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A Natural A/B Test of Harassment

123 points by benologist 12y ago

chiaro 12y ago
A shame the point needs to be repeatedly made. A five minute foray into the wasteland that is twitch chat will show some pretty stark differences between how men and women become targets for trolling and vitriol. While some of the concerns of the whole gamergate mess were perhaps reasonable at some point in time, the whole thing has disappeared under a huge number of people who see their any supposed righteousness as license to indulge in the pettiest of attacks that aligns them with segments of society I'd foolishly thought we'd largely left behind. Seriously, if you're looking for some injustices in the world to help make your life meaningful, you can do a hell of a lot better than "ethics in video game journalism", vitriolic element or no.
- droopyEyelids 12y ago
  I'm commenting to register my frustration with what I call the "harm reductionism fallacy". At it's most extreme point, it can be parodied to something like "You have no right to complain about a problem in your privileged life because people are starving in $COUNTRY" In all it's forms, it's a sort of ridicule directed towards people trying to make their lives better. I believe people have the right to complain about, and try to improve, any and every element of their lives- right down to asking for better/healthier free lunches from their employers. Working for ethics in video game journalism and to reduce nasty sex related comments towards women stands to reform a genuinely nasty cesspool in modern society
  - vacri 12y ago
    The impassioned hysteria over 'ethics in video game journalism' is the problematic part, not the issue itself. And, to be frank, that ridiculous level of hysteria makes it clear that it's not really about ethics in video game journalism. No-one is dead or has been maimed by it. Lives aren't destroyed by it. Basically, it's a good example of dog whistle politics, using a term that is more palatable to push a less palatable agenda: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics
    - paulnechifor 12y ago
      > The impassioned hysteria over 'ethics in video game journalism' is the problematic part, not the issue itself. The fact that people like you are saying that others have no right to be concerned and angry about unethical journalism is the reason for the impassioned hysteria in the first place. > And, to be frank, that ridiculous level of hysteria makes it clear that it's not really about ethics in video game journalism. Really? Tens of publications proclaim gamers dead in unison and you expect a large diverse group of people to be completely calm about it. Edit: Senseless downvotes don't make you right. Edit 2: I am taking downvotes personally because I only see white comments for trolling and spamming on HN.
      - wismer 12y ago
        "It's about ethics" yet most of the moderators of the subreddit /r/KotakuInAction are also moderators of distinctly misogynstic subreddits http://i.imgur.com/3j7uzXZ.jpg http://i.imgur.com/3j7uzXZ.jpg EDIT: You might be taking downvotes too personally.
      - vacri 12y ago
        I've been a heavy gamer for 25 years, with literally hundreds of games in my Steam account (I started out with Amiga floppies), and my heaviest-played games in that steam list have over half a thousand hours on them, each. I'm a heavy gamer, it's my vice, and I've been part of the 'scene' for a long time. So I'm not commenting as an outsider when I say that gamers, as a demographic, are the most self-entitled bunch of whiners I've ever seen. I've worked in tech support, in medicine, in retail, with children... and nothing holds a candle to the gaming community when they feel wronged. Every issue is blown way out of proportion. And they need to be called on it, because otherwise they keep on doing it. I'm so tired of this manufactured outrage. I see less passion in the comments when there's an article about child sexual abuse on a newspaper website, and that's a crime that raises pretty much everyone's hackles. So, speaking as a lifelong heavy gamer, this GamerGate bullshit has little to do with ethics in gaming journalism - a field that is so tangential to the important things in the human experience. Note also that I never said it was nothing to be concerned about or no right to complain; I said that the levels of hysterical concern were ridiculous and overblown. But of course, if you were actually interested in integrity, you wouldn't have characterised my comments of 'ridiculous levels of hysteria' as 'expecting complete calm', as if that's the only other possible option. A classic strawman fallacy. Perhaps you should show some of this integrity that you demand of others? Perhaps I should put it a different way: Issues with the supply of your entertainment are never worth a death threat.
  - aptwebapps 12y ago
    You can be concerned about ethics in game journalism and try to do something about it even though other injustices exist, by my book at least. But the gamergate tag has been effectively taken over by the misogynists and haters. That may not be fair, but it's a fact. If people in the first group continue to use that umbrella they are aiding the people in the second group. Again, not fair, but that's the way it is.
    - undersuit 12y ago
      It's incredibly unfair because the members of gamergate that aren't spewing misogyny and hate can't really start another movement, that movement would just be taken over by the same people they are trying to distance themselves from. So they can't distance themselves from the hate and their movement is being attacked because of the hate coming from these interlopers and Gawker/The Media is going to just continue to inflame the haters. How are people supposed to get anything done?
- Pxtl 12y ago
