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How I Deal with Harassment, Abuse, and Crazies in General
- pmiller2 11y agoThis is a part of why I'm quite selective about what I post online. The major part is that I value my privacy and don't really want random people knowing everything about me. I don't want to be a public figure. I avoid Facebook and Twitter, too, so that really reduces my surface area for this type of attack.
- realusername 11y agoFacebook is honestly not that bad on this because your "friends" circle makes it harder for a post to go completely viral. Twitter on the other hand is really dangerous because you can just make a tweet which pisses off some random celebrity and face a huge backlash, this is really scary.
- randycupertino 11y agoThat's exactly why I'm afraid to tweet. If I tweeted every stupid thought that flit across my mind, then ever became famous or in the public eye, people could dig up every dumb thing I've ever said and broadcast it out of context. No thanks.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoAgreed. Each tweet is like a 'sound byte' and we've seen how they can be used to twist anything by taking them out of context. 'Twitter context' is really an oxymoron.
- SyneRyder 11y agoIt depends on the social groups. In some ways Facebook can be worse, because the circle it goes viral in are the people you know in real life and interact with day-to-day. I have seen people make up rumours and publish them on Facebook, with the deliberate intention of hurting and destroying the life of someone they know, just because they felt slighted. Having anonymous crazies from around the world threatening you must be scary - but I can't imagine how it would feel to have friends and the people you turn to for support stop talking to you because of an accusation they read online.
- pmiller2 11y agoI've seen something like this happen to someone I know. :(
- stcredzero 11y agoThis is a part of why I'm quite selective about what I post online. The major part is that I value my privacy and don't really want random people knowing everything about me. I don't want to be a public figure. I avoid Facebook and Twitter, too, so that really reduces my surface area for this type of attack. From the op: So complaining about harassment isn't just whining by sheltered nerds. The more visible and outspoken you are online, the higher the chance that a whirlwind will land on the heads of you and those you love. There is no chance of this changing in the foreseeable future. This is serious business. I am scared. Everything I do online is weighed against the risk of harassment. So the nerds won against the schoolyard bullies. But as a result we created another kind of public space which has bullying mobs. Unthinking bullying mobs that are in denial of their own bullying and label their activities as something noble or socially/intellectually worthy. Just about every thoughtful person I know feels effectively censored. There are certain group-minds online you can't risk angering, for fear of the consequences. These often exist as binary pairs in opposition which feed off of one another, gaining more members by mutual creation of outrage. These phenomena need to be recognized by society. An intellectually vibrant society should shun such stultifying phenomena. However, our culturally dominant means of communication are precisely where such phenomena live, and are the places they effectively police. This ability makes them much more insidious than "hate groups" of the civil rights era. The nerds created the new bullies, and the new bullies now shape and control the new discourse.
- intrasight 11y agoI'd like to point out that one's public persona can be different from ones private persona. Lots of public people use that approach, and for good reason.
- pmiller2 11y agoI don't know because I haven't met the man, but I hear Zed Shaw is a good example of this that a lot of people here could probably relate to.
- technopath 11y ago> Crazies in General I wonder if, given the social unacceptability of mental illness, it will ever be socially unacceptable to slur mental illness.
- justinpombrio 11y agoI would describe very few mentally ill people as crazy.
- lacantina 11y agoI would describe all people described as crazy as mentally ill, unless we're talking about "gay doesn't mean homosexual, it just means dumb", which is also bad.
- ams6110 11y agoI don't see a slur there.
- paulddraper 11y agoI agree, though "crazies" is the likely candidate.
- technopath 11y agoDecent treatment: https://www.quora.com/Is-crazy-a-slur https://www.quora.com/Is-crazy-a-slur Personally, crazy the noun is worse than crazy the adjective.
- jholman 11y agoUtterly unpersuasive. The reasoning in that Quora response means that "harasser" and "wrong" are also slurs, because the Quora response equates denigration with "slur territory". As an ongoing fact in my life, I've noticed that (a) I use words like "crazy" in broad and insulting ways, and that (b) some people seem to complain about it. And I'm open to being persuaded that I ought to change my ways. But I haven't yet heard an argument that persuades me. It seems to me that the whole notion of "craziness" or of "mental instability" or even "mental health issue" etc is the notion of socially-atypical behaviour that the speaker judges to be harmful or undesirable (as contrasted with "eccentric", etc). If I hear someone say "that's crazy", I assume they mean "that's weird and I disapprove". (I haven't quite nailed it down. There's a bit more nuance here, in that if someone says "that's crazy", and then someone else says "it's not crazy, it's evil", then you can imagine the first persona conceding the point... so clearly "crazy" sometimes implies a certain degree of helplessness in the bad-weirdness.) Do you think "crazy" means something fundamentally different from this? Do you actually think it makes sense for people to stop observing that behaviours or people are atypical, or stop observing that they disapprove of particular instances of weirdness? At this risk of going on a tangent, here's a tangent. Sometimes advocates for people with mental health issues note that it does not make sense to fear folks with mental issues, because such people are more likely to be the target of violence than the perpetrator. What a hilarious fail. I assume that it's true that such people are more likely to be the target than the perpetrator, but I don't care. I care about whether they're more likely to endanger me than an apparently-not-sane person is to endanger me. It's not some kind of zero sum game where being crazy makes a person more endangered and thereby makes them less dangerous to others than they would be if non-crazy.
