The circle? I didn't see her threatening to kill or rape anyone. I'm pretty sure she's not putting it out there as retribution. It'd be pretty ineffective retribution considering the offenders put it out there themselves. I believe the point was to show how bad the harassment has become.
There are clearly both bigoted and inclusive gamers. I don't think anyone is saying "all gamers are sexist." But there is clearly a problem here that's worth discussing.
Despite protestations to the contrary, white men do not receive this level of abuse. In brief spurts maybe, especially if they dare to support someone like Anita, but sustained like this? No.
So maybe, just maybe, there's a cultural problem to be discussed.
The thing is this small minority is still a large group of people harassing constantly a very small group of people day in and day out. Long after this all old news and we've all forgot about it, these women will still be harassed.
I understand what it's like to be harassed online by a mentally unstable person. It's bad enough when one person does it. I couldn't imagine a dozen. A hundred is inconceivable. And thousands... I just don't know.
Scary to think that the venn diagram of young gamers and future programmers is pretty substantial.
The ratio of men/women in college was pretty abysmal. This may not be the exact cause, but it certainly doesn't help the cause. Truly is a shame that so much talent is driven to other fields due to lack of basic social skills.
(and I'll happily take any down vote for saying so. The cause and effect of this whole thing is a whole lot more complicated than youre giving it credit for)
I honestly don't think that a lack of social skills is to blame. I'm not the most social creature and that sort of behaviour horrifies me.
I think it is more likely a lack of empathy, combined with the view that the internet is somehow not the "real world" and an entitlement complex of incomprehensible size.
Perhaps we define social skills differently... or it's just the wrong word (probably).
But I do think a lot of the aggression towards women stem from insecurity and lack of ability to comfortably converse with opposite gender. Those in my mind are social skills.
I would agree that the symptomatic cause of the current situation is insecurity, but not about "talking to girls". It's fear of losing what you consider to be yours. Whether or not you have any sort of right to it--and I think it is very safe to say that, no, young white males do not have an inherent right to be catered to by all aspects of the game market--doesn't matter, you think it's yours and they're taking it and that means it's OK to call the cops and get a SWAT team sent to somebody's house. (Apparently.)
The fear that the universe is zero-sum is the major way that regressive elements maintain societal control. The rich guy takes nine cookies, elbows the middle-class guy, and says "hey, the poor guy's gonna steal your cookie!", and the middle-class guy hops to. It applies here just the same--if you're so unable to get outside of your head to entertain the idea that maybe games not targeted directly at you could maybe, just maybe, expand your horizons a bit and make your life better, while making life better for other people...well, you freak out, and apparently you don't stop freaking out.
Personally, as a straight white dude, I am marvelously unthreatened by the idea that people make games for people who aren't me. I encourage it. But then, I have the basic reading comprehension to not try to say with a straight face that "gamers are dead" was a pejorative rather than market analysis, so I was probably never in the wheelhouse for the hatemongering.
All you have to do is watch the HN comments on any thread that (even tangentially) mentions women. There's no shortage of of existing programmers / old gamers that are virulently hostile.
Definitely. I'm involved here because I think of HN as my people. But it's an embarrassment to me elsewhere. Sort of like that one cranky old relative who can be perfectly nice but also will spew out some unbelievable shit.
Yup. As I've said before, I've considered leaving because this place generally seems to accept utterly reprehensible behavior. I don't understand why aggressive sexism (and racism too, though that's not this thread) is tolerated on Y Combinator's doorstep. I told dang when I spoke to him about this that I think not eighty-sixing racists and sexists will self-select out the people who aren't, and that's a real bad look for YC.
I've flagged more posts in this thread than I have at any point on HN, by a lot. It's kind of amazing.
> I've flagged more posts in this thread than I have at any point on HN, by a lot. It's kind of amazing.
There's some inconsistency with flagging. If the comment is flagged it turns to [flagkilled] at which point it can't attract any more downvotes. But some posts are not bad enough to flag, but very unpopular, and people can just keep downvoting those posts - even after the post can't be edited any more.
It'd be nice if the edit period was as long as the downvote period. And it'd be nice if a [flagkilled] post was still able to be downvoted, or it automatically attracted some downvotes when it dies or somesuch.
...and I'd actually say that for programmers the percentage of people who were young gamers is lower that for the rest of the population (or at least their gaming looked a bit different, focused on different genres etc.).
Anonymous free speech can sure bring out some ugly things in people. Freedoms, though, often cut both ways, protecting important and significant behaviors but also sometimes allowing sad and pathetic ones.