  I tend to think Gamergate was a brewing culture war that was just looking for a spark to start the fire. Gamer culture has had a persecution complex for well over a generation, particularly with respect to the press - even the gaming press. Being repeatedly insulted and attacked by the media has made them circle their wagons instinctively. Combined with a substantial fraction of gamers that are intensely misogynistic and this ugliness was practically inevitable. The problem is that gamers picked a fight with SJWs, which are effectively their own mirror image - the same obsessiveness and mean-spirited put-downs and in-group high-fives. I mean, the fact that the SJWs are right is almost immaterial - in the words of The Big Lebowski: "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole". Online social justice groups have a knack for utterly alienating and insulting everyone they could ever hope to convince, even those who broadly agree with them. Combine that with Gawker media's spectacular ability to stir the pot, and a few prominent right-wing culture-war bloggers feeding the gamer-gaters' persecution complex, and we're seeing outright radicalization. You isolate and insult a guy and then give him an online culture of like-minded outcasts and they start encouraging each other to do drastic things. There are obvious parallels to other movements of angry young men... It's a perfect storm, and it's only going to get worse before it gets better since anybody who's trying to talk the gamergaters down from the ledge has to have infinite patience for their monomaniacal rationalizations. They see themselves as the defenders of rationality surrounded by SJWs who fling glib insults... and gaming is founded on endlessly grinding against a pointless task for fun. It's profoundly sad to see so many gamers rally behind that gamergate banner. To see harassment and threats and ruining women's lives become the public image of core gamer culture. I'm really worried that this is going to get worse before it gets better. The "us vs. them" mentality of the hardcore gamer world is too old and well-established, and everybody else involved is either feeding into it or is drowned out by the din.
  - ncallaway 12y ago
    I started seeing the phrase "Social Justice Warrior" used a lot as soon as #Gamergate happened. I have yet to see it well defined, though. I realize it's tangential to your point, but I'm curious how would you define or describe a SJW?
    - 12y ago
dvt 12y ago
> It’s pretty easy to look at these messages and see young males acting out in hopes of attention. But what societal and psychological dynamic is at play that they target a female at such a disproportionate rate to a male? Could be a million things. How about testosterone, the sexualization of just about everything online and on TV, and the courage brought on by anonymity on the internet? Of course, asking what "societal and psychological dynamic is at play" shows a very clear naivite on Ms. Greer's part. That is an impossibly difficult question to answer. And like all other overly-broad, overly-difficult questions, it will never be taken seriously. > Running these numbers through a statistical significance test confirms what should be obvious to anyone following Gamergate: with a 99.9% confidence level it is harder to be a woman than a man in the game industry, independent of what you say or do. Maybe, but let's not forget what incident started Gamergate: Zoe Quinn; an entitled, unethical, and hypocritical developer (female or otherwise). Furthermore, I'm sure it's more difficult to be woman pilot, a woman programmer or a woman CEO than their male counterparts. This has been known for a while now. I'm not sure why Gamergate et al. think they stumbled across some novel sociological phenomenon.
- DanBC 12y ago
  Gamergate claims to be about journalistic integrity. I hear the names of women, but never the male journalists. > Maybe, but let's not forget what incident started Gamergate: Zoe Quinn; an entitled, unethical, and hypocritical developer (female or otherwise). You're spreading the same lies.
  - dvt 12y ago
    I'm not spreading any lies. It's incontrovertible that Zoe Quinn had a relationship with a Kotaku editor (a male that has also been shunned publicly). In any other industry, this would be grounds for conflict of interest. Let's not kid ourselves, there is definitely a problem with the lack of women in tech, but Zoe Quinn is not the role model you want.
  - ijk 12y ago
    > Gamergate claims to be about journalistic integrity. I hear the names of women, but never the male journalists. And let's not forget: most of the women who have been attacked have little to nothing to do with journalism. Felicia Day is an actress, for crying out loud!
mcbailey 12y ago
I came to a very different conclusion from the data than the authors. The difference in the numbers was not substantively different (an absolute difference of about 1%) and much, much lower than I would have expected. The difference could easily be explained by other differences between the two founders other than sex and perhaps this could be pointed as evidence that once we removed those factors this small difference would evaporate entirely.
hug 12y ago
What interests me about these discussions is that the common perception seems to be that women face a level of harassment hugely disproportionate to that experienced by men, however studies don't show such a large gap. There was a recent study by Pew[1] that shows the differing levels of harassment faced by men and women in various communities. Unsurprisingly, online gaming was skewed massively towards being more welcoming to men. Unfortunately since the actual survey questions don't seem to be available, there's not too much in the way of insight you can make from the Pew poll. There's also this decidedly non-scientific study of Twitter[2] which shows male celebrities receive more "abuse" on Twitter than female celebrities, where "abuse" means "something tweeted @ them with a swear word in it." All of this, non-scientific as it is, makes me wonder if the common perception about women having it so much worse online is actually true. I will note, however, that anecdotally women clearly have it worse in terms of targeted sexual harassment. - [1] http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/ [2] http://www.demos.co.uk/press_releases/demosmalecelebritiesreceivemoreabuseontwitterthanwomen http://www.demos.co.uk/press_releases/demosmalecelebritiesre...
- ijk 12y ago
  Actually, all of the questions are available in the complete report, starting on page 53. [1] [1] http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2014/10/PI_OnlineHarassment_102214_pdf.pdf http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2014/10/PI_OnlineHarassment...
- return0 12y ago
  It's not a common perception,it's a victim mentality that tech bloggers often project: >"I’ve been lucky enough to escape attention from that howling mob" this phrase is bad enough to discredit her writing.
- andrewvc 12y ago
