6 ms·

At the risk of making a tenuous (and inflammatory) connection, I'm struck by the difference in tone between this and the Ashley Madison leak. Here, there's sen

by basseq 10y ago

At the risk of making a tenuous (and inflammatory) connection, I'm struck by the difference in tone between this and the Ashley Madison leak. Here, there's sentiments of "how terrible", "leaked users might have severe consequences", and "this ruins the privacy where people get away from repressive social mores". Ashley Madison, by comparison, was met with sentiments of "good!", "glad we're outing adulters", and "these people are getting what's coming to them". Yes, I know AM was explicitly based on having an affair, where this dataset might just include people who are committing adultery (with varying cultural definitions of "adultery"). But other than impressing our own values on the situation (e.g., "cheating on your wife" = bad; "premarital relations" = ok), how do you explain the difference?

basseq 10y ago
Example: HN gleefully ate up analytics on the AM dataset. What men were saying, searching for, the ratio of men to women, etc. Will we do the same here?
- existencebox 10y ago
  The following ramble will try and address the disagreement I'm having with the subtext I'm inferring from your post, that the desire to look over such a dataset is something to be looked down on. It's a rare dataset with some very interesting implications, as someone who works with data (and humans) I'm curious to better understand parts of behavior one can't often observe. Now; I will say that if used, it should be handled properly, anonymized to whatever degree possible, and would reject analytics use cases which aim at attacking the subjects. However, to deny that there are fascinating and valuable questions to be asked in how different population strata interact is to deny a basic curiosity present in many I've met from tech-centric communities. (Edit: to answer the child since reply limited: Perhaps I misunderstood you, since I read your statement as implying that people only wanted the data to "punish" the users or as some morbid curiosity in the prior case; since as you say I have equal (significant) desire to look at the datasets in both cases; I took the OP comment to focus more on the _sentiments_ and not on the data usage itself as you held up to example.)
  - basseq 10y ago
    And I'm struggling with the same thing: hence the comment thread here. Wouldn't Muslim Match have "interesting implications" as well?
jacquesm 10y ago
As far as I'm concerned there is absolutely no difference. Maybe you should only make this connection if it is the same individuals that make contradictory responses. Otherwise, HN is not as homogeneous as you seem to think.
- basseq 10y ago
  I don't think it's homogeneous, but the sentiment "feels" different. (Scientific, I know.) For instance, there aren't people here who are saying, "It's good we're outing adulterers: they deserve it." I went back and looked at two of the largest HN posts on AM from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10083536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10083536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914024 And yes, there are a lot of good comments. * In3d noticed the same thing then that I'm noticing now: "It looks like the reaction of most commenters is very different compared to when Gawker exposed the Conde Naste executive. This hack might have done this very same thing to many people." * ulrikrasmussen sees the sentiment: "I see a few comments sympathizing with the vigilantes behind this, implying that the exposed users had it coming." * nicholas_t makes the point about implications to Muslim users: "There are people who live in countries where adultery is punishable by death. Likewise for being gay. There's already one person from Saudi Arabia who expressed his concerns on Reddit but there's likely to be a lot of other people affected." * dsacco shared an anecdote: "I had an argument with my girlfriend about this. No matter what reasoning I used, no matter what I said, she could not agree that it was wrong that Ashley Madison (A.M.) was hacked. Her position was that marital infidelity is such a punishable offense that the participants on A.M. deserve to be publicly outed. In her view, it was not even up for debate. She felt so powerfully about infidelity that she didn't care." So yes, the general attitude is the same. You're right. There are just more assholes who said things like: "Zero sympathy. I have zero sympathy for both this site and for the users whose information was stolen. You all deserve it, for being selfish, amoral animals." (A comment that was rightfully downvoted to hell.)
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Most comment threads on HN only stabilize after 24 hours, if you want to draw long term sentiment information from comment threads I'd suggest to only do that after the threads are archived. Initial responses and final picture can be quite different.
mod 10y ago
If you're correct in that the same users are presenting different tones (which I don't necessarily agree with), then perhaps it could be summed up by, as you say, impressing our own values on the situation. Perhaps we think it's fitting for adulterers to be outed & shamed, but we don't think it's fitting for them to be attacked or jailed or executed.
- mikeash 10y ago
  That last part is an excellent point. Approximately nobody suffered legal prosecution, mob justice, or honor killings due to the AM leak. The potential consequences here are much more severe.
  - basseq 10y ago
    Agreed, well put on the severity of the consequences. Was anyone in the AM leak Muslim and persecuted? I didn't hear about any stories. Will anyone here be persecuted for their actions? We don't know and are supposing.
01Michael10 10y ago
Who has a value system where it's OK to lie and cheat on a person you entered into vows with? Regardless, it's not relevant what yours or my values are anyway on this. It's the person who is being cheated on that matters who obliviously doesn't have the same value system as the cheater so the behavior can only be seen as 'bad".
mikeash 10y ago
