15 ms·

On All That Fuckery

312 points by idan 6y ago

peltier 6y ago
Nobody deserves all that fuckery. Interesting read.
ggm 6y ago
ICT has a huge problem. We've been collectively in denial about it for far too long. My cohort at compsci classes in uni was a class of ten, in an industry only 20-30 years deep at best and already the gender ratio was in decline. (This is the seventies) I might say I think gamer culture is bound up in this but it's not just about that. Something very toxic is empowered by current s/W engineering. I'm retiring inside ten years. I worry it won't be fixed before I leave the field.
- enriquto 6y ago
  What's ICT?
  - arethuza 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_and_communications_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_and_communications...
  - jjgreen 6y ago
    It's what UK schools called IT when it entered the school curriculum. Not really sure what motivated the C, maybe it justified classes using the nascent web.
    - ggm 6y ago
      Communications. I used it, because "software engineer" is too specific, "engineer" is too broad, and we now have sociologists, artists, AI theoreticians, mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, VLSI design and layout specialists, systems management, network administration, protocol design.... ICT is a useful umbrella term. I do not believe it is UK specific or School specific.
    - Viliam1234 6y ago
      > Not really sure what motivated the C People who don't realize that "communication" is an exchange of information, therefore already included in "information technology"?
- xen0 6y ago
  Even if you completely removed all factors deterring women from going into CS tomorrow, drastically improved the gender ratio in courses beginning next year, it would still take years for that to affect the ratio in industry. And then you still have to fix any issues pushing them out of industry once they're already there.
  - ggm 6y ago
    I hate this, but, I think you're right.
teraku 6y ago
Lots of energy and thanks for taking the time to protocol your experiences! Stay strong! The amount of malice is just very sad
educationcto 6y ago
Thank you for documenting and sharing your experience. Nobody should have to go through that yet it happens every day, over and over.
- uniqueid 6y ago
  Yes, because we designed the internet and web "wrong". I've commented with my opinion on this, here on HN, before. In my opinion, the world should have two internets: the current internet, and a "safe for life" internet. The former would serve as a staging area and playground for new features. Just as the internet does today, it would provide, roughly speaking, no accountability and no security. My guess is that its main audience would be high-school seniors and college-age kids. In addition, you'd have a minority of techies, and — yes — some vile wingnuts. The "safe for life" internet's network-layer would have baked-in authentication (eg: part of your IP is a user-id). It would have a protocol for notarization (ie: the ability to have a third party vouch for information. eg: the choice to tie your real name to your user-id, or remain pseudonymous). Its "web" markup would be far simpler and more semantic (no per-site styles, no dynamic features, no scripting). When someone invents a very useful web feature/paradigm on the old internet/web, the new internet's web-standard could add special tags to support it. So, for example, the NewW3C could introduce a set of "store-front" tags with which one could create an entire online-store without any scripting. The NewW3C would include all sorts of functionality, eg: tags to host a Twitch-like site to stream video, with no JS whatsoever. With this sort of accountability, the alternate internet would finally provide the ability to effectively moderate — bad actors wouldn't easily "respawn" a sockpuppet or bot account, to evade a ban. It would make commerce and data-sharing much safer (via the lack of dynamic features). The situation today is absurd. What content do we want the web to promote: interesting photos of Japanese food, by a serious developer... or hackneyed ramblings by a bunch of 20-year old trolls? The internet we have today is "wrong" for most people.
  - Hitton 6y ago
    Are you seriously proposing totalitarian internet? So let's think who would adopt it first. My guess: China, Russia, Belarus, maybe even North Koreans would finally join internet.
catbuttes 6y ago
Normally I don't support going to peoples employers for shit they do outside of working hours, but I am willing to bet that some of those fucknuggets were using work email addresses/accounts. If I was their boss I would want Kat/Github to reach out and let me know about this. By using their work accounts, they are stating that the company condones their behaviour - and I suspect that isn't the case in the majority of cases. I would definitely want to know if any of my employees were engaging in this shit so I could explain in very simple terms why it is unacceptable - because they clearly don't get it on their own.
- xen0 6y ago
  I wonder the consequences of having an account blocked or suspended if your employer used Github. And including your employer to an account you used for harassment would not, I think, be unfair grounds for "disciplinary action".
  - wombatmobile 6y ago
    I don't know why people do this, but to figure out how to stop it, we need to understand it, don't we? How? How about, if any employer wants to hold one of these employees to account, how about requiring they make a video apology that begins with an admission of what they did, and an explanation of what was going on in their mind when they did it? Anonymise the subject and make it public? Give it to university psych departments for study?
    - Nasrudith 6y ago
      In the US at least that makes them a liability ticking time bomb to an employer, especially if they go beyond mere "asshole jokes" like the bloat removal which deletes everything. Since if the employer got involved in a discrimination or sexual harassment lawsuit later knowing about it makes them look very willfully negligent and complicit in a lawsuit. The ironic thing about it being for a "wrong reason" is that the incentive doesn't depend upon character of the employer.
    - chkaloon 6y ago
iagovar 6y ago
> Fix. This. Shit. How? I mean, what do you suggest? > It's a white supremacy problem. US Cultural hegemony is inevitable, but please, try to contain this stuff in your anglo world, everytime it spills over other countries it's not an improvement.
- lvturner 6y ago
  She's already done step one - highlighted the issue - I had no idea this kind of behaviour was prevalent and if I ever caught one of my employees engaging in it, they'd be out the door.
  - iagovar 6y ago
    This issues have been highlighted by at least a decade now, when I started to read english media and sites. If you had no idea, then congratulations, you saved yourself a lot of drama.
- ric2b 6y ago
  > How? I mean, what do you suggest? Not hiring people like this is a way to fix the culture.
  - iagovar 6y ago
    I don't think so, not even comment that won't be possible.
rmtech 6y ago
I don't think we should be normalizing using github for this kind of thing. Ultimately, everything is downstream of culture, and if it becomes the norm that one uses Github for (essentially) Instagramming your food, then Github will become Instagram/Tumblr/whatever. I don't expect anyone to agree with the point I'm making, I just want it to be noted so that in 5-10 years when Github succumbs and becomes a place that's not really used for code - or whatever other pathological outcomes the blue-haired ones create, nobody will say "wow, who could have predicted this!" The person who submitted a pull request deleting everything to "fix bloat" did exactly the right thing. This should probably even be a site policy.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
drosan 6y ago
> It's a white supremacy problem. oh i knew it, another whiny-bitchy post ehmke-style. take your sjw bullshit to some other place, preferrably 6ft underground.
throwaway77384 6y ago
I keep thinking back of the days of the wild west of the internet, when I was a teenager. Back then, 'trolling' felt like it was done in 'good spirit', and it seemed as though everyone was sort of 'in on it', maybe because people shared similar values and knew there was no ill-intent behind the 'trolling' of the old days. But at some point (and I suspect it has something to do with money, as always), it turned into a weird team-sport. And political. It's no longer acceptable and needs to end.
- watwut 6y ago
  When was it? Because while my own internet childhood was innocent too, I later found out a lot of very serious harassment was going on at exact that time - me seeing side pieces of it but not knowing full extend of what went on. Back then, you was not supposed to "feed the trolls" so victims just left.
  - throwaway77384 6y ago
    Yeah, from reading the replies here, I am beginning to think that I frequented some rather harmless parts of the internet, while left-right-and-centre, people were getting seriously harmed. It's quite eye opening :/
- piva00 6y ago
  When was that? Because that is not how I remember the internet from 96 onwards at all. Even more if you were involved in gaming communities, as an example: early MMOs were prime time for dogpiling. Trolling used to be more prank-ish but it would already at that time certainly devolve to doxxing and start affecting people's real lives. I remember it took me a long time to stop caring on not leaving traces that people could link to my real name, my real pictures or whatever online. I remember people on online forums salivating when Google came out and was a much better search tool to link an username to an email and from there to your life outside the internet. It was scary to post something confronting these trolls because they could try to find you, they had enough free time for that. So I don't know when the internet was really that naive and innocent place, it had more innocence but this bad side of it was very present from the get go, at least in my experience.
matthewmorgan 6y ago
Maybe try a bit of professionalism and keep your political views away from your place of work
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mijndert 6y ago
How is this post flagged.
- praptak 6y ago
  Out of sight, out of mind? (I hope it's not because enough HN users agree with the haters)
- KKPMW 6y ago
  I am glad it was flagged. People are mainly talking about US politics here. And look at the discussion. Every different opinion is downvoted and dead.
  - justusw 6y ago
    How is gender bias, discrimination and online harassment US politics? Can you point out something in this discussion to me that gives you the impression that this is mainly about US politics? Because I was not under that impression at all.
    - iagovar 6y ago