  You're really selectively quoting those studies. From the first link (the pew poll): Young women, those 18-24, experience certain severe types of harassment at disproportionately high levels: 26% of these young women have been stalked online, and 25% were the target of online sexual harassment. In addition, they do not escape the heightened rates of physical threats and sustained harassment common to their male peers and young people in general. You mention regarding the second link (which you yourself say is 'decidedly non-scientific', and yet still proceed to cite): There's also this decidedly non-scientific study of Twitter[2] which shows male celebrities receive more "abuse" on Twitter than female celebrities, where "abuse" means "something tweeted @ them with a swear word in it." So, there was no attempt made to determine the severity of the abuse. You sound like you want to find empirical data to back your point of view, but your sources don't really say what you claim them to be saying. My $0.02 (as a guy), sure you get some abuse, but none of it really matters. If someone emails me cursing, saying he's a navy seal and is going to come to my house to kill me, we all know it's BS and won't happen. For girls it's a threat that's much more likely to happen. As the pew study you linked to mentioned, 26% of young women have been stalked online.
yummyfajitas 12y ago
Is this a lot? I've probably hat to press my "delete" and "report spam" buttons 10-20x this week due solely to "I need a Scala ubermenschen". So while there seems to be a statistically significant gap between men and women, the problem in this case hardly seems clinically significant. 36 over 5 years is barely a little over 1 per 2 months.
- mindslight 12y ago
  Once every two months would definitely set off my pattern detector, while twice a year might slide under the radar or at least make me not take it viscerally. This is one of the few articles that I feel addressed this topic calmly and rationally. I appreciate that.
A_COMPUTER 12y ago
Every f*ing video on Youtube by a woman has that one jackass who posts "make me a sandwich" complemented with 10-100 upvotes.
- imaginenore 12y ago
  Every? Really?
  - girvo 12y ago
    Frighteningly close for anyone who has more than 301 views. I'm not one for hyperbole, but it really is quite amazing how consistent it is.
    - imaginenore 12y ago
      I don't believe you. Let's take a random sample of videos and see how "every" it is.
- mindslight 12y ago
  Nice anecdata. It really adds to the level of discussion! Perhaps a simple solution is to just give that jackass a gift certificate to Subway. edit: the downvotes on this comment come from the same source as the problem you hold so dear - simple herd politics.
- wnevets 12y ago
  people read youtube comments?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
mesozoic 12y ago
Gamergate is leaking again.
- htns 12y ago
  Yeah, I've heard about Gamergate in a couple of wildly different contexts. What's the deal with it?
  - defen 12y ago
    The extreme nutshell version is that a female indie game developer supposedly slept with a male video game journalist, and this supposedly let to favorable coverage for her game that would not have happened otherwise. The surface phenomenon is that a lot of people united under the banner of #gamergate to protest this breach of journalistic ethics. The dark side is that it seems like it's really just a bunch of people who want to see someone's life ruined, and they are wildly overreacting. I think the underlying phenomenon is similar to what happened to Brendan Eich, even though the ostensible cause and the people involved are completely different.
    - knowtheory 12y ago
      Those are the stated reasons. It's worth noting no such review was ever written for Zoe Quinn's game. GamerGate has now doxxed and threatened a number of women in the gaming world (developers, critics, actresses) and Phil Fish the creator of Fez. They publicly organize to drive advertisers away from publications which disagree with them or call Gamergate out as misogynistic or threatening.
      - towaway5098 12y ago
        There's the Intel vice president who told me via email that GamerGate was "doing great work" and that he was "sick of slander and self-loathing from the press". He was talking about male journalists who do misandrist feminists' work for them. "I am pressing that team, it's not mine, but I am exerting influence when I can, to stop spending money with people who hate themselves and hate our clients," he added by phone later. http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/10/23/Gawker-dishonest-fascists-of-GamerGate-could-cost-us-millions http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/10/23/Gawker-... Intels own words. Are you saying they're misogynists or threatening because they agree with GamerGate? Besides it's the media that pushing away their advertisers, not just gamergate. They turned on their advertisers after them wanting to distance themselves from pro-bullying, sexist & racist articles/messages.
chillingeffect 12y ago
> It’s pretty easy to look at these messages and see young males acting out She "knows" their gender, I'm surprised she can't also see that they're white...
- emocakes 12y ago
  they oughta check their privilege.
andrewvc 12y ago
What I urge people in this thread to do is not to pick up a google search, or read a book, but to just go out and ask a few female friends what their thoughts are about being online, being safe, and being respected, and to listen with an open mind. I see a lot of denial in here, people rooting around for reasons to think that there isn't a serious fucking problem with intimidation and psychological violence taking place on the net. I see a lot of cognitive dissonance, and that's sad, that's not a scientific mindset. You all need to get out of your comfort zone. I'm a straight white male software developer, I don't need to care about this for any reason other than a life that doesn't have truth and fairness as a cause isn't worth living. I encourage you all to calm down, reach out, and really understand what it's like on the other side.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  According to the article, the author received one unwanted message every 50 days. How is it "cognitive dissonance" or "denial" to describe pressing delete every 50 days as a minor problem? Note that in a typical 2 week period, I probably get more than 36 recruiter spams. Could you concretely explain what you feel is being denied?
  - andrewvc 12y ago
    So you're seriously equating getting an unwanted job offer with a threat of sexual violence? What?
    - yummyfajitas 12y ago
      In either case i lose 1-3 seconds of my day pressing delete (note that I have received threats of sexual violence, and delete worked on them too). So yes. If you feel differently I'd be curious to hear why.
      - timmclean 12y ago
        The psychological impact of "I'll drink your blood out of your c--- after I rip it open" [1] is very different from that of recruiter spam. [1] https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/504718160902492160 https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/504718160902492160