A major difference is that most AM users were in committed relationships and were attempting to cheat on their SO without their consent or knowledge, and the entire idea of the site was based around this. (I say "attempting to" because one of the more amusing tidbits from that leak was the fact that the site was pretty much useless.) They're hurting other people, not just themselves, not only emotionally but potentially physically due to the risk of STDs and such. There's no such thing here. I'm sure there are some cheaters using this site, but I doubt it's the majority, and it doesn't appear to be the whole point of the site. Most people there were harming nobody. I see a big difference between adultery, which is a broad category including many victimless behaviors, and cheating, which is a much narrow category where someone is necessarily being hurt. Attitudes toward adultery are very cultural, but I have no problem lumping cheating in with emotional abuse and physical harms as something which is objectively bad.
FilterSweep 10y ago
Do note there were multiple threads made on the same topic, and even within the individual ones, the responses vary over time (perhaps some of us didn't have our morning coffee yet). I remember reading a lot over the people impacted adversely from the hack - who were not just failed adulterous men.
FreedomToCreate 10y ago
One big difference is that people outed by Ashley Madison were not at risk to the degree that muslim daters are at being harmed violently. And even though the definition of adultery may vary between cultures, ignoring the difference between a website where you purposely go in blatant disregard of a personal and somewhat legal trust you established with someone versus a website where you go in an attempt to build a new relationship with the goal of finding a partner, are totally different things. This isn't "impressing" values. There is a clear difference in the acts. To drive that point home, there is a clear difference between a 8 year old stealing something versus a 40 years old man. The 40 year old man knows the difference and the consequences while the 8 year old does not. When making a decision on punishment, it shouldn't matter what cultural values you have, there is a clear difference between the two that cannot be ignored. And that is the same things here. Dating versus adultery are more different than just different values. So I wouldn't label this as hypocrisy as you are attempting to.
- douche 10y ago
  If an eight-year-old hasn't been impressed with the immorality of theft by that point then there has been a serious lapse of parental and even basic community policing.
  - douche 10y ago
    Apparently it is not okay to expect parents to teach their children that it is not acceptable to steal shit by the time they have reached school age...
- BurningFrog 10y ago
  Without looking up the statistics, I'm confident that "being outed as a cheater" is one of the leading causes of people being "harmed violently" by their spouse.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    But that's generally discouraged by law. Don't some muslim countries have laws violently that punish sexually promiscuous people?
centizen 10y ago
I think it's an important point to bring up, but I don't feel like the same people who were passing judgement on the AM leak are the ones raising concerns here. But if I had to explain the difference, I think it's the differences in potential backlash on the affected users. Majority of Ashely Madison users were not in countries that would severely persecute them for their activities.
- basseq 10y ago
  Yet the consequences for AM users could be severe as well (divorce, stigmatization, etc.). Yes, physical harm is worse than divorce, but it's a spectrum. Also, interesting thought exercise: there probably was a percentage of AM users that were Muslim. Was it a larger percentage than those users on Muslim Match who would face persecution?
- basseq 10y ago
  Also note that at least two people committed suicide over the AM leak. Not killed, but death nonetheless. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34044506 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34044506
  - centizen 10y ago
    I'm not trying to pretend that was a victimless crime - it was bad and it negatively affected people, some to a deadly extent. But the degree of risk here for all involved is night and day compared between the two.
hackuser 10y ago
The most important difference, IMHO, is this release puts at risk a vulnerable minority. It's like the difference between 'discrimination' against white-skinned Americans and against black or brown-skinned ones: The majority controls almost all the levers of power and institutions, from Washington to the state capital to courts to law enforcement to industry to medicine to everything else. They can and do create structures and make laws to protect themselves, and make a phone call to a buddy if those don't work. People in this group have the empathy and understanding of the rest of the majority, who see you as individuals (for example, they don't tend to write ignorant, thoughtless blanket stereotypes on HN - about their own group; or police don't pull you over when they see driving). If you're politically weak, you're powerless; you depend on the goodwill of the majority, which historically has often attacked you. Ultimately, there is no way to protect yourself - they can kill you and the institutions won't care, or put you in jail if they don't like you. And your only appeal is to more people in the majority; you're trapped. It's a precarious, dangerous position to be in.
projectramo 10y ago
I don't think people have a good response to this point. People don't really look at the statistics, they are reacting based on their assumptions based on what they see on TV. All the people who make this honor killing claim would be shocked to see the statistical difference between those and the violence with cheating.
__david__ 10y ago
Well of course people impress their own values on the situation. Yes, if you step back and put on your impartial glasses, there's no difference. But people aren't robots, and it's difficult to be impartial, even when you don't have a horse in the race. I find it completely natural, in our society, for people to be rather gleeful about the whole Ashley Madison thing—having cheaters (which goes against a large portion of the population's send of morality) be "punished" for their crimes feels just and karmic. It isn't really, but it feels that way. It rubs that high ground moral compass part of your brain (or maybe it's just schadenfreude). Either way, it's not necessarily wrong or unexpected—it's just the way people's brains tend to work. I can guarantee you there are some rabidly anti-muslim folk out there that feel gleeful about this hack, but that segment of the population is far, far smaller than the segment that feels adultery is wrong.

