.
And after eleven years here, I am quite clear that boils down to "Most men don't really want to engage me with me in a substantive and meaningful fashion if I am not going to sleep with them and even if I did sleep with them, I would merely be a sex object. They still wouldn't engage me meaningfully in a lot of the ways I want to be engaged."
That opinion is based on 55 years of living, lots of reading and yadda. It's not an uninformed or knee jerk opinion by any stretch of the imagination.
Eleven years ago, I showed up here (on HN) all naively assuming I should be treated like a person simply because I am one and that's not been my firsthand experience of participating here.
> So when five million mostly men step over my body in the gutter and go "Meh, not my problem she can't afford to eat. It's not like I'm sleeping with her." it's pretty freaking dehumanizing.
Those same men also step over male bodies in the gutter because of their same lack of utility. They dehumanize both sexes with equality.
That's just more BS excuses. I'm not going to argue this further. It always boils down to "La la la, not listening!"
There is always some justification for how it somehow isn't sexist that I cannot successfully use HN as a means to establish an adequate income, even though plenty of men do so and even though I appear to be the top ranked woman here and it is an overwhelmingly male space and so forth. But I still get told over and over and over "Well, that's not evidence of sexism. You're just basically a Loser."
I might be misreading your message. I'm a bit short of sleep and such at the moment.
But if I weren't already extremely good about assuming good intentions and interpreting the actions of others through a lens of benign and reasonable motives, I couldn't have stayed this long.
The problem is that me understanding why guys do the things they do and yadda keeps the focus on guys and how important their feelings and what not are and fails to move anything forward in terms of me resolving my very real issues with trying to make ends meet.
I spent a ton of time in therapy because I was sexually abused as a kid and I have thought a lot about it and if just sleeping my way to a solution would work, I would have no qualms about doing that.
The problem is that I don't get treated like an actual person whether the answer to sex is "yes" or "no." In neither case does it ever lead to me being able to establish some kind of earned income for something other than sex work, in essence.
Honest to god, if just sleeping with a guy would open career doors for me, I would take that option in like a heartbeat. But it doesn't work. (See Theranos for evidence of how very poorly that works.) My last two serious boyfriends were supposedly potential career contacts and they never did the first thing for my career aspirations.
Once a guy gets sexually involved with me, sex is all it is. And if he doesn't get sexually involved with me, in most cases that means he doesn't get involved with me at all. (And I don't think that's "just me." Again: See Theranos for an example of how poorly it works to intentionally try to open doors for your career by sleeping with men with money.)
Most men do not want to support my work, promote my work, discuss my work, open doors for me career-wise, etc etc etc etc etc.
And that leaves me unable to establish an income while having to listen to the same really lousy explanations, dismissals, sympathetic noises and so forth year in and year out while my income barely budges.
You’re getting some really bad responses to your comments, I definitely hear what you’re saying. I’m aspiring to be in tech to get out of homelessness but I wonder if I can even pull it off as a woman.
I began doing remote work while homeless. That was enormously helpful in getting past some of those hurdles, to some degree.
I run r/GigWorks and a zillion other little subreddits and I run a bunch of homeless websites. If you are not familiar, Street Life Solutions has a list of some of the most pertinent ones in the sidebar:
I"m actually getting a surprising amount of support in this discussion. Things used to be a lot rougher for me on HN. At least some of the worst and ugliest stuff tends to get fairly promptly flagged to death these days.
to be fair this is a male space, I would expect no different treatment if I showed up on a Karen Knitting Forum. Equal rights doesn't mean you get treated the same as men, it means you get TREATED THE SAME AS MEN
Although I'm only 55 years old, I'm post menopausal. I wish to hell and back that being too old to get knocked up was some miracle cure for this issue. It hasn't proven to be.
> As a heterosexual man I too wonder what it would be like to sleep with most women I meet that are in the fertile age range. This is less of an idiosyncratic personality trait than one built in by millions of generations of ancestors that all successfully bred. It does not imply that I consider those women to be less than human. In my own mind at least, it does not demean the women I speculate about. [...]
but what about online? often you wont get to know how these women look like. more often than not, imagination is better than reality. what makes women attractive online?