- ams6110 11y agoWhen I release a game or write something visible to the whole world, even a tiny something (Warning: Twitter counts!), I am acting as a public figure. A teeny tiny one, but a public figure nonetheless. Public figures have always received hate mail, abuse, threats, and messages from the unhinged, and they always will. Alas, the internet makes them much easier to deliver. Very true. Years ago I sent a "letter to the editor" to the local newspaper. Nothing too controversial, just an opinion about some local politics. I received several unsigned letter in the mail over the following days, no return address, etc. and that was just from a small town community.
- pmiller2 11y ago> ...opinion about some local politics. ... small town community. Well, right there is actually the reason. The smaller the pond you're in, the smaller the fish you need to be to make waves. If everybody knows who you are, you can bet a couple people are going to speak up.
- Chris2048 11y agoYou don't explicitly say this but, were these nasty or threatening letters?
- BobbyThrowaway 11y ago> Being harassed is harmful. It's easy to say, "Just toughen up. Walk away from the screen." until you've actually experienced it. Now that a man says this, hopefully some more nerds will actually listen to it.
- Animats 11y agoFrom the article: "Whenever I write about a topic that upsets me, I calm myself by illustrating it with royalty-free, reassuring stock photos." The pictures in the article are so irrelevant that they're annoying.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jeffsco 11y ago(You noticed. It is a form of humor fwiw.)
- mirimir 11y agoThere's a simple solution: Don't use real names online. That eliminates meatspace threats, if done properly. And then compartmentalize. For risky stuff, create new personas. In worst case, just burn them down.
- pmiller2 11y ago> There's a simple solution: Don't use real names online. Tell that to Facebook.
- jholman 11y agoThere's a simple solution: don't use Facebook.
- pmiller2 11y agoThat's my current and likely future solution.
- mirimir 11y agoThere are work-arounds. Not easy, mind you, but doable. Mostly only scammers will bother.
- tomjen3 11y agoNot much of a problem, just let your name be Mustafa Jones. It's a never going to fall for their real name policy.
- tajen 11y agoWhen you have a company, your name and contact is on every commerce registry document.
- mirimir 11y agoDPR had a company, with none of that stuff. If he hadn't been so careless, he still would.
- kelukelugames 11y agoI notice newly famous or semi famous people ignore all of Jeff Vogel's rules. They jump in and defend themselves in every argument. Happens often in the Magic community. Guy wins tournament, guy starts writing Magic articles, guy gets upset when criticized, and guy goes crazy.
- CM30 11y agoIt's sort of like what happens to people who win the lottery; they have less experience as millionaires, so they make a ton of big purchases and questionable spending decisions. People who were born/grew up/made it rich more slowly tend to have more experience managing their finances and hence tend to go broke a lot less quickly/often. The same thing tends to happen to the newly famous. They think they're invincible, get a quickly overinflated ego, respond poorly to criticism and end up under a ton of psychological pressure as a result. You can see it with people who make it big off talent shows or reality tv.
- LyndsySimon 11y agoIt's good to see someone seriously talking about taking responsibility for defending themselves.
- cpr 11y agoMaybe don't work in the games industry, where the crazy users tend to end up? Sorry to point that out (I know a lot of HN folks are gamers), but I think it's a valid approach. I really doubt if Guido has been harrassed or physically threatened because of something in Python 3, for example.
- cshenton 11y agoI agree that the games industry has a problem, but I think it's because they're independent developers selling a consumer product. This creates a direct sense of accountability among a large group of end users who know how to get into contact with you. Maybe it's simply not good business to be a dev who's both acting as the face of a product and writing divisive op-eds. This practice seems unique to the games industry.
- known 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullying
- YeGoblynQueenne 11y agoI see this article as a sign that we are slowly realising how shit some parts of the internet have become for the people who use them everyday. There were some recent articles in big news sites about how their comments attract the worse kind of trolling and what they plan to do, or are doing, about it. Maybe a few years from now we'll have found some sort of resolution to all this but currently, we have a problem.
- kelukelugames 11y agoDid this get flagged off the frontpage? looks like it. Sigh.
- martincmartin 11y agoNo, after 13 hours it just fell off of it organically. If you filter out low scoring posts you can still see it.
- kelukelugames 11y agoThere were posts with longer hours and fewer points ahead of it.
- Criticism123 11y agoCriticism ≠ Harassment
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- awinter-py 11y agoHmm; his public figure point is a little dangerous. Defamation / libel protections are generally less for public figures (you have to prove malice).