by basseq 10y ago

basseq 10y ago

Example: HN gleefully ate up analytics on the AM dataset. What men were saying, searching for, the ratio of men to women, etc. Will we do the same here?

existencebox 10y ago
The following ramble will try and address the disagreement I'm having with the subtext I'm inferring from your post, that the desire to look over such a dataset is something to be looked down on. It's a rare dataset with some very interesting implications, as someone who works with data (and humans) I'm curious to better understand parts of behavior one can't often observe. Now; I will say that if used, it should be handled properly, anonymized to whatever degree possible, and would reject analytics use cases which aim at attacking the subjects. However, to deny that there are fascinating and valuable questions to be asked in how different population strata interact is to deny a basic curiosity present in many I've met from tech-centric communities. (Edit: to answer the child since reply limited: Perhaps I misunderstood you, since I read your statement as implying that people only wanted the data to "punish" the users or as some morbid curiosity in the prior case; since as you say I have equal (significant) desire to look at the datasets in both cases; I took the OP comment to focus more on the _sentiments_ and not on the data usage itself as you held up to example.)
- basseq 10y ago
  And I'm struggling with the same thing: hence the comment thread here. Wouldn't Muslim Match have "interesting implications" as well?

jacquesm 10y ago

As far as I'm concerned there is absolutely no difference. Maybe you should only make this connection if it is the same individuals that make contradictory responses. Otherwise, HN is not as homogeneous as you seem to think.