There is great wisdom on this topic from the good old 4chan. You could google "there are no girls on the internet". It's much deeper than you might think! I'll paraphrase: There are no genders on the net. That's by default since it's mostly text-based. But (some) girls love to label themselves as such. They do that because it gives them immense advantages in real life and they want that on the net, too. However here no one cares since there is no (sexual) way of benefiting. That's why many people react so aggressively to those who present their gender in aggressive ways. And that's what I meant: Just be a human, not a woman.
The style of aggressively attacking "internet woman" might be questionable, but there is a deeper truth to it.
That amounts to asking women to actively and intentionally hide their gender online, something men are not asked to do. And it is extremely problematic to try to comply with such requests and it is extremely, extremely sexist to act like a woman can only expect decent treatment if she actively hides her gender.
That actually means it is impossible to get any kind of decent treatment as a woman, no matter what you do.
Really? Because your comment read exactly like an exaggeration. Sort of like the "culture of rape on campus" hysteria. You could be a journalist for rolling stone magazine.
Also, I hate to break this to you, but women on the internet also misbehave. And most of the nastiness women face online comes from other women.
Everybody gets shit on. Women aren't special. I know you think they are, but women are human beings just like the rest of us.
I didn't post a flamewar comment. I responded to a sexist flamewar comment. I tried to bring objectivity to the conversation.
If someone wrote, "as a man, an awful lot of women are list of stereotypical anti-women comments", I would have responded in kind. I would have called him out for being a sexist and point out that men also misbehave.
In what world is saying men and women are equal human beings who can equally be horrific be a flamewar comment.
> and it wrecks what it is for.
This doesn't? Is this what hacker news is for?
"If you are a woman, an awful lot of men treat you like you are nothing but a pussy to fuck and their entire interaction boils down to deciding if they would like to fuck you in specific or not and whether they want to fuck you or not, it's all downside for the woman. If they want to fuck you, they will be using you and mistreating you. If they don't want to fuck you, you will not be treated like a human being. You will be ignored, at best, or treated with open hostility.
I've spent a lot of years trying to "just be a human being" on the internet and, just like off the internet, the vast majority of men I run into find out I am a woman, wonder to themselves if they would like to sleep with me and regardless of the answer, the outcome is I will never, ever, ever, ever be treated like a human being. I will be treated only like a walking, talking sex object who utterly doesn't matter and has nothing whatsoever of value to add other than maybe sex and doesn't deserve any respect, any intellectual outlets, any friends, any money, etc. unless I am sleeping with some man who has an adequate income.
No, I am not exaggerating."
So if I wrote a highly exaggerated politically biased statement starting with "a lot blacks do X", "a lot of chinese do Y", "a lot of muslims are Z", etc and claim it isn't an exaggeration, that would be okay?
I'm more than willing to admit my mistakes, but I didn't here and if you want to stop flamewars, go speak to the OP.
I'm pretty sure that if you re-read your comment after some time has gone by, you'll see that it wasn't just "bringing objectivity to the conversation". I believe you that you intended it that way, but it came across as snarky and a personal attack. Intent doesn't communicate itself on the internet—quite the opposite—so the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
It's easy to understand how DoreenMichele's post could have triggered a defensive/offensive response. I get activated by comments that way all the time. For thoughtful discussion, we need the skill of processing that activation energy in ourselves, rather than allowing it to turn directly into words. Lashing out does provide momentary relief (which is why we do it of course), but it's not a real solution and it damages the container (the community environment) in the process.
The difference with DoreenMichele's comment is that she was speaking about her personal experience. It's true that the comment was provocative. But it wasn't really an abstract generalization. If you had responded by speaking about your personal experience on the same level, that would be a conversation—perhaps a difficult one—but not a flamewar.
