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Aside from the personal stuff between her and Adria, I think she has a good grasp of the situation. (i.e. I agree with her) However, I find one thing troubling:

by ceol 14y ago

Aside from the personal stuff between her and Adria, I think she has a good grasp of the situation. (i.e. I agree with her) However, I find one thing troubling: > Adria reinforced the idea of us as threats to men, as unreasonable, as hard to work with… as bitches. (From here addressed to Amanda, should she be unlucky enough to stumble upon this thread) I don't believe you should be worrying about whether what you do reinforces someone else's preconceived notion of your gender. Do you really think someone who already sees women as uppity b-tches would suddenly change their tone just because you don't adhere to their stereotype? No, they're going to write you off as an exception. "No no, you're not like them! You're one of the good ones!" But as soon as you do something they don't like? "What a fucking b-tch. This just proves women don't belong in tech. etc etc" However, I'm a guy. I don't really have the right to tell you how you should think about your own oppression, much like how no one has the right to tell Adria how she should have handled calling those two guys out— aside from doing something illegal, which posting a photo on Twitter most certainly is not. I guess what I'm saying is that I agree everyone lost, but one person lost a hell of a lot more than anyone else. That guy whose name we still don't know? He's gotten job offers. Play Haven, the place that actually fired him? Unscathed. Adria? Constant harassment, rape and death threats, and now presumably fired from her job while her former employer is being DDoS'd. All because she posted a picture of some guys on Twitter. Think about that the next time a thread comes up about the sexism women face in the programming community. You can't write it off as a bunch of trolls this time, because a lot of the backlash was directly from HN.

belorn 14y ago
Before you accuse everyone on HN to be sexists, please provide evidence that her gender is the cause of the comments. If a guy would had overheard two women, and found what they said to be offensive and hanged them out on twitter, would people send him roses instead? Say one of the women got fired. Everyone would cheer right? The DDoS and the personal attacks are horrible, wrong, and just plain bad, but I serious doubt to the point of disbelif that all this is because the gender of the twitter user.
- ceol 14y ago
  I don't have the effort to link every single comment, but please go into any of the major discussions (that have since been removed from the front page) and ctrl+F "feminist". Go and look at the vitriol being directed at her, look at the specific insults used (that Amanda mentions in her post.) If it didn't start because of her gender, it most certainly became about her gender.
  - belorn 14y ago
    > If it didn't start because of her gender, it most certainly became about her gender. So what you are saying is that the insults did not start because of her gender, but the type of insults used are. Peoples vocabulary when it comes to insults are limited. The average west person's vocabulary when it comes to insults are built on sexism, racism, agism, religious hatred, and homophobia. If we go east, nationality also pops in. If we go middle east, religious hatred starts to take a more prominent form. This is quite a large social problem, and is no where close limited to the technical crowd. People on hacker news a people too, and they are thus limited in their insult vocabulary like everyone else. Thankfully, people who use such insults are commonly down voted and/or removed. That's the community, dealing with bad behavior with the tools given to us. Last, I thought I would go and check and do some searches for feminist in those threads. The three largest thread are 5419071, 5415256 and 5410515. Neither one has a single comment calling Adria a feminist. Not a single one. Maybe you should go and re-read them instead of throwing down false statements?
cheald 14y ago
First of all, I want to say that in absolutely no way are the rape/death threats in any way acceptable or excusable. There are lots of ways to criticize someone without threatening physical violence. Shame on anyone who chooses that route. That said, I don't think that Adria is making off worse here because she's a woman, or because of inherent sexism in the community - she's making off worse because she was the aggressor, and because she decided to pick a fight and decided to go all-in on it. She's a bully, and if there's anything that the nerdosphere hates with a burning passion, it's a bully. The guy she photographed privately apologized and then publicly published an apology defending Adria. He's done his make-good on this. Adria, on the other hand, has apparently determined she's going down with this ship, and is riding it all the way to the bottom. If she's not willing to compromise and is instead determined to be a martyr, it's difficult to dredge up sympathy that she's getting a harder bargain than the guy she decided to pick on.
- ceol 14y ago
  Like I said in another reply, and like the author of this submission said in her post, many of the threats and harassing statements were very much specific to her gender (and some of her race.) Why is it that when a woman does something wrong, the hacker/tech community's first reaction is to throw around gendered slurs? Don't give me this crap about how every other community does it. That's not an excuse. We have to start somewhere, and we should be better than this, but we're not. WRT her not apologizing for posting his photograph: What do you think would happen if she did? She's been fired, she's been threatened with rape and with death, she's been harassed on a constant basis since this began. Do you think her apology will have any effect? Look at how her (rather benign and polite) comment was received: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399047 Scroll down and look at all those dead comments. Do you think her coming out now and saying, "I'm so sorry for publishing your photograph" would do anything? I'd like to add, where is the lynch mob against these guys that their photograph was supposed to cause? I see a lot of people saying "you're publicly shaming them!" and "you tried to get a witch hunt going!" but... there wasn't one. She was just posting their photograph, and nothing in the public sphere happened to them. Only one guy was fired, and no one knew about that until he went and made an account on HN himself and said it.
- deleted 14y ago