      You don't realize it, but all this toxicity is mainly an anglo thing. I regularly spend time around spanish, portuguese and some french internet and it's quite different. When there's such drama, participants even use english words to describe this phenomena. It's a clear anglo cultural artifact that spilled over due to US cultural hegemony.
      - AgentME 6y ago
        This is an english forum connected to a California venture firm that frequently discusses American tech companies and their workplaces, so of course you're going to find conversations about things relevant to that here. I find it weird to see this when I rarely see comments so strongly arguing that a subject is too US-centric for HN in threads about stuff like the San Francisco housing market, American workplaces, or other aspects of online sites.
DC-3 6y ago
It's insecurity. I browse /g/ sometimes and while there's some very talented and interesting engineers there, there's also a lot of people who are trying to get into programming because it's the path of least resistance for a socially awkward young white guy who spends 18 hours a day on a computer. I think these vitriolic threads mostly involve this latter group of users. Unfortunately not everyone is disposed towards becoming a good programmer and these guys don't tend to have the best study skills or work ethic anyway, so they often struggle to acquire the skills that they believe are their only way of finding success in life. This causes them to lash out with great ferocity at people who are both technologically able and socially graceful - especially women and non-white people. It infuriates them that these normies with friendship groups and romantic partners and progressive political views are able to do the things that they are inclined to believe are the sole preserve of the lonely basement dwelling nerd, and do those things much better than they can. So they convince themselves that when a non-white woman gets hired in tech it's all the fault of the (((diversity thought police))) and that she's actually a technological incompetent, because to believe otherwise would shatter their world view and force them to come to terms with their own mediocrity.
- nix23 6y ago
  >young white guy who You see what your doing here right?
  - DC-3 6y ago
    No, not really? I'm pretty sure 4chan is overwhelmingly young white guys. I think that's common knowledge.
    - nix23 6y ago
      >https://www.tinykat.cafe/static/b7462864208b987ab4889dcf7a278076/07a9c/screenshots-asian-slurs2.png https://www.tinykat.cafe/static/b7462864208b987ab4889dcf7a27... >This one in particular stood out to me because it's a very specific type of harassment I've received my whole life, usually from East Asians. Maybe call your commonsense prejudice?
square_usual 6y ago
This has been flagged, and I would like to speak to why it shouldn't have been. HackerNews is a site for hackers, and among hackers there is still a wide cohort of people who will absolutely deny that women face (and more generally, marginalised people) do not face hate for who they are. This ought to stay up, just so we have another very visible example of what tonnes of people go through.
- waihtis 6y ago
  Per the guidelines, hacker news is a "site for things that hackers might find interesting." Based on that, having the sufficient amount of flaggings suggests that hackers do not find this interesting. I see why it is important to highlight this, but don't see a reason why HN is the right place for it.
  - monkin 6y ago
    Because it talks about harassment in IT? Those trolls or “kids” as few people names them, are in most cases HN target audience. :)
    - waihtis 6y ago
      > Those trolls or “kids” as few people names them, are in most cases HN target audience. :) Not that I've spent a meaningful amount of time on any "chan", but based on my limited understanding just reducing HN and 4chan into "tech sites" is insufficient. Again, the flaggings are the obvious signal of what interests people here. Why enforce arbitrary moderation on top?
      - monkin 6y ago
        Yes, for me it’s obvious signal that most of them was hurt by this. It’s not about interest.
        waihtis 6y ago
        > It’s not about interest. How do you know? Example: I flag, on every opportunity, posts related to US politics. It's not because I'm "hurt" or annoyed by US politics, it's because I have close to zero interest in them and don't want that to be a content category that takes up space in HN from the actual interesting stuff. I bet many feel the same for posts about social issues like this, whether it's morally right or wrong.
onion2k 6y ago
Charlie Gerard made a Github Action recently that uses tensorflow's toxicity classifier to block some of the more horrible PRs and comments on repos - https://github.com/charliegerard/safe-space https://github.com/charliegerard/safe-space - it'd be good if Github could roll something like that out across the entire platform.
- Qub3d 6y ago
  While neat, this seems like an even more protracted version of the Scunthorpe problem just waiting to happen. We already know mass-automation of morals is problematic (see YouTube, Twitter, Facebook et al's attempts). This stuff is deplorable, but for now it requires human eyeballs and judgement. Perhaps allow for more granularity on repo visibility and interactivity beyond public/private.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    We already know mass-automation of morals is problematic (see YouTube, Twitter, Facebook et al's attempts). This is different. On Facebook, Twitter etc is that they're trying to use AI to automate detecting general speech. That's a hard problem. PRs and comments on GitHub aren't really general speech, which simplifies the issue, and GitHub already has access to billions of legitimate PRs to use as a dataset for training. It is at least worth exploring. I'll also add that while I think such an automated system should be opt-out by default for public repos there absolutely should be an opt-out if people want to use one.
noneeeed 6y ago
I never stop being amazed by how much time and energy people will put into being awful to other people. It's so frustrating that after being in this industry for over 20 years nothing's really improved, and far too many arseholes are still getting a free pass for their arseholery.
- tluyben2 6y ago
  It's getting worse. It used to be socially inadequate highly educated geeks who thought it was funny and/or couldn't really cope with anything other than highly intelligent white males. Now it's far broader than that. Logically because non-phd's can (luckily) work with computers and enter the industry now, but it has the good and bad side effect that people who I would not have to mingle with and who would've never made it to software developer 30 years ago, now suddenly are clients/colleagues etc. This means a rather large (and growing) share of racists, bigots, white supremacists (I thought those were some kind of fringe types living in the woods but then suddenly some rather good coder starts to talk politics to you...) and such. And a lot of guys I know act like they see women coders as equals, but from their subtle (and not so subtle sometimes) actions show they really don't, even while she might have superior skills/experience.
monkin 6y ago
GitHub and internet overall is full of neckbeards and retards hiding under “cute” barely legal anime girls avatars and “uber skills”. But most of them are angry, desperate, and with hate to everyone for their own fails in life. Social media give them more chances to pour out their insults, and feel anonymous. How to fight it? Probably only by bringing such things to the light and shame them publicly. Unfortunately, such people always have their companions who feel the attack in the same way as they do and set off in "defense" mode by ruthless attack on everyone as shown perfectly by Reddit and some "communities" on Twitter. It's a pity there is no "contact person's mother" service that would have ended such internet attacks very quickly. :)
jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
Start banning people, and keep banning until discourse improves. Ban all those users who put in those stupid pull requests. Then add firewall rules blocking every VPN and their entire ISP subnet. Burn it all down. Show them who controls the system. Then there will be tolerance and respect.
- josefx 6y ago
  This is 4chan we are talking about. Most of them wont need a github account until they grow old enough to work. They will only see it as a successful troll and move on to their next target. > Then add firewall rules blocking every VPN and their entire ISP subnet. So you start targeting random people that weren't involved while the trolls watch from the sideline munching on popcorn. Yes, that will show them.
  - jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
    Yeah. And ban you too. And every other complainer and objecter. Participation is a privilege, not a right. Also, punishing the entire group is very effective in the military. I am surprised how consistently the unit will turn on the offender, rather than the individuals who are making up the rules and administering the punishments. I think my proposed strategy will work.
    - josefx 6y ago
      > Also, punishing the entire group is very effective in the military. So how does banning an ISP subnet equate to punishing 4channers? > I am surprised how consistently the unit will turn on the offender That implies that you communicated the reason for the ban and there is actually a consistent group aware of what is going on. Randomly banning vpns and ISP subnets does not imply that.
      - jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
        It just needs the right press releases, precisely timed, carefully worded.
trabant00 6y ago
Unpopular opinion time: nothing to see here but mean kids. Ok, so you insist: some chan kids, triggered by social justice activist (totally lame in their book), went to her github account and made some "funny" PRs. Quality of life impact on victim: zero. Victim, being a social justice activist went to chan to search for discussions about herself. Found kids being mean. I for one am surprised how tame the shit talk is. Her conclusion: WHITE SUPREMACY!!!!!1111oneoneone Really? This is how chans where, are and will always be. If you ever get involved with them in any way they will talk shit about you. They "attack" each other all the time too. That's how chan kids behave. I never saved evidence about my "victimization" on chans because I just laughed about it. But if I did I would have hundreds of screenshots that where a lot more graphic then this (murder porn level) and I am a white cis male (now old too). This has absolutely nothing to do with social justice and everything with mean kids.
- PeterKropotkin 6y ago
  So—because you're used to worse abuse you think it's fine others are subjected to abuse? It seems like you're just opting out of any social responsibility.
  - trabant00 6y ago