emocakes 12y ago
I got harassed the other day at the shops. This guy opened the door for me and said 'after you'. All men are pigs, what vile filth. I had to cover my daughters ears.
paulnechifor 12y ago
I thought better of HN before this. It looks like if you don't toe the line you get downvoted and your comments get [killed].
- wismer 12y ago
  There's a really good reason for it and it's up to you to figure that part out.
  - meowface 12y ago
    There is no reason to delete a post that presents a rational argument without use of insults or ad hominem attacks, regardless of if you think the viewpoint is "destroying [insert any topical political or current events issue here]".
    - DanBC 12y ago
      There's plenty of reason to downvote trolls.
      - meowface 12y ago
        I did not see the posts that were deleted, but so far nothing I've seen in this thread seems like trolling.
- rcfox 12y ago
  I saw all of the dead comments, and my first thought was that the mods had probably done a good job of cleaning up the vitriol. I was curious though, so I enabled showdead, and while I'm not sure that I agree with many of the dead comments, most of them are not noise. It's clear that there has been some emotional voting going on.
- jhgfj6575hgf 12y ago
  I find this very unfortunate to be honest. Instead of allowing dissent, the people here are actively deleting speech that they disagree with. Imagine if a conservative professor at Stanford silenced supporters of Edward Snowden.
jzwinck 12y ago
Disclaimer: I agree there is a real social problem here. The rest of this message is solely about statistics (inspired by the language of statistics used in the article, like "A/B Test," "statistical significance," and "99.9% confidence level"). The article opens with an analysis of messages to one male and one (self-selected) female from a community which has a large male majority. Most people in the world are heterosexual, and in my opinion people are more likely to sexually harass the gender they "like." Let's say 3/4 of people are straight and 1/4 are gay. Let's also say that 2/3 of sexual harassment is directed at the "preferred" gender" of the perpetrator. Imagine a population of 80 boys and 8 girls, all equally "good." Half of them never say a bad thing to anyone. The other half lash out once a month and say something disgusting. Now, we have 60 straight boys, 30 of whom behave badly once a month. That's 30 nasty messages a month, 20 of which go to girls and 10 to boys. We also have 20 gay boys generating 10 nastygrams monthly, 7 to boys and 3 to girls. As for the girls, there are 6 straight ones, 3 of whom are bad, so they send 2 threatening topics to boys and 1 to a girl each month. Of the 2 gay girls only one is malfeasant, so let's say she sends her only "love letter" to a girl. How many total bad messages are sent each month? 20 + 3 + 1 + 1 = 25 to girls, and 10 + 7 + 2 + 0 = 19 to boys. With 80 total boys, each will receive about one salacious message per four months. But each of the 8 girls will absorb, on average, just over 3 per month. I tried to use conservative numbers here, and still the girls in a male-majority group get 13 times as many unwanted notes as boys. This is deplorable, but it is also unsurprising given the population.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- rtpg 12y ago
  I think the question here is "will gamers harass men or women more". In this case you want your community to be representative of the community at large, so this gender imbalance makes sense. Your point makes sense, but seems irrelevant to the discussion here.
  - ObviousScience 12y ago
    I think it's exactly to the point: the question is if we have a fundamentally more sexist male population online than female population, or if we're seeing confounding variables introducing an apparently difference. I mean, there's clearly a problem with the experience women have with many online communities - just ask them, they're not shy about admitting it. The hard questions are why is their experience like that and what are the main contributing causes. In fact, the last time we had a discussion about sexism here, someone posted a study to me claiming that it's often confounding community values that create a hotbed of apparent sexism.[1] So if we're talking about the situation where what we see is a normal (and consistent at large with society) rate of men harassing women, we should be asking what we can do to fix the other parts of the community that enable these people to be unduly felt, such as not properly spam filtering messages between users. Why is it, for instance, I can tell my email client to never display a message with the word 'cunt' in it, except for whitelisted users, but I can't do this when trying to interact with people in public, such as reddit or Kongregate? I believe what we see time and again when we analyze the numbers is not that we're seeing an inherently higher rate of sexism, to which we need to do something to fix the attitudes of men in general, but rather that we're seeing the undue influence of the usual rate of problematic actors - that is, it's way easier to bother a lot of people as a troll and dominate the conversation online than in person, and its this difference that is the cause of the problems, not the background rate of problematic actors. [1] http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4291/3381 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4291/33...
gohrt 12y ago
Hi, mods: Look at this thread. What does it mean for the appropriateness of "GamerGate" on Hacker News?
- JulianMorrison 12y ago
  It's not just appropriate, it's overdue. Look at all these ugly, ugly critters crawling out of the woodwork. They were already here before the scent of mass misogyny drew them out into the open.
HonorSworn 12y ago
Hrmm looks like someone needs to make some sort of filter that parses tweets and messages for insults and removes them.
- judk 12y ago
  It would be nice if HN talked more about technical and other ways to solve the actual problems here, and less repeating the same insults at each other over and over again.
Natsu 12y ago
I don't think I've ever seen a story with so many dead posts. EDIT: Everyone is downvote-happy. I'm going to do my best to upvote anyone who was downvoted unfairly.
_pmf_ 12y ago
> A Natural A/B Test Or, as more honest and less conceited people would call it, an anecdote.
slash3r 12y ago
How is this HN front page worthy? It's just a case study on only two people that ends up making a generalization about countless others. I could make a pro gamer gate statement for all I care, it would still be irrelevant.

