You missed the bigger point, then: Mob justice is a barbaric and ugly thing; stop patting yourself on the back and thinking you're a good person for being a part of it.
> This is not about justice, it's about a bad human being getting what she deserved.
... I'm sorry, I thought we were using the English language here and that we had a seven-letter Latin-derived word that we generally used to describe the situation of "[person] getting what [he/she] deserved". Perhaps I erred. Entschuldigung; tut mir leid.
But regardless, even accepting the (modestly tendentious) assertion that this is about a Bad Human Being, angry mobs following the Outrage Of The Moment and out for blood are hideous and disgusting phenomena themselves at the best of times. The modern justice system was largely invented to counter these barbarous shortcomings, which is why we have nice things like presumption of innocence, rights of the accused, impartial trials, the notion of the finitude of one's debt to society, et cetera.
I don't think someone is a "bad human being" even if he or she thoughtlessly makes a bad joke.
Moreover, lynch mob can hit someone wasn't bad at all. Someone just mishears or misunderstands, is mightily offended and the twitter storm starts. Like that guy who joked about dongles. It is not inconceivable that someone might make a half-tone joke that is completely harmless, and someone mishears and thinks it was racist or sexist.
There is no way to defend against that. "I didn't say that (in that context)" is not going to work.
Firstly, she's not a racist, she made one joke with racial tones.
Secondly, do you not see how your position is a rather extreme one, that other, more moderate people might not endorse? Racism is bad, but saying racists aren't people and deserve any kind of mob justice against them is also bad.
I'm not sure you know what that word means. Telling an off-color joke that simply referenced race is not necessarily being racist, any more than telling "your mom" or "that's what she said" jokes makes someone sexist.
Racist:
NOUN
a person who believes that a particular race is superior to another.
It's about the scale of the response. If someone rolls their eyes at you, you don't throw them down and stomp on their head. Yes, they were rude, you perhaps would be OK to flip them the bird, but a curb stomp? Really?
And please don't say this is totally different because racism. It was an isolated twitter joke to 140 followers. Tweets don't move the world - but floods of them can certainly ruin individual lives.
I'm worried about people who water down the term "racist" to mean someone who posts mean things on Twitter.
I'm sure the systemic issue with blacks in America is largely caused by immature comments on Twitter. I'm so glad the lynch mob was able to right this wrong, its almost like I'm living in a post-racial America!
I missed no such point. If you want to be a racist, sexist, or anything else potentially covered by *-ist, do so locally and quietly. If you don't, the mob of internet injustices will hit and will kill your livelihood.
You are assuming that the "mob of internet injustices" make good choices. It's pretty clear that they don't in all cases. As someone else said, that's why we have due process, we're supposed be thoughtful before we get out the torches.
This type of mass shaming existed before twitter. The Steve Bartman incident[0] comes to mind. The difference appears to be that it used to only be possible for such things to snowball when the media or a celebrity pushed the issue into the spotlight. Nowadays, twitter allows for quick and easy mass shaming by anyone and everyone.
The play Bartman disrupted didn't advance any runners. It was a foul ball. Cubs were up 3-0, with one out. Had Moises Alou caught the ball, there would have been two outs. The Marlins proceeded to score 4 runs before the second out occurred, and another 4 before the third.
Bartman didn't throw a wild pitch, or commit a fielding error, or give up 5 hits and eight runs. The Cubs did.
Yes, but all that happened after the Bartman incident. Pre Bartman, expected runs were 0.69. If Alou makes that catch, expected runs drop by over 50% to 0.33.
Thank you. Sometimes the leads you get here give us gems like this:
"The loose ball was snatched up by a Chicago lawyer and sold at an auction in December 2003. Grant DePorter purchased it for $113,824.16 on behalf of Harry Caray's Restaurant Group. On February 26, 2004, it was publicly detonated by special effects expert Michael Lantieri.
In 2005, the remains of the ball were used by the restaurant in a pasta sauce."
It's worth saying that this does seem to be something distinct to twitter (maybe tumblr has some elements of it). It doesn't seem to happen in the same way on facebook or less social-oriented web fora.
(That's my impression anyway; I don't have statistics)
How is she is victim here? How is Twitter bad here?
She made two racist comments in 1 tweet on her own will. That is not something that should be taken lightly, no matter what the platform.
EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm not commenting on whether firing her was fair or not, but rather how her completely intentional tweets makes Twitter the bad guy.
There's no use in trying to explain. I'm being downvoted to hell for trying to explain why racist jokes are not ok, with replies like "this is just an off-color joke" or "do you know what racism means?" . I'm pretty dissapointed in this community, been here for lots of years and thought that generally speaking people in here would be more open-minded. But the minute you start to explain why making jokes about one's race or incurable disease is not ok you realize you're in the wrong group.
It's a weird, weird world when "open minded" means "likes to participate in mob justice".
And if you understand the tweet, you'd understand the she was making fun of ditzy white girls who naively assume that white people can't get AIDS. It's a caricature of racism, not racism itself.
In all honesty, you did a really poor job explaining why racist jokes are bad. You're being downvoted because (1) you assume that her joke was racist, and (2) you assume that racist jokes are bad (without showing understanding or "open-mindedness" about people who think otherwise).
Personally, I disagree on both counts. I like offensive jokes of all kinds (I mean, if they're actually funny). Coming from a very homogeneous Central European country, I have never been on either side of oppression (other than being bullied in school for being weak, small, smart geek), so I definitely don't have your experience of being "hurt" by jokes, but your experience doesn't translate into a universally-applicable moral/rational argument that racist jokes are bad. However, even if I agreed with you and would personally dislike racist jokes, I would still strongly oppose restrictions or censorship on racist/offensive jokes, to avoid situations like the recent Charlie Hebdo attack.
...unless you standard for "affect" covers all communication. In which case, you're saying "People should pay for the sin of expressing an opinion or making a joke".
Have you ever been the victim or racism? If not, let's say you're in an open group, you're of a certain nationality (let's call it X), and some other member of that group starts making racist or xenophobic jokes about your race/nationality.
By mistake my skin is white (so I've never been the victim of racist jokes/looks, even though my brother, whose skin is browner, has been a victim of said racist jokes), but being from a not-so-important-East-European country I've been the victim of xenophobic remarks/jokes coming from people "with the best intentions". They always, I mean always, hurt. It also hurts me why I have to explain on HN why racist jokes hurt people. I've been in this community for lots of years and never thought I'd see this day.
> By mistake my skin is white (so I've never been the victim of racist jokes/looks ...
Are you serious?
That white people couldn't be victims of racism? That only white people can be racist? You've never met even just funny looks? Then you haven't been out to the world too much.
I'm a big, white European, and when I was in China, I could hear myself being referred to as "laowai" "or dabizi". I could have gotten mad, because yes indeed by nose is big by Chinese standards and this is a reference to my racial features, but I chose to carry on. The people mostly meant nothing bad. Even the ones that actually maybe thought bad of me - possibly associating me with Western colonialism, of which I or my country were quite innocent - did nothing bad to me, so I let it be.
When our family went to the zoo, we were looking at the pandas, and a hundred people were looking at us (Look! Three white kids!). Very slow looks. It may be a bit awkward, but needs to be tolerated. I was just as much in awe when I saw the first black person in my life.
But perhaps I can do this because there was nothing I could gain by acquiring a victim identity. I'll leave getting mad to a time when someone actually tries to insult me.
In an open and democratic society, free speech is a value that is foundationally the core value that underpins everything. Free speech is there to protect the offensive and inappropriate... not civil discourse.
Supporting an environment where it's acceptable to respond to some perceived slight (which changes over time) with an crazy overreacting mob isn't OK in an open society ever. You're very sensitive to racist statements... how do you feel 10 years from when the "offensive statement of the day" is an anti-war statement? Or a statement offensive to a particular religious doctrine?
History is littered with people who do awful things while believing that they are righteous. Nobody in colonial Massachusetts was pro-witch. Nobody in 1950 America was pro-communist.
People get offended, you might think that's right, wrong or whatever but it happens. And you certainly wouldn't make that joke outside of your close circle of friends.
Mob justice mentality certainly sucks though, imagine someone simply inspects one of your tweets, rewrites it and posts it somewhere and says "hey this person's racist, call their employer #{employer-number}".
She was being ironic - making fun of herself by pretending to be a ditzy, entitled white girl who though that she could never get AIDS. Unfortunately, in her absence, people took her literally and assumed she was serious.
She has plenty of reason to now explain it as being ironic, but we'll never know if that was her original intent, will we? Her other tweets from the same period strike me immature and mean-spirited.
My point is, it's natural for her to say afterwards that it was meant ironically now that the backlash has happened. Maybe she's just a jerk who got caught being a jerk.
She publicly broadcasted something that was, at best and assuming one gives her the benefit of the doubt, extremely insensitive and in any case indicative that she is perhaps not the best choice to be a communications director.
If an accountant got caught stealing in her off hours should she expect to find herself still employed?
I don't like the extremism behind the idea that we should fire someone from their job over a off-color joke which is intended for a small audience, but may be overheard accidentally by others.
That sort of absolutism of policing thought just doesn't end well, ever.
To translate it away from Twitter: imagine you're at a public space, such as a mall, and you happen to be walking by a table of people leaning together just as one makes a racist joke.
Is your response a) give them a sort of disgusted look and go on about your day or b) call everyone you know and repeat the joke to them, along with the location of the table in hopes you can whip up a mob of people to shout obscenities at them, continuing to follow them around for the day, and eventually form a mob outside of their office building, continuing to shout at them until their employer fires them?
Most of us would go with 'a' and not 'b', because we realize that what happened doesn't really fit the extreme response. It's interesting to me that people feel that more extreme response is okay, as long as they don't feel personally too involved with it (eg, they can shout remotely).
There's nothing accidental about being in public when you're at a table at the mall, either, and yet we accept that people make communications in such spaces, which because of the medium carry beyond their party, that were really only meant for their group. In the same sense that voices carry in a public space, Tweets can be seen by a larger group than was intended.
It's a sad state of affairs if our only option for having semi-open communications on the internet - things that friends of friends can see without having to sign up to a walled garden - is if we only say things that are acceptable to everyone possible, for fear of mobs semi-randomly forming, or worse, forming at the behest of a for-profit company driving the mob in a frenzy to get ad revenue (which is the case for times companies like Gawker have stirred the mob up).
I think if you want to use the appropriate analogy, you have to include that it was fundamentally a public thing to do, even though she believed her audience tiny. Your analogy as presented gets confused because of the social conventions against eavesdropping, even in a public place. A tweet is fundamentally meant to be a broadcast to the world, not just your immediate followers.
Rather, imagine her shouting it out at a mall on a day when the mall is relatively empty. (So that she had reason to believe the audience tiny, but still broadcast it) Unfortunately for analogy-world Justine, a news crew was downstairs shooting B roll for background and she's there clearly visible and audible in the corner of the screen, and the clip got leaked. That's the analogous real-life situation.
I think the issue is that the response is disproportionate to the sin. Littering is socially undesirable but randomly executing 1 out of every 10,000 people who litter is probably excessive. In the same way, racist tweets are undesirable, but lynching randomly people who make them seems unproductive and does nothing more than fill people's want for something to self-righteous about.
If everyone was treated equally, no matter the platform, I might agree with you.
But, don't you think it's interesting that out of all the countless racist and sexist comments on twitter, that those who are chosen for pillory fit an obvious demographic pattern.
Eighth Amendment - and secondly, I can't say the "social media lynching" is right either. This has gone far & above reprimanding someone for racial language to full on schadenfreude and mob punishment, and I can't agree thats an appropriate response to anything.
Articles like this lend credence to the occasionally heard wisdom "Don't post anything personal on the internet, ever." I tell people I think that society is moving beyond digging into people's lives for little infractions, since with so much social media, everyone is guilty, but apparently that's not true. Or at least, not true yet.
This is probably true, but it's shameful. The consequences of making a joke that doesn't land shouldn't be this severe. For what it's worth, nor should overreacting to one. I think Adria Richards was in every possible way, wrong. We're all wrong quite often though. She didn't deserve a tiny fraction of the shit that came her way either.
If you are a relatively famous person who has an audience/market who supports you despite (or even because of) an obnoxious persona or offensiveness to some people, then you are relatively immune to this kind of thing. Certainly, an "edgy" comic, or political commentator, can get away with a lot more than a CTO or CEO, even if the content is approximately the same.
The danger comes when you misunderstand your core audience, or alienate them. If you go off brand at the same time as you write something dangerous, you risk offending your own audience. That can be deadly.
Aren't all these Twitter sh*tstorms over within a few days, or in the worst case, weeks? People should just sit them out and not panic / call their lives ruined. Seems to work even for politicians.
People's names become toxic. Note that the Donglegate guy wouldn't let his name be used, and another woman in the article wouldn't do a followup interview.
To be fair, Pax Dickinson wasn't one stupid tweet, it was a pattern of awful shit over years. At some point, it's not a careless lapse anymore, you're just a d-bag. A few examples:
"In The Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of niggers. It's his own fault for dressing like a whore though."
"aw, you can't feed your family on minimum wage? well who told you to start a fucking family when your skills are only worth minimum wage?"
"Who has more dedication, ambition, and drive? Kobe only raped one girl, Lebron raped an entire city. +1 for Lebron."
And arguably the worst, for a freaking CTO:
"Tech managers spend as much time worrying about how to hire talented female developers as they do worrying about how to hire a unicorn."
Would you hire that guy to represent your company?
The first tweet, which seems to be the one that people reacted most strongly to, is pretty clearly a lampooning of Mel Gibson. I suspect most people missed that, though. It's distasteful, but it's not exactly Dickinson himself expressing racist, victim-blaming sentiments; it's a mockery of them.
The second is a pretty standard libertarian talking-point (which is more "personal responsibility rah rah rah" than "yay, starving poor people!"). The third I don't really get (but I don't really follow basketball), and the fourth I suspect you're misinterpreting as "Tech managers don't want to hire women", when I think it's more "Tech managers don't care about the gender of their developers"; the truth of the statement is debatable, but I do think it takes some willful effort to read that and be offended by it.
I think Dickinson made unwise choices in how he chose to tweet, but I also think the backlash he's suffered has been orders of magnitude worse than the offense. He has been made persona non grata to the point of being unemployable over a handful of ill-considered tweets - he's unemployable now because of the extent to which people have gone to associate him and anyone associated with him with racism, rape, and sexism - regardless of the reality of his actions.
On one hand, he's suffering the consequences of his decisions (see tweet #2 for some schadenfreude). On the other, because the internet loves a shitstorm, it seems that the magnitude of the consequences are way out of line with the original offense.
> the fourth I suspect you're misinterpreting as "Tech managers don't want to hire women", when I think it's more "Tech managers don't care about the gender of their developers"
You're giving that the most contorted, charitable reading possible. In your reading, the reference to a "unicorn" is nonsensical. I would argue the accurate reading is: "Tech managers don't spend time worrying about hiring talented women because [like unicorns] they are mythical and don't exist."
Now, the further implications behind that statement might be:
a) Talented female developers are rare--we need to make serious efforts to improve the educational pipeline and get more young girls interested in programming.
b) Talented female developers are rare, but it's not the tech industry's job to worry or care about that.
c) Talented female developers aren't rare, but [usually male] hiring managers are too blinded by sexism to recognize them.
> regardless of the reality of his actions.
That's the thing. We don't know the reality of his actions. Based only on his tweets (I don't know him personally), he certainly sounds like he might be the kind of guy who would discriminate in his hiring. He might not even do it consciously, he'd just think "Well, I only hire the best" and in his mind, "the best" does not include women.
If you take that tweet in isolation and read it as a comparison of female developers to unicorns, then sure, I can see how you arrive at that conclusion. I think it's a faulty conclusion, and I think that its faultiness is further illustrated by his response to the whole drama, in which he explicitly clarified his stance of female developers. My reading of it is based on what I know of him, which does not consist solely of a Valleywag article and four tweets.
You're exemplifying the worst of the Twitter lynchmob problem here; you took a tweet, extrapolated it into a full sum of a person, and then don't bother to establish any further context and have decided that the author is a racist, sexist psychopath based on a context-free reading of a one-sentence statement. That's great for feeling superior to people, but it's pretty awful for useful dialog.
> illustrated by his response to the whole drama, in which he explicitly clarified his stance of female developers.
I mean, obviously he's going to say that. I'm not sure how much stock you want to put into after-the-fact PR damage control. I think actions speak louder than words, and I'd reserve judgment before hearing from some of the women developers who he's hired (he has hired women, right?) about how he was to work under, what he was like as a boss (not as a co-founder).
You accuse me of "exemplifying the worst of the Twitter lynchmob problem" but I'm trying hard to be as neutral and generous as possible. I listed three possible implications of that tweet, only one of which is explicitly negative, and you claim I've "decided that the author is a racist, sexist psychopath". If anyone is guilty of twitter-like hyperbole in this conversation, it's you.
If you didn't think that Dickinson was being a racist, misogynistic, victim-blaming rape apologist, why those tweets in particular? This whole discussion is happening in the implict context of the Valleywag article that touched this whole thing off, where those explicit accusations were made with those tweets as evidence - we aren't discussing this issue in a vacuum here. They're certainly in bad taste, but bad taste doesn't deserve the accusations that he's had thrown at him. You listed multiple implications of the tweet, but then called it "the worst" of a lot that include jokes with racial slurs about rape of a venerated religious figure, so it's pretty safe to infer that you aren't giving it any of the charitable readings; if you were, it wouldn't be anything worth mentioning!
My point in all of this, relevant to the original article, is that these sorts of accusations can have a profound and disproportionate impact on those affected, even if the truth is something else entirely. I think it's unfortunate that Dickinson was fired from BI because they couldn't afford to have the accusations against him associated with their brand (and note that it was the baggage that was the issue, not him actually being a misogynist to his employees or whatnot), but I don't think it's an unreasonable response - he made a bad choice in what he said, and he suffered the consequences of it. I do think it's unreasonable that he remains effectively unemployable because of the bogeyman that has been constructed around his name in which those tweets are trotted out with accusations of racism and sexism every time someone mentions him.
Because those are the tweets that got him fired. Obviously!
Fine, let's say Pax Dickinson is a completely wonderful guy without a bigoted bone in his body.
He still showed monumentally bad judgment. I don't buy your premise that losing your C-level position (and being unable to find another one) after carrying on for years the way he did is such a "profound and disproportionate impact". He demonstrated repeatedly that he's not willing to comport himself in a professional way in public. I also dispute that he is "effectively unemployable". He can certainly go get a job at McDonalds, because he's demonstrated that he's unqualified to be a corporate executive.
Edit: After reading the links you sent, it seems like the women he's worked with don't have a problem with him. So maybe he's not an asshole, he just plays one on twitter.
