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I wrote my post about "Don't ask me for a date" in reponse to a specific comment that did not outright come out and use the term date. I left the comment out of

by Mz 10y ago

I wrote my post about "Don't ask me for a date" in reponse to a specific comment that did not outright come out and use the term date. I left the comment out of my post and have no plans to describe it further because I am not interested in naming and shaming the individual that inspired my reaction. There have been other incidents where it became clear to me that the individual's interest in me was romantic in nature. I wouod be hard pressed to prove that to anyone. Nonethless, I have found it useful to blog about such things. It has changed my experience of HN for the better. I have studied social phenomenon both formally and informally for a lot of years. In a nutshell, you do not need to announce that egregiously bad things are not okay when you establish a standard of real respect. Of course, that won't stop all of it. But the overall character of the experience can be modified.

mindslight 10y ago
Regardless of the specific content, that comment stuck with you enough to become a thing. Otherwise it would have been brushed off, forgotten about, and we wouldn't be talking about it. I was only pointing out how something can be objectively very rare, yet still personally intense. > Of course, that won't stop all of it This is the crux of my point. The egregious things are already outliers - I don't think hitting on someone has ever been within the HN community standards, and your anecdata implies the ratio is better than 1:10,000. At that rarity, it's going to be awfully hard to even analyze how to shrink that number further. Rereading the original post, it seems like the specific unwanted behavior in this case is having random (male) readers try to friend a young woman on Facebook with hopes of hitting on her. If that ratio were actually under say 1:1000, I don't know that we'd even be here as a species. If either situation were limited to a small town, there would be a manageable number of occurrences over a longer time with a wider social sphere to police them. But at Internet scale, a small chance times a stateless flash mob causes an immediate intense issue.
- Mz 10y ago
  It wasn't a single comment and some of the more egregious things that have been said to me on HN were deleted before the edit window closed. In fact, accounts were recently banned by the mods over a particularly ugly and sexually explicit personal attack against me (which was deleted before the edit window closed). I don't believe the overall pattern of behavior where women get male attention that is motivated primarily by sexual interest is remotely as rare as you are suggesting. We would not be having this conversation at all if that were the case. Women do get treated differently than men online. I am hardly the only one that sees that.
  - mindslight 10y ago
    I'm not saying that the occurrences themselves are rare to the recipients of them. But when viewed in the context of how many people one is actually interacting with, the fraction of boneheaded anti-social behavior is small. My ratios were meant as lower bounds. As in, I would expect at least 1 in 1000 readers to attempt to friend the author [0], especially as such an action can be plausibly denied as just friendly professional networking. In reality that number is much higher [1], but I'm using a conservative estimate to make the point that even if it is this rare, multiplied by a huge audience still creates an issue. [0] I certainly wouldn't do so myself and I'm not condoning the behavior either. I'm just saying that there are going to be at least this many asshats. [1] In fact I now see that the original post only had 3k views, so I should revise that to 1:100 - without contradiction.

by Mz 10y ago

mindslight 10y ago

Regardless of the specific content, that comment stuck with you enough to become a thing. Otherwise it would have been brushed off, forgotten about, and we wouldn't be talking about it. I was only pointing out how something can be objectively very rare, yet still personally intense. > Of course, that won't stop all of it This is the crux of my point. The egregious things are already outliers - I don't think hitting on someone has ever been within the HN community standards, and your anecdata implies the ratio is better than 1:10,000. At that rarity, it's going to be awfully hard to even analyze how to shrink that number further. Rereading the original post, it seems like the specific unwanted behavior in this case is having random (male) readers try to friend a young woman on Facebook with hopes of hitting on her. If that ratio were actually under say 1:1000, I don't know that we'd even be here as a species. If either situation were limited to a small town, there would be a manageable number of occurrences over a longer time with a wider social sphere to police them. But at Internet scale, a small chance times a stateless flash mob causes an immediate intense issue.

Mz 10y ago
It wasn't a single comment and some of the more egregious things that have been said to me on HN were deleted before the edit window closed. In fact, accounts were recently banned by the mods over a particularly ugly and sexually explicit personal attack against me (which was deleted before the edit window closed). I don't believe the overall pattern of behavior where women get male attention that is motivated primarily by sexual interest is remotely as rare as you are suggesting. We would not be having this conversation at all if that were the case. Women do get treated differently than men online. I am hardly the only one that sees that.
- mindslight 10y ago
  I'm not saying that the occurrences themselves are rare to the recipients of them. But when viewed in the context of how many people one is actually interacting with, the fraction of boneheaded anti-social behavior is small. My ratios were meant as lower bounds. As in, I would expect at least 1 in 1000 readers to attempt to friend the author [0], especially as such an action can be plausibly denied as just friendly professional networking. In reality that number is much higher [1], but I'm using a conservative estimate to make the point that even if it is this rare, multiplied by a huge audience still creates an issue. [0] I certainly wouldn't do so myself and I'm not condoning the behavior either. I'm just saying that there are going to be at least this many asshats. [1] In fact I now see that the original post only had 3k views, so I should revise that to 1:100 - without contradiction.