    My point was clearly that is not white supremacy, not that it is ok. Please work on your reading comprehension.
- watwut 6y ago
  Your argument for why it is not white supremacy or misogyny is that people like there perpetrators always existed and that they are possibly young? How exactly does the latter disproves the former? The are independent claims.
  - trabant00 6y ago
    If you read my post you can see I mentioned I was the target for chan trolling/abuse/attack (whatever you want to call it) while being a white cis man. Also they attack each other inside the chans while being god knows what every one of them. It has nothing to do with white supremacy or misogyny but with mean kids that will attack anyone.
itronitron 6y ago
Excellent post. Whenever I see the full extent of harassment that an acquaintance endures it usually turns out to be far more than I assumed. So if someone you know is dealing with this keep in mind that there is probably a lot more than they are initially letting on.
joosters 6y ago
The fact that this was flagged so quickly shows that HN and its readers are part of the problem :(
PeterKropotkin 6y ago
Why is this flagged?
- dang 6y ago
  Users flagged it. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html What does [flagged] mean? It means that users flagged a post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on Hacker News. Moderators sometimes add [flagged] for the same reasons, and sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair.
mrkwse 6y ago
I think the call for action by teams/management to ensure sufficient support (including time off) is a really important one. Lots of organisations are investing time and effort into trying to build a more diverse workforce, but the bulk of that attention tends to be in hiring, rather than retaining and supporting minority groups in the workforce.
appleflaxen 6y ago
The behavior demonstrated by the mob is utterly abhorrent, and we should all oppose it as vigorously as possible. But the "suggestions" section is not constructive. > When these events happen to your employees, are you investing actual money to support them? I'm sorry, but you don't even know the human beings on my team. > It's easy to dismiss these trolls as incel 4channers that we shun and don't associate with. Lol no. These are your people. They work at your companies and write your code. They are harassing or doxxing your other employees. This toxic behavior is still very much a part of your tech culture, and you keep rewarding it. Well, after building an airtight case for incredibly gross behavior on the part of the mob, you lost me completely. The implication is that "incel 4channers" are mainstream programmers. They are not. Not even close. I have worked with hundreds, and not one of them is like this. This is the vocal minority that the internet enables to speak out of proportion to their numbers, and make us all miserable. And the phenomenon of a vocal malignant minority is present in every domain, so why are we making this about our colleagues in the tech community? No normal adult with a job, maybe a family, maybe a pet, and a million other things to do has time for this. They are either children, or bitter social and emotional pariahs. I'm extremely sorry this talented programmer had to deal with them, but becoming bitter only fuels their sense of importance. The best revenge is living well.
- Ndymium 6y ago
  > No normal adult with a job, maybe a family, maybe a pet, and a million other things to do has time for this. This is simply not true. "Normal", regular people do this too. I remember a while back a Finnish journalist wrote an article about meeting one of his online abusers[1], who had - on a Finnish copy of 4chan - wished that an immigrant would stab him and his whole family to death. Turned out the offender was a regular family man with a job and young children. He could not offer an explanation for his words and was not politically active. These boards, their super hateful environment, and the presumed anonymity can get even a normal person to sling online hate. Even this person in the article said that his public persona in his normal life was completely different and not representative of his online comments. [1] https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2019/05/30/nettivihaa-tyossaan-kohtaava-sami-koivisto-tapasi-miehen-joka-toivoi-hanen https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2019/05/30/nettivihaa-tyossaan... (in Finnish) EDIT: Found it in English: https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2019/11/06/face-to-face-with-a-man-who-wished-an-asylum-seeker-would-kill-my-family-the https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2019/11/06/face-to-face-with-a...
b280f4cdeabf 6y ago
> Very funny, as I've been writing code to production since 2016, despite not being a skilled developer. I'm sorry... what?? I find this utterly confusing. Why are unskilled devs at GitHub allowed to push code to production?
Toutouxc 6y ago
You can say from the language in those screenshots that at least some of the bullies are not from the US. I don't really know how the US racial 'dynamics' work and feel, as I don't live there, so I'm not taking sides here. There's just one thing I would like to bring your attention to. I'm a white guy, born and raised in Europe, in an almost all-white country (+ Vietnamese and Gypsy minorities, but basically no big racial tensions). In my 20-thousand-people hometown there was a black guy and everyone knew him by name, because he was THE black guy. My country had been through fourty years of communism, then had a revolution and then went through a slow, uphill struggle to become a modern country where people vote in free elections every few years, have MacBooks and drive BMWs too fast. The living standard isn't exactly like Germany or the Great Britain, but we manage. And yet, every time I go online, there are people talking about "white supremacy". About "white privilege". People blaming the whites for slavery and wars, people saying whites are responsible for everything bad that has ever happened to the blacks. There are people who get so offended about everything they slightly disagree with, who are so sensitive and self-righteous, they wouldn't even be taken seriously in my country. To a white person whose ancestors never took part in any colonialism or slavery, the internet feels pretty hostile and just as judgemental as those 4chan weirdos. I don't like feeling guilty and being judged just because I don't support BLM, don't condemn Trump or don't care for "diversity" in companies whose products I use. I don't vote in your elections, I'm not the one who doesn't greet your black neighbor, I didn't install an obscure bipartisan system in your country. I don't feel guilty, yet every time I try to express any of those opinions online I get downvoted into oblivion by a US-centric virtue signalling mob. I understand the world is a complicated place and I kind of let it fly, but there are people getting slowly pushed over the edge by the hostility and shaming. Here's a link [0] to a news site discussion under a BLM related article. The opinions expressed there are pretty much in unison with what I hear from people around me. [0] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=cs&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.idnes.cz%2Fzpravy%2Fzahranicni%2Fseattle-usa-black-lives-matter-cernosi-bydleni-gentrifikace.A200819_162800_zahranicni_jhr%2Fdiskuse https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=cs&tl=en&u=https%3...
- AgentME 6y ago
  Is your point that her politics are bad enough that she deserves this harassment, and is wrong to complain about it?
eacardenes 6y ago
Maybe she deserves it, github is for software code not for your food blog.
drcongo 6y ago
Seems there's enough of these kind of trolls on HN too for this to get flagged. Maybe even some of the same people.
- thinkingemote 6y ago
  I think this is uncharitable and paints users of HN who want to avoid flame as to enemy. Furthermore as shown in the article trolls are happy to comment with their real accounts. Even furthermore an internet troll craves attention. Therefore the very last thing they want is for this to be flagged.
  - drcongo 6y ago
    The alternative is that there's enough people on here who find it uncomfortable when the spotlight is turned on the misogyny and racism that they share, that they flag this kind of article every single time one comes up. It's embarrassing for the community, because tech is deeply toxic and HN, arguably the biggest, most respected tech community online, shuts down every discussion of that toxicity among us. Every time this happens, I lose a little more respect for my fellow HN users, and care less about getting downvoted for calling it out.
    - dang 6y ago
      > shuts down every discussion of that toxicity That's far from accurate. There have been many major discussions. It's true that some people feel that those topics are underrepresented, but that's because every topic is felt to be underrepresented, including the most common topics. It seems to be a consequence of front page space being such a scarce resource [1]. Sometimes people even end up with the idea that the most-commonly-discussed topics are actually being "aggressively removed from discussion" [2]. It's true that users sometimes flag articles that don't deserve to be flagged. We sometimes turn flags off on those. We don't always do that, because not every article on a given topic (e.g. misogyny or racism) is equally likely to support a meaningful discussion. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20scarce&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962
D13Fd 6y ago
This sounds awful and she obviously does not deserve this. No one does or could. These people attacking her are being absolutely horrible and disgustingly wrong. It's sickening. I hope that one day their employers (and really, their friends and family) end up finding out the kinds of things they have been saying. It's a lot harder to be a horrible racist bigot in real life than it is to be a semi-anonymous one on the internet. That said, I would have liked to see more in the "so why me?" section. There are other Asian women in tech, and her "radical" profile honestly seems pretty mundane to me. It's definitely possible that she was just targeted at random like she suggests, but it would be nice if she linked the threads (in addition to screenshotting them) or otherwise provided some more context.
- reeestandard 6y ago
  She mentioned giving talks, and those are floating around online, as well as a decent twitter following. Chances are they just stumbled upon her randomly and decided that pure vitriol was the natural response, as is the way with certain communities.
  - D13Fd 6y ago
    I'd still rather hear her thoughts than guess.
squibbles 6y ago