Still, you've really shot your own argument in the foot here:
> Shevinsky told me just the other day that she was still a bit uncertain about Dickinson after returning to Glimpse. “I was hoping he wouldn’t blow his second chance, because a third chance would be a challenge.” Now he’s co-founder of a company with a strong female CEO and a strong female advisor
Tell me again about how he's "effectively unemployable" and has disproportionately had his career destroyed forever?
Yeah, he showed bad judgement. I'm not sure I agree that it was "monumentally bad". The fact of the matter is that he lost his job and has baggage that follows him around because people continue to perpetuate the Valleywag-constructed outrage, not because of actual behavioral sexism or racism (the accusations of which pretty rapidly evaporate upon closer inspection). It's not something that will blow over in a couple of weeks, because it's an enormous straw man that has taken on a life of its own at this point.
Regarding employability, you'll note that article is from Dec 2013. He's now gone from Glimpse.
> I also knew that I was holding Elissa back. I know my baggage was hurting the company. We were asked to insert clauses that would strip my equity if I “embarrassed” the company and it’s reasonable to assume that my presence as co-founder made other VCs shy away from us, which is heartbreaking to me because Elissa is fucking amazing and deserves better than that.
He further writes:
> My career has been irretrievably damaged. I’ll always have trouble finding a job. It used to be easy for me but even a year later I find that recruiters shy away and applications to jobs I’m well qualified for don’t result in a call back. I’m not worried, I know that with enough time I’ll find someone who doesn’t mind my notoriety given my skills, but I’ll always pay a very real price for this whole incident.
If he says it's still following him around, I'm inclined to believe him, because...well, he'd be the one to know.
"You're giving that the most contorted, charitable reading possible."
I don't think he is, but given you only have 140 characters on twitter, everyone should give "the the most contorted, charitable reading possible" unless you follow up with the person and get a clarification of their tweet. Hell, given autocorrect, you should do that even if you think it is plain.
I'm saddened that Pax's work at Glimpse didn't help to redeem his reputation. Pax showed excellent judgment on social media for the entire time that he was my cofounder. And we did excellent work together (we consistently had 10 - 18% week over week traction, app had five star reviews, well known security experts pen tested our app and found it was well designed etc.)
For what it's worth, some VCs did want to fund Glimpse. We didn't follow up on that while Pax was on board, for various reasons. A significant A raise would likely have helped Pax rebrand positively in a mainstream way.
Pax is now publicly pro-gamer gate (as you can see on his Twitter feed and with his most recent startup ExposeCorrupt.) I understand why that would have an impact on marketability.
As much as we talk about diversity in technology, there are some ideas and some kind of people that are simply not welcome. I worry about this a bit because I think it hurts a lot of people, not just neo-reactionaries.
Also - Pax apologized and then spent over a year being an excellent citizen of the startup community and on social media. I worry about an ecosystem that is so unforgiving.
I believe that ostracizing people - without the possibility of giving them second chances - is ultimately bad for everyone. It takes folks who have messed up and disenfranchises them so that they no longer have a stake in their reputation and participation in the community.
For whatever reason, the following snippet prompted me to see who the author was:
Amid the hundreds of congratulatory messages I received,
one stuck out: “Were you a bully at school?”
As it turns out, the author is Jon Ronson. He's well worth checking out. I've particularly enjoyed The Men Who Stare at Goats (the book), The Secret Rulers of the World, and The Psychopath Test.
As dislikable as the tweet's content is, it's truly frightening how quickly an incredibly large pitchforks-and-torches mob can come to life via the internet.
The tweet is clearly a quip about western white privilege. Her tweet caused no harm, but the blithering mass of bullying social justice warriors continually ruins lives.
Did you read the article? By thinking for a few seconds, the point of the tweet is obviously not racist. Not a smart tweet, in retrospect, but. Here's her explanation from the article:
> I thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was literal. (...) Living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the third world. I was making fun of that bubble.
It matters because making an offhand joke parodying a stupid person is something that we've all done. This example shows that if you make a little parody joke like that in the wrong medium, your life could permanently pivot 180 degrees for the worst.
> This example shows that if you make a little parody joke like that in the wrong medium, your life could permanently pivot 180 degrees for the worst.
Definitely. But my point was, whether it was racist or not, her life pivoted for the worse—and whether it was racist or not, she didn't deserve what happened to her.
This is the saddest thing. It's so trendy to have offended narcissistic egos today that people don't even recognize when someone is on YOUR side, defending YOUR cause with sarcasm!
I think what's more frightening to me is how non-systematic this sort of thing is. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to who wins the "doxing lottery". I was looking at my own Facebook and Twitter feeds and realized that I (and maybe most of us, unless we live a pristine life) could just as easily have been Justine Sacco.
We could argue that people shouldn't make posts like these, but in doing so, we ignore our own humanity. We're not robots. Humor is an essential cognitive mechanism for building neural structures so that we can understand the world around us. It helps us to recognize and make sense of subjects that otherwise would be too emotionally difficult to face head-on. This is part of the reason I think that faux news shows like the Colbert Report have been so successful. By denying this sort of expression, we are essentially denying an important cognitive tool for understanding.
I'd like to think that as the world gets more saturated in constant social media and sharing, that we'd have a higher tolerance for things...in this case, a joke that if a person told it to you, with the right tone of voice, it'd be funny...imagine Louis CK making that quip. But no, I doubt it...I think it's more a physical limitation of our brains...we just don't have the brain system designed to adequately consider all the context of all the messages we might consume in day...It's just easier to assume that a 140-character message really is an adequate reflection of someone who we have never met, and who we would have never been exposed to before the Internet. And it feels good to pat yourself on the back as you think, "Jeez, I can't believe such racist people still exist"
To paraphrase the famous comic from the New Yorker, "On the Internet, no one knows that you have nuance"
The problem is compounded in that not only are people easily offended, savvy organizations (cough Gawker) have monetized being offended. So not only are our limited monkey brains quick to be insulted, there are now people whose job it is to find the Maximally Offensive Tweets of the day, which only compounds the problem.
Plus, for some reasonably large percentage of the populace, being righteously outraged is a pleasurable experience. In 1984, the inhabitants of Airstrip One needed nagging from the telescreen to do their morning calisthenics, but even Winston could get worked up for the Two Minute Hate.
Poe's Law: Without a blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of extremism or fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.
It may take more than saturation in social media. I think it will take time. Eventually everyone's Bacon distance to someone who got shamed or similarly mistreated will be small enough that maybe there'll be enough awareness to prevent most occurrences.
I could be self-deluded, but I feel like to some extent my ability to imagine the missing context, or even just a possible context for these things has increased in the age of social media, and online gaming, and soundbytes. I'm still aware that in many cases there's a high percentage chance a person is just a jerk.
Maybe it's a situation where working on the 8th floor makes most people more likely to take an elevator than if you worked on the 2nd floor, but if you do keep taking the stairs you quickly become very good at it.
I think it is a mistake to think that most people were actually offended and didn't get the joke. There are definitely much more offensive things out on the internet than the examples in the article.
I think it's much more likely that people revel in seeing someone go down; the article clearly alluded to this sadistic aspect I think. As soon as there is enough critical mass for a public shaming, people will jump on the bandwagon.
What needs to change is that this kind of public shaming on the internet should be looked down upon in the future, just at is now in real life. The first step is for employers not to be so spineless to immediately fire an employee that is talked about.
I think it's much more likely that people revel in seeing someone go down; the article clearly alluded to this sadistic aspect I think.
This is possible. But I think it's less about this and more about status marking. Joining the pile on is often a quick, cheap way to demonstrate that you care about the right things.
I wonder if there's a distinction that needs to be made between offending people and hurting people.
From my self-confessed but unavoidable smug vantage point of white privilege I wonder if being offended is something that needs to be disregarded. I'm trying to remember how it felt to be 'offended' myself and whether anyone other than me should have cared. Is it actually a form of power when one can choose to be offended and know that you can affect the actions of others by doing so?
Genuinely hurting people (emotionally) on the other hand is something different and I'd need to think a lot more deeply about that.
I have some sympathy for a company whose Senior Director of Corporate Communications instigates a massive PR disaster by joking about Africans having AIDS on Twitter.
This makes me wonder if PR is actually effective, and not a massive money sink. Would that company really lose any noticeable amount of customers over that Twitter shitstorm? If so, how come that no one apparently got hurt over ACTA/SOPA and Snowdengate? I don't see companies losing significant business over trying to destroy the Internet itself.
Because they have good PR departments. A good PR department makes you forget that there ever was an issue, or if you remember the issue, you forget that the company was ever involved.
PR is an interesting job function in that if they do their job correctly, you forget that they exist. It's much like security in that regard. If you have a bad PR department, you'll know, because you'll be constantly under-siege in the media. (Uber comes to mind.)
I feel like most people realized the tweet was a joke. But a "HAHA isn't racism funny?" joke by a white person just isn't socially acceptable anymore. Personally, I'm in the camp where I believe that you should be able to joke about anything, but I know I'm in the minority. As a society, we have judged that certain things can't be joked about. This list includes "racist jokes made by white people".
Personally, this just shows that maybe people shouldn't be broadcasting their every thought out to the entire world. If you're not comfortable with it being on the front page of the New York Times, don't tweet it.
> But no, I doubt it...I think it's more a physical limitation of our brains...we just don't have the brain system designed to adequately consider all the context of all the messages we might consume in day
There's an easy solution to this (if one isn't an idiot). If there's a reasonable explanation that doesn't imply bad intentions, just err on the side of that one. The "principle of charity" honestly has pretty much no downside, and pretty huge upside. One of the real shocks I got coming into adulthood was finding out that more people don't act this way. Somewhat tangentially, it also removes a lot of stress from your life: when a service worker fucks up badly, people I'm with are often pretty pissed at them (whether or not they express that directly) while my reaction is "eh shit happens, people make mistakes, why get worked up".
Turned off by what? A tweet ... unless for couple of million participants in the oppression olympics, for the sane people having said or done something offensive is not a big deal.
If so many people were offended on the internet, is it that big of a stretch that people in real life might be turned off too? Just because you or I don't think it's a big deal does not mean that others might share the same opinion. I could easily see how someone might be turned off, especially before actually meeting the person.
>After that, she left New York, going as far away as she could, to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She flew there alone and got a volunteer job doing P.R. for an NGO working to reduce maternal-mortality rates.
Anyone for whom something even remotely resembling this can be said certainly has had a thick mat of privilege to land on, even if the experience were difficult, as it seems to have been.
At least logged into my Google account, if I type "Justine", it suggests "Sacco" as the top completion. It's not all that hyperbolic to say "ruined your life" when your first name is literally a global URI to the (perceived) worst thing you've ever done.
I once created a server-side app that would monitor where certain search terms showed up in google rankings, so you could monitor change over time.
The biggest challenge we faced was that google dramatically changes your search results based on who you are, and where you are.
My point is - Justine Sacco isn't even on the first page of Justines for me. Maybe google just thinks Sacco is the best Justine for you, but it's probably not as bad as a "global uri".
If you add pws=0 to your querystring, it'll search without personalization. Actually, there are other factors at play too [1], but that alone should work well enough.
yeah, but the goal was to track how your ranking would appear to individual users. not to a hypothetical completely unpersonalized user with no geographic location.
If I say something stupid to a group of friends, usually they'll tell me it's stupid or I said something wrong, and everyone moves on. If I say something stupid on twitter, it's literally archived forever. Another reason I'm glad I've disconnected from all social media. I'll keep my stupid, non-politically correct jokes in my own head.
It's for that exact reason, I never post to Twitter. However, I consume a lot there. And as a consumer of various Twitter Feeds, I have to say I am pretty happy with the product.
There is this idea of self-censorship before you post something public--which Twitter is. That said, I'm not unhappy that there was no Twitter when I was a young twenty-something. I have no doubt I would have posted things that I'm glad I didn't have the opportunity to.
set up a twitter account and dont link it to your real name. sign up through a vpn, say waht you want and dont worry about it. unless what you say is actually illegal no one can really track you down without getting your login IP address from twitter. People get tracked down because they link it to their PSN/XBOX/FB account or reuse usernames between twitter and somewhere else they have left personal details.
I have a twitter accout that I set up through TOR and a VPN. I use a username I have never used elsewhere. I dont post anything controversial but I would be pretty happy that I could not be traced without someone obtaining a court order requiring twitter to hand over my IP address, even then it would point to a VPN that (supposedly) does not keep logs.
Nope. I interact with them on WhatsApp, text message, email, phone and in person. Twitter is like a crappy version of text messaging on a feature phone for chatting with friends.
Two things: Don't be too clever. People trip over themselves to feel offended. Two, you really don't have freedom of speech when you can get mugged by being obnoxious online. Not being malicious -just obnoxious.
Yes all the tweets quoted in the article were obnoxious and leveraged stereotypes but I don't think people should be flogged for being like that.
I remember all the obnoxious Polish jokes growing up. They were terrible. But I don't agree that they should be censored. Demanding this mind of self censorship is a sign that a society is fragile rather than robust. A robust society can take the jokes.
It's like with friendships. With good friends you can nettle them; say terrible things and we know that's it's all in good fun, a ritual of sorts. With so so friends you don't make bad jokes because the friendship is too fragile. It's a sign of an immature or fragile society when bad jokes upset the cart.
Edit. An irony is that many of the people calling offense don't realize their own transgression in becoming part of a self-righteous mob meting out punishment at the speed of thought.
It doesn't but one should expect some maturity from society. I think it'll take a generation maybe less but people will learn and understand it as an extension of self albeit diffused.
> Over-reaction or not, freedom of speech does not guarantee a receptive audience.
That's so. But if society frequently inflicts severe extralegal punishment for unpopular speech, then you don't really have free speech. You just have First Amendment rights. They aren't the same thing.
As a thought experiment, imagine Person X said something deemed offensive and society responded in a uniform manner - by constant public humiliation, refusing to do business with them, refusing to even speak to them, etc. All this is well within our legal rights (with maybe some exceptions) but life for such a person would be very difficult, if not impossible - they'd probably end up starving in the streets. That's not a very free society even if there are no legal consequences whatsoever for any speech.
I think it's very important to affirm that even if someone says something offensive that the response should be measured.
I've thought it odd that the discourse over free speech focusses on legal rights.
The idea behind human rights is that they're not government granted, but instead are innate to humans are humans.
The issue is more complicated than "let everyone say what they want to say", but it's also more complicated than "you have a legal right, but nothing beyond that"
> As a thought experiment, imagine Person X said something deemed offensive and society responded in a uniform manner - by constant public humiliation, refusing to do business with them, refusing to even speak to them, etc.
I will note that until relatively recently, those who we consider "conservatives" today did exactly that towards "progressives". You try and dare being publicly against segregation and the mistreatment of black people in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s - Juliette Morgan did, and promptly got fired and ostracised. I'm sure you can find similar examples for supporters of gay rights, right up to today.
> I will note that until relatively recently, those who we consider "conservatives" today did exactly that towards "progressives".
And we agree that's bad, right? I thought we had all agreed that was bad. 'Cause it really seems like here you're advocating "well they did it to us, so it's okay if we do it to them."
Sometimes. It's less clear-cut in some cases - specifically, when a statement or action is more directly against some group's human rights, or otherwise directly dehumanises people. However, what I'm suggesting that it's not going to stop - all sides are going to keep doing it, and always have done.
It used to be that if you learned that something was OK, it'd be OK for the rest of your life (more-or-less, ignoring major political events). Now, that's not so much the case as the progressives have more power and visibility, and so it's more visible when someone says something that might've been accepted 10 years ago and isn't now, vs someone saying something that is generally not accepted now but might be in 10 years.
I would just like to point out that the progressives were the ones who pushed to disenfranchise African-Americans for decades.[1] The conservatives were on the other side, pushing for equal rights; as an example, President Coolidge said "[As president, I am] one who feels a responsibility for living up to the traditions and maintaining the principles of the Republican Party. Our Constitution guarantees equal rights to all our citizens, without discrimination on account of race or color. I have taken my oath to support that Constitution. It is the source of your rights and my rights. I propose to regard it, and administer it, as the source of the rights of all the people, whatever their belief or race.".[2]
The progressive movement has a horrific history, and I find it puzzling as to why someone would self identify with a movement so steeped in racism and eugenics.
Mainly because "progressivism" as the term is used today has little to do with what it was about in the past? Most movements have had huge changes over the past hundred years.
It wasn't exactly conservatism which brought us back to the point we're at now from there, was it? It seems as if it were a different movement entirely from the late 1800s progressives and the conservative movement.
But if you value what freedom of speech provides—an open marketplace of ideas, socialization between those of different values and opinions without fear of violence—you should practice and encourage tolerance and equanimity, regardless of what the laws about speech are.
Angry mobs petitioning people to be fired from their jobs for bad jokes or unfavorable political donations don't violate the First Amendment, but they certainly discourage speaking freely.
It is deceptive to characterize an online lynch mob as not a "receptive audience".
Read the article again... some of the lynch mobs weren't even factually correct about what they mobilized for. The attempt to implicitly pull in the "well, they sorta deserved it defense" fails on the grounds that you're leaving the determination of who deserved it up to a mob.
Hi, I'm one of your friendly neighborhood HN libertarians, and everyone take note, I'm about to defend government here. If someone does something seriously deserving of that level of opprobrium, firings, and social tarring-and-feathering, they deserve the protections that government processes can bring to bear to try to do our best to make sure that we only fire the big guns at people who, to the best of our knowledge, have been determined to deserve it by processes with a longstanding historical pedigree and centuries of back-and-forth tuning. There's a reason we have trials and such, a deep and important one.
Do not be so hurried to give up that social standard because, let's not mince words here, you're playacting at being offended because that's what your social group expects. Let's not pretend that anybody was actually offended at the statement of someone with 170 twitter followers, and if anybody really, truly was somehow "offended" it was only after the actions of the lynch mob itself! They're the ones who actually spread it around... maybe they're the ones we should lynch. Without trial, of course.
Scale matters. And it has real-world effects... people get fired over this sort of thing, among other things.
The only thing preventing the lynch mob from doing what things the physical lynch mobs used to do is simple, sheer lack of physical proximity, so A: I consider it a valid use of the term and B: It should not be viewed by any sane person as a normal and healthy social correction mechanism, it should be condemned by all. It is still dangerous, and if everyone acts like it's no big deal or even a good idea, it will get worse, until the lynch mobs do do what lynch mobs used to do.
And I mean that 100% fully literally, with absolutely no exaggeration whatsoever. In the real world, the line between "dozens of death threats", which we've already handily reached, and "an actual attempt on your life" is very thin. As easy as it may be to tell others not to worry, if you personally were betting your life on that line, you would not be happy; it is not to be relied upon. There are crazy people out there. Failure to take that into account while passively accepting that online lynch mobs are OK is just stupid.
This stuff isn't a joke. It's one of the foundational bricks between having a civilization and not having one. It is unwise to be so lackadaisical about it, if you like living in a civilization.
