25 ms·

Still Here, Part 1: A Memoir

206 points by panic 12y ago

song 12y ago
I have a seething hatred for weev, his clique and anyone who behaves similarly. I hope to think they're a small minority of people but it's amazing how many women they've tried to turn off tech with their idiocy, their defamation, their death threats and their abuse. When I see what happens to women in tech and a lot of the abuse they have to withstand, I admire those that can stand the trolls. I don't think I would be this resilient faced with this abuse. I wish we could be in a world where everybody would be accepted in the tech community regardless of gender, race or sexual orientation. I hoped before that due to the relatively higher education level of tech workers, people would be more tolerant but it seems that's not the case. PS: Now, in the case of weev and his AT & T conviction, I of course support reversing it and support the work that EFF is doing defending him but that's despite weev. It's because, in this particular issue, he's innocent. That doesn't stop him from being an horrible person.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Horrible people are the best touchstone for principles. If you can stand up for the rights of horrible people then you're probably doing ok. EDIT: It's weird, I'm so conflicted about 'weev'. I have serious problems with him going to jail the way he did (and I know he's been released), but at the same time I feel that I'd probably be A-ok with him serving jail time for the wanton destruction of other peoples lives (and then pretending he never did it whereas he first proudly claimed he had) that he inflicted with so much carelessness, some of which is detailed in this article. He's right up there with the child pornographers. I recall my frustration with the way /. got overrun by weev and his buddies in their eternal quest for negative attention and griefing. Total jerks, the lot of them.
  - tomp 12y ago
    So wait, in the first paragraph you're saying that we should stand up for horrible people's rights, and in the second, you're saying he should go to jail because he's a horrible person. Which one is it? Personally, my principles are perfectly clear: just because I disagree with someone's opinions or behaviors, that doesn't mean they should go to jail (actually, that shouldn't even be a debate!). As long as he has not physically harmed anybody, he should be a free man. If we start jailing people for the psychological harm they cause, we would jail a lot of people (including most of the politicians). It's better if we (as the society) learn how to ignore the trolls, and give less fuck about what other people think/say/do. Thankfully, that's mostly the problem in USA, not in Europe so much. We don't freak out every time someone curses on TV or shows her boobs. (On the other hand, we have other issues, e.g. xenophobia, gag orders, lack of free speech, ...)
    - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
      > If we start jailing people for the psychological harm they cause, we would jail a lot of people (including most of the politicians). Perhaps we should, then.
      - tomp 12y ago
        I didn't think I would need to explain this... The problem with that is that it's a very slippery slope. Everything you do, someone will complain, and be hurt. You're pro choice? You hurt Christians. You're pro life? You hurt women. You're pro immigration? You hurt domestic workers. You're against immigration? You're hurting foreigners living in oppressive countries. Most any binary choice will have some people pro and others against, and unfortunately everybody can pretend they're emotionally hurt, which effectively means you'll be jailing people whose opponents are the loudest.
        TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
        "Pretend to be emotionally hurt" If we were just talking about mere offense and hurt feelings (which are still serious), I wouldn't be talking about jail time.
        DanBC 12y ago
        I'd be interested to know how you would cope with the persistant vicious attacks from people like Weev, lasting many years. And what you'd actually do in that situation, now what you'd think you'd do.
        wpietri 12y ago
        It is not particularly slippery. In theory, I could also have you arrested because your sleeve accidentally brushed mine in a crowded elevator. "Assault!", I cry, while I flop to the ground like a soccer player. But that's not a big problem because it turns out that legislators and prosecutors and judges and juries are not total idiots. The flopping thing has been attempted, seen as a problem, and generally dealt with. It's also not even a slope. Blasphemy has been a crime in plenty of places, but we're moving away from that. Ditto crimes like insulting the king or harming the state. We move away from it because we get better at discerning actual harm from societally valuable dissenting speech.
  - knowtheory 12y ago
    Kathy Sierra made her feelings on the subject very clear on twitter before she left. Weev is a horrible person, and probably he even deserves to go to jail. But he does not deserve to go to jail based on bullshit. We should never forget that injustice done to Weev is not the same as justice for the things he done.
    - geographomics 12y ago
      I'm surprised weev hasn't been prosecuted for the numerous campaigns of individual harassment he's instigated and been involved with. Does the USA not have any law against such behaviour? He's been responsible for deliberate and persistent personal abuse, causing much alarm and distress, and has bragged about it openly. Does this genuinely come under the protections of "free speech", as is claimed by those who defend him?
      - knowtheory 12y ago
        Yeah. So there's a lot going on with harassment charges. First things first, i'm not a lawyer. I'm just a dude who cares about civics. The internet makes harassment considerably more problematic. Even setting aside constitutional defenses of speech, just trying to figure out which agency should be in charge of investigating and prosecuting harassment is confusing at best. Do you go to your local police? Do you go to a federal agency? Which one? Even when you do approach a law enforcement agency after receiving threats, do they think its worth their time to investigate? (Amanda Hess's piece on harassment is an interesting for her interactions w/ the police alone: http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-arent-welcome-internet-72170/ http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-ar... ) Revenge porn is an analogous (but not identical) problem, and even in that case, where basically everyone can agree it's a bad thing, it's clear first that states don't have statutes which they can use to prosecute (until very recently at least: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_porn#U.S._laws http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_porn#U.S._laws ), and in several cases some of the laws being written are complete clusterfucks. The truth of the matter is that you can get away with a whole lot of bullshit before anybody starts trying to drop hammers on you. And harassers live in that space between what is legal and what is enforceable (a lot of other interesting stuff lives in that space too).