Free speech is a noble ideal, but it seems like the current implementation of the Internet has turned that ideal on its head. Yes, everyone should be able to say whatever they want to say, but no one should be forced to hear it. The way we implement discussion forums, chats, issue trackers, wikis, etc. is perhaps giving too many privileges to the mob. I am partial to the idea of someone getting to decide, in advance, who they can see or hear. Letting the mob in, and then muting or banning after the fact can be exploited too easily.
- AgentME 6y ago
  >Letting the mob in, and then muting or banning after the fact can be exploited too easily. This seems like the popular wisdom online, but is it really something that's abused so much (at all, or relative to the problem it exists to solve)? I've seen many more places with people terrified of the concept of moderators abusing their powers and places that refused to ban outright harassment and bigotry because the moderators were too worried about being seen as power hungry than I've actually seen power abusing moderators issue too many bans. (If you count "refusing to kick out harassers" as a kind of power abuse through inaction though, then I've seen a lot of that. Maybe this reframing would be helpful in general online.) I believe you can already block people on GitHub and it stops them from interacting with any of your repos, and that doesn't seem too exploitable or broken in my opinion. If anything, they need more features along these lines and what you mentioned.
- smcphile 6y ago
  > I am partial to the idea of someone getting to decide, in advance, who they can see or hear. Letting the mob in, and then muting or banning after the fact can be exploited too easily. I see that that could be done in a private group setting where everyone knows each other. In a forum for the general public though I have difficulty seeing how that could be done. Do you have any implementation details in mind?
  - squibbles 6y ago
    I don't know of an easy or economical way to prevent or discourage abuse of communications. For social communications, the main problem is: How do I find people I like or trust? That is a tough problem given constraints. For network communications (IP), practically any two machines can communicate with each other, which opens up a number of serious security risks.
TurkishPoptart 6y ago
>I also received an email from what appears to be an MRAsian... It's sadly not uncommon to see Asian men upholding white supremacy and targeting Asian women for living our damn lives. This is a bit fishy. The email sender was asking her opinion on certain matters related to racial politics, and our dear author just accused him/them of "upholding white supremacy". This makes me lose sympathy for the author here.
- eutropia 6y ago
  I think you and author have different connotations of white supremacy. It seems to me as though you are thinking Skinheads, KKK, etc. In typical equity/inclusivity language, the breadth of White Supremacy goes a lot farther. It's similar in concept to Structural Racism -- It's not that the MRAsian emailer literally supports Nazis, it's that they're parroting political and societal points that were created as a result of the White Supremacy being the default state in the USA. White Supremacy (i.e, Whites, and in particular, (rich) White Males being the defacto "person" that US policy and culture was/is created for) is essentially the state of the world after centuries of actions and policy based on the idea that the White Man is most deserving the fruits of the world, and that their place must be defended from colored people and women. White Supremacy will remain a fact until the long and hard work of including and raising all other people up to the same level of consideration and opportunity is complete, and society stops transmitting toxic memes which are rooted in it. At least, this is how I understand it. (as a member of the most privileged class; happy to be educated by someone more knowledgeable than I)
ncmncm 6y ago
This mystifies me. They have accounts on Github. Does Github not have any sort of code-of-conduct? If not, why not?
maest 6y ago
I'm curious, what did the poster do to cause 4chan/trols to focus on her? I know she pointed out some stuff in her article (she's a woman, mixed asian background, lists her pronouns on her page), but, usually, there's some sort of inciting incident that causes people to dogpile. To ward off any non-constructive replies, I'll point out from the beggining that I'm not blaming her of anything, and the trolls are _obviously_ in the wrong here.
- klyrs 6y ago
  All it takes is one asshole finding your youtube, github, or whatever. They tell their shithead friends, who yuk it up trying to ruin your life.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- anon43255463 6y ago
  I had the same question so I dug around. As far as I can tell it really is just one anon that hates her for no reason. He's posted a couple threads with vague insults egging people on to comment on her github.
- tomatotomato37 6y ago
  You can trace it yourself by using one of the 4chan archives, but to save you the trouble it started over someone complaining about GitHub having a readme page with a random profile as the example pic, other users looked up that profile, at which point the usual 4chan process took over. Also something about food pics. https://rbt.asia/g/thread/76729744/ https://rbt.asia/g/thread/76729744/ https://rbt.asia/g/thread/76735740/ https://rbt.asia/g/thread/76735740/
- ShamelessC 6y ago
  I know she pointed out some stuff in her article (she's a woman, mixed asian background, lists her pronouns on her page), but, usually, there's some sort of inciting incident that causes people to dogpile. To ward off any non-constructive replies, I'll point out from the beggining that I'm not blaming her of anything, and the trolls are _obviously_ in the wrong here. > she's a woman, mixed asian background, lists her pronouns on her page Not sure if you're familiar with how toxic trolls tend to be, but any one of those things could be reason enough for some (most?) of them.
codingunicorn 6y ago
Thanks for writing this. As a female developer with 60K followers on Instagram, I went through all this: – “Programmers don’t look like that!” – “You’re fake. Some dude writes your content.” – “Are you a model or a coder?” Bullies are not happiest people on the planet: some of them have been harassed or bullied by their parents, in schools etc. I discovered the hard way that when I pay back with the hate, it makes me feel bad and also feeds their hate. The hardest and probably wisest solution is to respond with love to those unhappy folks. Or not responding at all. It's very hard, but it works. – Julia
mrlonglong 6y ago
It's sickening.:-( To see so much hate directed at women.
honest_tovarich 6y ago
If you think is rough, imagine how is for afroamericans and latinos when they interview at your company, and get trolled, dismissed and patronized by the white/asian interviewers, I'm sad you have to experience racism and getting trolled, is not ok. But this is just a very small example of what we have to deal in a day to day basis. I guess renaming `master` to `main` didn't solved the problem , ah?
BTCOG 6y ago
You are never going to be able to control others' speech. The internet went wrong in my opinion when folks started using their real identity and their real life information. When I was growing up and getting online in the early 90's it was the most common of knowledge to use a handle, and never endanger yourself or contaminate your real life with your online persona. I have an ongoing theory that quite a lot of modern day anxiety and stress levels is due to making this switch to always being connected to online conversations with your real identity that you cannot back out of or turn off. All that aside and not trying to go really in depth into that whole pocket theory of mine, it's the same as in real life, it's just amplified. You can't do a whole lot about other's opinions about you, or what they say to you and if you're online and you become a target for any reason it just becomes something you have to deal with on your own terms. It's nasty, it's petty and it's a hurtful thing to continually attack someone else, but it's the internet. All celebrities deal with the way they are talked about online in their own terms. You do understand all the mainstream Brad Pitts, Britney Spears and whoever get death/sexist/racial harassment all the time as well I assume. It's being a public persona that now becomes the problem. You are willingly putting yourself out there where essentially millions of people can online swarm you. It's a responsibility to have all your personal information online, and to talk about what you like, who you are, hobbies and passions and associate these things to your identity on platforms in which millions can hate/obsess/harass. I think it's a very serious mental and social problem, a load that is taxing the entire human psyche right now. It's obvious to me what this is doing to humans, with everyone trying to be a public celebrity for likes and fans. I don't think it's good.
theshadowknows 6y ago
I’ve always wondered if internet trolls are all 14 y/o boys or if some of them are like legal adults. The constructions and logic they use are are so simplistic. Is there a pervasive mental disorder common among trolls? Or are they all just a bunch of bad people?
dakial1 6y ago
Free speech shouldn't be anonymous speech. You can say what you think, but you should be ready to face the consequences of it as the view society has on you will change. Also I think not all kinds of speech should be free. Racism and hate speech should be something to be clearly defined and prohibited (in my country, Brazil, Racism is a crime with clear consequences).
Wald76 6y ago
I’m so sorry people have to suffer from such awful behavior. Last year a troll at my company Slacked his friend a horribly misogynistic remark about a women’s mentorship group meeting. But by mistake, he sent it on the general channel. Within minutes he was fired and escorted out the door by security.
fellellor 6y ago
It’s alarming that github is being used for this bullshit. 4chan is a pile of trash anyway, but GitHub is supposed to be different. This makes me fearful for the future and very sad that people are being harassed in professional platforms like this.
inshadows 6y ago
> Fix. This. Shit. Not trying to defend the bullies but people shit talking on Internet is pretty common thing. If you decide to share your photos and lifestyle, that is if you open the gate to your private space, you have to account for consequences. People mocked other people before the dawn of Internet and unless there's verifiable harm being done I think this should fall under freedom of speech. It was her decision to go public with her private life. I don't see any way to fix this except being tied into mind rewriting program like in Clockwork Orange. If people mock you behind your back, that's life. You may as well ignore them.