It's hyperbole, as the victim doesn't actually die. But there are certainly similarities.
They were able to get Sacco fired. They were able to mobilize someone to take her picture right after her plane landed. And she had to leave Cape Town because "no one could guarantee her safety". So, it could have easily escalated into a real lynch mob.
How about people getting "swatted" by internet vigilantes?
So the "not dying" part is about the only significant difference I can see in some of these more extreme cases, and, God help me, I wouldn't be overly shocked if someone actually does end up dead from an "internet shaming" some day.
Not only is someone bound to end up dead, based on past human behaviour the majority of shamers will claim they deserved it, and feel no shame themselves for their part in the death of an innocent. Diffusion of responsibility is a terrible thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility
> you really don't have freedom of speech when you can get mugged by being obnoxious online
If you published something similarly obnoxious in a newspaper before the Internet, I'm sure you'd get a similarly angry response from some people, and quite possibly have someone harass you in person if they knew where to find you.
If you stood on top of a soap box and shouted offensive crap at the public, you might have stuff thrown at you.
The only things that have changed - it's easier to publish things online, you're publishing for a global audience rather than a national or a local one, it's easier to find other people who find those publications obnoxious online, and it's a two-way medium rather than the traditional one-way medium of newspapers.
Basically, the masses finally have a voice. If that's a problem, perhaps free speech has never actually had a chance of working?
But it's still niche media manipulating the voice and attention of the masses, as illustrated by the article. There is so much bigotry and racism that goes unnoticed in the depths of comment boards and bad blogs. Why aren't the masses also voicing about any of this? Because they aren't speaking briefly enough to be easily criticizable.
> There is so much bigotry and racism that goes unnoticed in the depths of comment boards and bad blogs. Why aren't the masses also voicing about any of this?
They do. Constantly. It's just that most of the time, they're talking about <such-and-such a site's community> or <such-and-such a blog> rather than individual people.
You're missing a crucial point: whatever an average person does lasts forever. It used to be that you had to be somebody notable before this happened, which meant you had a recompense -- you were already famous for some reason. Now, the average shit you might say at the bar to your friends can mark you for all eternity. That's something unheralded in the history of communication, and it's horrifying.
Exactly. And if you were famous and got tarred one had the option of moving. It wasn't a good option as that typically meant starting from scratch --but it was there. You could start a new life.
Perhaps the so called right to be forgotten deserves serious consideration at least for some kinds of instances. Say, you can have indiscretion purged but not info on a felony.
On the other hand... In addition to searching foe people who get called out for offensive behavior also search for those who engage in mob mentality and hold them accountable when they try to find a job.
One of the cited cases was a person whispering to a friend during a conference, and a stranger who listened in felt offended.
Not only is it easier to publish things, it is also easier to attack people. The only thing needed to begin a shaming, is a large list of followers and the ability to tell a narrative.
I'm not certain if you realise this, but that was part of a much broader discussion on sexism in tech - there's plenty of discussion on the topic of women feeling threatened by the male-dominated atmosphere at some tech conferences.
It's not good, however, that these two got singled out when I have no doubt that there was much worse said at that conference alone.
Anyway, the point of my post was the last line - if free speech doesn't work when the masses have a voice, has it ever actually been a good ideal to work towards?
> Demanding this mind of self censorship is a sign that a society is fragile rather than robust. A robust society can take the jokes.
Sure, but you don't magically make society robust by telling racist jokes. The healthy society comes first; the fact that these jokes no longer sting is just a pleasant side effect.
you really don't have freedom of speech when you can get mugged by being obnoxious online.
Ken White has quite a few posts about freedom of speech vs the Internet. I think this quote is apropos to that type of comment.
Speech Is Not Censorship: Put another way, as we often say here, speech is not tyranny. Freedom of speech does not (and cannot, under any coherent legal or philosophical approach) involve freedom from criticism. Free speech does not mean "I have a right to say whatever I want without social consequences." [0]
To me the unresolved problem here is that this approach leads to online coercion, bullying, and suppressing dissent and steers opinion to the center. Korea has many examples of people being harassed and some leading to suicides due to online castigation.
And, as others have noted. On the past these idiotic social indiscretions and letting off of steam were for the most part quickly forgotten, people went on with life. People say all kinds of idiotic things in ordinary speech for many reasons. Few of those reasons are malicious.
For cornering people's though like this is not productive. It's like whack-a-mole. People will let steam out some other way. You can't change society and its mores by force of on-line bullying. Many many times those calling offense don't understand the context.
It's like one day calling out people who when they have sex have a disposition to say nasty things. I can see it rationalized right now. Don't say b c* d* etc. Even as re playing as that unconsciously has an effect on people....
No. Fuvk no. I've come to the conclusion that only allowing the ugliness to surface can we call ourselves free. Anything else is a sanitized life. The thing is who decides what is healthy?
> A robust society requires everyone in the minority to shut the fuck up when anyone in the majority makes them feel invisible
> An irony is that many of the people calling offense don't realize their own transgression in becoming part of a self-righteous mob meting out punishment at the speed of thought.
There's a difference between pointing out someone acting obnoxiously and couch-fainting.
No not quite. A robust society is one which evolves to know limits. You can have stereotypical jokes, racist jokes, etc. But they are part of a bonding mechanism rather than an alienating mechanism.
Societies need to allow the free flow of ideas. We can't be choosy about what we consider proper or not, desirable and not. We have to allow everything.
I used to be a dreamer growing up and thought why not make these bad thoughts illegal, racism cured. No. That was naive. It has too many negative collateral consequences.
You should not receive that from a superior. Nor should one be harassed (repeated uninvited antagonism). Else, society at large, there is no guarantee --taboos change over time. They come and go. People become sensitive to things and become desensitized to other things.
My belief is only our own selves have control over our reaction. We as receivers of all kinds of bad things need to learn how to deal with adversity. Nature is not sanitized, we should be taught how to deal with this kind of adversity. It's a cold place, and not everyone's or every thing's nice. Children often are not prepared by adults for these things.
Now, bullying is something different and there are different aspects to it. Sometimes it's peer pressure, other times it's harassment, other times it's a social mechanism to get people to behave a certain way (don't cut in line), be a certain way (slim, not fat, etc.) Bullying is an intimate attack, a malicious attack on a particular person, typically by a group, but also by an individual often accompanied by explicit or implicit violence. It's about control.
"The woman who took the photograph, Adria Richards, soon felt the wrath of the crowd herself. The man responsible for the dongle joke had posted about losing his job on Hacker News, an online forum popular with developers. This led to a backlash from the other end of the political spectrum. So-called men’s rights activists and anonymous trolls bombarded Richards with death threats on Twitter and Facebook."
Wow, this almost makes it sound as if HN is a bunch of MRA losers :( A pity it's so sloppily worded (unless it's true, in which case, ugh).
I don't think HN is a bunch of MRA losers, but it's certainly closely connected to places that are. (as in, lots of people participate in HN who also participate in places that could be characterized as such)
HN isn't completely made up of MRA types, but if you've been noticing there are a lot of them here (along with your more typical "SJWs out to get us" types).
HN is in general no longer held with the same regard it was a couple of years ago. Note the number of progressive, well-respected regulars who've left this place behind.
There are other avenues to discuss tech and tech issues without ancaps, MRAs, and anti-SJW crusaders trying to internet-fight you at every turn.
Holy crap, I haven't been there in awhile. It's almost torture to see such trash on the front page. Soon I will go there to get my TMZ updates about the hollywood stars or rappers who did something, maybe, possibly tangentially related to tech?
If you're internet-dogpiling people or taking creepshots and getting people fired for jokes not even directed at you, I will happily internet-fight you for being an awful person.
It's amazing how self-described "progressives" can come in here and happily defend this kind of behaviour. I hope you find a nice new website and never have your views challenged again.
I... what? Hold your horses, there's an awful lot of projection here.
I haven't come in here to defend internet lynch mobs - there's literally not a word in my post condoning it.
The bulk of tech progressive aren't the ones spoiling for a Twitter fight, they're the silent majority that's reading posts on HN, rolling their eyes, maybe sighing a little bit, and moving along with their lives. They're not orchestrating backlashes, brigades, or downvote chains, or any such devices. The most they're doing is emailing a link to some comment to their friends with a "sigh, HN again" quip - and I've received many such messages.
Heck, I know people who read HN - but only the links - knowing what a cesspool the comments are going to be. Heck, this is me on most days.
These are the people I'm talking about - the ones who've largely left this place behind because the tone of the community has shifted to one where any talk of race, gender, or even age (or in fact any talk of institutional problems in the industry) is automatically the work of professional victims (and a largely fictional narrative of a "social justice warrior") out to oppress techies. The general tenor of the community here now has a very distinctly reactionary twist, which has caused people to bail for greener pastures.
I'm sorry, I was overreaching. Your reply seemed to support the OPs idea that Adria Richards was harassed for no reason by "MRA losers".
>These are the people I'm talking about - the ones who've largely left this place behind because the tone of the community has shifted to one where any talk of race, gender, or even age (or in fact any talk of institutional problems in the industry) is automatically the work of professional victims (and a largely fictional narrative of a "social justice warrior") out to oppress techies.
I won't deny that the MRA side is often reactionary, but you must admit that the "social justice" side is just as bad. The internet of today is designed for reactionism, makes it so easy to react and so easy to find controversial conversations.
This is something I've noticed a lot - both sides are as bad as each other. Both claim to be better people, but both are so mired in faeces that they haven't even noticed they're throwing it themselves. (I've been up for 36 hours that's the best I can come up with).
> (and a largely fictional narrative of a "social justice warrior")
That's a very opinionated statement. Unfortunately, few agree on the definition of SJW, so everyone makes up their own. Pretending that there isn't a clique of 'progressives' in the tech world doing their best to cause trouble is just fantasy. Look at Adria's creepshot/dog whistling, the elevatorgate thing, that time Ben Noordhuis was forced out of the Node community because of a SJW hate mob enraged over a pronoun, or this thing: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/32778.html. SJWs exist, and have done plenty of damage to the industry.
They've also no doubt scared many young women away from STEM careers through their wild stories about misogyny and dudebro cultures in the tech world. Would you, as (possibly) a woman, want to work in an industry frequently proclaimed to be an unaccepting boys club? Funnily enough, the proclaimers of such always seem to benefit personally from such attacks, landing cushy "developer relations" jobs and hefty sums on patreon. That's where the "professional victim" label comes from.
Also, it's worth noting Ben Noordhuis wasn't forced out of the Node community - just the core contribution team (although I do believe he chose to take a break afterward). His company, StrongLoop, would go on to be the owners of the Express repo, and Ben Noordhuis is one of the contributors to IO.js.
That's weird, I'm the opposite--I read HN specifically for the comments.
It's not true for articles like this, which I generally don't read. But when the link is a programming article expressing an opinion on _______, I definitely want to read what HN has to say.
I see a lot of what you're saying happening, and subjectively, it has gotten worse. One interesting thing is that I see this popping up in comment sections and forums far removed from HN - neo-monarchists, redpillers, neo-objectivists, and their loosely related ideological ilk have spread far and wide. At the same time, the ILM does seem out of control, both on the SJW and anti-SJW sides. The Internet has become an excellent hate amplifier.
Another interesting thing is that the same thing happens on the other side. For many others (like myself) who are on the liberal / progressive / pro social justice side who couldn't take the influx of inchoate, unfocused rage (along with all the other fun stuff like oppression olympics, tone policing/anti-tone policing, fights over trigger warnings, slugfests over performativity, implosions over minor transgressions causing a space space to turn into an unsafe one and all the rest) that has become prevalent in various online SJ communities - they also left, looking for said greener pastures (or just hang around and don't comment - that's generally what I do in those spaces.) Michelle Goldberg wrote a good article on this a while back:
Anyway, if you know of any places for technology discussion with a good signal-to-noise ratio and low on hate and warriors/conspiracy theorists from either side (and a liberal bent would be even better), I'd appreciate hearing about it. I saw Slashdot rise and fall. Sad to think it could be happening to HN, too. Where do we go next?
>neo-monarchists, redpillers, neo-objectivists, and their loosely related ideological ilk have spread far and wide
Those are widely different viewpoints who have more in common with mainstream viewpoints than with each other - it is dishonest to label them together, please don't do so.
I'm fully aware of where and how they differ, and I'm aware of the strident disagreements both within and between - but to deny an overlap today I think is misguided.
That is a slander piece. If you are going to come up with a source then at a mimimum I expect the author to know the http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-fa... and be able to tell me with a straight face that that is what those who (like me) believe fathers should have better custody rights.
Oh and how PUAs and MRA are part of the same moment when PUAs look down on MRAs, how PUAs want a class of alphas with more social responsibility like the NR.
To me your argument only works if you adopt a you are either with us or against humanity attitude for political correctness and associated belief with _is_ inline with what many SJW think.
I will give you this much: about the only thing these people you have grouped together do agree on is that feminism and modern leftism has gone a little too far: but since they do not agree on how much (wiz MRA wanting more custody rights to NR wanting James of Stuart as king) nor what to do about it they in fact have more in-group and out-group variance.
Of course the fact that they disagree at all is enough for some (such as the author of that hit piece) to wrap them all together, we should be above such simple mindedness here on hacker news.
Edit: removed unecessary and counterproductive anger, added call to unity.
> HN isn't completely made up of MRA types, but if you've been noticing there are a lot of them here (along with your more typical "SJWs out to get us" types).
This much is true.
> HN is in general no longer held with the same regard it was a couple of years ago.
This may be true in some circles, but I don't think its generally true. Its probably true that HN is seen by some who participated in it earlier as less of an exclusive club of like-interested folk as it has gained popularity, but that's going to happen with any narrow forum over time that doesn't have an exclusionary wall for membership (and exclusive walls of membership have their own problems which will can erode the image of a forum over time in different ways.)
> Note the number of progressive, well-respected regulars who've left this place behind.
Such as...?
> There are other avenues to discuss tech and tech issues without ancaps, MRAs, and anti-SJW crusaders trying to internet-fight you at every turn.
Well, I suppose you could have a forum with a political litmus test for membership or heavy-handed pre-publication moderation of comments, but given how much the tech community overlaps with the ancap, MRA, and anti-SJW crusader communities -- and, perhaps more importantly, the reaction many outside those communities would have to the kind of approaches necessary to eradicate the unwanted comments -- you'd probably lose some value for actual tech and, particularly, tech issues discussions.
Ahah, not about to name names - the trouble with openly naming people who are opposed to MRAs/anti-SJWs is that the demographic is also very, very adept at launching internet lynch mobs.
Sadly the events of the past half-year or so have succeeded in silencing some people who would otherwise speak, for fear of being doxxed, swatted, or otherwise harassed (where harassment goes above and beyond receiving angry messages of disapproval).
If the people who have left HN because of the toxicity want to make themselves known, they should do that. It's not my place to direct the people they want to avoid straight to their doorstep.
A good place to start would be the top posters list and seeing who's still around. Many of these folks still read HN but no longer participate in comments. Many read HN and have their commentary elsewhere. I know some of them, I certainly don't know all of them.
> "you'd probably lose some value for actual tech and, particularly, tech issues discussions."
Yeah, this is where idealism and values run head-first into the brick wall of reality, and no one really knows how to fix it.
We like freedom of speech, we dislike heavy-handed moderation especially when it comes to things that inform our views. At the same time we have real instances of abuse, and we have even more instances where extremists in one camp can simply shout down any dissent (extremists, for some reason, have a lot more time to comment on the internet than the rest of us).
I don't think anyone really knows the right answer to this. We want to preserve intelligent discussion, but at the same time give minority views held in good faith a fair shake. The solution thus far has been for people to abandon communities with toxic demographics, but that hasn't really solved the core problem - it's just hit the reset button until the new community itself attracts the wrong crowd.
> Yeah, this is where idealism and values run head-first into the brick wall of reality, and no one really knows how to fix it.
That's the thing. We do know how to fix it. We just don't know how to fix it in a way that preserves social mechanisms such as public shaming of people you disagree with.
She tried, very intentionally, to use the social media "machine" to punish what she deemed deviant behaviour, the fact that that same machine turned on her is both unsurprising if you're paying attention, but also a little deserved.
While the original joke was childish, I cannot think of one adult working in any industry who's never said something in a similar vein (or pointing out someone else's phasing might have a double meaning, and so on). It really has nothing to do with gender politics, she was just on a quest and picked up any small examples she could find.
Nobody should have been fired. That's on the employers. However if anyone was going to be fired she deserved it the most, simply because she started this ball rolling on purpose, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Also, her job at the time was as a developer evangelist. The high-profile name-and-shame she had engaged in would have made any developer within a hundred miles hesitant to deal with her at all, making her far less effective at her job.
I can't really blame SendGrid for thinking that a tech evangelist who deliberately publicly shamed a couple of developers over an unfunny private joke is maybe not a good fit. This doesn't justify all the abuse that followed, though.
She dog-whistled the mob, no doubt that mob gave death threats.
People lose their shit when anonymous trolls send death threats to prominent women, but typically completely ignore the same happening to men. Perhaps women get more because they react more? Perhaps people shouldn't feed the trolls?
Please don't reply to this with a pithy feel-good response like "nobody should send death threats!". It's like saying "there shouldn't be war in the world!". It's an obvious goal that everyone agrees on, but there is no way to achieve without use of totalitarian control over the world/internet - something I'm sure we can agree is unacceptable.
You seem to be confused about what "dog whistle" means. She wasn't using secret SJW shibboleths.
> no doubt that mob gave death threats
"No doubt"! What a convenient way to assert that something happened without having to provide evidence for it.
> typically completely ignore the same happening to men
No doubt you have evidence of this, too. No doubt you have evidence that this happens to as many men as women, and as often, so as to warrant equivalent reactions.
> but there is no way to achieve without use of totalitarian control over the world/internet
You need to have a very limited imagination and near-total ignorance of history to think that positive change only comes about via totalitarian means.
It's surprising how many have fallen for the "MRA" thing. In the case of Adria Richards, she bullied a person and misrepresented a situation to the point of getting a man fired from a job, torch mob in close pursuit. I don't care if such bullies are men or women, be wary living by the sword because, as Adria learned, often you'll "die" by one (metaphorically...though someone somewhere will declare that a vile death threat from the oppressors).
Torch mobs are an atrocity. They were against a gentleman making a lame but benign joke. They are against someone posting some random thought-crime tweet. They are against the people who send the torch mobs in fast pursuit.
And equally to blame are people in positions of power who bend so easily to torch mobs. If you immediately fire someone for something that would be at most a warning, all because a mob demands it, you are the problem, and a coward to boot.
I wouldn't say that HN "is" a bunch of MRA losers; HN is a big place, and there are a lot of different types of people on it.