123 points by benologist 12y ago

A shame the point needs to be repeatedly made. A five minute foray into the wasteland that is twitch chat will show some pretty stark differences between how men and women become targets for trolling and vitriol. While some of the concerns of the whole gamergate mess were perhaps reasonable at some point in time, the whole thing has disappeared under a huge number of people who see their any supposed righteousness as license to indulge in the pettiest of attacks that aligns them with segments of society I'd foolishly thought we'd largely left behind. Seriously, if you're looking for some injustices in the world to help make your life meaningful, you can do a hell of a lot better than "ethics in video game journalism", vitriolic element or no.

droopyEyelids 12y ago
I'm commenting to register my frustration with what I call the "harm reductionism fallacy". At it's most extreme point, it can be parodied to something like "You have no right to complain about a problem in your privileged life because people are starving in $COUNTRY" In all it's forms, it's a sort of ridicule directed towards people trying to make their lives better. I believe people have the right to complain about, and try to improve, any and every element of their lives- right down to asking for better/healthier free lunches from their employers. Working for ethics in video game journalism and to reduce nasty sex related comments towards women stands to reform a genuinely nasty cesspool in modern society
- vacri 12y ago
  The impassioned hysteria over 'ethics in video game journalism' is the problematic part, not the issue itself. And, to be frank, that ridiculous level of hysteria makes it clear that it's not really about ethics in video game journalism. No-one is dead or has been maimed by it. Lives aren't destroyed by it. Basically, it's a good example of dog whistle politics, using a term that is more palatable to push a less palatable agenda: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics
  - paulnechifor 12y ago
    > The impassioned hysteria over 'ethics in video game journalism' is the problematic part, not the issue itself. The fact that people like you are saying that others have no right to be concerned and angry about unethical journalism is the reason for the impassioned hysteria in the first place. > And, to be frank, that ridiculous level of hysteria makes it clear that it's not really about ethics in video game journalism. Really? Tens of publications proclaim gamers dead in unison and you expect a large diverse group of people to be completely calm about it. Edit: Senseless downvotes don't make you right. Edit 2: I am taking downvotes personally because I only see white comments for trolling and spamming on HN.
    - wismer 12y ago
      "It's about ethics" yet most of the moderators of the subreddit /r/KotakuInAction are also moderators of distinctly misogynstic subreddits http://i.imgur.com/3j7uzXZ.jpg http://i.imgur.com/3j7uzXZ.jpg EDIT: You might be taking downvotes too personally.
    - vacri 12y ago
      I've been a heavy gamer for 25 years, with literally hundreds of games in my Steam account (I started out with Amiga floppies), and my heaviest-played games in that steam list have over half a thousand hours on them, each. I'm a heavy gamer, it's my vice, and I've been part of the 'scene' for a long time. So I'm not commenting as an outsider when I say that gamers, as a demographic, are the most self-entitled bunch of whiners I've ever seen. I've worked in tech support, in medicine, in retail, with children... and nothing holds a candle to the gaming community when they feel wronged. Every issue is blown way out of proportion. And they need to be called on it, because otherwise they keep on doing it. I'm so tired of this manufactured outrage. I see less passion in the comments when there's an article about child sexual abuse on a newspaper website, and that's a crime that raises pretty much everyone's hackles. So, speaking as a lifelong heavy gamer, this GamerGate bullshit has little to do with ethics in gaming journalism - a field that is so tangential to the important things in the human experience. Note also that I never said it was nothing to be concerned about or no right to complain; I said that the levels of hysterical concern were ridiculous and overblown. But of course, if you were actually interested in integrity, you wouldn't have characterised my comments of 'ridiculous levels of hysteria' as 'expecting complete calm', as if that's the only other possible option. A classic strawman fallacy. Perhaps you should show some of this integrity that you demand of others? Perhaps I should put it a different way: Issues with the supply of your entertainment are never worth a death threat.
- aptwebapps 12y ago
  You can be concerned about ethics in game journalism and try to do something about it even though other injustices exist, by my book at least. But the gamergate tag has been effectively taken over by the misogynists and haters. That may not be fair, but it's a fact. If people in the first group continue to use that umbrella they are aiding the people in the second group. Again, not fair, but that's the way it is.
  - undersuit 12y ago
    It's incredibly unfair because the members of gamergate that aren't spewing misogyny and hate can't really start another movement, that movement would just be taken over by the same people they are trying to distance themselves from. So they can't distance themselves from the hate and their movement is being attacked because of the hate coming from these interlopers and Gawker/The Media is going to just continue to inflame the haters. How are people supposed to get anything done?
Pxtl 12y ago
I tend to think Gamergate was a brewing culture war that was just looking for a spark to start the fire. Gamer culture has had a persecution complex for well over a generation, particularly with respect to the press - even the gaming press. Being repeatedly insulted and attacked by the media has made them circle their wagons instinctively. Combined with a substantial fraction of gamers that are intensely misogynistic and this ugliness was practically inevitable. The problem is that gamers picked a fight with SJWs, which are effectively their own mirror image - the same obsessiveness and mean-spirited put-downs and in-group high-fives. I mean, the fact that the SJWs are right is almost immaterial - in the words of The Big Lebowski: "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole". Online social justice groups have a knack for utterly alienating and insulting everyone they could ever hope to convince, even those who broadly agree with them. Combine that with Gawker media's spectacular ability to stir the pot, and a few prominent right-wing culture-war bloggers feeding the gamer-gaters' persecution complex, and we're seeing outright radicalization. You isolate and insult a guy and then give him an online culture of like-minded outcasts and they start encouraging each other to do drastic things. There are obvious parallels to other movements of angry young men... It's a perfect storm, and it's only going to get worse before it gets better since anybody who's trying to talk the gamergaters down from the ledge has to have infinite patience for their monomaniacal rationalizations. They see themselves as the defenders of rationality surrounded by SJWs who fling glib insults... and gaming is founded on endlessly grinding against a pointless task for fun. It's profoundly sad to see so many gamers rally behind that gamergate banner. To see harassment and threats and ruining women's lives become the public image of core gamer culture. I'm really worried that this is going to get worse before it gets better. The "us vs. them" mentality of the hardcore gamer world is too old and well-established, and everybody else involved is either feeding into it or is drowned out by the din.
- ncallaway 12y ago
  I started seeing the phrase "Social Justice Warrior" used a lot as soon as #Gamergate happened. I have yet to see it well defined, though. I realize it's tangential to your point, but I'm curious how would you define or describe a SJW?
  - 12y ago