312 points by idan 6y ago

Nobody deserves all that fuckery. Interesting read.

ggm 6y ago

ICT has a huge problem. We've been collectively in denial about it for far too long. My cohort at compsci classes in uni was a class of ten, in an industry only 20-30 years deep at best and already the gender ratio was in decline. (This is the seventies) I might say I think gamer culture is bound up in this but it's not just about that. Something very toxic is empowered by current s/W engineering. I'm retiring inside ten years. I worry it won't be fixed before I leave the field.

enriquto 6y ago
What's ICT?
- arethuza 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_and_communications_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_and_communications...
- jjgreen 6y ago
  It's what UK schools called IT when it entered the school curriculum. Not really sure what motivated the C, maybe it justified classes using the nascent web.
  - ggm 6y ago
    Communications. I used it, because "software engineer" is too specific, "engineer" is too broad, and we now have sociologists, artists, AI theoreticians, mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, VLSI design and layout specialists, systems management, network administration, protocol design.... ICT is a useful umbrella term. I do not believe it is UK specific or School specific.
  - Viliam1234 6y ago
    > Not really sure what motivated the C People who don't realize that "communication" is an exchange of information, therefore already included in "information technology"?
xen0 6y ago
Even if you completely removed all factors deterring women from going into CS tomorrow, drastically improved the gender ratio in courses beginning next year, it would still take years for that to affect the ratio in industry. And then you still have to fix any issues pushing them out of industry once they're already there.
- ggm 6y ago
  I hate this, but, I think you're right.

teraku 6y ago

Lots of energy and thanks for taking the time to protocol your experiences! Stay strong! The amount of malice is just very sad

educationcto 6y ago

Thank you for documenting and sharing your experience. Nobody should have to go through that yet it happens every day, over and over.

uniqueid 6y ago
Yes, because we designed the internet and web "wrong". I've commented with my opinion on this, here on HN, before. In my opinion, the world should have two internets: the current internet, and a "safe for life" internet. The former would serve as a staging area and playground for new features. Just as the internet does today, it would provide, roughly speaking, no accountability and no security. My guess is that its main audience would be high-school seniors and college-age kids. In addition, you'd have a minority of techies, and — yes — some vile wingnuts. The "safe for life" internet's network-layer would have baked-in authentication (eg: part of your IP is a user-id). It would have a protocol for notarization (ie: the ability to have a third party vouch for information. eg: the choice to tie your real name to your user-id, or remain pseudonymous). Its "web" markup would be far simpler and more semantic (no per-site styles, no dynamic features, no scripting). When someone invents a very useful web feature/paradigm on the old internet/web, the new internet's web-standard could add special tags to support it. So, for example, the NewW3C could introduce a set of "store-front" tags with which one could create an entire online-store without any scripting. The NewW3C would include all sorts of functionality, eg: tags to host a Twitch-like site to stream video, with no JS whatsoever. With this sort of accountability, the alternate internet would finally provide the ability to effectively moderate — bad actors wouldn't easily "respawn" a sockpuppet or bot account, to evade a ban. It would make commerce and data-sharing much safer (via the lack of dynamic features). The situation today is absurd. What content do we want the web to promote: interesting photos of Japanese food, by a serious developer... or hackneyed ramblings by a bunch of 20-year old trolls? The internet we have today is "wrong" for most people.
- Hitton 6y ago
  Are you seriously proposing totalitarian internet? So let's think who would adopt it first. My guess: China, Russia, Belarus, maybe even North Koreans would finally join internet.

catbuttes 6y ago

Normally I don't support going to peoples employers for shit they do outside of working hours, but I am willing to bet that some of those fucknuggets were using work email addresses/accounts. If I was their boss I would want Kat/Github to reach out and let me know about this. By using their work accounts, they are stating that the company condones their behaviour - and I suspect that isn't the case in the majority of cases. I would definitely want to know if any of my employees were engaging in this shit so I could explain in very simple terms why it is unacceptable - because they clearly don't get it on their own.

xen0 6y ago
I wonder the consequences of having an account blocked or suspended if your employer used Github. And including your employer to an account you used for harassment would not, I think, be unfair grounds for "disciplinary action".
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  I don't know why people do this, but to figure out how to stop it, we need to understand it, don't we? How? How about, if any employer wants to hold one of these employees to account, how about requiring they make a video apology that begins with an admission of what they did, and an explanation of what was going on in their mind when they did it? Anonymise the subject and make it public? Give it to university psych departments for study?
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    In the US at least that makes them a liability ticking time bomb to an employer, especially if they go beyond mere "asshole jokes" like the bloat removal which deletes everything. Since if the employer got involved in a discrimination or sexual harassment lawsuit later knowing about it makes them look very willfully negligent and complicit in a lawsuit. The ironic thing about it being for a "wrong reason" is that the incentive doesn't depend upon character of the employer.
  - chkaloon 6y ago

iagovar 6y ago

> Fix. This. Shit. How? I mean, what do you suggest? > It's a white supremacy problem. US Cultural hegemony is inevitable, but please, try to contain this stuff in your anglo world, everytime it spills over other countries it's not an improvement.

lvturner 6y ago
She's already done step one - highlighted the issue - I had no idea this kind of behaviour was prevalent and if I ever caught one of my employees engaging in it, they'd be out the door.
- iagovar 6y ago
  This issues have been highlighted by at least a decade now, when I started to read english media and sites. If you had no idea, then congratulations, you saved yourself a lot of drama.
ric2b 6y ago
> How? I mean, what do you suggest? Not hiring people like this is a way to fix the culture.
- iagovar 6y ago
  I don't think so, not even comment that won't be possible.

rmtech 6y ago

I don't think we should be normalizing using github for this kind of thing. Ultimately, everything is downstream of culture, and if it becomes the norm that one uses Github for (essentially) Instagramming your food, then Github will become Instagram/Tumblr/whatever. I don't expect anyone to agree with the point I'm making, I just want it to be noted so that in 5-10 years when Github succumbs and becomes a place that's not really used for code - or whatever other pathological outcomes the blue-haired ones create, nobody will say "wow, who could have predicted this!" The person who submitted a pull request deleting everything to "fix bloat" did exactly the right thing. This should probably even be a site policy.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

drosan 6y ago

> It's a white supremacy problem. oh i knew it, another whiny-bitchy post ehmke-style. take your sjw bullshit to some other place, preferrably 6ft underground.

throwaway77384 6y ago

I keep thinking back of the days of the wild west of the internet, when I was a teenager. Back then, 'trolling' felt like it was done in 'good spirit', and it seemed as though everyone was sort of 'in on it', maybe because people shared similar values and knew there was no ill-intent behind the 'trolling' of the old days. But at some point (and I suspect it has something to do with money, as always), it turned into a weird team-sport. And political. It's no longer acceptable and needs to end.

watwut 6y ago
When was it? Because while my own internet childhood was innocent too, I later found out a lot of very serious harassment was going on at exact that time - me seeing side pieces of it but not knowing full extend of what went on. Back then, you was not supposed to "feed the trolls" so victims just left.
- throwaway77384 6y ago
  Yeah, from reading the replies here, I am beginning to think that I frequented some rather harmless parts of the internet, while left-right-and-centre, people were getting seriously harmed. It's quite eye opening :/
piva00 6y ago
When was that? Because that is not how I remember the internet from 96 onwards at all. Even more if you were involved in gaming communities, as an example: early MMOs were prime time for dogpiling. Trolling used to be more prank-ish but it would already at that time certainly devolve to doxxing and start affecting people's real lives. I remember it took me a long time to stop caring on not leaving traces that people could link to my real name, my real pictures or whatever online. I remember people on online forums salivating when Google came out and was a much better search tool to link an username to an email and from there to your life outside the internet. It was scary to post something confronting these trolls because they could try to find you, they had enough free time for that. So I don't know when the internet was really that naive and innocent place, it had more innocence but this bad side of it was very present from the get go, at least in my experience.

matthewmorgan 6y ago

Maybe try a bit of professionalism and keep your political views away from your place of work

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mijndert 6y ago

How is this post flagged.

praptak 6y ago
Out of sight, out of mind? (I hope it's not because enough HN users agree with the haters)
KKPMW 6y ago
I am glad it was flagged. People are mainly talking about US politics here. And look at the discussion. Every different opinion is downvoted and dead.
- justusw 6y ago
  How is gender bias, discrimination and online harassment US politics? Can you point out something in this discussion to me that gives you the impression that this is mainly about US politics? Because I was not under that impression at all.
  - iagovar 6y ago
    You don't realize it, but all this toxicity is mainly an anglo thing. I regularly spend time around spanish, portuguese and some french internet and it's quite different. When there's such drama, participants even use english words to describe this phenomena. It's a clear anglo cultural artifact that spilled over due to US cultural hegemony.
    - AgentME 6y ago
      This is an english forum connected to a California venture firm that frequently discusses American tech companies and their workplaces, so of course you're going to find conversations about things relevant to that here. I find it weird to see this when I rarely see comments so strongly arguing that a subject is too US-centric for HN in threads about stuff like the San Francisco housing market, American workplaces, or other aspects of online sites.