But there are a bunch of MRA losers on HN. How many, it's hard to tell; maybe a few that are very vocal, maybe a few with many sockpuppets, maybe a lot. If you ever get involved in a thread about any issue about women in technology, programs for encouraging women in technology, or the like, you will see them come out of the woodwork (and such threads will frequently drop off the front page as the long comment threads trigger HN's algorithm that try to discourage flamewar topics).
"MRA is short for Men's Rights Activist. MRAs argue that, as human beings, men should have human rights, due process in legal matters, and should not be subject to "reverse discrimination" in favor of other groups.
MRAs typically point to men's lower life expectancy in almost every country, higher rates of incarceration, more severe penalties for similar offenses, lower rates of health care spending and health research spending on men, higher suicide rates, higher rates of being subject to violence and murder including by women and when they are children, higher rates of genital mutilation, liability to conscription, higher rates of death at work, various disadvantages in divorce and child support, and higher school and college dropout rates, as reasons why men's rights should be on the agenda."
A lot of people feel that since men are privileged in so many areas, no effort should be expended on men's issues until every women's problem is entirely resolved. Due to that scapegoating Men's Rights Activists as people who hate women is popular.
So how does any of that make you a loser? What's going on in this thread? As far as I can tell it's nothing more than a similar type of bullying the article is itself is talking about, which I didn't ever expect to see on HN, let alone tolerated.
At what point can you no longer express controversial opinions without being called a loser?
On the Internet, someone is already calling you a loser, possibly without your knowledge. It's best to worry more about the folks who have greater power to destroy your social standing than just simple name-calling.
And to provide a sentinel value for the previous search space, I'll just say it. You, and everyone else who may be wondering if someone on the network is calling them a loser, are all losers.
Now that's taken care of, and you can go about your business, expressing controversial opinions without worrying about incurring greater harm to yourself than has already occurred.
The reason you'll get banned for such behavior, and the whole reason why such behavior is against the rules, is because personal attacks are counterproductive to logical discussions. When HN degenerates into a group of people who go around calling other groups of people losers, that does not bode well.
It was, I admit, somewhat of an obscure joke. I realized, after my first sentence, that I couldn't be certain that it was true. So I added a sentinel value.
>As far as I can tell it's nothing more than a similar type of bullying
It absolutely is. "MRA" is a short cut to dismiss an entire spectrum of arguments and perspectives. Just as farcical, but on the opposite side, are people who declare anyone who has a problem with something like, say, "GamerGate", a "SJW".
These are shorthand for idiots. It lets you pretend that you're in a tribe and everything is black and white.
It doesn't make MRA losers. If it did there would be no reason to tack the word loser on. Being an mean, agressive alcoholic bum implies being a loser so you don't often see loser tacked on.
I am an advocate for men's rights for many of the reasons you cite, but I also acknowledge that there really are people who adopt the MRA label who are bitterly misogynist nutjobs who have no interest in a more just and equal society, but are rather the flip-side of those misandric feminists who believe--amongst other things--that "rape is nothing less than a conscious conspiracy by all men against all women" (likely not an exact quote as it's from memory, but Brownmiller says something with the same meaning.)
The problem is that misogynist MRAs disrupt the possibility of positive change the same way misandric feminists like Brownmiller and McKinnon do. Because they share a label with sane people, they allow the enemies of sanity to mount a trivially plausible ad hominem against any proposal to genuinely address the real injustices that men and women face due to the simple fact of being a man or a woman.
There are lots of good reasons to talk about issues affecting men, but sadly the bad parts of the MRM far outweigh the good at this point. I'd say it's 85% bashing feminism, complaining about women's sexual power (e.g. The Friendzone), denying and minimizing rape as a social problem, etc. and only 15% talking about fathers' custody rights and boys' education issues.
I was surprised at the lapse in thorough reporting at that point in the article. It was because a few women in the tech community wrote about her history of passive-aggressive bullying. This made clear that it was not a men-vs-women issue and gave the backlash the legitimacy that led to Richards' dismissal.
Except for Facebook and LinkedIn, I haven't used my real name and any personally identifiable information on the Internet in 20 years, since I realized that everything I wrote on Usenet would be there forever. There is no value with having the things I say potentially used against me for the rest of my life.
I do think it's a bit odd it's considered obvious that children should avoid putting any information online that could reveal their real identity/location/et c., but when people turn 18 it's suddenly not eyebrow-raising for them to have a bunch of social media accounts and such under their real names.
Mind you, such caution used to be common sense behavior for everyone. Then Facebook[1] happened. The second Eternal September.
It also seems to have become common for professionals to promote themselves under their real names without keeping separate, anonymous accounts for non-business activities.
When it goes well they're growth-hacking (puke) their careers, using all their twitter followers and likes and GitHub projects or whatever to market themselves and/or their services and/or products they're paid to sell. When it goes poorly we get stories like this. Live by the sword, die by the sword. (I don't know that that applies in this case, but it has in others)
The situation in the article is really shitty, of course, and I don't mean to minimize that. I'm just puzzled that throwing your real name on every corner of the Internet stopped drawing derision and advice to cut it out, at some point. It's why the calls for reducing online anonymity to end online harassment by strangers strike me as such a strange approach—the absolutely undisputed solution used to be more anonymity! It's a major cultural shift from the very recent past, but I don't see it brought up very often.
[1] Not just Facebook, obviously, but the timing fits.
The reason why Google, Facebook, Twitter, NSA, etc, want to reduce online anonymity is so that they can do a better job in tracking your behavior and advertise to you. They are simply packaging it as an anti-harrassment reason, when in fact that's a complete lie. As you said, the only solution is complete anonymity.
I'm the opposite. I use my real name, or real enough, everywhere. It makes me think twice before hitting enter. Anything I say I'm backing up, for better or worse, with my identity. I may someday regret this decision. So far so good.
I do the same thing, I use my real name as my username on all social media sites including Reddit. I always think to myself, is this something I want permanently associated with my real identity?
It could obviously backfire. You say something that you think is fine, someone else gets offended, and they know exactly who you are. But generally, I think using your real name makes people more accountable for what they say online.
The problem with this approach is you have no idea what will become wrongthink in the future. In 2008, opposing gay marriage was a relatively mainstream idea. In 2014 someone was fired for donating to an anti-gay marriage campaign. In 2015 it might be acceptable for one to express wariness of expanding the H-1B visa program, but in 2020 will it be so?
You at least admit that it might backfire on you. I try to tell people, you don't get a choice in how people interpret what you say. If an angry mob decides to take one tweet out of context, your good intentions won't save you.
I think they article would more aptly have been titled, "How One Thoughtless Public Expression of Justine Sacco's Lack of Judgment and Racism Had Consequences." Really hard to feel sympathy for her.
How about, "one ironic joke, and then a long flight where she could not communicate that she was being ironic, cost Justine Sacco a lot".
She wasn't being racist, she was lampooning American insularity. Unfortunately, a lot of people didn't get that it was a joke, and/or didn't get the joke, and she paid the price.
Even if one were to give her the benefit of the doubt on whether or not her tweets express racist sentiment, there's still a stupendous lack of judgment on her part. She's saying things publicly, associated with her name. Anyone who expresses something in that fashion should be fully prepared to deal with backlash. She should have the right to express her views, even if they are unpopular--and she should be willing to handle the consequences.
I agree with you that there was an overreaction. But that's a risk each of us runs when we publish something via a public medium. Any time I want to publish something, whether it's a private SMS, a tweet, a comment on HN, or something else, I'm obliged to consider its content, and make a judgment call on whether it's appropriate. If I'm wrong, I have to deal with it.
I sure as hell have. Many times. And every time, no matter how much I hated it, I had to face the music and deal with the mess I had created, regardless of whether it was my original intent.
I was probably a tad harsh there. Sorry about that. I guess it's a matter of degree - she wrote something she thought was ironic which came across badly, but instead of getting a chance to face up to the music and explain her side, the entire Internet went insane and she lost her job.
I'm sorry you can't feel sympathy for her for the bad things that happened to her. None of us are perfect, we all act badly sometimes—but we're not comic book supervillains, either. Even bad people deserve sympathy when bad things happen to them.
Really? No sympathy? Did you read the article? Obviously what she said was inappropriate but there are very few people that should be dragged through the mud as roughly as she was. Especially over less than 140 characters.
Should she have lost her job? Yeah probably being in such a high profile position. But should she be reviled as an truly awful person when her only crime was an ill-conceived tweet? I don't think so personally, and it scares me that we are willing to judge and condemn people for so little.
> it scares me that we are willing to judge and condemn people for so little.
Me too! That's why I try my absolute best to exercise caution and be thoughtful about what I say in a public forum. I don't disagree that the reaction was overkill; but that's the way the world is, even if I think it's wrong.
I think this is very well stated and I'd like to see this idea presented more frequently in dialogue surrounding internet zealotry.
Simply put, a great deal of what drives the extremist behavior on the internet is straight up narcissism. The people participating in pile-on internet bullying campaigns feel good about themselves when they do so, and receive praise (from the internet mob that they have aligned with) for doing so.
I wonder about this a lot - in 15-20 years, political candidates / public figures will have hundreds of things they have said online embarrassing their campaigns/images. Do we all just become more accepting of sarcasm, racism, bad jokes, etc? Is it a step backwards or is it a step forward?
I can tell you for a fact I'm sure things on my Twitter account could likely be taken out of context as I can sometimes be a bit of a "Larry David" with my public observations that I can't help but share.
A lot of the people planning to be politicians are purposefully keeping their current digital life clean.
CJ John Roberts knew from a young age he wanted to be Chief Justice. (Overachiever, but lots of us on HN are overachievers.) He kept his record very clean. He never even got a speeding ticket.
And I totally see understand why: he was aware of how the media pick apart people, and who knows what one tiny thing might spiral out of control.
But it means the CJ, when making ruling about police stops, has never actually experienced something the majority of Americans have, and the Court loses some bit of useful perspective.
I actually thought it was funny. If you get offended by a thing that's so over the top it just can't be taken seriously, you sir are an absolute moron. Hate how people are just looking to get excuses to get offended and show off their 'righteousness' at the expense of other people.
I don't think anyone got truly offended, just that they saw an opportunity to do something interesting with Twitter - which is mostly a very mundane activity - and went with it. An opportunity to rally the pitchfork brigade can feel very empowering to people who spend a majority of their time 'socializing' with a facile society such as Twitter provides. If you ask me, the root cause of this cannibalistic mob desire is, fundamentally, dire loneliness.
When can you get 15,000 people to hate something you've decided is worth hating, its quite a buzz.
"Still, in those early days, the collective fury felt righteous, powerful and effective. It felt as if hierarchies were being dismantled, as if justice were being democratized."
This is delusional slacktivism. Overthrowing power structures and hierarchies by retweeting. How more delusional can you get?
OTOH, if you've got a PR job or a shitty position where you'd get fired for saying such stuff, you really ought to be ever so careful. Why are people posting this stuff with their real names attached? Unless you've got FU money or are in a career track that's mostly immune to this kind of harassment, just use a separate personal account. FFS, does anyone think the general public wants your tweets?
But it's not that over the top. There are A LOT of people that would say the "I'm white" comment and MEAN IT. It's not obviously over the top.
Once I saw a T-Shirt in tshirthell.com that said something like "arrest black babies before they become criminals". I don't remember the exact words. THAT is obviously and ridiculously over the top.
Regardless of your political orientation, you should think twice before cheerleading mob justice. If you think mob justice is good and if you think "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" then you're just saying unpopular speech is always bad and wrong. Once the mob turns against your political beliefs then one day you might be the one getting attacked and fired.
I totally agree. I was also surprised to see the author of the article defend the tweet as well.
>But after thinking about her tweet for a few seconds more, I began to suspect that it wasn’t racist but a reflexive critique of white privilege — on our tendency to naïvely imagine ourselves immune from life’s horrors.
Her comments that followed seemed to agree with your second point.
Even if we were to take the offensiveness of the tweet as a given, the reaction seems insanely disproportionate.
It's great to push back against casual racism, but I don't think anything is gained by turning it into a lottery where any given tweet has a one-in-a-million chance of provoking a national-scale, life-destroying burst of outrage, and the rest are ignored.
You can't control what other people find offensive, and you can't avoid offending other people. You can control your own reaction to what you find offensive.
In my experience, the people who find these things the most offensive are the people the barb is pointed at. Privileged white people--who have nothing better to do than run around worrying about what other people are thinking out loud, trying hard to make sure that the whole world is protected from harmful speech, but who do nothing about actually solving things like the AIDs problem in Africa--are exactly the target of these kinds of comments.
These comments call out and critique the people who only care about Africans when someone says something that can possibly be interpreted to be offensive to them. Of course, privileged white people then use the alleged racism as a shield to hide their own hypocrisy behind and make blanket statements to the effect that there is some universal, writ-in-stone definition of what's offensive.
Now that the mob has doled out justice and protected all the Africans from a menace like Saccio, they go back to Whole Foods after their yoga classes and continue right on not giving a damn about how shitty things are in Africa.
If you find that tweet offensive, perhaps you should pause for a moment and consider that maybe, just maybe, it feels that way to you because you were the intended target.
Someone finally said it! I have often remarked that much of the so-called anti-racism is in fact designed to keep a lid on actual racism itself. People are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
It was offensive to you. It also wasn't offensive to some other people. Offensiveness isn't an objective property; the fact that something offended you doesn't make it "an offensive thing".
> And segregation wasn't offensive to most southern whites.
Does racial segregation offend you, then? If so what are you actually doing about it? Are you putting your kids in a diverse school? Are you encouraging them to date people from other races? Are you married to one currently? How much of your social circle, other than acquaintances, involve non-whites?
There is no way you are going to "fix" societal issues without demonstrating a resolution in your own life.
Everything is offensive to someone. In fact, the sentiment in these comments that a single bad joke on twitter should blow up publicly and cost someone their job I find disgusting. The trick is to not invoke mob justice every time you're offended by any little thing.
When I was on Wikipedia as an admin, someone modified their signature to point to a user who didn't exist. I was pretty pissed off about this, and so I went to the admins noticeboard I'd setup not really that long ago to ask someone to resolve the issue.
This is where I did something particularly dumb. I created the account to the non-existent user and posted a few comments on it - then quickly switched back to my Ta bu Shi da Yu account to say what I'd done and explain the impact it was likely to have.
It was a bad, bad judgement call. I got such a massive lynching that I seriously regretted what I'd done - but there was no way of undoing it. Eventually, I started getting depressed - I mean, my entire reputation was in tatters. None of the work I'd done - not the hours and hours of fighting trolls, extensive article writing, innovative strategies for dealing with referencing or organizing the admins via the board, nor the work on featured article candidates, peer review, articles for deletion, vandalism fighting, meeting up with Sydney people interested in Wikipedia, made any difference at all.
I left the project and asked to be desysopped. About a year or so later, I created an account Tbsdy lives and tried again. I managed to get my admin status re established (I readily admitted it was a bad judgement call), but still I was told I'd left "under a cloud", by none other than Brad Fitzpatrick - their legal counsel.
What's the moral of this? Online communities suck. If you make even one minor error in judgment, be prepared to be lynched. If you get depressed, just exit at this point and don't look back. It's not worth it. It doesn't matter how much time you put into a project - you're going to get judged, and you'll never make your way back.
If you don't think it can't happen, then ask Ben Noordrius how he felt when Bryan Cantrell called him an arsehole and said he should have been fired because he reverted a personal pronoun. That did the Node.js community a lot of good now, didn't it?
Not really understanding how the wikipedia community operates, why were you irritated by the signature and how was writing the comments such an irreconcilable wrong? Were they inappropriate comments?
The comments weren't awful. It was really a bad judgement call because it violated the principle "don't be disruptive to make a point", which I really didn't consider very clearly before doing it.
The reason I was annoyed about it was because signatures are the way you see who is saying something in a conversation thread. Back then you'd click on the person's username and get easy access to their pages, talk page, block links, contributions, etc. it also made it really hard to see what they had contributed. I was also concerned that someone would go what I in essence did - which was a really dumb move on my part, like I say.
Are 'admins' on wikipedia more like 'moderators' than actual admins? The word admin to me makes me think of someone who runs something and makes the rules, not always being held to them themselves.
Meta-Wikipedia is where the toxic parts are. Admins are an easy target and sometimes people get swept up in bashing. Read ANI today and you can see similar things occasionally.
It's been a long time since I participated. But admins, at the time, weren't meant to be anything more that editors with some special tools. Those tools require good judgement, unfortunately good judgement is not something any of exhibit 100% of the time, especially if you need to show it every day.
You'll have to forgive me, because even after you explained it, I still don't understand.
If someone has a link in their signature pointing to an unassigned user name, then grabbing that username could also be interpreted at plugging a security hole as a stop gap measure while the problem is being discussed.
I don't see how it's outrageous. I don't see how you overstepped your bounds.
I think the context is important (it's hard to dig up the edit history for so long ago). I actually was in the wrong about the way I went about things - it was being debated and I really did try to prove a point (though it never occurred to me that I was being disruptive).
The editor in question quite possibly had good intentions, or didn't see anything wrong with what they did. Whilst I was not a malicious actor, there was debate about the situation and I think people objected more to the way I went about proving the point I was making (which I maintain was valid). That's a fair cop, and I accept my action was rash.
I just want to say, I remember the account name "Ta bu shi da yu" from when I was active on Wikipedia (it's been about 10 years) and you seemed cool. I missed whatever drama this was, but my only association with that name is that it was someone who was active on Wikipedia and doing useful things.
Regarding Bryan Cantrill, never forget this post (a one-line reply at the bottom):
Which I link not to shame him for what he wrote as a recent college grad 20 years ago, but to say that everyone does dumb, borderline offensive things sometimes, and what matters is that you are not obstinate in your dumbness.
Maybe Bryan would have fired the person he was then; that's fine. We need both effective, meaningful punishment, and also effective rehabilitation. It should be possible to go from Bryan Cantrill in Sun to Bryan Cantrill in Joyent. It should be possible to go from Ben Noordhuis in Node to Ben Noordhuis in io, or Justine Sacco in IAC to Justine Sacco wherever she is now, or Sam Biddle to chastened empathetic Sam Biddle, or whatever.
He acknowledges that in the replies, but this particular "idiocy" is not one of tone, behavior, or offense. It is about bad technical policy in the pursuit of ego, which is something that Linus has done several times since.
(And he's a brilliant enough kernel hacker that he can work around his own bad policy and still come up with a system that works well, but that doesn't mean it's not bad technical policy. I feel bad begrudging him for making a worse product when it's so good due exactly to his skill, but still, the product could have been better if he avoided making these sorts of decisions.)
Anyway, I do kind of wish Bryan would issue a clearer apology for what he said 20 years ago. But I also kind of wish we lived in a world where he didn't have to, and it's obvious he's grown up in the last 20 years.