Of course, where to draw these lines is matter of interpretation and different people would draw them differently. But watch out for the bias where we always see our own comments as less harsh than they actually land with others. As I said in a different context recently, comments in the rear-view mirror are much larger than they appear!
The other issue of course is that moderation responses are conditioned by an account's past behavior on the site. You've unfortunately been making a habit of posting in the flamewar style and/or including harsh swipes in your HN comments:
...and we already asked you to stop doing this. That's why my reply to you used stronger language this time.
You're 100% welcome here. We just need you to take the site guidelines more to heart and practice them going forward: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That isn't easy, but we all need to work on it in order for HN to be the community we want. That is in all of our interests.
> I'm pretty sure that if you re-read your comment after some time has gone by, you'll see that it wasn't just "bringing objectivity to the conversation".
Perhaps objectivity may not be the most precise word. Maybe "another point of view". Or better yet, the middle ground. I was trying to counter her extremism the best I could.
> It's easy to understand how DoreenMichele's post could have triggered a defensive/offensive response.
Because it was flamebait. It was intentionally divisive and toxic extremism. It's no different than what racists, chauvanists and all kinds of extremists do. By now, it's obvious to most people who aren't ideologically blind. Replace "men" with "women" in her comment and you'd spot the hateful sexism right away. I'm sure of it.
> The difference with DoreenMichele's comment is that she was speaking about her personal experience.
No. It's not. There was no personal anecdote, no mention of personal event. Just generalizations like "if you are a woman ... " and some bizarre projection about "what men think". That's the point. It's an obvious exaggeration. The easy tell is that she ended her diatribe with a defensive "No, I am not exaggerating.".
Even if her experience were real, her sexist comment is clearly not what HN is about. If you are truly sincere, would you allow people who had negative experiences with "jews", "chinese", "blacks", "gays" or "women" to freely express their views here? Can someone take their personal negative experience and then extrapolate that to most jews, most chinese, most blacks, most gays or most women? Of course not. It would be insane to paint millions or billions of people with the same brush.
> You've unfortunately been making a habit of posting in the flamewar style and/or including harsh swipes in your HN comments:
Yes, I made a mistake here or there, but then again, it was mostly in response to flamebait from an obvious bigot and trolling throwaways. I've never went out of my way to attack a certain gender, race, religion, etc like DoreenMichele.
> ...and we already asked you to stop doing this. That's why my reply to you used stronger language this time.
And it's why my response to DoreenMichele was far tamer than my response to the throwaway. And it may be personal bias, but the more I read her comment and mine, the more it feels like hers is extremely biased and hateful while mine is relatively benign.
> That is in all of our interests.
Fair moderation. That's all I ask for. I know it's a tough job but honestly, if I felt that the commenter would have been admonished, I wouldn't have wasted my time responding to her in the first place. Because her comment is like all hate speech - they all follow the same pattern and hit the same beats. It's boring. But if left unchecked it'll fester and grow. Still shocked she hasn't been reprimanded and her hateful comment hasn't been flagged. But I'll try do better and I'm sure you will try to do better and hopefully DoreenMichele comes to terms with her hate and has a better life both on and off the internet.
The concept of 'online violence', from my best faith effort to look in to it, seeks to trivialize victims of actual violence, and this was elucidated by the responses I got. This does teach us and is very much in keeping with the ethos and rules of the site.
30 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 71.9 ms ] threadDr. Emma A. Jane, a UNSW Senior Lecturer in the School of the Arts & Media, says online violence can refer to a range of dialogs and acts that occur at the gender, technology and violence nexus.
"Examples of online violence include hate speech, sexually violent dialog, plausible rape and death threats, stalking, large groups attacking individuals, the malicious circulation of targets' personal details online (known as "doxing"), and the uploading of sexually explicit material without the consent of the pictured subject ("revenge porn")," Dr. Jane says.
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-online-violence-destructive-of...
I am not going to read through this. I have some sympathy for why and how stuff like this gets written, but I think stuff like this tends to be more part of the problem than part of the solution.