basseq 10y ago
I don't think it's homogeneous, but the sentiment "feels" different. (Scientific, I know.) For instance, there aren't people here who are saying, "It's good we're outing adulterers: they deserve it." I went back and looked at two of the largest HN posts on AM from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10083536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10083536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914024 And yes, there are a lot of good comments. * In3d noticed the same thing then that I'm noticing now: "It looks like the reaction of most commenters is very different compared to when Gawker exposed the Conde Naste executive. This hack might have done this very same thing to many people." * ulrikrasmussen sees the sentiment: "I see a few comments sympathizing with the vigilantes behind this, implying that the exposed users had it coming." * nicholas_t makes the point about implications to Muslim users: "There are people who live in countries where adultery is punishable by death. Likewise for being gay. There's already one person from Saudi Arabia who expressed his concerns on Reddit but there's likely to be a lot of other people affected." * dsacco shared an anecdote: "I had an argument with my girlfriend about this. No matter what reasoning I used, no matter what I said, she could not agree that it was wrong that Ashley Madison (A.M.) was hacked. Her position was that marital infidelity is such a punishable offense that the participants on A.M. deserve to be publicly outed. In her view, it was not even up for debate. She felt so powerfully about infidelity that she didn't care." So yes, the general attitude is the same. You're right. There are just more assholes who said things like: "Zero sympathy. I have zero sympathy for both this site and for the users whose information was stolen. You all deserve it, for being selfish, amoral animals." (A comment that was rightfully downvoted to hell.)
- jacquesm 10y ago
  Most comment threads on HN only stabilize after 24 hours, if you want to draw long term sentiment information from comment threads I'd suggest to only do that after the threads are archived. Initial responses and final picture can be quite different.

mod 10y ago

If you're correct in that the same users are presenting different tones (which I don't necessarily agree with), then perhaps it could be summed up by, as you say, impressing our own values on the situation. Perhaps we think it's fitting for adulterers to be outed & shamed, but we don't think it's fitting for them to be attacked or jailed or executed.

mikeash 10y ago
That last part is an excellent point. Approximately nobody suffered legal prosecution, mob justice, or honor killings due to the AM leak. The potential consequences here are much more severe.
- basseq 10y ago
  Agreed, well put on the severity of the consequences. Was anyone in the AM leak Muslim and persecuted? I didn't hear about any stories. Will anyone here be persecuted for their actions? We don't know and are supposing.

01Michael10 10y ago

Who has a value system where it's OK to lie and cheat on a person you entered into vows with? Regardless, it's not relevant what yours or my values are anyway on this. It's the person who is being cheated on that matters who obliviously doesn't have the same value system as the cheater so the behavior can only be seen as 'bad".

mikeash 10y ago

A major difference is that most AM users were in committed relationships and were attempting to cheat on their SO without their consent or knowledge, and the entire idea of the site was based around this. (I say "attempting to" because one of the more amusing tidbits from that leak was the fact that the site was pretty much useless.) They're hurting other people, not just themselves, not only emotionally but potentially physically due to the risk of STDs and such. There's no such thing here. I'm sure there are some cheaters using this site, but I doubt it's the majority, and it doesn't appear to be the whole point of the site. Most people there were harming nobody. I see a big difference between adultery, which is a broad category including many victimless behaviors, and cheating, which is a much narrow category where someone is necessarily being hurt. Attitudes toward adultery are very cultural, but I have no problem lumping cheating in with emotional abuse and physical harms as something which is objectively bad.

FilterSweep 10y ago

Do note there were multiple threads made on the same topic, and even within the individual ones, the responses vary over time (perhaps some of us didn't have our morning coffee yet). I remember reading a lot over the people impacted adversely from the hack - who were not just failed adulterous men.