I see what you're saying and agree that's a rational reason for bringing up past events. But hear me out. My issue was that based on these three events it seems like he continues to like to raise his relative position by slamming other people. The means have changed, where before it was social status ("have you ever even kissed a girl?") to social justice "I would have fired BEN NOORDHUIS if he worked for me and did these despicable things").
I have noticed that a number of the most vocal social justice advocates have similar sort of behavior in their past. There is nothing wrong with advocating for social justice, but to me it's clear that as it has become a socially acceptable way to punish, it has attracted people in whom the desire to socially punish others is strong. Callout culture gives these people their "fix".
It's funny you should mention that, as that episode from nearly 20 years ago (!!) has come up much more in the last year than it did in the two decades prior. Of course, the reason is not an accident; it's a direct result of those who
vehemently disagree with my handling of the Noordhuis pronoun incident.
Anyway, your request is entirely fair, and let me be clear that I (obviously?) regret the have-you-ever-kissed-a-girl response (which was actually an obscure Saturday Night Live reference). I was young, and it was stupid -- and I regretted it shortly thereafter, for whatever it's worth. I have never actually met David in person, but if I did, the first thing I would do would be to look him in the eye and apologize.
That said, I do think that this is contrast to the Noordhuis incident. I know that this position is not popular here (and that I will be downvoted into oblivion), and that it's likely foolish to revisit this, but just to make clear my position: I am understanding (very understanding, given my own history) of gaffes made on the internet. The Noordhuis issue, however, was not a gaffe: it's not that he rejected the pull request (that's arguably a gaffe), it's that when he was overruled by Isaac some hours later, he unilaterally reverted Isaac's commit. (And, it must be said, sent a very nasty private note to make clear that this was no accident.) This transcended gaffe, and it became an issue of principle -- one that I feel strongly about. So what I wrote at the time was entirely honest, and it is something that I absolutely stand by -- more than ever, actually.
The inarguably contrast is this: I regretted the have-you-ever-kissed-a-girl response; I do not and will not regret my handling of the Noordhuis incident -- and any company that would not employ me over this is a company that I would not want to work for.
Whenever the Noordhuis incident comes up, I'm always quick to point out that `git push -f master`ing a non-fast-forward commit without prior warning is already halfway to a firing offense.
EDIT: No, wait, it was a revert commit, this just raises further questions.
Incidentally, I don't think you should have to apologize for what you said 20 years ago, because it was 20 years ago and that's ridiculous. But I do think you were an ass for escalating the Noordhuis incident the way you did, not because of your opinion on pronouns. And I voted you up because downvoting because of petty disagreement _is_ getting ridiculous around here.
Its fruitful to reflect on such past behavior both professional and personal. I have my share of regrets as well. None of us are without fault, just some of us have our mistakes more amplified than others. It important to learn from such things.
In interest of personal edification (since you seem to be open to feedback) the one criticism I have about the Noordhuis incident is that in my opinion if you felt as strongly as you did about publicly chastising Noordhuis it should have been done from your personal blog and not from the Joyent blog. I feel this was slight abuse of power and influence of the Joyent brand, specifically because you mention the intent on terminating his employment if it was within your power. I don't think that belongs there as permanent public record. That said, I think your desire was to make it clear to the community that gender biases were not going to be tolerated and to me that intent (for the most part) came through.
I do think its plausible that Noordhuis wasn't quite represented properly and that he had strong opinions about process and how commits are merged but those strong opinions were interpreted as an intent to have gender bias. But I don't have enough information to know for sure, that's just how it looks to me.
In the end regret is an entirely personal thing and we all get to decide what kind of person we are going to be. I would also like to suggest that regret isn't black and white there are always ways we can conduct or communicate more effectively and perhaps this could be a take away for you. Could there have been a way to achieve your goals equally/more effectively with less of a direct expense to Ben??
As someone who has worked directly under (and along side) you I have a deep respect for the way you conduct yourself professionally. I see you as someone with integrity, which is probably why you feel comfortable bringing up incidences you have been criticized for (this something far too rare). I offer my perspective as a friend so take it for what its worth to you.
So here's the thing I've always been a little fuzzy on. bnoodhuis' reversion said (to isaacs) "All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert."
The reaction would seem to indicate that this is like telling Linus Torvalds he needs approval to land patches in Linux. Was there anything codified anywhere explaining that this was the case? Did that rule only apply for code and not docs changes? Was the sign-off rule not actually written down anywhere?
I appreciate (as always) your thoughtful candor. And I (certainly) appreciate your kind words with respect to my personal integrity; the sentiment is very much mutual!
In this case, we may have to agree to disagree: I felt (and feel) that a message from Joyent -- not a message from me -- was called for: members of the node.js community were calling Joyent to task for Ben's behavior, and I (we) felt that it was Joyent that needed to respond. That said, I appreciate your willingness to speak your mind and to earnestly engage on this issue!
Haha, hi, thanks for showing up on the thread. Not that I have any real justification in having opinions on something you said to someone else while I was in third grade (... although I think I was using Solaris then), but as a random member of the open-source community, I do appreciate you saying this clearly. :)
I did see it brought up first by some obvious single-purpose-troll account on Twitter in the midst of the pronoun incident. And just to make sure I'm being totally clear, I'm not bringing it up because I want to dog you with it, but because I think it's a great example of how everyone's fallible, even the people that I most look up to for how they push a community to be better. The standard isn't perfection and it's not about individuals per se; it's about improvement, as a community. We ought to criticize so we can build a better community, not so that we can knock each other down at the first mistake.
I was actually glad you brought it up. When I saw the New York Times story, I naturally thought back to my own episode(s) -- and it's been on my mind anyway because it came up on HN as recently as yesterday.[1]
Part of the peril of social media is that everyone becomes a public figure -- whether they want to be one or not. Those who are more traditional public figures (e.g., politicians, actors, athletes, business leaders) often have the personality attributes that make it easier to deal with scathing public criticism (though I don't think anyone particularly likes being excoriated) -- but most normal people actually don't. As a culture, I hope that we will be both more tolerant of mistakes made on social media -- but also more aware that (at some level) we all need to act as public figures when in public. Certainly, it's a thorny, complicated issue -- and one that is decidedly (if not canonically) modern.
"On the one hand, it seems ridiculous (absurd, perhaps) to fire someone over a pronoun -- but to characterize it that way would be a gross oversimplification: it's not the use of the gendered pronoun that's at issue (that's just sloppy), but rather the insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered."
The biggest issue is the way that you handled this. You did this appallingly. You still seem to be puzzled why people still bring this up.
In a community project, people often do things you aren't going to like. Ben rejected a push, and he steadfastly maintains that he did this for good reasons:
Now instead of communicating with Ben, giving him the benefit of the doubt as a non-native speaker of English and calling him out publicly in the way you did was an absolute classic case of what you do NOT do.
In a community run project, the dynamics are different to being in a corporation. The first rule is: you are dealing with a lot of people, from a lot of different backgrounds. There is lots of room for misunderstanding. The absolute golden rule around dealing with a popular project is to try to wrangle this appropriately and with as little heat as possible.
So let's review what you did:
1. You posted one of the most inflammatory, aggressive posts I've seen in a very long time. You took no time to talk to Ben about his position and to talk him around to making an apology and reversing his decision.
2. You compete with StrongLoop. You basically told your competitor that they should fire one of their best developers to the project. Your company may have been a main initiator of Node.js and you see it as largely the steward for the project, but your own employee reversed the decision of a major contributor.
And this is where you really stuffed up. For some time there had been rumblings about how Joyent was biased about the way they accepted commits and directed the project - rightly or wrongly. There was a perception of bias towards Joyent's interests. That's not necessarily a correct viewpoint. But you started a chain of events you now can't control.
Joyent has finally setup a Foundation, but has now got a fork competing with the core project. StrongLoop is one of the groups backing io.js. A large number of your core developers are publicly backing io.js.
3. Community leaders, like yourself, aren't meant to send abusive messages over blogs. You called him an arsehole. You called for his sacking.
Let's underscore how tone-deaf you have been, and completely clueless over how to run an open source project:
"While we would fire Ben over this, node.js is an open source project and one doesn't necessarily have the same levers. Indeed, one of the challenges of an open source project that depends on volunteer effort is dealing with assholes"
You don't realise how much damage you did. I agree with gender neutral language in technical writing. Many others do as well. If you had dealt with this differently and not decided to become a self-aggrandizing pundit, then you would have probably shown that Joyent can deal with controversial matters maturely and civilly, play nicely with others, resolve conflict, and you'd have the high moral ground.
Now you just look like a bully, and I'd say you were the catalyst for the io.js fork. You also opened yourself up to your own past, which you also regret.
As I say - you've basically given us all a text-book case study into how not to manage an open source project.
I don't care how much anyone dislikes Cantrill, but standing up for Ben about this is a mark of shame.
> You took no time to talk to Ben about his position and to talk him around to making an apology and reversing his decision.
Whereas just above:
> it's that when he was overruled by Isaac some hours later, he unilaterally reverted Isaac's commit. (And, it must be said, sent a very nasty private note to make clear that this was no accident.)
I don't know why you thought you were privy to all the communication that went on in this situation, but that sentence ought to indicate to you that you are not, in fact, omniscient.
The fact that Ben remains absolutely unrepentant on this issue, and sees "I was following the project's rules to the letter on an issue which I myself dismissed as trivial" as a valid excuse should be to his lasting shame, and you should be ashamed of perpetuating it.
You're right - I didn't see the private correspondence - Bryan certainly never mentioned it before now.
I certainly don't feel ashamed about calling out the bullying behaviour of Joyent. It's never ok to call someone an arsehole on a company blog about a competitor's employee, let alone call on his sacking. And who knows what the content of that nasty note was - perhaps he called Bryan an arsehole, perhaps he said that he thought that the change was rubbish, maybe he was passed off that the change wasn't discussed, maybe he thought that it was gasp a beat up, or maybe he swore at Cantrell for being a jerk?
Whatever it was, it's irrelevant. It's not the approach an open source leader should take, it certainly didn't concubine anyone about gender neutral language, it was hostile, ungracious, gave Ben Noordius no way of graciously apologising (had he wanted to) and it led to unnecessary schisms in the project.
All up, Bryan looks like a bully, Joyent look pompous and overbearing, the reasonable debate about gender equality is obscured by the abusive language and tone of the post, Ben Noordius appears to have been wronged, and a nuanced debate about gender neutral language is rather appallingly sidetracked by a man who uses dominant and crude language to ram his pint across - most likely due to political and personal reasons.
I can see an organization having an internal gendered pronoun elimination policy --who cares. But I think one should allow anyone writing any contribution to use whatever pronoun gender they prefer. Encourage women to use feminine grammatical gender and men to use either grammatical gender pronoun.
Leave it up to the writer to decide.
For what it's worth, I prefer the neutral 'they' but I also don't get caught up in grammatical genders. Imagine if English had retained grammatical genders for regular nouns --as german and spanish do. What, so we rewrite the language and change grammatical gender because it gets conflated with biological gender?
Also, when I read text and it has the grammatical gender opposite mine, I don't feel disenfranchised by the text. It's not something I keep conscious of. I'm not pronoun hunting, and I think few people do that. Reading would become incomprehensibly distracting.
It's the same as when you see the pronoun 'you' Do you automatically believe it refers to you personally? I know I don't. Same with he, she, they, they're all a third person abstraction.
You are not your mistakes, and there is a natural human margin of error. Mistakes make us human and it's what every single one of us has in common.
You seem to be a super bright guy who experienced a momentary lapse in judgement fuelled by emotion. We all do this, it's just not always public.
Also- I don't know how old you were at the time this story occurred but according to neuroscience, the frontal lobe doesn't develop until we are 25-27 years old (males develop later than females) and this is exactly the type of mistake the frontal lobe prevents us from making.
I hope you've recovered from this incident and have learned to not take these mistakes too personally...
I've been pretty open in that situations probably get exacerbated for me because I have a mental illness - anxiety, depression and adult ADD (I refuse to call it ADHD, I'm not hyperactive!). I manage these better now, but it still leaks into my life. I'm extremely lucky I have a supportive wife and two small children who keep my mind off things and let me focus on what's important :-)
>Adults with ADHD are often perceived by others as chaotic and disorganized, with a tendency to need high stimulation to be less distracted and function effectively. Additionally, many adults suffer from associated or "co-morbid" psychiatric conditions such as depression or anxiety.[13]
>Symptoms of ADHD can vary widely between individuals and throughout the lifetime of an individual. As the neurobiology of ADHD is becoming increasingly understood, it is becoming evident that difficulties exhibited by individuals with ADHD are due to problems with the parts of the brain responsible for executive functions (see below: Pathophysiology). These result in problems with sustaining attention, planning, organizing, prioritizing, and impulsive thinking/decision making.
Hope I'm being useful -- a close family member was in the same boat. I was able to help, because it was me who randomly saw someone talking about this on an HN comment and I dived further into the world of ADHD and found out that it may not be 'classical' depression, but depression caused by something else. Since then, there's been complete emotional stability, rational decision making and depression is controlled completely.
Lastly, Chris... what you did I think was not a bad judgement call at all. In my mind you were making something right, and fixing a wrong because that was the only tool available to you. Debating something just takes forever and some things need to be fixed there and then. What happened to you, is simply disgusting. I am sorry for that, and I hope you can look back on it as a good memory and not a bad memory (which is tough).
I ran a massive community as the real admin, but the same sort of thing happened to me as well. Been years since I left but it's still sore to think about.
595 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] thread"Don't use Twitter."
And on the smaller side is "Don't upload shit to social media."
I'm sorry, but none of us are capable of judging the entirety of a human being as "bad" or not, based on a few of their tweets.
Cast the first stone, and all of that.
... I'm sorry, I thought we were using the English language here and that we had a seven-letter Latin-derived word that we generally used to describe the situation of "[person] getting what [he/she] deserved". Perhaps I erred. Entschuldigung; tut mir leid.
But regardless, even accepting the (modestly tendentious) assertion that this is about a Bad Human Being, angry mobs following the Outrage Of The Moment and out for blood are hideous and disgusting phenomena themselves at the best of times. The modern justice system was largely invented to counter these barbarous shortcomings, which is why we have nice things like presumption of innocence, rights of the accused, impartial trials, the notion of the finitude of one's debt to society, et cetera.
- Are judgmental or annoying.
- Feel the need to interject their unsolicited opinion.
- Are not me.
Will be categorized as "bad" people. Bad people should have their livelihoods taken away from them and be subject to public shaming.
Please report to HR.
Sorry, can't see any logic in your statement there.
Moreover, lynch mob can hit someone wasn't bad at all. Someone just mishears or misunderstands, is mightily offended and the twitter storm starts. Like that guy who joked about dongles. It is not inconceivable that someone might make a half-tone joke that is completely harmless, and someone mishears and thinks it was racist or sexist.
There is no way to defend against that. "I didn't say that (in that context)" is not going to work.
Secondly, do you not see how your position is a rather extreme one, that other, more moderate people might not endorse? Racism is bad, but saying racists aren't people and deserve any kind of mob justice against them is also bad.
I'm not sure you know what that word means. Telling an off-color joke that simply referenced race is not necessarily being racist, any more than telling "your mom" or "that's what she said" jokes makes someone sexist.
Racist:
NOUN
And please don't say this is totally different because racism. It was an isolated twitter joke to 140 followers. Tweets don't move the world - but floods of them can certainly ruin individual lives.
I'm sure the systemic issue with blacks in America is largely caused by immature comments on Twitter. I'm so glad the lynch mob was able to right this wrong, its almost like I'm living in a post-racial America!
When you make assumptions about someone based on 1 line, then you may or may not be a bad human being ;)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Bartman_incident
The play Bartman disrupted didn't advance any runners. It was a foul ball. Cubs were up 3-0, with one out. Had Moises Alou caught the ball, there would have been two outs. The Marlins proceeded to score 4 runs before the second out occurred, and another 4 before the third.
Bartman didn't throw a wild pitch, or commit a fielding error, or give up 5 hits and eight runs. The Cubs did.
http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/users/brooks/public_html/feda/datas...
"The loose ball was snatched up by a Chicago lawyer and sold at an auction in December 2003. Grant DePorter purchased it for $113,824.16 on behalf of Harry Caray's Restaurant Group. On February 26, 2004, it was publicly detonated by special effects expert Michael Lantieri.
In 2005, the remains of the ball were used by the restaurant in a pasta sauce."
(That's my impression anyway; I don't have statistics)
She made two racist comments in 1 tweet on her own will. That is not something that should be taken lightly, no matter what the platform.
EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm not commenting on whether firing her was fair or not, but rather how her completely intentional tweets makes Twitter the bad guy.
And if you understand the tweet, you'd understand the she was making fun of ditzy white girls who naively assume that white people can't get AIDS. It's a caricature of racism, not racism itself.
Personally, I disagree on both counts. I like offensive jokes of all kinds (I mean, if they're actually funny). Coming from a very homogeneous Central European country, I have never been on either side of oppression (other than being bullied in school for being weak, small, smart geek), so I definitely don't have your experience of being "hurt" by jokes, but your experience doesn't translate into a universally-applicable moral/rational argument that racist jokes are bad. However, even if I agreed with you and would personally dislike racist jokes, I would still strongly oppose restrictions or censorship on racist/offensive jokes, to avoid situations like the recent Charlie Hebdo attack.
...unless you standard for "affect" covers all communication. In which case, you're saying "People should pay for the sin of expressing an opinion or making a joke".
...and perhaps you are.
Have you ever been the victim or racism? If not, let's say you're in an open group, you're of a certain nationality (let's call it X), and some other member of that group starts making racist or xenophobic jokes about your race/nationality.
By mistake my skin is white (so I've never been the victim of racist jokes/looks, even though my brother, whose skin is browner, has been a victim of said racist jokes), but being from a not-so-important-East-European country I've been the victim of xenophobic remarks/jokes coming from people "with the best intentions". They always, I mean always, hurt. It also hurts me why I have to explain on HN why racist jokes hurt people. I've been in this community for lots of years and never thought I'd see this day.
Are you serious?
That white people couldn't be victims of racism? That only white people can be racist? You've never met even just funny looks? Then you haven't been out to the world too much.
I'm a big, white European, and when I was in China, I could hear myself being referred to as "laowai" "or dabizi". I could have gotten mad, because yes indeed by nose is big by Chinese standards and this is a reference to my racial features, but I chose to carry on. The people mostly meant nothing bad. Even the ones that actually maybe thought bad of me - possibly associating me with Western colonialism, of which I or my country were quite innocent - did nothing bad to me, so I let it be.
When our family went to the zoo, we were looking at the pandas, and a hundred people were looking at us (Look! Three white kids!). Very slow looks. It may be a bit awkward, but needs to be tolerated. I was just as much in awe when I saw the first black person in my life.
But perhaps I can do this because there was nothing I could gain by acquiring a victim identity. I'll leave getting mad to a time when someone actually tries to insult me.