by ceol 14y ago

belorn 14y ago

Before you accuse everyone on HN to be sexists, please provide evidence that her gender is the cause of the comments. If a guy would had overheard two women, and found what they said to be offensive and hanged them out on twitter, would people send him roses instead? Say one of the women got fired. Everyone would cheer right? The DDoS and the personal attacks are horrible, wrong, and just plain bad, but I serious doubt to the point of disbelif that all this is because the gender of the twitter user.

ceol 14y ago
I don't have the effort to link every single comment, but please go into any of the major discussions (that have since been removed from the front page) and ctrl+F "feminist". Go and look at the vitriol being directed at her, look at the specific insults used (that Amanda mentions in her post.) If it didn't start because of her gender, it most certainly became about her gender.
- belorn 14y ago
  > If it didn't start because of her gender, it most certainly became about her gender. So what you are saying is that the insults did not start because of her gender, but the type of insults used are. Peoples vocabulary when it comes to insults are limited. The average west person's vocabulary when it comes to insults are built on sexism, racism, agism, religious hatred, and homophobia. If we go east, nationality also pops in. If we go middle east, religious hatred starts to take a more prominent form. This is quite a large social problem, and is no where close limited to the technical crowd. People on hacker news a people too, and they are thus limited in their insult vocabulary like everyone else. Thankfully, people who use such insults are commonly down voted and/or removed. That's the community, dealing with bad behavior with the tools given to us. Last, I thought I would go and check and do some searches for feminist in those threads. The three largest thread are 5419071, 5415256 and 5410515. Neither one has a single comment calling Adria a feminist. Not a single one. Maybe you should go and re-read them instead of throwing down false statements?

cheald 14y ago

First of all, I want to say that in absolutely no way are the rape/death threats in any way acceptable or excusable. There are lots of ways to criticize someone without threatening physical violence. Shame on anyone who chooses that route. That said, I don't think that Adria is making off worse here because she's a woman, or because of inherent sexism in the community - she's making off worse because she was the aggressor, and because she decided to pick a fight and decided to go all-in on it. She's a bully, and if there's anything that the nerdosphere hates with a burning passion, it's a bully. The guy she photographed privately apologized and then publicly published an apology defending Adria. He's done his make-good on this. Adria, on the other hand, has apparently determined she's going down with this ship, and is riding it all the way to the bottom. If she's not willing to compromise and is instead determined to be a martyr, it's difficult to dredge up sympathy that she's getting a harder bargain than the guy she decided to pick on.

ceol 14y ago
Like I said in another reply, and like the author of this submission said in her post, many of the threats and harassing statements were very much specific to her gender (and some of her race.) Why is it that when a woman does something wrong, the hacker/tech community's first reaction is to throw around gendered slurs? Don't give me this crap about how every other community does it. That's not an excuse. We have to start somewhere, and we should be better than this, but we're not. WRT her not apologizing for posting his photograph: What do you think would happen if she did? She's been fired, she's been threatened with rape and with death, she's been harassed on a constant basis since this began. Do you think her apology will have any effect? Look at how her (rather benign and polite) comment was received: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399047 Scroll down and look at all those dead comments. Do you think her coming out now and saying, "I'm so sorry for publishing your photograph" would do anything? I'd like to add, where is the lynch mob against these guys that their photograph was supposed to cause? I see a lot of people saying "you're publicly shaming them!" and "you tried to get a witch hunt going!" but... there wasn't one. She was just posting their photograph, and nothing in the public sphere happened to them. Only one guy was fired, and no one knew about that until he went and made an account on HN himself and said it.
deleted 14y ago