I believe what they are going for is the idea that hostility you run into online has real world consequences. We dismiss the idea that "words on a screen" can have impact, but lots of men have no problem using Hacker News to make money but it is not a female-friendly space and even being fairly prominent as a woman here is more downside than up. It has not proven to be a good networking opportunity for me and I am given all kinds of crap for trying to talk about that, even in comments like this one intended to simply elucidate a problem space for someone scratching their head.
There is no good way to talk about such things, so they get entrenched and it causes real and serious problems for women and other marginalized peoples.
I'm spending less time here generally and may be in the process of "leaving" HN, more or less, because this is not a solvable problem and my motives for putting up with this shit are possibly disappearing. Without compelling reason to put up with it, I seem to be spending less time here and more time elsewhere.
So that's likely to leave HN with more crap like this piece and, hey, you get what you want. No one wanted to hear my take and I'm tired of trying to build bridges while getting kicked in the teeth and lumped in with man-hating self-proclaimed feminists for the crime of trying to make my life work.
The reason HN isn't a good networking opportunity for you is a lack of qualifications and personal achievements. I guarantee if you put in the work, learned a programming language, got in some commits of actual code to FOSS projects people actually use on a day to day basis and made a cool tech demo to Show HN, it would suddenly be a very useful networking opportunity for you.
I don't think any spaces should be hostile to women who arrive in earnest. But your lack of equal contributions to the valued posters here make me think you are not operating in earnest.
I've spent a lot of years trying to "just be a human being" on the internet and, just like off the internet, the vast majority of men I run into find out I am a woman, wonder to themselves if they would like to sleep with me and regardless of the answer, the outcome is I will never, ever, ever, ever be treated like a human being. I will be treated only like a walking, talking sex object who utterly doesn't matter and has nothing whatsoever of value to add other than maybe sex and doesn't deserve any respect, any intellectual outlets, any friends, any money, etc. unless I am sleeping with some man who has an adequate income.
No, I am not exaggerating.
This does not follow. As a heterosexual man I too wonder what it would be like to sleep with most women I meet that are in the fertile age range. This is less of an idiosyncratic personality trait than one built in by millions of generations of ancestors that all successfully bred. It does not imply that I consider those women to be less than human. In my own mind at least, it does not demean the women I speculate about.
But, in a nutshell, I am dirt poor and cannot seem to escape poverty in spite of apparently being the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board of HN. Plenty of men have no problem using HN to network and make money. For me, it's mostly been a dead end in that regard.
And I get a zillion personal attacks and excuses when I say that, but if it is "just me" then explain to me where all the women "doing it right" are. Because I appear to manage to fit in here better than average in spite of my gender, yet cannot turn it into an adequate income even though that's an explicit goal of mine.
So when five million mostly men step over my body in the gutter and go "Meh, not my problem she can't afford to eat. It's not like I'm sleeping with her." it's pretty freaking dehumanizing.
And after eleven years here, I am quite clear that boils down to "Most men don't really want to engage me with me in a substantive and meaningful fashion if I am not going to sleep with them and even if I did sleep with them, I would merely be a sex object. They still wouldn't engage me meaningfully in a lot of the ways I want to be engaged."
That opinion is based on 55 years of living, lots of reading and yadda. It's not an uninformed or knee jerk opinion by any stretch of the imagination.
Eleven years ago, I showed up here (on HN) all naively assuming I should be treated like a person simply because I am one and that's not been my firsthand experience of participating here.
Those same men also step over male bodies in the gutter because of their same lack of utility. They dehumanize both sexes with equality.
There is always some justification for how it somehow isn't sexist that I cannot successfully use HN as a means to establish an adequate income, even though plenty of men do so and even though I appear to be the top ranked woman here and it is an overwhelmingly male space and so forth. But I still get told over and over and over "Well, that's not evidence of sexism. You're just basically a Loser."
Uh huh. Whatevs.
That's actually a human thing (now I'm equating and I threw in an 'actually') but it's so, so, so, much more ubiquitous with guys+internet.