dvt 12y ago

> It’s pretty easy to look at these messages and see young males acting out in hopes of attention. But what societal and psychological dynamic is at play that they target a female at such a disproportionate rate to a male? Could be a million things. How about testosterone, the sexualization of just about everything online and on TV, and the courage brought on by anonymity on the internet? Of course, asking what "societal and psychological dynamic is at play" shows a very clear naivite on Ms. Greer's part. That is an impossibly difficult question to answer. And like all other overly-broad, overly-difficult questions, it will never be taken seriously. > Running these numbers through a statistical significance test confirms what should be obvious to anyone following Gamergate: with a 99.9% confidence level it is harder to be a woman than a man in the game industry, independent of what you say or do. Maybe, but let's not forget what incident started Gamergate: Zoe Quinn; an entitled, unethical, and hypocritical developer (female or otherwise). Furthermore, I'm sure it's more difficult to be woman pilot, a woman programmer or a woman CEO than their male counterparts. This has been known for a while now. I'm not sure why Gamergate et al. think they stumbled across some novel sociological phenomenon.

DanBC 12y ago
Gamergate claims to be about journalistic integrity. I hear the names of women, but never the male journalists. > Maybe, but let's not forget what incident started Gamergate: Zoe Quinn; an entitled, unethical, and hypocritical developer (female or otherwise). You're spreading the same lies.
- dvt 12y ago
  I'm not spreading any lies. It's incontrovertible that Zoe Quinn had a relationship with a Kotaku editor (a male that has also been shunned publicly). In any other industry, this would be grounds for conflict of interest. Let's not kid ourselves, there is definitely a problem with the lack of women in tech, but Zoe Quinn is not the role model you want.
- ijk 12y ago
  > Gamergate claims to be about journalistic integrity. I hear the names of women, but never the male journalists. And let's not forget: most of the women who have been attacked have little to nothing to do with journalism. Felicia Day is an actress, for crying out loud!

mcbailey 12y ago

I came to a very different conclusion from the data than the authors. The difference in the numbers was not substantively different (an absolute difference of about 1%) and much, much lower than I would have expected. The difference could easily be explained by other differences between the two founders other than sex and perhaps this could be pointed as evidence that once we removed those factors this small difference would evaporate entirely.

hug 12y ago

What interests me about these discussions is that the common perception seems to be that women face a level of harassment hugely disproportionate to that experienced by men, however studies don't show such a large gap. There was a recent study by Pew[1] that shows the differing levels of harassment faced by men and women in various communities. Unsurprisingly, online gaming was skewed massively towards being more welcoming to men. Unfortunately since the actual survey questions don't seem to be available, there's not too much in the way of insight you can make from the Pew poll. There's also this decidedly non-scientific study of Twitter[2] which shows male celebrities receive more "abuse" on Twitter than female celebrities, where "abuse" means "something tweeted @ them with a swear word in it." All of this, non-scientific as it is, makes me wonder if the common perception about women having it so much worse online is actually true. I will note, however, that anecdotally women clearly have it worse in terms of targeted sexual harassment. - [1] http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/ [2] http://www.demos.co.uk/press_releases/demosmalecelebritiesreceivemoreabuseontwitterthanwomen http://www.demos.co.uk/press_releases/demosmalecelebritiesre...

ijk 12y ago
Actually, all of the questions are available in the complete report, starting on page 53. [1] [1] http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2014/10/PI_OnlineHarassment_102214_pdf.pdf http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2014/10/PI_OnlineHarassment...
return0 12y ago
It's not a common perception,it's a victim mentality that tech bloggers often project: >"I’ve been lucky enough to escape attention from that howling mob" this phrase is bad enough to discredit her writing.
andrewvc 12y ago
You're really selectively quoting those studies. From the first link (the pew poll): Young women, those 18-24, experience certain severe types of harassment at disproportionately high levels: 26% of these young women have been stalked online, and 25% were the target of online sexual harassment. In addition, they do not escape the heightened rates of physical threats and sustained harassment common to their male peers and young people in general. You mention regarding the second link (which you yourself say is 'decidedly non-scientific', and yet still proceed to cite): There's also this decidedly non-scientific study of Twitter[2] which shows male celebrities receive more "abuse" on Twitter than female celebrities, where "abuse" means "something tweeted @ them with a swear word in it." So, there was no attempt made to determine the severity of the abuse. You sound like you want to find empirical data to back your point of view, but your sources don't really say what you claim them to be saying. My $0.02 (as a guy), sure you get some abuse, but none of it really matters. If someone emails me cursing, saying he's a navy seal and is going to come to my house to kill me, we all know it's BS and won't happen. For girls it's a threat that's much more likely to happen. As the pew study you linked to mentioned, 26% of young women have been stalked online.