DC-3 6y ago

It's insecurity. I browse /g/ sometimes and while there's some very talented and interesting engineers there, there's also a lot of people who are trying to get into programming because it's the path of least resistance for a socially awkward young white guy who spends 18 hours a day on a computer. I think these vitriolic threads mostly involve this latter group of users. Unfortunately not everyone is disposed towards becoming a good programmer and these guys don't tend to have the best study skills or work ethic anyway, so they often struggle to acquire the skills that they believe are their only way of finding success in life. This causes them to lash out with great ferocity at people who are both technologically able and socially graceful - especially women and non-white people. It infuriates them that these normies with friendship groups and romantic partners and progressive political views are able to do the things that they are inclined to believe are the sole preserve of the lonely basement dwelling nerd, and do those things much better than they can. So they convince themselves that when a non-white woman gets hired in tech it's all the fault of the (((diversity thought police))) and that she's actually a technological incompetent, because to believe otherwise would shatter their world view and force them to come to terms with their own mediocrity.

nix23 6y ago
>young white guy who You see what your doing here right?
- DC-3 6y ago
  No, not really? I'm pretty sure 4chan is overwhelmingly young white guys. I think that's common knowledge.
  - nix23 6y ago
    >https://www.tinykat.cafe/static/b7462864208b987ab4889dcf7a278076/07a9c/screenshots-asian-slurs2.png https://www.tinykat.cafe/static/b7462864208b987ab4889dcf7a27... >This one in particular stood out to me because it's a very specific type of harassment I've received my whole life, usually from East Asians. Maybe call your commonsense prejudice?

square_usual 6y ago

This has been flagged, and I would like to speak to why it shouldn't have been. HackerNews is a site for hackers, and among hackers there is still a wide cohort of people who will absolutely deny that women face (and more generally, marginalised people) do not face hate for who they are. This ought to stay up, just so we have another very visible example of what tonnes of people go through.

waihtis 6y ago
Per the guidelines, hacker news is a "site for things that hackers might find interesting." Based on that, having the sufficient amount of flaggings suggests that hackers do not find this interesting. I see why it is important to highlight this, but don't see a reason why HN is the right place for it.
- monkin 6y ago
  Because it talks about harassment in IT? Those trolls or “kids” as few people names them, are in most cases HN target audience. :)
  - waihtis 6y ago
    > Those trolls or “kids” as few people names them, are in most cases HN target audience. :) Not that I've spent a meaningful amount of time on any "chan", but based on my limited understanding just reducing HN and 4chan into "tech sites" is insufficient. Again, the flaggings are the obvious signal of what interests people here. Why enforce arbitrary moderation on top?
    - monkin 6y ago
      Yes, for me it’s obvious signal that most of them was hurt by this. It’s not about interest.
      - waihtis 6y ago
        > It’s not about interest. How do you know? Example: I flag, on every opportunity, posts related to US politics. It's not because I'm "hurt" or annoyed by US politics, it's because I have close to zero interest in them and don't want that to be a content category that takes up space in HN from the actual interesting stuff. I bet many feel the same for posts about social issues like this, whether it's morally right or wrong.

onion2k 6y ago

Charlie Gerard made a Github Action recently that uses tensorflow's toxicity classifier to block some of the more horrible PRs and comments on repos - https://github.com/charliegerard/safe-space https://github.com/charliegerard/safe-space - it'd be good if Github could roll something like that out across the entire platform.

Qub3d 6y ago
While neat, this seems like an even more protracted version of the Scunthorpe problem just waiting to happen. We already know mass-automation of morals is problematic (see YouTube, Twitter, Facebook et al's attempts). This stuff is deplorable, but for now it requires human eyeballs and judgement. Perhaps allow for more granularity on repo visibility and interactivity beyond public/private.
- onion2k 6y ago
  We already know mass-automation of morals is problematic (see YouTube, Twitter, Facebook et al's attempts). This is different. On Facebook, Twitter etc is that they're trying to use AI to automate detecting general speech. That's a hard problem. PRs and comments on GitHub aren't really general speech, which simplifies the issue, and GitHub already has access to billions of legitimate PRs to use as a dataset for training. It is at least worth exploring. I'll also add that while I think such an automated system should be opt-out by default for public repos there absolutely should be an opt-out if people want to use one.

noneeeed 6y ago

I never stop being amazed by how much time and energy people will put into being awful to other people. It's so frustrating that after being in this industry for over 20 years nothing's really improved, and far too many arseholes are still getting a free pass for their arseholery.

tluyben2 6y ago
It's getting worse. It used to be socially inadequate highly educated geeks who thought it was funny and/or couldn't really cope with anything other than highly intelligent white males. Now it's far broader than that. Logically because non-phd's can (luckily) work with computers and enter the industry now, but it has the good and bad side effect that people who I would not have to mingle with and who would've never made it to software developer 30 years ago, now suddenly are clients/colleagues etc. This means a rather large (and growing) share of racists, bigots, white supremacists (I thought those were some kind of fringe types living in the woods but then suddenly some rather good coder starts to talk politics to you...) and such. And a lot of guys I know act like they see women coders as equals, but from their subtle (and not so subtle sometimes) actions show they really don't, even while she might have superior skills/experience.

monkin 6y ago

GitHub and internet overall is full of neckbeards and retards hiding under “cute” barely legal anime girls avatars and “uber skills”. But most of them are angry, desperate, and with hate to everyone for their own fails in life. Social media give them more chances to pour out their insults, and feel anonymous. How to fight it? Probably only by bringing such things to the light and shame them publicly. Unfortunately, such people always have their companions who feel the attack in the same way as they do and set off in "defense" mode by ruthless attack on everyone as shown perfectly by Reddit and some "communities" on Twitter. It's a pity there is no "contact person's mother" service that would have ended such internet attacks very quickly. :)

jacobwilliamroy 6y ago

Start banning people, and keep banning until discourse improves. Ban all those users who put in those stupid pull requests. Then add firewall rules blocking every VPN and their entire ISP subnet. Burn it all down. Show them who controls the system. Then there will be tolerance and respect.

josefx 6y ago
This is 4chan we are talking about. Most of them wont need a github account until they grow old enough to work. They will only see it as a successful troll and move on to their next target. > Then add firewall rules blocking every VPN and their entire ISP subnet. So you start targeting random people that weren't involved while the trolls watch from the sideline munching on popcorn. Yes, that will show them.
- jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
  Yeah. And ban you too. And every other complainer and objecter. Participation is a privilege, not a right. Also, punishing the entire group is very effective in the military. I am surprised how consistently the unit will turn on the offender, rather than the individuals who are making up the rules and administering the punishments. I think my proposed strategy will work.
  - josefx 6y ago
    > Also, punishing the entire group is very effective in the military. So how does banning an ISP subnet equate to punishing 4channers? > I am surprised how consistently the unit will turn on the offender That implies that you communicated the reason for the ban and there is actually a consistent group aware of what is going on. Randomly banning vpns and ISP subnets does not imply that.
    - jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
      It just needs the right press releases, precisely timed, carefully worded.

trabant00 6y ago

Unpopular opinion time: nothing to see here but mean kids. Ok, so you insist: some chan kids, triggered by social justice activist (totally lame in their book), went to her github account and made some "funny" PRs. Quality of life impact on victim: zero. Victim, being a social justice activist went to chan to search for discussions about herself. Found kids being mean. I for one am surprised how tame the shit talk is. Her conclusion: WHITE SUPREMACY!!!!!1111oneoneone Really? This is how chans where, are and will always be. If you ever get involved with them in any way they will talk shit about you. They "attack" each other all the time too. That's how chan kids behave. I never saved evidence about my "victimization" on chans because I just laughed about it. But if I did I would have hundreds of screenshots that where a lot more graphic then this (murder porn level) and I am a white cis male (now old too). This has absolutely nothing to do with social justice and everything with mean kids.