I think it would be delicious punishment if the author of each of those tweets were forced to read them out loud, in front of their mothers, sisters, wives, friends, bosses, coworkers, and children. If someone's willing to send messages like that to a real life person, they should see how people in real life react to their hate spew.
As makers and participants in internet culture, I think it's incumbent on all of us to find ways to minimize the downsides of anonymity and pseudonymity while maximizing the benefits. Because otherwise, the baby's getting thrown out with the bathwater.
Note, for example, that Facebook doesn't allow any anonymity, and Quora only allows it with tight controls. I think the long-term trend is to get rid of it, which would be a shame.
Sure, some people are fine being ignorant bigots in the town square at high noon, too. But that doesn't mean that people are equally comfortable being bigots no matter the circumstance. And even if the amount of bigotry were identical whether anonymous or not, it doesn't mean that people won't perceive anonymity as the problem because of the broken social feedback loop.
That said, I think anonymity actually is an enabler here. The KKK knew exactly what they were doing with those hoods.
The entire internet is full of this. Every comment section every forum its just absolute anywhere and everywhere someone can post text. Anyone who makes any statement on the internet will receive hate, the more famous you are the more you receive.
I defy you to post an equivalent amount of ongoing abuse. "Someone was mean to me a few times and I got over it" is a pretty lame response to someone who undergoes constant rape/death threats.
It is, but there's a bunch of legal doctrine to say what actually counts as a threat. Also, SCOTUS has a case before it now that will further refine the issue, specifically about online behavior.
I hate to be that guy, but when you see the twitter account, you only have some reports of tweets like this, that's not how the situation is going to be improved. I agree it's outrageous to see people like this, but their twitter account is effectively completely useless to promote their message, I have to scroll down ~100 tweet to have something useful about video games. Their twitter account is effectively doing some publicity to this kind of message by posting only this kind of content.
Please do a constructive comment instead of downvoting me, I'm not posting any spam here. I just fail to see how only posting this kind of tweets is going to promote their cause in any ways, just have a look at their twitter account.
This is a marketing strategy. Down voting you means less people see the real arguments against them, because they are unfavorable. It's sad to see hnews fall prey to these professional victims/trolls.
Make no mistake, this chick makes a lot of money off the hate she worked so hard to get.
I am told (!) that Tumblr is one of the more immature platforms out there, especially in regards to feminism/gaming. Then again, it might just be that jug5 doesn't like Tumblr. I wouldn't know, really.
There's no reason to disregard a piece of writing because of the platform it's published on, especially considering the creators of Tumblr have no agenda and there's no barrier to entry. Would this piece suddenly become better if it were written on Medium?
I thought my comment was more relevant to yours than the OP's since you mentioned the frequently-cited claims against the platform. I meant to add to the discussion, not critique your post.
The most recent episode of This American Life (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/i...) has Jezebel writer Lindy West reach out and talk to one of her trolls who created a page celebrating her father's death and claiming she was a disappointment to him. He sent her an apology after realizing there was an actual person on the other end of his trolling and they actually have a remarkably civil conversation about the incident. It's highly worth listening to.
This phenomenon can be found all over the place. Follow some of the cycling hate on twitter some time. People fantasizing about literally killing people with their cars. Why? Because they lost 12 seconds on their 30 minute commute?
It's a weird disconnection. The 'targets' are moms, dads, sisters, brothers, friends... people. I just don't get it. Why are some people so lacking in empathy?
It would be entirely possible for Twitter to create various community driven feedback mechanisms, they just don't want to.
Plenty of online communities have various moderation systems, including HN that hugely reduce the potential for abuse, trolling and bullying - and most don't require your real identity.
They have community driven feedback mechanisms. When a user is flagged sufficiently often, they're pretty much gone.
Of course this is now abused against (some) X people and by (some) X people (for X being pretty much any cause or philosophy that creates uproar and with-us-or-against-us camps).
Somehow I don't like the people that harass like that.
But... Sorry you start a completly unuseful campaign against sexism in video games. Come on that are just games.
There are many more things in life that would help other people than changing the way games are designed.
It's a real mess that some people always come with sexism and do nothing against the real problems. Sexism is a problem but not in video games. Just look at other countries and take a look how women are treated. That is something that is scary and not video games.
Sarkeesian is discussing games as art, within the context of the society that creates them. That is valuable, and attempting to dismiss her based on the medium she discusses is fundamentally misguided.
Art matters because it shapes and forms cultural perceptions. Our cultural perceptions hurt people who are not straight white males. "Oh but it's worse over there" does not legitimize shittiness here.