yummyfajitas 12y ago

Is this a lot? I've probably hat to press my "delete" and "report spam" buttons 10-20x this week due solely to "I need a Scala ubermenschen". So while there seems to be a statistically significant gap between men and women, the problem in this case hardly seems clinically significant. 36 over 5 years is barely a little over 1 per 2 months.

mindslight 12y ago
Once every two months would definitely set off my pattern detector, while twice a year might slide under the radar or at least make me not take it viscerally. This is one of the few articles that I feel addressed this topic calmly and rationally. I appreciate that.

A_COMPUTER 12y ago

Every f*ing video on Youtube by a woman has that one jackass who posts "make me a sandwich" complemented with 10-100 upvotes.

imaginenore 12y ago
Every? Really?
- girvo 12y ago
  Frighteningly close for anyone who has more than 301 views. I'm not one for hyperbole, but it really is quite amazing how consistent it is.
  - imaginenore 12y ago
    I don't believe you. Let's take a random sample of videos and see how "every" it is.
mindslight 12y ago
Nice anecdata. It really adds to the level of discussion! Perhaps a simple solution is to just give that jackass a gift certificate to Subway. edit: the downvotes on this comment come from the same source as the problem you hold so dear - simple herd politics.
wnevets 12y ago
people read youtube comments?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

mesozoic 12y ago

Gamergate is leaking again.

htns 12y ago
Yeah, I've heard about Gamergate in a couple of wildly different contexts. What's the deal with it?
- defen 12y ago
  The extreme nutshell version is that a female indie game developer supposedly slept with a male video game journalist, and this supposedly let to favorable coverage for her game that would not have happened otherwise. The surface phenomenon is that a lot of people united under the banner of #gamergate to protest this breach of journalistic ethics. The dark side is that it seems like it's really just a bunch of people who want to see someone's life ruined, and they are wildly overreacting. I think the underlying phenomenon is similar to what happened to Brendan Eich, even though the ostensible cause and the people involved are completely different.
  - knowtheory 12y ago
    Those are the stated reasons. It's worth noting no such review was ever written for Zoe Quinn's game. GamerGate has now doxxed and threatened a number of women in the gaming world (developers, critics, actresses) and Phil Fish the creator of Fez. They publicly organize to drive advertisers away from publications which disagree with them or call Gamergate out as misogynistic or threatening.
    - towaway5098 12y ago
      There's the Intel vice president who told me via email that GamerGate was "doing great work" and that he was "sick of slander and self-loathing from the press". He was talking about male journalists who do misandrist feminists' work for them. "I am pressing that team, it's not mine, but I am exerting influence when I can, to stop spending money with people who hate themselves and hate our clients," he added by phone later. http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/10/23/Gawker-dishonest-fascists-of-GamerGate-could-cost-us-millions http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/10/23/Gawker-... Intels own words. Are you saying they're misogynists or threatening because they agree with GamerGate? Besides it's the media that pushing away their advertisers, not just gamergate. They turned on their advertisers after them wanting to distance themselves from pro-bullying, sexist & racist articles/messages.

chillingeffect 12y ago

> It’s pretty easy to look at these messages and see young males acting out She "knows" their gender, I'm surprised she can't also see that they're white...

emocakes 12y ago
they oughta check their privilege.

andrewvc 12y ago

What I urge people in this thread to do is not to pick up a google search, or read a book, but to just go out and ask a few female friends what their thoughts are about being online, being safe, and being respected, and to listen with an open mind. I see a lot of denial in here, people rooting around for reasons to think that there isn't a serious fucking problem with intimidation and psychological violence taking place on the net. I see a lot of cognitive dissonance, and that's sad, that's not a scientific mindset. You all need to get out of your comfort zone. I'm a straight white male software developer, I don't need to care about this for any reason other than a life that doesn't have truth and fairness as a cause isn't worth living. I encourage you all to calm down, reach out, and really understand what it's like on the other side.

yummyfajitas 12y ago
According to the article, the author received one unwanted message every 50 days. How is it "cognitive dissonance" or "denial" to describe pressing delete every 50 days as a minor problem? Note that in a typical 2 week period, I probably get more than 36 recruiter spams. Could you concretely explain what you feel is being denied?
- andrewvc 12y ago
  So you're seriously equating getting an unwanted job offer with a threat of sexual violence? What?
  - yummyfajitas 12y ago
    In either case i lose 1-3 seconds of my day pressing delete (note that I have received threats of sexual violence, and delete worked on them too). So yes. If you feel differently I'd be curious to hear why.
    - timmclean 12y ago
      The psychological impact of "I'll drink your blood out of your c--- after I rip it open" [1] is very different from that of recruiter spam. [1] https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/504718160902492160 https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/504718160902492160

emocakes 12y ago

I got harassed the other day at the shops. This guy opened the door for me and said 'after you'. All men are pigs, what vile filth. I had to cover my daughters ears.