PeterKropotkin 6y ago
So—because you're used to worse abuse you think it's fine others are subjected to abuse? It seems like you're just opting out of any social responsibility.
- trabant00 6y ago
  My point was clearly that is not white supremacy, not that it is ok. Please work on your reading comprehension.
watwut 6y ago
Your argument for why it is not white supremacy or misogyny is that people like there perpetrators always existed and that they are possibly young? How exactly does the latter disproves the former? The are independent claims.
- trabant00 6y ago
  If you read my post you can see I mentioned I was the target for chan trolling/abuse/attack (whatever you want to call it) while being a white cis man. Also they attack each other inside the chans while being god knows what every one of them. It has nothing to do with white supremacy or misogyny but with mean kids that will attack anyone.

itronitron 6y ago

Excellent post. Whenever I see the full extent of harassment that an acquaintance endures it usually turns out to be far more than I assumed. So if someone you know is dealing with this keep in mind that there is probably a lot more than they are initially letting on.

joosters 6y ago

The fact that this was flagged so quickly shows that HN and its readers are part of the problem :(

PeterKropotkin 6y ago

Why is this flagged?

dang 6y ago
Users flagged it. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html What does [flagged] mean? It means that users flagged a post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on Hacker News. Moderators sometimes add [flagged] for the same reasons, and sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair.

mrkwse 6y ago

I think the call for action by teams/management to ensure sufficient support (including time off) is a really important one. Lots of organisations are investing time and effort into trying to build a more diverse workforce, but the bulk of that attention tends to be in hiring, rather than retaining and supporting minority groups in the workforce.

appleflaxen 6y ago

The behavior demonstrated by the mob is utterly abhorrent, and we should all oppose it as vigorously as possible. But the "suggestions" section is not constructive. > When these events happen to your employees, are you investing actual money to support them? I'm sorry, but you don't even know the human beings on my team. > It's easy to dismiss these trolls as incel 4channers that we shun and don't associate with. Lol no. These are your people. They work at your companies and write your code. They are harassing or doxxing your other employees. This toxic behavior is still very much a part of your tech culture, and you keep rewarding it. Well, after building an airtight case for incredibly gross behavior on the part of the mob, you lost me completely. The implication is that "incel 4channers" are mainstream programmers. They are not. Not even close. I have worked with hundreds, and not one of them is like this. This is the vocal minority that the internet enables to speak out of proportion to their numbers, and make us all miserable. And the phenomenon of a vocal malignant minority is present in every domain, so why are we making this about our colleagues in the tech community? No normal adult with a job, maybe a family, maybe a pet, and a million other things to do has time for this. They are either children, or bitter social and emotional pariahs. I'm extremely sorry this talented programmer had to deal with them, but becoming bitter only fuels their sense of importance. The best revenge is living well.

Ndymium 6y ago
> No normal adult with a job, maybe a family, maybe a pet, and a million other things to do has time for this. This is simply not true. "Normal", regular people do this too. I remember a while back a Finnish journalist wrote an article about meeting one of his online abusers[1], who had - on a Finnish copy of 4chan - wished that an immigrant would stab him and his whole family to death. Turned out the offender was a regular family man with a job and young children. He could not offer an explanation for his words and was not politically active. These boards, their super hateful environment, and the presumed anonymity can get even a normal person to sling online hate. Even this person in the article said that his public persona in his normal life was completely different and not representative of his online comments. [1] https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2019/05/30/nettivihaa-tyossaan-kohtaava-sami-koivisto-tapasi-miehen-joka-toivoi-hanen https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2019/05/30/nettivihaa-tyossaan... (in Finnish) EDIT: Found it in English: https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2019/11/06/face-to-face-with-a-man-who-wished-an-asylum-seeker-would-kill-my-family-the https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2019/11/06/face-to-face-with-a...

b280f4cdeabf 6y ago

> Very funny, as I've been writing code to production since 2016, despite not being a skilled developer. I'm sorry... what?? I find this utterly confusing. Why are unskilled devs at GitHub allowed to push code to production?

Toutouxc 6y ago

You can say from the language in those screenshots that at least some of the bullies are not from the US. I don't really know how the US racial 'dynamics' work and feel, as I don't live there, so I'm not taking sides here. There's just one thing I would like to bring your attention to. I'm a white guy, born and raised in Europe, in an almost all-white country (+ Vietnamese and Gypsy minorities, but basically no big racial tensions). In my 20-thousand-people hometown there was a black guy and everyone knew him by name, because he was THE black guy. My country had been through fourty years of communism, then had a revolution and then went through a slow, uphill struggle to become a modern country where people vote in free elections every few years, have MacBooks and drive BMWs too fast. The living standard isn't exactly like Germany or the Great Britain, but we manage. And yet, every time I go online, there are people talking about "white supremacy". About "white privilege". People blaming the whites for slavery and wars, people saying whites are responsible for everything bad that has ever happened to the blacks. There are people who get so offended about everything they slightly disagree with, who are so sensitive and self-righteous, they wouldn't even be taken seriously in my country. To a white person whose ancestors never took part in any colonialism or slavery, the internet feels pretty hostile and just as judgemental as those 4chan weirdos. I don't like feeling guilty and being judged just because I don't support BLM, don't condemn Trump or don't care for "diversity" in companies whose products I use. I don't vote in your elections, I'm not the one who doesn't greet your black neighbor, I didn't install an obscure bipartisan system in your country. I don't feel guilty, yet every time I try to express any of those opinions online I get downvoted into oblivion by a US-centric virtue signalling mob. I understand the world is a complicated place and I kind of let it fly, but there are people getting slowly pushed over the edge by the hostility and shaming. Here's a link [0] to a news site discussion under a BLM related article. The opinions expressed there are pretty much in unison with what I hear from people around me. [0] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=cs&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.idnes.cz%2Fzpravy%2Fzahranicni%2Fseattle-usa-black-lives-matter-cernosi-bydleni-gentrifikace.A200819_162800_zahranicni_jhr%2Fdiskuse https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=cs&tl=en&u=https%3...

AgentME 6y ago
Is your point that her politics are bad enough that she deserves this harassment, and is wrong to complain about it?

eacardenes 6y ago

Maybe she deserves it, github is for software code not for your food blog.

drcongo 6y ago

Seems there's enough of these kind of trolls on HN too for this to get flagged. Maybe even some of the same people.

thinkingemote 6y ago
I think this is uncharitable and paints users of HN who want to avoid flame as to enemy. Furthermore as shown in the article trolls are happy to comment with their real accounts. Even furthermore an internet troll craves attention. Therefore the very last thing they want is for this to be flagged.
- drcongo 6y ago
  The alternative is that there's enough people on here who find it uncomfortable when the spotlight is turned on the misogyny and racism that they share, that they flag this kind of article every single time one comes up. It's embarrassing for the community, because tech is deeply toxic and HN, arguably the biggest, most respected tech community online, shuts down every discussion of that toxicity among us. Every time this happens, I lose a little more respect for my fellow HN users, and care less about getting downvoted for calling it out.
  - dang 6y ago
    > shuts down every discussion of that toxicity That's far from accurate. There have been many major discussions. It's true that some people feel that those topics are underrepresented, but that's because every topic is felt to be underrepresented, including the most common topics. It seems to be a consequence of front page space being such a scarce resource [1]. Sometimes people even end up with the idea that the most-commonly-discussed topics are actually being "aggressively removed from discussion" [2]. It's true that users sometimes flag articles that don't deserve to be flagged. We sometimes turn flags off on those. We don't always do that, because not every article on a given topic (e.g. misogyny or racism) is equally likely to support a meaningful discussion. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20scarce&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962

D13Fd 6y ago

This sounds awful and she obviously does not deserve this. No one does or could. These people attacking her are being absolutely horrible and disgustingly wrong. It's sickening. I hope that one day their employers (and really, their friends and family) end up finding out the kinds of things they have been saying. It's a lot harder to be a horrible racist bigot in real life than it is to be a semi-anonymous one on the internet. That said, I would have liked to see more in the "so why me?" section. There are other Asian women in tech, and her "radical" profile honestly seems pretty mundane to me. It's definitely possible that she was just targeted at random like she suggests, but it would be nice if she linked the threads (in addition to screenshotting them) or otherwise provided some more context.

reeestandard 6y ago
She mentioned giving talks, and those are floating around online, as well as a decent twitter following. Chances are they just stumbled upon her randomly and decided that pure vitriol was the natural response, as is the way with certain communities.
- D13Fd 6y ago
  I'd still rather hear her thoughts than guess.

squibbles 6y ago

Free speech is a noble ideal, but it seems like the current implementation of the Internet has turned that ideal on its head. Yes, everyone should be able to say whatever they want to say, but no one should be forced to hear it. The way we implement discussion forums, chats, issue trackers, wikis, etc. is perhaps giving too many privileges to the mob. I am partial to the idea of someone getting to decide, in advance, who they can see or hear. Letting the mob in, and then muting or banning after the fact can be exploited too easily.