This is disgusting. It's also disappointing how little most games (CoD, for example) have done to cut back on back behavior. I've seen players on some games just spew hate and nasty taunts in games with no repercussions. At most, they get banned from servers that care to moderate. Often there's not even a mechanism for reporting other players globally. The lack of oversight allows a culture of trolling and nastiness to thrive.
Twitter could also do more to proactively prevent troll accounts and monitor tweets without waiting for someone to report it. I'd be a little more sympathetic to startup-stage Twitter figuring it out, but they're to the point where I'd expect something better.
Those who raise the "free speech" argument fail to realize that these are private companies. Companies like EA and Twitter are well within their rights to limit what is broadcast on their servers and networks. You can say what you like (within some reasonable constraints), but that doesn't give you the right to have it amplified through someone else's work.
This post appears to have been flagged incorrectly. I'm sure we've been using a bunch of words that would raise a flag, when in reality we're just talking about the content and important but sensitive issues.
One of the tweets on that date (26.1) on femfreq channel was about some influential "angry" youtubers slandering her and in those bunch she also put ThunderFoot who is really OK guy who posts videos about astronomy, chemistry, atheism, etc. That guy also received hundreds of threats (including death threats) from feminists and religious people but you will never see that on the news and he will not label all groups of people as misandryc because of it.
Point is, there is hate thrown all around the internet towards all "famous" people, and we must condemn all that hate, but stop being quick to label whole groups of people with some heavy labels because of individuals and try to fight the hate on a more basic level.
Anita Sarkeesian (girl from femfreq channel) is not allowing ANY, even very valid criticism of her and is labeling everyone who criticise her (with arguments) as misogynist woman hater which only adds oil to the fire. For example, here are some of the valid critiques of her authority on the subject of games :
- There is video of here giving lecture before she made the kickstarter campaign where she says that she does not play and do not like video games, but in the kickstarter campaign she wants to portray her self as a gamer and knowledgable on the matter and stated that she likes video games.
- In here videos she put so many examples out of context, cherry picked, presented things wrongly.
- She used videos of gameplays of other people, not hers, and did not give them credit for it.
- She asked for 6 000$, but was given 160 000$ for 12 video series, but after 2 years she made only one video of that series and in the mean time she received more funding from other sources.
- She disallows any critique, valid or not valid of her arguments. For example she blocks comments and ratings on her youtube videos, labels people as haters or worse haters of all woman.
- She never debated someone from the other side of the argument and looks like she is not interested in the honest debate and ideas exchange.
There are many other problems with here arguments, but the point is, she is also adding fuel to the fire by labeling other nice people as angry and woman haters, and other bad labels, not engaging herself in the honest debate and engaging in, what some people perceive as dishonest money making tactics and at the same time presenting things that some people see as not true but are unable to engage in real debates with her about it. I would like to see 0 of this hateful threats directed to her and other people, because this kinds of comments are in the first place bad and wicked but secondly they distract from the real arguments other people make.
Again, I will never excuse death and other threats, but the sad truth is that internet will always "allow" such behaviour to some extent. I do not know the intent of the topic poster because he only posted the link to the tumblr, if he only wanted to show that there is hate on the internet we already knew that. But what is the solution to disproportionally larger amount of hate on the internet compared to the "real" world (including all kinds of hate and directed to anyone) ?
" after 2 years she made only one video of that series"
In actual fact, she's come out with several, and as a backer I'm perfectly ready to accept "delays from pressure of constant abuse and death threats" as a fair reason for delay.
My bad, she covered 2 topics after 2 years and recently she covered the third from her list on the Kickstarter. So, by now after ~2.5 years she made "Damsel in Distress", "Ms. Male Character" and "Woman as Background Decoration".
For me that is taking way to long to fulfil kickstarter promises, knowing that she even got 25x amount of money (and more from other sources and asking for more all the time), because she is actively engaged in other public activities (conferences, activism, giving speeches, lectures, etc.). She basically converted this to her full time job and not one time project.
She can do whatever she wants of course and you can back her even if she do not fulfil her promise ever, I just find problem in the fact that whenever someone puts out some valid criticism of her work and methods he or she (yes there are many woman gamers or non gamers who disagree with Anita) gets silenced and labeled as hater for no proper reason. And those people are also harassed on the net and get threats but you never see that in the media, I do not get why, problems can not be solved without honest look on both sides of any argument.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I agree very much. I didn't find this interesting, nor did it gratify my intellectual curiosity. Glad it's off the front page.
Would be terrible if HN devolved into a mess of posts about how dumb and hateful random comments are on the internet and turned into another outrage generating machine (just like the TV news you mentioned).