The steps between me doing that by default and sometimes not doing that - well, it was a lot of steps. Or time. Something.
I'm a slow learn so I have to grind away at things repeatedly before I really get a handle.
But if I weren't already extremely good about assuming good intentions and interpreting the actions of others through a lens of benign and reasonable motives, I couldn't have stayed this long.
The problem is that me understanding why guys do the things they do and yadda keeps the focus on guys and how important their feelings and what not are and fails to move anything forward in terms of me resolving my very real issues with trying to make ends meet.
I spent a ton of time in therapy because I was sexually abused as a kid and I have thought a lot about it and if just sleeping my way to a solution would work, I would have no qualms about doing that.
The problem is that I don't get treated like an actual person whether the answer to sex is "yes" or "no." In neither case does it ever lead to me being able to establish some kind of earned income for something other than sex work, in essence.
Honest to god, if just sleeping with a guy would open career doors for me, I would take that option in like a heartbeat. But it doesn't work. (See Theranos for evidence of how very poorly that works.) My last two serious boyfriends were supposedly potential career contacts and they never did the first thing for my career aspirations.
Once a guy gets sexually involved with me, sex is all it is. And if he doesn't get sexually involved with me, in most cases that means he doesn't get involved with me at all. (And I don't think that's "just me." Again: See Theranos for an example of how poorly it works to intentionally try to open doors for your career by sleeping with men with money.)
Most men do not want to support my work, promote my work, discuss my work, open doors for me career-wise, etc etc etc etc etc.
And that leaves me unable to establish an income while having to listen to the same really lousy explanations, dismissals, sympathetic noises and so forth year in and year out while my income barely budges.
I run r/GigWorks and a zillion other little subreddits and I run a bunch of homeless websites. If you are not familiar, Street Life Solutions has a list of some of the most pertinent ones in the sidebar:
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/
Pocket Puter has this link on its Links page:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JfNAbUX_lN9K3MCNHO15...
I"m actually getting a surprising amount of support in this discussion. Things used to be a lot rougher for me on HN. At least some of the worst and ugliest stuff tends to get fairly promptly flagged to death these days.
but what about online? often you wont get to know how these women look like. more often than not, imagination is better than reality. what makes women attractive online?
The style of aggressively attacking "internet woman" might be questionable, but there is a deeper truth to it.
That actually means it is impossible to get any kind of decent treatment as a woman, no matter what you do.
Really? Because your comment read exactly like an exaggeration. Sort of like the "culture of rape on campus" hysteria. You could be a journalist for rolling stone magazine.
Also, I hate to break this to you, but women on the internet also misbehave. And most of the nastiness women face online comes from other women.
Everybody gets shit on. Women aren't special. I know you think they are, but women are human beings just like the rest of us.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If someone wrote, "as a man, an awful lot of women are list of stereotypical anti-women comments", I would have responded in kind. I would have called him out for being a sexist and point out that men also misbehave.
In what world is saying men and women are equal human beings who can equally be horrific be a flamewar comment.
> and it wrecks what it is for.
This doesn't? Is this what hacker news is for?
"If you are a woman, an awful lot of men treat you like you are nothing but a pussy to fuck and their entire interaction boils down to deciding if they would like to fuck you in specific or not and whether they want to fuck you or not, it's all downside for the woman. If they want to fuck you, they will be using you and mistreating you. If they don't want to fuck you, you will not be treated like a human being. You will be ignored, at best, or treated with open hostility.
I've spent a lot of years trying to "just be a human being" on the internet and, just like off the internet, the vast majority of men I run into find out I am a woman, wonder to themselves if they would like to sleep with me and regardless of the answer, the outcome is I will never, ever, ever, ever be treated like a human being. I will be treated only like a walking, talking sex object who utterly doesn't matter and has nothing whatsoever of value to add other than maybe sex and doesn't deserve any respect, any intellectual outlets, any friends, any money, etc. unless I am sleeping with some man who has an adequate income.
No, I am not exaggerating."