Edit: Maybe I'm not being clear. What I mean is can you point to any harm done by her tweet besides hurt feelings?
And in any case, no crime deserves the horrific public shaming she got.
Am I the only one that "got" what she was saying?
Supporting an environment where it's acceptable to respond to some perceived slight (which changes over time) with an crazy overreacting mob isn't OK in an open society ever. You're very sensitive to racist statements... how do you feel 10 years from when the "offensive statement of the day" is an anti-war statement? Or a statement offensive to a particular religious doctrine?
History is littered with people who do awful things while believing that they are righteous. Nobody in colonial Massachusetts was pro-witch. Nobody in 1950 America was pro-communist.
Mob justice mentality certainly sucks though, imagine someone simply inspects one of your tweets, rewrites it and posts it somewhere and says "hey this person's racist, call their employer #{employer-number}".
Gotta thicken up that skin, friend.
Come on.
Was it a somewhat insensitive joke? Sure. But you can't take the statement at face value.
If an accountant got caught stealing in her off hours should she expect to find herself still employed?
Pssst...Africa is a continent, not a nation.
"Stop the planet. I want to get off."
That sort of absolutism of policing thought just doesn't end well, ever.
To translate it away from Twitter: imagine you're at a public space, such as a mall, and you happen to be walking by a table of people leaning together just as one makes a racist joke.
Is your response a) give them a sort of disgusted look and go on about your day or b) call everyone you know and repeat the joke to them, along with the location of the table in hopes you can whip up a mob of people to shout obscenities at them, continuing to follow them around for the day, and eventually form a mob outside of their office building, continuing to shout at them until their employer fires them?
Most of us would go with 'a' and not 'b', because we realize that what happened doesn't really fit the extreme response. It's interesting to me that people feel that more extreme response is okay, as long as they don't feel personally too involved with it (eg, they can shout remotely).
> but may be overheard accidentally by others
There is nothing accidental about tweeting in public. If she wanted to limit the exposure, she could have used the "protected tweets" feature.
It's a sad state of affairs if our only option for having semi-open communications on the internet - things that friends of friends can see without having to sign up to a walled garden - is if we only say things that are acceptable to everyone possible, for fear of mobs semi-randomly forming, or worse, forming at the behest of a for-profit company driving the mob in a frenzy to get ad revenue (which is the case for times companies like Gawker have stirred the mob up).
If only she wasn't wearing /that dress/ in public...
Rather, imagine her shouting it out at a mall on a day when the mall is relatively empty. (So that she had reason to believe the audience tiny, but still broadcast it) Unfortunately for analogy-world Justine, a news crew was downstairs shooting B roll for background and she's there clearly visible and audible in the corner of the screen, and the clip got leaked. That's the analogous real-life situation.
But, don't you think it's interesting that out of all the countless racist and sexist comments on twitter, that those who are chosen for pillory fit an obvious demographic pattern.
The danger comes when you misunderstand your core audience, or alienate them. If you go off brand at the same time as you write something dangerous, you risk offending your own audience. That can be deadly.
People's names become toxic. Note that the Donglegate guy wouldn't let his name be used, and another woman in the article wouldn't do a followup interview.
"In The Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of niggers. It's his own fault for dressing like a whore though."
"aw, you can't feed your family on minimum wage? well who told you to start a fucking family when your skills are only worth minimum wage?"
"Who has more dedication, ambition, and drive? Kobe only raped one girl, Lebron raped an entire city. +1 for Lebron."
And arguably the worst, for a freaking CTO:
"Tech managers spend as much time worrying about how to hire talented female developers as they do worrying about how to hire a unicorn."
Would you hire that guy to represent your company?
The second is a pretty standard libertarian talking-point (which is more "personal responsibility rah rah rah" than "yay, starving poor people!"). The third I don't really get (but I don't really follow basketball), and the fourth I suspect you're misinterpreting as "Tech managers don't want to hire women", when I think it's more "Tech managers don't care about the gender of their developers"; the truth of the statement is debatable, but I do think it takes some willful effort to read that and be offended by it.
I think Dickinson made unwise choices in how he chose to tweet, but I also think the backlash he's suffered has been orders of magnitude worse than the offense. He has been made persona non grata to the point of being unemployable over a handful of ill-considered tweets - he's unemployable now because of the extent to which people have gone to associate him and anyone associated with him with racism, rape, and sexism - regardless of the reality of his actions.
On one hand, he's suffering the consequences of his decisions (see tweet #2 for some schadenfreude). On the other, because the internet loves a shitstorm, it seems that the magnitude of the consequences are way out of line with the original offense.
You're giving that the most contorted, charitable reading possible. In your reading, the reference to a "unicorn" is nonsensical. I would argue the accurate reading is: "Tech managers don't spend time worrying about hiring talented women because [like unicorns] they are mythical and don't exist."
Now, the further implications behind that statement might be:
a) Talented female developers are rare--we need to make serious efforts to improve the educational pipeline and get more young girls interested in programming.
b) Talented female developers are rare, but it's not the tech industry's job to worry or care about that.
c) Talented female developers aren't rare, but [usually male] hiring managers are too blinded by sexism to recognize them.
> regardless of the reality of his actions.
That's the thing. We don't know the reality of his actions. Based only on his tweets (I don't know him personally), he certainly sounds like he might be the kind of guy who would discriminate in his hiring. He might not even do it consciously, he'd just think "Well, I only hire the best" and in his mind, "the best" does not include women.
You're exemplifying the worst of the Twitter lynchmob problem here; you took a tweet, extrapolated it into a full sum of a person, and then don't bother to establish any further context and have decided that the author is a racist, sexist psychopath based on a context-free reading of a one-sentence statement. That's great for feeling superior to people, but it's pretty awful for useful dialog.
I mean, obviously he's going to say that. I'm not sure how much stock you want to put into after-the-fact PR damage control. I think actions speak louder than words, and I'd reserve judgment before hearing from some of the women developers who he's hired (he has hired women, right?) about how he was to work under, what he was like as a boss (not as a co-founder).
You accuse me of "exemplifying the worst of the Twitter lynchmob problem" but I'm trying hard to be as neutral and generous as possible. I listed three possible implications of that tweet, only one of which is explicitly negative, and you claim I've "decided that the author is a racist, sexist psychopath". If anyone is guilty of twitter-like hyperbole in this conversation, it's you.
http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/11/ladyboss/
http://www.amyvernon.net/glimpse/why-ive-joined-glimpse-labs...
If you didn't think that Dickinson was being a racist, misogynistic, victim-blaming rape apologist, why those tweets in particular? This whole discussion is happening in the implict context of the Valleywag article that touched this whole thing off, where those explicit accusations were made with those tweets as evidence - we aren't discussing this issue in a vacuum here. They're certainly in bad taste, but bad taste doesn't deserve the accusations that he's had thrown at him. You listed multiple implications of the tweet, but then called it "the worst" of a lot that include jokes with racial slurs about rape of a venerated religious figure, so it's pretty safe to infer that you aren't giving it any of the charitable readings; if you were, it wouldn't be anything worth mentioning!
My point in all of this, relevant to the original article, is that these sorts of accusations can have a profound and disproportionate impact on those affected, even if the truth is something else entirely. I think it's unfortunate that Dickinson was fired from BI because they couldn't afford to have the accusations against him associated with their brand (and note that it was the baggage that was the issue, not him actually being a misogynist to his employees or whatnot), but I don't think it's an unreasonable response - he made a bad choice in what he said, and he suffered the consequences of it. I do think it's unreasonable that he remains effectively unemployable because of the bogeyman that has been constructed around his name in which those tweets are trotted out with accusations of racism and sexism every time someone mentions him.
Because those are the tweets that got him fired. Obviously!
Fine, let's say Pax Dickinson is a completely wonderful guy without a bigoted bone in his body.
He still showed monumentally bad judgment. I don't buy your premise that losing your C-level position (and being unable to find another one) after carrying on for years the way he did is such a "profound and disproportionate impact". He demonstrated repeatedly that he's not willing to comport himself in a professional way in public. I also dispute that he is "effectively unemployable". He can certainly go get a job at McDonalds, because he's demonstrated that he's unqualified to be a corporate executive.
Edit: After reading the links you sent, it seems like the women he's worked with don't have a problem with him. So maybe he's not an asshole, he just plays one on twitter.
Still, you've really shot your own argument in the foot here:
> Shevinsky told me just the other day that she was still a bit uncertain about Dickinson after returning to Glimpse. “I was hoping he wouldn’t blow his second chance, because a third chance would be a challenge.” Now he’s co-founder of a company with a strong female CEO and a strong female advisor
Tell me again about how he's "effectively unemployable" and has disproportionately had his career destroyed forever?
Regarding employability, you'll note that article is from Dec 2013. He's now gone from Glimpse.
> I also knew that I was holding Elissa back. I know my baggage was hurting the company. We were asked to insert clauses that would strip my equity if I “embarrassed” the company and it’s reasonable to assume that my presence as co-founder made other VCs shy away from us, which is heartbreaking to me because Elissa is fucking amazing and deserves better than that.
He further writes:
> My career has been irretrievably damaged. I’ll always have trouble finding a job. It used to be easy for me but even a year later I find that recruiters shy away and applications to jobs I’m well qualified for don’t result in a call back. I’m not worried, I know that with enough time I’ll find someone who doesn’t mind my notoriety given my skills, but I’ll always pay a very real price for this whole incident.
If he says it's still following him around, I'm inclined to believe him, because...well, he'd be the one to know.
I don't think he is, but given you only have 140 characters on twitter, everyone should give "the the most contorted, charitable reading possible" unless you follow up with the person and get a clarification of their tweet. Hell, given autocorrect, you should do that even if you think it is plain.
For what it's worth, some VCs did want to fund Glimpse. We didn't follow up on that while Pax was on board, for various reasons. A significant A raise would likely have helped Pax rebrand positively in a mainstream way.
Pax is now publicly pro-gamer gate (as you can see on his Twitter feed and with his most recent startup ExposeCorrupt.) I understand why that would have an impact on marketability.
As much as we talk about diversity in technology, there are some ideas and some kind of people that are simply not welcome. I worry about this a bit because I think it hurts a lot of people, not just neo-reactionaries.
I believe that ostracizing people - without the possibility of giving them second chances - is ultimately bad for everyone. It takes folks who have messed up and disenfranchises them so that they no longer have a stake in their reputation and participation in the community.
Did you read the article? By thinking for a few seconds, the point of the tweet is obviously not racist. Not a smart tweet, in retrospect, but. Here's her explanation from the article:
> I thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was literal. (...) Living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the third world. I was making fun of that bubble.
Honestly, does it even matter? Say it was a racist tweet, and she was a racist. Does that mean she deserved what happened to her? Definitely not.
Definitely. But my point was, whether it was racist or not, her life pivoted for the worse—and whether it was racist or not, she didn't deserve what happened to her.
We could argue that people shouldn't make posts like these, but in doing so, we ignore our own humanity. We're not robots. Humor is an essential cognitive mechanism for building neural structures so that we can understand the world around us. It helps us to recognize and make sense of subjects that otherwise would be too emotionally difficult to face head-on. This is part of the reason I think that faux news shows like the Colbert Report have been so successful. By denying this sort of expression, we are essentially denying an important cognitive tool for understanding.
To paraphrase the famous comic from the New Yorker, "On the Internet, no one knows that you have nuance"
Maybe it's a situation where working on the 8th floor makes most people more likely to take an elevator than if you worked on the 2nd floor, but if you do keep taking the stairs you quickly become very good at it.
I think it's much more likely that people revel in seeing someone go down; the article clearly alluded to this sadistic aspect I think. As soon as there is enough critical mass for a public shaming, people will jump on the bandwagon.
What needs to change is that this kind of public shaming on the internet should be looked down upon in the future, just at is now in real life. The first step is for employers not to be so spineless to immediately fire an employee that is talked about.
This is possible. But I think it's less about this and more about status marking. Joining the pile on is often a quick, cheap way to demonstrate that you care about the right things.
From my self-confessed but unavoidable smug vantage point of white privilege I wonder if being offended is something that needs to be disregarded. I'm trying to remember how it felt to be 'offended' myself and whether anyone other than me should have cared. Is it actually a form of power when one can choose to be offended and know that you can affect the actions of others by doing so?
Genuinely hurting people (emotionally) on the other hand is something different and I'd need to think a lot more deeply about that.
PR is an interesting job function in that if they do their job correctly, you forget that they exist. It's much like security in that regard. If you have a bad PR department, you'll know, because you'll be constantly under-siege in the media. (Uber comes to mind.)
Personally, this just shows that maybe people shouldn't be broadcasting their every thought out to the entire world. If you're not comfortable with it being on the front page of the New York Times, don't tweet it.
Is being cynical and self-deprecating really such an unacceptable packaging of the message that someone should be fired over it?
Here's Louis CK doing a bit about being so disgusted by a gay guy rollerblading that proclaims "go skate into an AIDS tree, you motherfucker."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q--gp6YpOpQ
There's an easy solution to this (if one isn't an idiot). If there's a reasonable explanation that doesn't imply bad intentions, just err on the side of that one. The "principle of charity" honestly has pretty much no downside, and pretty huge upside. One of the real shocks I got coming into adulthood was finding out that more people don't act this way. Somewhat tangentially, it also removes a lot of stress from your life: when a service worker fucks up badly, people I'm with are often pretty pissed at them (whether or not they express that directly) while my reaction is "eh shit happens, people make mistakes, why get worked up".
- She was jobless for a period of time, and there's a lot of stress that comes with that.
- Her family seemed to be set on disowning her for tarnishing their name.
- She can't date without someone Googling her and most likely being turned off by what they find.
As long as she is above the hot/crazy line, she won't be turned down dating for such a petty "offence"
Anyone for whom something even remotely resembling this can be said certainly has had a thick mat of privilege to land on, even if the experience were difficult, as it seems to have been.
The biggest challenge we faced was that google dramatically changes your search results based on who you are, and where you are.
My point is - Justine Sacco isn't even on the first page of Justines for me. Maybe google just thinks Sacco is the best Justine for you, but it's probably not as bad as a "global uri".
1: http://moz.com/blog/face-off-4-ways-to-de-personalize-google
I think you and I have very different definitions of what "fine" means.
I have a twitter accout that I set up through TOR and a VPN. I use a username I have never used elsewhere. I dont post anything controversial but I would be pretty happy that I could not be traced without someone obtaining a court order requiring twitter to hand over my IP address, even then it would point to a VPN that (supposedly) does not keep logs.
Yes all the tweets quoted in the article were obnoxious and leveraged stereotypes but I don't think people should be flogged for being like that.
I remember all the obnoxious Polish jokes growing up. They were terrible. But I don't agree that they should be censored. Demanding this mind of self censorship is a sign that a society is fragile rather than robust. A robust society can take the jokes.
It's like with friendships. With good friends you can nettle them; say terrible things and we know that's it's all in good fun, a ritual of sorts. With so so friends you don't make bad jokes because the friendship is too fragile. It's a sign of an immature or fragile society when bad jokes upset the cart.
Edit. An irony is that many of the people calling offense don't realize their own transgression in becoming part of a self-righteous mob meting out punishment at the speed of thought.
That's so. But if society frequently inflicts severe extralegal punishment for unpopular speech, then you don't really have free speech. You just have First Amendment rights. They aren't the same thing.
As a thought experiment, imagine Person X said something deemed offensive and society responded in a uniform manner - by constant public humiliation, refusing to do business with them, refusing to even speak to them, etc. All this is well within our legal rights (with maybe some exceptions) but life for such a person would be very difficult, if not impossible - they'd probably end up starving in the streets. That's not a very free society even if there are no legal consequences whatsoever for any speech.
I think it's very important to affirm that even if someone says something offensive that the response should be measured.
The idea behind human rights is that they're not government granted, but instead are innate to humans are humans.
The issue is more complicated than "let everyone say what they want to say", but it's also more complicated than "you have a legal right, but nothing beyond that"
I will note that until relatively recently, those who we consider "conservatives" today did exactly that towards "progressives". You try and dare being publicly against segregation and the mistreatment of black people in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s - Juliette Morgan did, and promptly got fired and ostracised. I'm sure you can find similar examples for supporters of gay rights, right up to today.
It's not exactly a new, nor a partisan thing.
And we agree that's bad, right? I thought we had all agreed that was bad. 'Cause it really seems like here you're advocating "well they did it to us, so it's okay if we do it to them."
Sometimes. It's less clear-cut in some cases - specifically, when a statement or action is more directly against some group's human rights, or otherwise directly dehumanises people. However, what I'm suggesting that it's not going to stop - all sides are going to keep doing it, and always have done.
It used to be that if you learned that something was OK, it'd be OK for the rest of your life (more-or-less, ignoring major political events). Now, that's not so much the case as the progressives have more power and visibility, and so it's more visible when someone says something that might've been accepted 10 years ago and isn't now, vs someone saying something that is generally not accepted now but might be in 10 years.
The progressive movement has a horrific history, and I find it puzzling as to why someone would self identify with a movement so steeped in racism and eugenics.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism_in_the_United_Sta...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_Coolidge
It wasn't exactly conservatism which brought us back to the point we're at now from there, was it? It seems as if it were a different movement entirely from the late 1800s progressives and the conservative movement.
Angry mobs petitioning people to be fired from their jobs for bad jokes or unfavorable political donations don't violate the First Amendment, but they certainly discourage speaking freely.
Read the article again... some of the lynch mobs weren't even factually correct about what they mobilized for. The attempt to implicitly pull in the "well, they sorta deserved it defense" fails on the grounds that you're leaving the determination of who deserved it up to a mob.
Hi, I'm one of your friendly neighborhood HN libertarians, and everyone take note, I'm about to defend government here. If someone does something seriously deserving of that level of opprobrium, firings, and social tarring-and-feathering, they deserve the protections that government processes can bring to bear to try to do our best to make sure that we only fire the big guns at people who, to the best of our knowledge, have been determined to deserve it by processes with a longstanding historical pedigree and centuries of back-and-forth tuning. There's a reason we have trials and such, a deep and important one.
Do not be so hurried to give up that social standard because, let's not mince words here, you're playacting at being offended because that's what your social group expects. Let's not pretend that anybody was actually offended at the statement of someone with 170 twitter followers, and if anybody really, truly was somehow "offended" it was only after the actions of the lynch mob itself! They're the ones who actually spread it around... maybe they're the ones we should lynch. Without trial, of course.
The only thing preventing the lynch mob from doing what things the physical lynch mobs used to do is simple, sheer lack of physical proximity, so A: I consider it a valid use of the term and B: It should not be viewed by any sane person as a normal and healthy social correction mechanism, it should be condemned by all. It is still dangerous, and if everyone acts like it's no big deal or even a good idea, it will get worse, until the lynch mobs do do what lynch mobs used to do.