BTW, here's a nice HN alternative that someone pointed me to recently (for those of us that are sad to see what HN is devolving into):
I'm not a huge gamer, but this is really important to me in terms of tech hiring. It's a serious problem that I didn't know about until graduate school. One of the few women working on file systems was the type that in addition to being friendly and charming, did not tolerate any shit, and would actually speak out about it. Since those days my eyes have been opened about the small percentage of people that do terrible things to women in tech without men ever seeing the terrible things that happen.
I wish that this post had stayed up on the front page longer, so that more people could see 1) what terrible shit goes on in this world, and 2) how a tiny minority of people try to minimize or excuse it in comment threads, and 3) how they get downvoted into oblivion as they should.
These three bits of evidence point out that the solution to tech's problems are pretty easy in that they are not endemic and broadly spread to everyone in the field. There's a tiny but very vocal minority of terrible people, and by either changing their behavior or not hiring them, a whole bunch more people would be willing to work in the field.
Seriously, if anybody thinks that these tweets at FemFreq are not so bad, just quit your job and find some other field to work in. That type of person is hurting us all. Alternatively they could grow a spine and not be so hateful.
I personally don't like the woman, but while scrolling down the list, the contrast between these people and the people i know online and in real life is so stark that i can only wonder:
The twitter usernames are public, and reading a sample of those biographies looked to me like everything from 13 year old boy to female middle aged graphics designer.
And even though these comments look very much the same, these seem to be actual accounts with normal use, not some troll battalion.
For those who don't normally have "showdead" turned on, it's worth doing so for this article. A) I'm grateful that HN's more active moderation is taking out some of the trash. And B) it's worth noting the details of the sort of awfulness that's getting moderated here. This isn't just a gamer problem.
> I'm grateful that HN's more active moderation is taking out some of the trash.
I don't see it that way. I read those comments and there's very little vitriol in there. There's a lot of legitimate counter arguments being made that are being flag killed. You're essentially being grateful that HN's moderation is stifling any attempt at disagreement with their own political views.
80 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadAs with so many things it is merely a new twist on an old problem.
At most, this is a semi-circle of hatred. The other half of the circle being a mixture of disclosure and, I imagine, catharsis.
There are clearly both bigoted and inclusive gamers. I don't think anyone is saying "all gamers are sexist." But there is clearly a problem here that's worth discussing.
So maybe, just maybe, there's a cultural problem to be discussed.
I understand what it's like to be harassed online by a mentally unstable person. It's bad enough when one person does it. I couldn't imagine a dozen. A hundred is inconceivable. And thousands... I just don't know.
The ratio of men/women in college was pretty abysmal. This may not be the exact cause, but it certainly doesn't help the cause. Truly is a shame that so much talent is driven to other fields due to lack of basic social skills.
(and I'll happily take any down vote for saying so. The cause and effect of this whole thing is a whole lot more complicated than youre giving it credit for)
I think it is more likely a lack of empathy, combined with the view that the internet is somehow not the "real world" and an entitlement complex of incomprehensible size.
But I do think a lot of the aggression towards women stem from insecurity and lack of ability to comfortably converse with opposite gender. Those in my mind are social skills.
The fear that the universe is zero-sum is the major way that regressive elements maintain societal control. The rich guy takes nine cookies, elbows the middle-class guy, and says "hey, the poor guy's gonna steal your cookie!", and the middle-class guy hops to. It applies here just the same--if you're so unable to get outside of your head to entertain the idea that maybe games not targeted directly at you could maybe, just maybe, expand your horizons a bit and make your life better, while making life better for other people...well, you freak out, and apparently you don't stop freaking out.
Personally, as a straight white dude, I am marvelously unthreatened by the idea that people make games for people who aren't me. I encourage it. But then, I have the basic reading comprehension to not try to say with a straight face that "gamers are dead" was a pejorative rather than market analysis, so I was probably never in the wheelhouse for the hatemongering.
I am only speaking to the manner in which presumably a few people decided to address a women online.
I've flagged more posts in this thread than I have at any point on HN, by a lot. It's kind of amazing.
There's some inconsistency with flagging. If the comment is flagged it turns to [flagkilled] at which point it can't attract any more downvotes. But some posts are not bad enough to flag, but very unpopular, and people can just keep downvoting those posts - even after the post can't be edited any more.
It'd be nice if the edit period was as long as the downvote period. And it'd be nice if a [flagkilled] post was still able to be downvoted, or it automatically attracted some downvotes when it dies or somesuch.