paulnechifor 12y ago

I thought better of HN before this. It looks like if you don't toe the line you get downvoted and your comments get [killed].

wismer 12y ago
There's a really good reason for it and it's up to you to figure that part out.
- meowface 12y ago
  There is no reason to delete a post that presents a rational argument without use of insults or ad hominem attacks, regardless of if you think the viewpoint is "destroying [insert any topical political or current events issue here]".
  - DanBC 12y ago
    There's plenty of reason to downvote trolls.
    - meowface 12y ago
      I did not see the posts that were deleted, but so far nothing I've seen in this thread seems like trolling.
rcfox 12y ago
I saw all of the dead comments, and my first thought was that the mods had probably done a good job of cleaning up the vitriol. I was curious though, so I enabled showdead, and while I'm not sure that I agree with many of the dead comments, most of them are not noise. It's clear that there has been some emotional voting going on.
jhgfj6575hgf 12y ago
I find this very unfortunate to be honest. Instead of allowing dissent, the people here are actively deleting speech that they disagree with. Imagine if a conservative professor at Stanford silenced supporters of Edward Snowden.

jzwinck 12y ago

Disclaimer: I agree there is a real social problem here. The rest of this message is solely about statistics (inspired by the language of statistics used in the article, like "A/B Test," "statistical significance," and "99.9% confidence level"). The article opens with an analysis of messages to one male and one (self-selected) female from a community which has a large male majority. Most people in the world are heterosexual, and in my opinion people are more likely to sexually harass the gender they "like." Let's say 3/4 of people are straight and 1/4 are gay. Let's also say that 2/3 of sexual harassment is directed at the "preferred" gender" of the perpetrator. Imagine a population of 80 boys and 8 girls, all equally "good." Half of them never say a bad thing to anyone. The other half lash out once a month and say something disgusting. Now, we have 60 straight boys, 30 of whom behave badly once a month. That's 30 nasty messages a month, 20 of which go to girls and 10 to boys. We also have 20 gay boys generating 10 nastygrams monthly, 7 to boys and 3 to girls. As for the girls, there are 6 straight ones, 3 of whom are bad, so they send 2 threatening topics to boys and 1 to a girl each month. Of the 2 gay girls only one is malfeasant, so let's say she sends her only "love letter" to a girl. How many total bad messages are sent each month? 20 + 3 + 1 + 1 = 25 to girls, and 10 + 7 + 2 + 0 = 19 to boys. With 80 total boys, each will receive about one salacious message per four months. But each of the 8 girls will absorb, on average, just over 3 per month. I tried to use conservative numbers here, and still the girls in a male-majority group get 13 times as many unwanted notes as boys. This is deplorable, but it is also unsurprising given the population.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
rtpg 12y ago
I think the question here is "will gamers harass men or women more". In this case you want your community to be representative of the community at large, so this gender imbalance makes sense. Your point makes sense, but seems irrelevant to the discussion here.
- ObviousScience 12y ago
  I think it's exactly to the point: the question is if we have a fundamentally more sexist male population online than female population, or if we're seeing confounding variables introducing an apparently difference. I mean, there's clearly a problem with the experience women have with many online communities - just ask them, they're not shy about admitting it. The hard questions are why is their experience like that and what are the main contributing causes. In fact, the last time we had a discussion about sexism here, someone posted a study to me claiming that it's often confounding community values that create a hotbed of apparent sexism.[1] So if we're talking about the situation where what we see is a normal (and consistent at large with society) rate of men harassing women, we should be asking what we can do to fix the other parts of the community that enable these people to be unduly felt, such as not properly spam filtering messages between users. Why is it, for instance, I can tell my email client to never display a message with the word 'cunt' in it, except for whitelisted users, but I can't do this when trying to interact with people in public, such as reddit or Kongregate? I believe what we see time and again when we analyze the numbers is not that we're seeing an inherently higher rate of sexism, to which we need to do something to fix the attitudes of men in general, but rather that we're seeing the undue influence of the usual rate of problematic actors - that is, it's way easier to bother a lot of people as a troll and dominate the conversation online than in person, and its this difference that is the cause of the problems, not the background rate of problematic actors. [1] http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4291/3381 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4291/33...

gohrt 12y ago

Hi, mods: Look at this thread. What does it mean for the appropriateness of "GamerGate" on Hacker News?

JulianMorrison 12y ago
It's not just appropriate, it's overdue. Look at all these ugly, ugly critters crawling out of the woodwork. They were already here before the scent of mass misogyny drew them out into the open.

HonorSworn 12y ago

Hrmm looks like someone needs to make some sort of filter that parses tweets and messages for insults and removes them.

judk 12y ago
It would be nice if HN talked more about technical and other ways to solve the actual problems here, and less repeating the same insults at each other over and over again.

Natsu 12y ago

I don't think I've ever seen a story with so many dead posts. EDIT: Everyone is downvote-happy. I'm going to do my best to upvote anyone who was downvoted unfairly.

_pmf_ 12y ago

> A Natural A/B Test Or, as more honest and less conceited people would call it, an anecdote.

slash3r 12y ago

How is this HN front page worthy? It's just a case study on only two people that ends up making a generalization about countless others. I could make a pro gamer gate statement for all I care, it would still be irrelevant.