FreedomToCreate 10y ago

One big difference is that people outed by Ashley Madison were not at risk to the degree that muslim daters are at being harmed violently. And even though the definition of adultery may vary between cultures, ignoring the difference between a website where you purposely go in blatant disregard of a personal and somewhat legal trust you established with someone versus a website where you go in an attempt to build a new relationship with the goal of finding a partner, are totally different things. This isn't "impressing" values. There is a clear difference in the acts. To drive that point home, there is a clear difference between a 8 year old stealing something versus a 40 years old man. The 40 year old man knows the difference and the consequences while the 8 year old does not. When making a decision on punishment, it shouldn't matter what cultural values you have, there is a clear difference between the two that cannot be ignored. And that is the same things here. Dating versus adultery are more different than just different values. So I wouldn't label this as hypocrisy as you are attempting to.

douche 10y ago
If an eight-year-old hasn't been impressed with the immorality of theft by that point then there has been a serious lapse of parental and even basic community policing.
- douche 10y ago
  Apparently it is not okay to expect parents to teach their children that it is not acceptable to steal shit by the time they have reached school age...
BurningFrog 10y ago
Without looking up the statistics, I'm confident that "being outed as a cheater" is one of the leading causes of people being "harmed violently" by their spouse.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  But that's generally discouraged by law. Don't some muslim countries have laws violently that punish sexually promiscuous people?

centizen 10y ago

I think it's an important point to bring up, but I don't feel like the same people who were passing judgement on the AM leak are the ones raising concerns here. But if I had to explain the difference, I think it's the differences in potential backlash on the affected users. Majority of Ashely Madison users were not in countries that would severely persecute them for their activities.

basseq 10y ago
Yet the consequences for AM users could be severe as well (divorce, stigmatization, etc.). Yes, physical harm is worse than divorce, but it's a spectrum. Also, interesting thought exercise: there probably was a percentage of AM users that were Muslim. Was it a larger percentage than those users on Muslim Match who would face persecution?
basseq 10y ago
Also note that at least two people committed suicide over the AM leak. Not killed, but death nonetheless. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34044506 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34044506
- centizen 10y ago
  I'm not trying to pretend that was a victimless crime - it was bad and it negatively affected people, some to a deadly extent. But the degree of risk here for all involved is night and day compared between the two.

hackuser 10y ago

The most important difference, IMHO, is this release puts at risk a vulnerable minority. It's like the difference between 'discrimination' against white-skinned Americans and against black or brown-skinned ones: The majority controls almost all the levers of power and institutions, from Washington to the state capital to courts to law enforcement to industry to medicine to everything else. They can and do create structures and make laws to protect themselves, and make a phone call to a buddy if those don't work. People in this group have the empathy and understanding of the rest of the majority, who see you as individuals (for example, they don't tend to write ignorant, thoughtless blanket stereotypes on HN - about their own group; or police don't pull you over when they see driving). If you're politically weak, you're powerless; you depend on the goodwill of the majority, which historically has often attacked you. Ultimately, there is no way to protect yourself - they can kill you and the institutions won't care, or put you in jail if they don't like you. And your only appeal is to more people in the majority; you're trapped. It's a precarious, dangerous position to be in.

projectramo 10y ago

I don't think people have a good response to this point. People don't really look at the statistics, they are reacting based on their assumptions based on what they see on TV. All the people who make this honor killing claim would be shocked to see the statistical difference between those and the violence with cheating.

__david__ 10y ago

Well of course people impress their own values on the situation. Yes, if you step back and put on your impartial glasses, there's no difference. But people aren't robots, and it's difficult to be impartial, even when you don't have a horse in the race. I find it completely natural, in our society, for people to be rather gleeful about the whole Ashley Madison thing—having cheaters (which goes against a large portion of the population's send of morality) be "punished" for their crimes feels just and karmic. It isn't really, but it feels that way. It rubs that high ground moral compass part of your brain (or maybe it's just schadenfreude). Either way, it's not necessarily wrong or unexpected—it's just the way people's brains tend to work. I can guarantee you there are some rabidly anti-muslim folk out there that feel gleeful about this hack, but that segment of the population is far, far smaller than the segment that feels adultery is wrong.