And I mean that 100% fully literally, with absolutely no exaggeration whatsoever. In the real world, the line between "dozens of death threats", which we've already handily reached, and "an actual attempt on your life" is very thin. As easy as it may be to tell others not to worry, if you personally were betting your life on that line, you would not be happy; it is not to be relied upon. There are crazy people out there. Failure to take that into account while passively accepting that online lynch mobs are OK is just stupid.
This stuff isn't a joke. It's one of the foundational bricks between having a civilization and not having one. It is unwise to be so lackadaisical about it, if you like living in a civilization.
They were able to get Sacco fired. They were able to mobilize someone to take her picture right after her plane landed. And she had to leave Cape Town because "no one could guarantee her safety". So, it could have easily escalated into a real lynch mob.
How about people getting "swatted" by internet vigilantes?
So the "not dying" part is about the only significant difference I can see in some of these more extreme cases, and, God help me, I wouldn't be overly shocked if someone actually does end up dead from an "internet shaming" some day.
(posting from a throwaway because I resolved to stop commenting here, but couldn't help myself here)
If you published something similarly obnoxious in a newspaper before the Internet, I'm sure you'd get a similarly angry response from some people, and quite possibly have someone harass you in person if they knew where to find you.
If you stood on top of a soap box and shouted offensive crap at the public, you might have stuff thrown at you.
The only things that have changed - it's easier to publish things online, you're publishing for a global audience rather than a national or a local one, it's easier to find other people who find those publications obnoxious online, and it's a two-way medium rather than the traditional one-way medium of newspapers.
Basically, the masses finally have a voice. If that's a problem, perhaps free speech has never actually had a chance of working?
They do. Constantly. It's just that most of the time, they're talking about <such-and-such a site's community> or <such-and-such a blog> rather than individual people.
Perhaps the so called right to be forgotten deserves serious consideration at least for some kinds of instances. Say, you can have indiscretion purged but not info on a felony.
On the other hand... In addition to searching foe people who get called out for offensive behavior also search for those who engage in mob mentality and hold them accountable when they try to find a job.
Not only is it easier to publish things, it is also easier to attack people. The only thing needed to begin a shaming, is a large list of followers and the ability to tell a narrative.
It's not good, however, that these two got singled out when I have no doubt that there was much worse said at that conference alone.
Anyway, the point of my post was the last line - if free speech doesn't work when the masses have a voice, has it ever actually been a good ideal to work towards?
Sure, but you don't magically make society robust by telling racist jokes. The healthy society comes first; the fact that these jokes no longer sting is just a pleasant side effect.
Ken White has quite a few posts about freedom of speech vs the Internet. I think this quote is apropos to that type of comment.
Speech Is Not Censorship: Put another way, as we often say here, speech is not tyranny. Freedom of speech does not (and cannot, under any coherent legal or philosophical approach) involve freedom from criticism. Free speech does not mean "I have a right to say whatever I want without social consequences." [0]
[0] - https://www.popehat.com/2012/10/16/a-few-words-on-reddit-gaw...
And, as others have noted. On the past these idiotic social indiscretions and letting off of steam were for the most part quickly forgotten, people went on with life. People say all kinds of idiotic things in ordinary speech for many reasons. Few of those reasons are malicious.
For cornering people's though like this is not productive. It's like whack-a-mole. People will let steam out some other way. You can't change society and its mores by force of on-line bullying. Many many times those calling offense don't understand the context.
It's like one day calling out people who when they have sex have a disposition to say nasty things. I can see it rationalized right now. Don't say b c* d* etc. Even as re playing as that unconsciously has an effect on people....
No. Fuvk no. I've come to the conclusion that only allowing the ugliness to surface can we call ourselves free. Anything else is a sanitized life. The thing is who decides what is healthy?
Let me rephrase that:
> A robust society requires everyone in the minority to shut the fuck up when anyone in the majority makes them feel invisible
> An irony is that many of the people calling offense don't realize their own transgression in becoming part of a self-righteous mob meting out punishment at the speed of thought.
There's a difference between pointing out someone acting obnoxiously and couch-fainting.
Societies need to allow the free flow of ideas. We can't be choosy about what we consider proper or not, desirable and not. We have to allow everything.
I used to be a dreamer growing up and thought why not make these bad thoughts illegal, racism cured. No. That was naive. It has too many negative collateral consequences.
Then when does "That makes me feel like shit when you say things like that" become taboo?
My belief is only our own selves have control over our reaction. We as receivers of all kinds of bad things need to learn how to deal with adversity. Nature is not sanitized, we should be taught how to deal with this kind of adversity. It's a cold place, and not everyone's or every thing's nice. Children often are not prepared by adults for these things.
Now, bullying is something different and there are different aspects to it. Sometimes it's peer pressure, other times it's harassment, other times it's a social mechanism to get people to behave a certain way (don't cut in line), be a certain way (slim, not fat, etc.) Bullying is an intimate attack, a malicious attack on a particular person, typically by a group, but also by an individual often accompanied by explicit or implicit violence. It's about control.
Aristotle
Wow, this almost makes it sound as if HN is a bunch of MRA losers :( A pity it's so sloppily worded (unless it's true, in which case, ugh).
So I'd say it's MRA-loserville-adjacent.
HN is in general no longer held with the same regard it was a couple of years ago. Note the number of progressive, well-respected regulars who've left this place behind.
There are other avenues to discuss tech and tech issues without ancaps, MRAs, and anti-SJW crusaders trying to internet-fight you at every turn.
Please tell me where? I've noticed the same irritating trends here. At this rate, I might just go back to Slashdot.
It's amazing how self-described "progressives" can come in here and happily defend this kind of behaviour. I hope you find a nice new website and never have your views challenged again.
I haven't come in here to defend internet lynch mobs - there's literally not a word in my post condoning it.
The bulk of tech progressive aren't the ones spoiling for a Twitter fight, they're the silent majority that's reading posts on HN, rolling their eyes, maybe sighing a little bit, and moving along with their lives. They're not orchestrating backlashes, brigades, or downvote chains, or any such devices. The most they're doing is emailing a link to some comment to their friends with a "sigh, HN again" quip - and I've received many such messages.
Heck, I know people who read HN - but only the links - knowing what a cesspool the comments are going to be. Heck, this is me on most days.
These are the people I'm talking about - the ones who've largely left this place behind because the tone of the community has shifted to one where any talk of race, gender, or even age (or in fact any talk of institutional problems in the industry) is automatically the work of professional victims (and a largely fictional narrative of a "social justice warrior") out to oppress techies. The general tenor of the community here now has a very distinctly reactionary twist, which has caused people to bail for greener pastures.
>These are the people I'm talking about - the ones who've largely left this place behind because the tone of the community has shifted to one where any talk of race, gender, or even age (or in fact any talk of institutional problems in the industry) is automatically the work of professional victims (and a largely fictional narrative of a "social justice warrior") out to oppress techies.
I won't deny that the MRA side is often reactionary, but you must admit that the "social justice" side is just as bad. The internet of today is designed for reactionism, makes it so easy to react and so easy to find controversial conversations.
This is something I've noticed a lot - both sides are as bad as each other. Both claim to be better people, but both are so mired in faeces that they haven't even noticed they're throwing it themselves. (I've been up for 36 hours that's the best I can come up with).
> (and a largely fictional narrative of a "social justice warrior")
That's a very opinionated statement. Unfortunately, few agree on the definition of SJW, so everyone makes up their own. Pretending that there isn't a clique of 'progressives' in the tech world doing their best to cause trouble is just fantasy. Look at Adria's creepshot/dog whistling, the elevatorgate thing, that time Ben Noordhuis was forced out of the Node community because of a SJW hate mob enraged over a pronoun, or this thing: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/32778.html. SJWs exist, and have done plenty of damage to the industry.
They've also no doubt scared many young women away from STEM careers through their wild stories about misogyny and dudebro cultures in the tech world. Would you, as (possibly) a woman, want to work in an industry frequently proclaimed to be an unaccepting boys club? Funnily enough, the proclaimers of such always seem to benefit personally from such attacks, landing cushy "developer relations" jobs and hefty sums on patreon. That's where the "professional victim" label comes from.
bcantrill commented on this above, with more authority than I could address this with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9041086
Also, it's worth noting Ben Noordhuis wasn't forced out of the Node community - just the core contribution team (although I do believe he chose to take a break afterward). His company, StrongLoop, would go on to be the owners of the Express repo, and Ben Noordhuis is one of the contributors to IO.js.
It's not true for articles like this, which I generally don't read. But when the link is a programming article expressing an opinion on _______, I definitely want to read what HN has to say.
Another interesting thing is that the same thing happens on the other side. For many others (like myself) who are on the liberal / progressive / pro social justice side who couldn't take the influx of inchoate, unfocused rage (along with all the other fun stuff like oppression olympics, tone policing/anti-tone policing, fights over trigger warnings, slugfests over performativity, implosions over minor transgressions causing a space space to turn into an unsafe one and all the rest) that has become prevalent in various online SJ communities - they also left, looking for said greener pastures (or just hang around and don't comment - that's generally what I do in those spaces.) Michelle Goldberg wrote a good article on this a while back:
http://www.thenation.com/article/178140/feminisms-toxic-twit...
Anyway, if you know of any places for technology discussion with a good signal-to-noise ratio and low on hate and warriors/conspiracy theorists from either side (and a liberal bent would be even better), I'd appreciate hearing about it. I saw Slashdot rise and fall. Sad to think it could be happening to HN, too. Where do we go next?
Those are widely different viewpoints who have more in common with mainstream viewpoints than with each other - it is dishonest to label them together, please don't do so.
I'm fully aware of where and how they differ, and I'm aware of the strident disagreements both within and between - but to deny an overlap today I think is misguided.
Oh and how PUAs and MRA are part of the same moment when PUAs look down on MRAs, how PUAs want a class of alphas with more social responsibility like the NR.
To me your argument only works if you adopt a you are either with us or against humanity attitude for political correctness and associated belief with _is_ inline with what many SJW think.
I will give you this much: about the only thing these people you have grouped together do agree on is that feminism and modern leftism has gone a little too far: but since they do not agree on how much (wiz MRA wanting more custody rights to NR wanting James of Stuart as king) nor what to do about it they in fact have more in-group and out-group variance.
Of course the fact that they disagree at all is enough for some (such as the author of that hit piece) to wrap them all together, we should be above such simple mindedness here on hacker news.
Edit: removed unecessary and counterproductive anger, added call to unity.
This much is true.
> HN is in general no longer held with the same regard it was a couple of years ago.
This may be true in some circles, but I don't think its generally true. Its probably true that HN is seen by some who participated in it earlier as less of an exclusive club of like-interested folk as it has gained popularity, but that's going to happen with any narrow forum over time that doesn't have an exclusionary wall for membership (and exclusive walls of membership have their own problems which will can erode the image of a forum over time in different ways.)
> Note the number of progressive, well-respected regulars who've left this place behind.
Such as...?
> There are other avenues to discuss tech and tech issues without ancaps, MRAs, and anti-SJW crusaders trying to internet-fight you at every turn.
Well, I suppose you could have a forum with a political litmus test for membership or heavy-handed pre-publication moderation of comments, but given how much the tech community overlaps with the ancap, MRA, and anti-SJW crusader communities -- and, perhaps more importantly, the reaction many outside those communities would have to the kind of approaches necessary to eradicate the unwanted comments -- you'd probably lose some value for actual tech and, particularly, tech issues discussions.
But where do you see those better alternatives?
Ahah, not about to name names - the trouble with openly naming people who are opposed to MRAs/anti-SJWs is that the demographic is also very, very adept at launching internet lynch mobs.
Sadly the events of the past half-year or so have succeeded in silencing some people who would otherwise speak, for fear of being doxxed, swatted, or otherwise harassed (where harassment goes above and beyond receiving angry messages of disapproval).
If the people who have left HN because of the toxicity want to make themselves known, they should do that. It's not my place to direct the people they want to avoid straight to their doorstep.
A good place to start would be the top posters list and seeing who's still around. Many of these folks still read HN but no longer participate in comments. Many read HN and have their commentary elsewhere. I know some of them, I certainly don't know all of them.
> "you'd probably lose some value for actual tech and, particularly, tech issues discussions."
Yeah, this is where idealism and values run head-first into the brick wall of reality, and no one really knows how to fix it.
We like freedom of speech, we dislike heavy-handed moderation especially when it comes to things that inform our views. At the same time we have real instances of abuse, and we have even more instances where extremists in one camp can simply shout down any dissent (extremists, for some reason, have a lot more time to comment on the internet than the rest of us).
I don't think anyone really knows the right answer to this. We want to preserve intelligent discussion, but at the same time give minority views held in good faith a fair shake. The solution thus far has been for people to abandon communities with toxic demographics, but that hasn't really solved the core problem - it's just hit the reset button until the new community itself attracts the wrong crowd.
That's the thing. We do know how to fix it. We just don't know how to fix it in a way that preserves social mechanisms such as public shaming of people you disagree with.
While the original joke was childish, I cannot think of one adult working in any industry who's never said something in a similar vein (or pointing out someone else's phasing might have a double meaning, and so on). It really has nothing to do with gender politics, she was just on a quest and picked up any small examples she could find.
Nobody should have been fired. That's on the employers. However if anyone was going to be fired she deserved it the most, simply because she started this ball rolling on purpose, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
People lose their shit when anonymous trolls send death threats to prominent women, but typically completely ignore the same happening to men. Perhaps women get more because they react more? Perhaps people shouldn't feed the trolls?
Please don't reply to this with a pithy feel-good response like "nobody should send death threats!". It's like saying "there shouldn't be war in the world!". It's an obvious goal that everyone agrees on, but there is no way to achieve without use of totalitarian control over the world/internet - something I'm sure we can agree is unacceptable.
You seem to be confused about what "dog whistle" means. She wasn't using secret SJW shibboleths.
> no doubt that mob gave death threats
"No doubt"! What a convenient way to assert that something happened without having to provide evidence for it.
> typically completely ignore the same happening to men
No doubt you have evidence of this, too. No doubt you have evidence that this happens to as many men as women, and as often, so as to warrant equivalent reactions.
> but there is no way to achieve without use of totalitarian control over the world/internet
You need to have a very limited imagination and near-total ignorance of history to think that positive change only comes about via totalitarian means.
Torch mobs are an atrocity. They were against a gentleman making a lame but benign joke. They are against someone posting some random thought-crime tweet. They are against the people who send the torch mobs in fast pursuit.
And equally to blame are people in positions of power who bend so easily to torch mobs. If you immediately fire someone for something that would be at most a warning, all because a mob demands it, you are the problem, and a coward to boot.
But there are a bunch of MRA losers on HN. How many, it's hard to tell; maybe a few that are very vocal, maybe a few with many sockpuppets, maybe a lot. If you ever get involved in a thread about any issue about women in technology, programs for encouraging women in technology, or the like, you will see them come out of the woodwork (and such threads will frequently drop off the front page as the long comment threads trigger HN's algorithm that try to discourage flamewar topics).
MRAs typically point to men's lower life expectancy in almost every country, higher rates of incarceration, more severe penalties for similar offenses, lower rates of health care spending and health research spending on men, higher suicide rates, higher rates of being subject to violence and murder including by women and when they are children, higher rates of genital mutilation, liability to conscription, higher rates of death at work, various disadvantages in divorce and child support, and higher school and college dropout rates, as reasons why men's rights should be on the agenda."
A lot of people feel that since men are privileged in so many areas, no effort should be expended on men's issues until every women's problem is entirely resolved. Due to that scapegoating Men's Rights Activists as people who hate women is popular.
At what point can you no longer express controversial opinions without being called a loser?
And to provide a sentinel value for the previous search space, I'll just say it. You, and everyone else who may be wondering if someone on the network is calling them a loser, are all losers.
Now that's taken care of, and you can go about your business, expressing controversial opinions without worrying about incurring greater harm to yourself than has already occurred.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_in_Cairo
Don't despair. Being called a loser does not make you one.
It absolutely is. "MRA" is a short cut to dismiss an entire spectrum of arguments and perspectives. Just as farcical, but on the opposite side, are people who declare anyone who has a problem with something like, say, "GamerGate", a "SJW".
These are shorthand for idiots. It lets you pretend that you're in a tribe and everything is black and white.
The problem is that misogynist MRAs disrupt the possibility of positive change the same way misandric feminists like Brownmiller and McKinnon do. Because they share a label with sane people, they allow the enemies of sanity to mount a trivially plausible ad hominem against any proposal to genuinely address the real injustices that men and women face due to the simple fact of being a man or a woman.
There are lots of good reasons to talk about issues affecting men, but sadly the bad parts of the MRM far outweigh the good at this point. I'd say it's 85% bashing feminism, complaining about women's sexual power (e.g. The Friendzone), denying and minimizing rape as a social problem, etc. and only 15% talking about fathers' custody rights and boys' education issues.
You might want to rotate your current one a little sooner ;-)
Mind you, such caution used to be common sense behavior for everyone. Then Facebook[1] happened. The second Eternal September.
It also seems to have become common for professionals to promote themselves under their real names without keeping separate, anonymous accounts for non-business activities.
When it goes well they're growth-hacking (puke) their careers, using all their twitter followers and likes and GitHub projects or whatever to market themselves and/or their services and/or products they're paid to sell. When it goes poorly we get stories like this. Live by the sword, die by the sword. (I don't know that that applies in this case, but it has in others)
The situation in the article is really shitty, of course, and I don't mean to minimize that. I'm just puzzled that throwing your real name on every corner of the Internet stopped drawing derision and advice to cut it out, at some point. It's why the calls for reducing online anonymity to end online harassment by strangers strike me as such a strange approach—the absolutely undisputed solution used to be more anonymity! It's a major cultural shift from the very recent past, but I don't see it brought up very often.
[1] Not just Facebook, obviously, but the timing fits.
It could obviously backfire. You say something that you think is fine, someone else gets offended, and they know exactly who you are. But generally, I think using your real name makes people more accountable for what they say online.
Separation is good opsec.
She wasn't being racist, she was lampooning American insularity. Unfortunately, a lot of people didn't get that it was a joke, and/or didn't get the joke, and she paid the price.
Here's what "should" have happened:
<sacco>: <original tweet>
<public>: Hey, that's really racist.
<sacco>: Oh, I didn't mean it that way - I'm making fun of American insularity.
<public>: OK, I still don't like it, but I get what you meant now.
It seems a little much.
I'm sorry you can't feel sympathy for her for the bad things that happened to her. None of us are perfect, we all act badly sometimes—but we're not comic book supervillains, either. Even bad people deserve sympathy when bad things happen to them.
Should she have lost her job? Yeah probably being in such a high profile position. But should she be reviled as an truly awful person when her only crime was an ill-conceived tweet? I don't think so personally, and it scares me that we are willing to judge and condemn people for so little.