AgentME 6y ago
>Letting the mob in, and then muting or banning after the fact can be exploited too easily. This seems like the popular wisdom online, but is it really something that's abused so much (at all, or relative to the problem it exists to solve)? I've seen many more places with people terrified of the concept of moderators abusing their powers and places that refused to ban outright harassment and bigotry because the moderators were too worried about being seen as power hungry than I've actually seen power abusing moderators issue too many bans. (If you count "refusing to kick out harassers" as a kind of power abuse through inaction though, then I've seen a lot of that. Maybe this reframing would be helpful in general online.) I believe you can already block people on GitHub and it stops them from interacting with any of your repos, and that doesn't seem too exploitable or broken in my opinion. If anything, they need more features along these lines and what you mentioned.
smcphile 6y ago
> I am partial to the idea of someone getting to decide, in advance, who they can see or hear. Letting the mob in, and then muting or banning after the fact can be exploited too easily. I see that that could be done in a private group setting where everyone knows each other. In a forum for the general public though I have difficulty seeing how that could be done. Do you have any implementation details in mind?
- squibbles 6y ago
  I don't know of an easy or economical way to prevent or discourage abuse of communications. For social communications, the main problem is: How do I find people I like or trust? That is a tough problem given constraints. For network communications (IP), practically any two machines can communicate with each other, which opens up a number of serious security risks.

TurkishPoptart 6y ago

>I also received an email from what appears to be an MRAsian... It's sadly not uncommon to see Asian men upholding white supremacy and targeting Asian women for living our damn lives. This is a bit fishy. The email sender was asking her opinion on certain matters related to racial politics, and our dear author just accused him/them of "upholding white supremacy". This makes me lose sympathy for the author here.

eutropia 6y ago
I think you and author have different connotations of white supremacy. It seems to me as though you are thinking Skinheads, KKK, etc. In typical equity/inclusivity language, the breadth of White Supremacy goes a lot farther. It's similar in concept to Structural Racism -- It's not that the MRAsian emailer literally supports Nazis, it's that they're parroting political and societal points that were created as a result of the White Supremacy being the default state in the USA. White Supremacy (i.e, Whites, and in particular, (rich) White Males being the defacto "person" that US policy and culture was/is created for) is essentially the state of the world after centuries of actions and policy based on the idea that the White Man is most deserving the fruits of the world, and that their place must be defended from colored people and women. White Supremacy will remain a fact until the long and hard work of including and raising all other people up to the same level of consideration and opportunity is complete, and society stops transmitting toxic memes which are rooted in it. At least, this is how I understand it. (as a member of the most privileged class; happy to be educated by someone more knowledgeable than I)

ncmncm 6y ago

This mystifies me. They have accounts on Github. Does Github not have any sort of code-of-conduct? If not, why not?

maest 6y ago

I'm curious, what did the poster do to cause 4chan/trols to focus on her? I know she pointed out some stuff in her article (she's a woman, mixed asian background, lists her pronouns on her page), but, usually, there's some sort of inciting incident that causes people to dogpile. To ward off any non-constructive replies, I'll point out from the beggining that I'm not blaming her of anything, and the trolls are _obviously_ in the wrong here.

klyrs 6y ago
All it takes is one asshole finding your youtube, github, or whatever. They tell their shithead friends, who yuk it up trying to ruin your life.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
anon43255463 6y ago
I had the same question so I dug around. As far as I can tell it really is just one anon that hates her for no reason. He's posted a couple threads with vague insults egging people on to comment on her github.
tomatotomato37 6y ago
You can trace it yourself by using one of the 4chan archives, but to save you the trouble it started over someone complaining about GitHub having a readme page with a random profile as the example pic, other users looked up that profile, at which point the usual 4chan process took over. Also something about food pics. https://rbt.asia/g/thread/76729744/ https://rbt.asia/g/thread/76729744/ https://rbt.asia/g/thread/76735740/ https://rbt.asia/g/thread/76735740/
ShamelessC 6y ago
I know she pointed out some stuff in her article (she's a woman, mixed asian background, lists her pronouns on her page), but, usually, there's some sort of inciting incident that causes people to dogpile. To ward off any non-constructive replies, I'll point out from the beggining that I'm not blaming her of anything, and the trolls are _obviously_ in the wrong here. > she's a woman, mixed asian background, lists her pronouns on her page Not sure if you're familiar with how toxic trolls tend to be, but any one of those things could be reason enough for some (most?) of them.

codingunicorn 6y ago

Thanks for writing this. As a female developer with 60K followers on Instagram, I went through all this: – “Programmers don’t look like that!” – “You’re fake. Some dude writes your content.” – “Are you a model or a coder?” Bullies are not happiest people on the planet: some of them have been harassed or bullied by their parents, in schools etc. I discovered the hard way that when I pay back with the hate, it makes me feel bad and also feeds their hate. The hardest and probably wisest solution is to respond with love to those unhappy folks. Or not responding at all. It's very hard, but it works. – Julia

mrlonglong 6y ago

It's sickening.:-( To see so much hate directed at women.

honest_tovarich 6y ago

If you think is rough, imagine how is for afroamericans and latinos when they interview at your company, and get trolled, dismissed and patronized by the white/asian interviewers, I'm sad you have to experience racism and getting trolled, is not ok. But this is just a very small example of what we have to deal in a day to day basis. I guess renaming `master` to `main` didn't solved the problem , ah?

BTCOG 6y ago

You are never going to be able to control others' speech. The internet went wrong in my opinion when folks started using their real identity and their real life information. When I was growing up and getting online in the early 90's it was the most common of knowledge to use a handle, and never endanger yourself or contaminate your real life with your online persona. I have an ongoing theory that quite a lot of modern day anxiety and stress levels is due to making this switch to always being connected to online conversations with your real identity that you cannot back out of or turn off. All that aside and not trying to go really in depth into that whole pocket theory of mine, it's the same as in real life, it's just amplified. You can't do a whole lot about other's opinions about you, or what they say to you and if you're online and you become a target for any reason it just becomes something you have to deal with on your own terms. It's nasty, it's petty and it's a hurtful thing to continually attack someone else, but it's the internet. All celebrities deal with the way they are talked about online in their own terms. You do understand all the mainstream Brad Pitts, Britney Spears and whoever get death/sexist/racial harassment all the time as well I assume. It's being a public persona that now becomes the problem. You are willingly putting yourself out there where essentially millions of people can online swarm you. It's a responsibility to have all your personal information online, and to talk about what you like, who you are, hobbies and passions and associate these things to your identity on platforms in which millions can hate/obsess/harass. I think it's a very serious mental and social problem, a load that is taxing the entire human psyche right now. It's obvious to me what this is doing to humans, with everyone trying to be a public celebrity for likes and fans. I don't think it's good.

theshadowknows 6y ago

I’ve always wondered if internet trolls are all 14 y/o boys or if some of them are like legal adults. The constructions and logic they use are are so simplistic. Is there a pervasive mental disorder common among trolls? Or are they all just a bunch of bad people?

dakial1 6y ago

Free speech shouldn't be anonymous speech. You can say what you think, but you should be ready to face the consequences of it as the view society has on you will change. Also I think not all kinds of speech should be free. Racism and hate speech should be something to be clearly defined and prohibited (in my country, Brazil, Racism is a crime with clear consequences).

Wald76 6y ago

I’m so sorry people have to suffer from such awful behavior. Last year a troll at my company Slacked his friend a horribly misogynistic remark about a women’s mentorship group meeting. But by mistake, he sent it on the general channel. Within minutes he was fired and escorted out the door by security.

fellellor 6y ago

It’s alarming that github is being used for this bullshit. 4chan is a pile of trash anyway, but GitHub is supposed to be different. This makes me fearful for the future and very sad that people are being harassed in professional platforms like this.

inshadows 6y ago

> Fix. This. Shit. Not trying to defend the bullies but people shit talking on Internet is pretty common thing. If you decide to share your photos and lifestyle, that is if you open the gate to your private space, you have to account for consequences. People mocked other people before the dawn of Internet and unless there's verifiable harm being done I think this should fall under freedom of speech. It was her decision to go public with her private life. I don't see any way to fix this except being tied into mind rewriting program like in Clockwork Orange. If people mock you behind your back, that's life. You may as well ignore them.