I think it would be delicious punishment if the author of each of those tweets were forced to read them out loud, in front of their mothers, sisters, wives, friends, bosses, coworkers, and children. If someone's willing to send messages like that to a real life person, they should see how people in real life react to their hate spew.
https://twitter.com/Charalanahzard/status/538144080534847489
Note, for example, that Facebook doesn't allow any anonymity, and Quora only allows it with tight controls. I think the long-term trend is to get rid of it, which would be a shame.
http://www.salon.com/2014/12/10/whats_up_with_the_rag_head_w...
Facebook introduced a new feature; created an ad with a Sikh man; racists everywhere.
That said, I think anonymity actually is an enabler here. The KKK knew exactly what they were doing with those hoods.
Just f*ing deal with it.
Perhaps what you really meant was, shut up and take the abuse quietly? Not a very helpful suggestion.
Make no mistake, this chick makes a lot of money off the hate she worked so hard to get.
// Sorry in_cahoots. Though you were mad at me or something.
"The most common response was not remorse or defensiveness but surprise. They were startled that I could hear what they’d been saying."
It's a weird disconnection. The 'targets' are moms, dads, sisters, brothers, friends... people. I just don't get it. Why are some people so lacking in empathy?
Plenty of online communities have various moderation systems, including HN that hugely reduce the potential for abuse, trolling and bullying - and most don't require your real identity.
Of course this is now abused against (some) X people and by (some) X people (for X being pretty much any cause or philosophy that creates uproar and with-us-or-against-us camps).
But... Sorry you start a completly unuseful campaign against sexism in video games. Come on that are just games.
There are many more things in life that would help other people than changing the way games are designed. It's a real mess that some people always come with sexism and do nothing against the real problems. Sexism is a problem but not in video games. Just look at other countries and take a look how women are treated. That is something that is scary and not video games.
Art matters because it shapes and forms cultural perceptions. Our cultural perceptions hurt people who are not straight white males. "Oh but it's worse over there" does not legitimize shittiness here.
Twitter could also do more to proactively prevent troll accounts and monitor tweets without waiting for someone to report it. I'd be a little more sympathetic to startup-stage Twitter figuring it out, but they're to the point where I'd expect something better.
Those who raise the "free speech" argument fail to realize that these are private companies. Companies like EA and Twitter are well within their rights to limit what is broadcast on their servers and networks. You can say what you like (within some reasonable constraints), but that doesn't give you the right to have it amplified through someone else's work.
Could some fix that? Remove the flag?
There are many other problems with here arguments, but the point is, she is also adding fuel to the fire by labeling other nice people as angry and woman haters, and other bad labels, not engaging herself in the honest debate and engaging in, what some people perceive as dishonest money making tactics and at the same time presenting things that some people see as not true but are unable to engage in real debates with her about it. I would like to see 0 of this hateful threats directed to her and other people, because this kinds of comments are in the first place bad and wicked but secondly they distract from the real arguments other people make.
Again, I will never excuse death and other threats, but the sad truth is that internet will always "allow" such behaviour to some extent. I do not know the intent of the topic poster because he only posted the link to the tumblr, if he only wanted to show that there is hate on the internet we already knew that. But what is the solution to disproportionally larger amount of hate on the internet compared to the "real" world (including all kinds of hate and directed to anyone) ?
In actual fact, she's come out with several, and as a backer I'm perfectly ready to accept "delays from pressure of constant abuse and death threats" as a fair reason for delay.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Would be terrible if HN devolved into a mess of posts about how dumb and hateful random comments are on the internet and turned into another outrage generating machine (just like the TV news you mentioned).
BTW, here's a nice HN alternative that someone pointed me to recently (for those of us that are sad to see what HN is devolving into):
https://lobste.rs
I wish that this post had stayed up on the front page longer, so that more people could see 1) what terrible shit goes on in this world, and 2) how a tiny minority of people try to minimize or excuse it in comment threads, and 3) how they get downvoted into oblivion as they should.
These three bits of evidence point out that the solution to tech's problems are pretty easy in that they are not endemic and broadly spread to everyone in the field. There's a tiny but very vocal minority of terrible people, and by either changing their behavior or not hiring them, a whole bunch more people would be willing to work in the field.
Seriously, if anybody thinks that these tweets at FemFreq are not so bad, just quit your job and find some other field to work in. That type of person is hurting us all. Alternatively they could grow a spine and not be so hateful.
Who are these people and where do they come from?
The twitter usernames are public, and reading a sample of those biographies looked to me like everything from 13 year old boy to female middle aged graphics designer.
And even though these comments look very much the same, these seem to be actual accounts with normal use, not some troll battalion.
I don't see it that way. I read those comments and there's very little vitriol in there. There's a lot of legitimate counter arguments being made that are being flag killed. You're essentially being grateful that HN's moderation is stifling any attempt at disagreement with their own political views.