Me too! That's why I try my absolute best to exercise caution and be thoughtful about what I say in a public forum. I don't disagree that the reaction was overkill; but that's the way the world is, even if I think it's wrong.
Post anything online and there's a chance you'll be someone's next fix.
Simply put, a great deal of what drives the extremist behavior on the internet is straight up narcissism. The people participating in pile-on internet bullying campaigns feel good about themselves when they do so, and receive praise (from the internet mob that they have aligned with) for doing so.
I can tell you for a fact I'm sure things on my Twitter account could likely be taken out of context as I can sometimes be a bit of a "Larry David" with my public observations that I can't help but share.
CJ John Roberts knew from a young age he wanted to be Chief Justice. (Overachiever, but lots of us on HN are overachievers.) He kept his record very clean. He never even got a speeding ticket.
And I totally see understand why: he was aware of how the media pick apart people, and who knows what one tiny thing might spiral out of control.
But it means the CJ, when making ruling about police stops, has never actually experienced something the majority of Americans have, and the Court loses some bit of useful perspective.
Point is: It's a joke. Learn the difference.
Offensive people who do offensive things and then defend them saying 'it was just a joke, bro!'
When can you get 15,000 people to hate something you've decided is worth hating, its quite a buzz.
I gather many youtube commenters have a Twitter account and an attitude.
"Still, in those early days, the collective fury felt righteous, powerful and effective. It felt as if hierarchies were being dismantled, as if justice were being democratized."
This is delusional slacktivism. Overthrowing power structures and hierarchies by retweeting. How more delusional can you get?
OTOH, if you've got a PR job or a shitty position where you'd get fired for saying such stuff, you really ought to be ever so careful. Why are people posting this stuff with their real names attached? Unless you've got FU money or are in a career track that's mostly immune to this kind of harassment, just use a separate personal account. FFS, does anyone think the general public wants your tweets?
Once I saw a T-Shirt in tshirthell.com that said something like "arrest black babies before they become criminals". I don't remember the exact words. THAT is obviously and ridiculously over the top.
2) It's very easy to pass off casual racism as a joke or a misunderstanding of the medium after it blows up in your face.
>But after thinking about her tweet for a few seconds more, I began to suspect that it wasn’t racist but a reflexive critique of white privilege — on our tendency to naïvely imagine ourselves immune from life’s horrors.
Her comments that followed seemed to agree with your second point.
It's great to push back against casual racism, but I don't think anything is gained by turning it into a lottery where any given tweet has a one-in-a-million chance of provoking a national-scale, life-destroying burst of outrage, and the rest are ignored.
These comments call out and critique the people who only care about Africans when someone says something that can possibly be interpreted to be offensive to them. Of course, privileged white people then use the alleged racism as a shield to hide their own hypocrisy behind and make blanket statements to the effect that there is some universal, writ-in-stone definition of what's offensive.
Now that the mob has doled out justice and protected all the Africans from a menace like Saccio, they go back to Whole Foods after their yoga classes and continue right on not giving a damn about how shitty things are in Africa.
If you find that tweet offensive, perhaps you should pause for a moment and consider that maybe, just maybe, it feels that way to you because you were the intended target.
It was offensive to you. It also wasn't offensive to some other people. Offensiveness isn't an objective property; the fact that something offended you doesn't make it "an offensive thing".
Offensiveness is a function with two inputs; it depends on both the thing and the person in question.
Does racial segregation offend you, then? If so what are you actually doing about it? Are you putting your kids in a diverse school? Are you encouraging them to date people from other races? Are you married to one currently? How much of your social circle, other than acquaintances, involve non-whites?
There is no way you are going to "fix" societal issues without demonstrating a resolution in your own life.
This is where I did something particularly dumb. I created the account to the non-existent user and posted a few comments on it - then quickly switched back to my Ta bu Shi da Yu account to say what I'd done and explain the impact it was likely to have.
It was a bad, bad judgement call. I got such a massive lynching that I seriously regretted what I'd done - but there was no way of undoing it. Eventually, I started getting depressed - I mean, my entire reputation was in tatters. None of the work I'd done - not the hours and hours of fighting trolls, extensive article writing, innovative strategies for dealing with referencing or organizing the admins via the board, nor the work on featured article candidates, peer review, articles for deletion, vandalism fighting, meeting up with Sydney people interested in Wikipedia, made any difference at all.
I left the project and asked to be desysopped. About a year or so later, I created an account Tbsdy lives and tried again. I managed to get my admin status re established (I readily admitted it was a bad judgement call), but still I was told I'd left "under a cloud", by none other than Brad Fitzpatrick - their legal counsel.
What's the moral of this? Online communities suck. If you make even one minor error in judgment, be prepared to be lynched. If you get depressed, just exit at this point and don't look back. It's not worth it. It doesn't matter how much time you put into a project - you're going to get judged, and you'll never make your way back.
If you don't think it can't happen, then ask Ben Noordrius how he felt when Bryan Cantrell called him an arsehole and said he should have been fired because he reverted a personal pronoun. That did the Node.js community a lot of good now, didn't it?
The reason I was annoyed about it was because signatures are the way you see who is saying something in a conversation thread. Back then you'd click on the person's username and get easy access to their pages, talk page, block links, contributions, etc. it also made it really hard to see what they had contributed. I was also concerned that someone would go what I in essence did - which was a really dumb move on my part, like I say.
Thanks for the insight!
Not sure what the status of admins are now.
If someone has a link in their signature pointing to an unassigned user name, then grabbing that username could also be interpreted at plugging a security hole as a stop gap measure while the problem is being discussed.
I don't see how it's outrageous. I don't see how you overstepped your bounds.
It's not clear to me what happened here.
The editor in question quite possibly had good intentions, or didn't see anything wrong with what they did. Whilst I was not a malicious actor, there was debate about the situation and I think people objected more to the way I went about proving the point I was making (which I maintain was valid). That's a fair cop, and I accept my action was rash.
But yes, it wasn't outrageous.
Regarding Bryan Cantrill, never forget this post (a one-line reply at the bottom):
http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html
Which I link not to shame him for what he wrote as a recent college grad 20 years ago, but to say that everyone does dumb, borderline offensive things sometimes, and what matters is that you are not obstinate in your dumbness.
Maybe Bryan would have fired the person he was then; that's fine. We need both effective, meaningful punishment, and also effective rehabilitation. It should be possible to go from Bryan Cantrill in Sun to Bryan Cantrill in Joyent. It should be possible to go from Ben Noordhuis in Node to Ben Noordhuis in io, or Justine Sacco in IAC to Justine Sacco wherever she is now, or Sam Biddle to chastened empathetic Sam Biddle, or whatever.
https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/456540342649487361
(And he's a brilliant enough kernel hacker that he can work around his own bad policy and still come up with a system that works well, but that doesn't mean it's not bad technical policy. I feel bad begrudging him for making a worse product when it's so good due exactly to his skill, but still, the product could have been better if he avoided making these sorts of decisions.)
Anyway, I do kind of wish Bryan would issue a clearer apology for what he said 20 years ago. But I also kind of wish we lived in a world where he didn't have to, and it's obvious he's grown up in the last 20 years.
I have noticed that a number of the most vocal social justice advocates have similar sort of behavior in their past. There is nothing wrong with advocating for social justice, but to me it's clear that as it has become a socially acceptable way to punish, it has attracted people in whom the desire to socially punish others is strong. Callout culture gives these people their "fix".
Anyway, your request is entirely fair, and let me be clear that I (obviously?) regret the have-you-ever-kissed-a-girl response (which was actually an obscure Saturday Night Live reference). I was young, and it was stupid -- and I regretted it shortly thereafter, for whatever it's worth. I have never actually met David in person, but if I did, the first thing I would do would be to look him in the eye and apologize.
That said, I do think that this is contrast to the Noordhuis incident. I know that this position is not popular here (and that I will be downvoted into oblivion), and that it's likely foolish to revisit this, but just to make clear my position: I am understanding (very understanding, given my own history) of gaffes made on the internet. The Noordhuis issue, however, was not a gaffe: it's not that he rejected the pull request (that's arguably a gaffe), it's that when he was overruled by Isaac some hours later, he unilaterally reverted Isaac's commit. (And, it must be said, sent a very nasty private note to make clear that this was no accident.) This transcended gaffe, and it became an issue of principle -- one that I feel strongly about. So what I wrote at the time was entirely honest, and it is something that I absolutely stand by -- more than ever, actually.
The inarguably contrast is this: I regretted the have-you-ever-kissed-a-girl response; I do not and will not regret my handling of the Noordhuis incident -- and any company that would not employ me over this is a company that I would not want to work for.
EDIT: No, wait, it was a revert commit, this just raises further questions.
In interest of personal edification (since you seem to be open to feedback) the one criticism I have about the Noordhuis incident is that in my opinion if you felt as strongly as you did about publicly chastising Noordhuis it should have been done from your personal blog and not from the Joyent blog. I feel this was slight abuse of power and influence of the Joyent brand, specifically because you mention the intent on terminating his employment if it was within your power. I don't think that belongs there as permanent public record. That said, I think your desire was to make it clear to the community that gender biases were not going to be tolerated and to me that intent (for the most part) came through.
I do think its plausible that Noordhuis wasn't quite represented properly and that he had strong opinions about process and how commits are merged but those strong opinions were interpreted as an intent to have gender bias. But I don't have enough information to know for sure, that's just how it looks to me.
In the end regret is an entirely personal thing and we all get to decide what kind of person we are going to be. I would also like to suggest that regret isn't black and white there are always ways we can conduct or communicate more effectively and perhaps this could be a take away for you. Could there have been a way to achieve your goals equally/more effectively with less of a direct expense to Ben??
As someone who has worked directly under (and along side) you I have a deep respect for the way you conduct yourself professionally. I see you as someone with integrity, which is probably why you feel comfortable bringing up incidences you have been criticized for (this something far too rare). I offer my perspective as a friend so take it for what its worth to you.
The reaction would seem to indicate that this is like telling Linus Torvalds he needs approval to land patches in Linux. Was there anything codified anywhere explaining that this was the case? Did that rule only apply for code and not docs changes? Was the sign-off rule not actually written down anywhere?
In this case, we may have to agree to disagree: I felt (and feel) that a message from Joyent -- not a message from me -- was called for: members of the node.js community were calling Joyent to task for Ben's behavior, and I (we) felt that it was Joyent that needed to respond. That said, I appreciate your willingness to speak your mind and to earnestly engage on this issue!
I did see it brought up first by some obvious single-purpose-troll account on Twitter in the midst of the pronoun incident. And just to make sure I'm being totally clear, I'm not bringing it up because I want to dog you with it, but because I think it's a great example of how everyone's fallible, even the people that I most look up to for how they push a community to be better. The standard isn't perfection and it's not about individuals per se; it's about improvement, as a community. We ought to criticize so we can build a better community, not so that we can knock each other down at the first mistake.
Part of the peril of social media is that everyone becomes a public figure -- whether they want to be one or not. Those who are more traditional public figures (e.g., politicians, actors, athletes, business leaders) often have the personality attributes that make it easier to deal with scathing public criticism (though I don't think anyone particularly likes being excoriated) -- but most normal people actually don't. As a culture, I hope that we will be both more tolerant of mistakes made on social media -- but also more aware that (at some level) we all need to act as public figures when in public. Certainly, it's a thorny, complicated issue -- and one that is decidedly (if not canonically) modern.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9028497
"On the one hand, it seems ridiculous (absurd, perhaps) to fire someone over a pronoun -- but to characterize it that way would be a gross oversimplification: it's not the use of the gendered pronoun that's at issue (that's just sloppy), but rather the insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered."
https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun
The biggest issue is the way that you handled this. You did this appallingly. You still seem to be puzzled why people still bring this up.
In a community project, people often do things you aren't going to like. Ben rejected a push, and he steadfastly maintains that he did this for good reasons:
https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568...
Now instead of communicating with Ben, giving him the benefit of the doubt as a non-native speaker of English and calling him out publicly in the way you did was an absolute classic case of what you do NOT do.
In a community run project, the dynamics are different to being in a corporation. The first rule is: you are dealing with a lot of people, from a lot of different backgrounds. There is lots of room for misunderstanding. The absolute golden rule around dealing with a popular project is to try to wrangle this appropriately and with as little heat as possible.
So let's review what you did:
1. You posted one of the most inflammatory, aggressive posts I've seen in a very long time. You took no time to talk to Ben about his position and to talk him around to making an apology and reversing his decision.
2. You compete with StrongLoop. You basically told your competitor that they should fire one of their best developers to the project. Your company may have been a main initiator of Node.js and you see it as largely the steward for the project, but your own employee reversed the decision of a major contributor.
And this is where you really stuffed up. For some time there had been rumblings about how Joyent was biased about the way they accepted commits and directed the project - rightly or wrongly. There was a perception of bias towards Joyent's interests. That's not necessarily a correct viewpoint. But you started a chain of events you now can't control.
Joyent has finally setup a Foundation, but has now got a fork competing with the core project. StrongLoop is one of the groups backing io.js. A large number of your core developers are publicly backing io.js.
3. Community leaders, like yourself, aren't meant to send abusive messages over blogs. You called him an arsehole. You called for his sacking.
Let's underscore how tone-deaf you have been, and completely clueless over how to run an open source project:
"While we would fire Ben over this, node.js is an open source project and one doesn't necessarily have the same levers. Indeed, one of the challenges of an open source project that depends on volunteer effort is dealing with assholes"
You don't realise how much damage you did. I agree with gender neutral language in technical writing. Many others do as well. If you had dealt with this differently and not decided to become a self-aggrandizing pundit, then you would have probably shown that Joyent can deal with controversial matters maturely and civilly, play nicely with others, resolve conflict, and you'd have the high moral ground.
Now you just look like a bully, and I'd say you were the catalyst for the io.js fork. You also opened yourself up to your own past, which you also regret.
As I say - you've basically given us all a text-book case study into how not to manage an open source project.
P.S. FWIW, I upvoted you.
> You took no time to talk to Ben about his position and to talk him around to making an apology and reversing his decision.
Whereas just above:
> it's that when he was overruled by Isaac some hours later, he unilaterally reverted Isaac's commit. (And, it must be said, sent a very nasty private note to make clear that this was no accident.)
I don't know why you thought you were privy to all the communication that went on in this situation, but that sentence ought to indicate to you that you are not, in fact, omniscient.
The fact that Ben remains absolutely unrepentant on this issue, and sees "I was following the project's rules to the letter on an issue which I myself dismissed as trivial" as a valid excuse should be to his lasting shame, and you should be ashamed of perpetuating it.
I certainly don't feel ashamed about calling out the bullying behaviour of Joyent. It's never ok to call someone an arsehole on a company blog about a competitor's employee, let alone call on his sacking. And who knows what the content of that nasty note was - perhaps he called Bryan an arsehole, perhaps he said that he thought that the change was rubbish, maybe he was passed off that the change wasn't discussed, maybe he thought that it was gasp a beat up, or maybe he swore at Cantrell for being a jerk?
Whatever it was, it's irrelevant. It's not the approach an open source leader should take, it certainly didn't concubine anyone about gender neutral language, it was hostile, ungracious, gave Ben Noordius no way of graciously apologising (had he wanted to) and it led to unnecessary schisms in the project.
All up, Bryan looks like a bully, Joyent look pompous and overbearing, the reasonable debate about gender equality is obscured by the abusive language and tone of the post, Ben Noordius appears to have been wronged, and a nuanced debate about gender neutral language is rather appallingly sidetracked by a man who uses dominant and crude language to ram his pint across - most likely due to political and personal reasons.
Could it be because of this recent OSNews article bringing it to a bunch of people's attention?
http://www.osnews.com/story/28261/_Have_you_ever_kissed_a_gi...
Video: https://screen.yahoo.com/star-trek-convention-000000768.html
Script: http://snltranscripts.jt.org/86/86hgetalife.phtml
Someone might have posted a link in the original thread but the episode was 10 years old and YouTube was 10 years away.
Leave it up to the writer to decide.
For what it's worth, I prefer the neutral 'they' but I also don't get caught up in grammatical genders. Imagine if English had retained grammatical genders for regular nouns --as german and spanish do. What, so we rewrite the language and change grammatical gender because it gets conflated with biological gender?
Also, when I read text and it has the grammatical gender opposite mine, I don't feel disenfranchised by the text. It's not something I keep conscious of. I'm not pronoun hunting, and I think few people do that. Reading would become incomprehensibly distracting.
It's the same as when you see the pronoun 'you' Do you automatically believe it refers to you personally? I know I don't. Same with he, she, they, they're all a third person abstraction.
Seems a bit like sect behavior to me (arbitrary rules and punishments).
Wikipedia in a nutshell.
You seem to be a super bright guy who experienced a momentary lapse in judgement fuelled by emotion. We all do this, it's just not always public.
Also- I don't know how old you were at the time this story occurred but according to neuroscience, the frontal lobe doesn't develop until we are 25-27 years old (males develop later than females) and this is exactly the type of mistake the frontal lobe prevents us from making.
I hope you've recovered from this incident and have learned to not take these mistakes too personally...
Even calculators make mistakes.
I've been pretty open in that situations probably get exacerbated for me because I have a mental illness - anxiety, depression and adult ADD (I refuse to call it ADHD, I'm not hyperactive!). I manage these better now, but it still leaks into my life. I'm extremely lucky I have a supportive wife and two small children who keep my mind off things and let me focus on what's important :-)
I really appreciate your kind words, btw.
It sounds like you are doing pretty okay to me!
If you don't mind me posting this Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_attention_deficit_hyperac... you may find some answers there.
>Adults with ADHD are often perceived by others as chaotic and disorganized, with a tendency to need high stimulation to be less distracted and function effectively. Additionally, many adults suffer from associated or "co-morbid" psychiatric conditions such as depression or anxiety.[13]
>Symptoms of ADHD can vary widely between individuals and throughout the lifetime of an individual. As the neurobiology of ADHD is becoming increasingly understood, it is becoming evident that difficulties exhibited by individuals with ADHD are due to problems with the parts of the brain responsible for executive functions (see below: Pathophysiology). These result in problems with sustaining attention, planning, organizing, prioritizing, and impulsive thinking/decision making.
Hope I'm being useful -- a close family member was in the same boat. I was able to help, because it was me who randomly saw someone talking about this on an HN comment and I dived further into the world of ADHD and found out that it may not be 'classical' depression, but depression caused by something else. Since then, there's been complete emotional stability, rational decision making and depression is controlled completely.
Lastly, Chris... what you did I think was not a bad judgement call at all. In my mind you were making something right, and fixing a wrong because that was the only tool available to you. Debating something just takes forever and some things need to be fixed there and then. What happened to you, is simply disgusting. I am sorry for that, and I hope you can look back on it as a good memory and not a bad memory (which is tough).
I ran a massive community as the real admin, but the same sort of thing happened to me as well. Been years since I left but it's still sore to think about.
Hope all is well man. :)