So if I wrote a highly exaggerated politically biased statement starting with "a lot blacks do X", "a lot of chinese do Y", "a lot of muslims are Z", etc and claim it isn't an exaggeration, that would be okay?
I'm more than willing to admit my mistakes, but I didn't here and if you want to stop flamewars, go speak to the OP.
It's easy to understand how DoreenMichele's post could have triggered a defensive/offensive response. I get activated by comments that way all the time. For thoughtful discussion, we need the skill of processing that activation energy in ourselves, rather than allowing it to turn directly into words. Lashing out does provide momentary relief (which is why we do it of course), but it's not a real solution and it damages the container (the community environment) in the process.
The difference with DoreenMichele's comment is that she was speaking about her personal experience. It's true that the comment was provocative. But it wasn't really an abstract generalization. If you had responded by speaking about your personal experience on the same level, that would be a conversation—perhaps a difficult one—but not a flamewar.
Of course, where to draw these lines is matter of interpretation and different people would draw them differently. But watch out for the bias where we always see our own comments as less harsh than they actually land with others. As I said in a different context recently, comments in the rear-view mirror are much larger than they appear!
The other issue of course is that moderation responses are conditioned by an account's past behavior on the site. You've unfortunately been making a habit of posting in the flamewar style and/or including harsh swipes in your HN comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24666716
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24665961
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24665856
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24654852
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24618909
...and we already asked you to stop doing this. That's why my reply to you used stronger language this time.
You're 100% welcome here. We just need you to take the site guidelines more to heart and practice them going forward: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That isn't easy, but we all need to work on it in order for HN to be the community we want. That is in all of our interests.
Perhaps objectivity may not be the most precise word. Maybe "another point of view". Or better yet, the middle ground. I was trying to counter her extremism the best I could.
> It's easy to understand how DoreenMichele's post could have triggered a defensive/offensive response.
Because it was flamebait. It was intentionally divisive and toxic extremism. It's no different than what racists, chauvanists and all kinds of extremists do. By now, it's obvious to most people who aren't ideologically blind. Replace "men" with "women" in her comment and you'd spot the hateful sexism right away. I'm sure of it.
> The difference with DoreenMichele's comment is that she was speaking about her personal experience.
No. It's not. There was no personal anecdote, no mention of personal event. Just generalizations like "if you are a woman ... " and some bizarre projection about "what men think". That's the point. It's an obvious exaggeration. The easy tell is that she ended her diatribe with a defensive "No, I am not exaggerating.".
Even if her experience were real, her sexist comment is clearly not what HN is about. If you are truly sincere, would you allow people who had negative experiences with "jews", "chinese", "blacks", "gays" or "women" to freely express their views here? Can someone take their personal negative experience and then extrapolate that to most jews, most chinese, most blacks, most gays or most women? Of course not. It would be insane to paint millions or billions of people with the same brush.
> You've unfortunately been making a habit of posting in the flamewar style and/or including harsh swipes in your HN comments:
Yes, I made a mistake here or there, but then again, it was mostly in response to flamebait from an obvious bigot and trolling throwaways. I've never went out of my way to attack a certain gender, race, religion, etc like DoreenMichele.
> ...and we already asked you to stop doing this. That's why my reply to you used stronger language this time.
And it's why my response to DoreenMichele was far tamer than my response to the throwaway. And it may be personal bias, but the more I read her comment and mine, the more it feels like hers is extremely biased and hateful while mine is relatively benign.
> That is in all of our interests.
Fair moderation. That's all I ask for. I know it's a tough job but honestly, if I felt that the commenter would have been admonished, I wouldn't have wasted my time responding to her in the first place. Because her comment is like all hate speech - they all follow the same pattern and hit the same beats. It's boring. But if left unchecked it'll fester and grow. Still shocked she hasn't been reprimanded and her hateful comment hasn't been flagged. But I'll try do better and I'm sure you will try to do better and hopefully DoreenMichele comes to terms with her hate and has a better life both on and off the internet.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html