  - deleted 12y ago
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- calibraxis 12y ago
  Reminds me of what Grigori Perelman (who quit math professionally) said about mathematicians: "Of course, there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest." Sometimes you see programmers mulling over why someone would leave math over this. Unfortunately, it doesn't strike them to use their own profession's lack of ethics as an analogy: racism and sexism. Many more leave programming over this. (Or at least stop helping their fellow programmer, because they don't like them overall.)
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  I wonder though, has he actually turned a statistically significant number of people off? Suppose field X had a crazy person so dedicated that he shot a US president in order to send a message to a woman working there (far more than Weev has done). Suppose that pervert letters to women in field X were completely expected and commonplace, and had been for many years. Would women flee from X? Surprisingly, acting has no shortage of women. Pervs sending creepy letters is a topic of humor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmeh7EHpIE0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmeh7EHpIE0 Journalism has similar issues. Still plenty of women. Seems like there must be something else at play. [edit: replaced the word "anyone" with "a statistically significant number". This better expresses what I meant to say.]
  - empthought 12y ago
    Idle speculation: tech attracts more than its fair share of introverts relative to those career choices, and for someone who needs just a little positive social interaction from time to time, the risk of extremely negative social interaction being the norm is too great.
    - wpietri 12y ago
      This is definitely an issue. One of the people I mentor is a shy young woman. She will make an awesome developer. A few weeks back I had to sit her down and have The Talk explaining that if she rose to prominence, she could well be the target of hideous attacks where guys would have no problem at all. Her eventual conclusion was to stay in the field, but it was definitely something she had to weigh. I've talked with a number of women with established tech careers who have been questioning whether their work to get women into the field is even a good idea. Women drop out of the field at twice the rate men do.
      - empthought 12y ago
        This could be a third-rail question, but I wonder how that "dropout" rate compares to any arbitrary field when measured by the same yardsticks. Women are still the primary caregivers for 95% of infants born, and hence will always show up as more frequent "dropouts," so that statistic really needs to control for this factor somehow to be compelling. Without that control, the anecdotes are more convincing than the statistic, so why bother with the statistic?
- ZeroGravitas 12y ago
  Weev's own words are probably the best way to expose him: http://weev.livejournal.com/409913.html http://weev.livejournal.com/409913.html The fact that he goes to such lengths to sound reasonable and yet fails adds a very dark cast to the whole affair and appropriating the "politically correct" language of what he considers the enemy is a big part of Gamergate too. He struggles to keep it up for long periods of time though, e.g. his reponse to a comment question, "do you support gamergate?": "As much I can support a bunch of beta faggots crying about vidya. I agree that feminist nutjobs are ruining the tech industry, of which I suppose the video game development industry is a subset. I'll agree that #GamerGate probably has moral superiority to a bunch of useless whores whining about shit that they profess to dislike yet still want to dominate and destroy anyways. However, probably all of the /v/ and /gg/ faggots need to be more admirable and brutal in their tactics. This reasoned and polite dialogue that they are attempting with these degenerates and their histrionic shills is obviously not going to work. They need to start putting jackboots on the ground."
aw3c2 12y ago
To maybe save some from reading through this rambling who like to stay away from the topic: It does not seem to be about women in tech generally but seems to boil down to the work of a few socio-/psychopaths caught in a feedback loop.
- nounaut 12y ago
  You sound like you're probably part of the problem.
  - aw3c2 12y ago
    Uh... Please elaborate?
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      > It does not seem to be about women in tech generally but seems to boil down to the work of a few socio-/psychopaths caught in a feedback loop. I think it's more than just a few and I think she's trying to broaden the scope by showing (fairly clearly) that outside of the BSD community these issues are pervasive. Hard for me to judge if that's true or not but I'll take her word for it.
      - aw3c2 12y ago
        It is my honest belief that a few dedicated abusers can easily attract and steer an army of trolls. They feed on the affirmation of comments, upvote points, whatever. The worst ones enjoy hearing about the misery of their victims. Just look at how easily online groups can turn pro/contra certain issues. A good friend of mine is biologically male, identifies as female though. He was public about that online and also due to other circumstances attracted a dedicated abuser. That abuser is so perfidious and persistent, that he (we assume) still manages to rally communities against my friend several years after it started.
        niconii 12y ago
JonnieCache 12y ago
I stopped hanging around on IRC because of people always being weird to women, it's just depressing to watch. Maybe I should have stayed and made a stand...
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  I was aware of sexism in tech but it had never caused me problems. And then one day I enter some Hackintosh IRC channel and I get mad at them calling me 'he', and then they figure out I'm trans... And I eventually leave, because now they're being really sexual and creepy. It's really horrible. You start to rationalise it or try to ignore it. You become insensitive to it. You don't want to leave because they're helpful and talk about interesting stuff and all, but they're also nasty to you.
  - Svenstaro 12y ago
    This is more or less a practical thing. I think you would agree that there are more males in IRC than females. Which personal pronoun would you choose by default to address someone without explicitly knowing their gender? Would you always ask them beforehand? That might get weird. Would you use some weird Internet pronoun like "xe"? Statistically speaking, going "he" is not a bad first guess. I'm not saying it's helping, though.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
      Um, I'd just use singular they (which has been in use in English for literally centuries), or rework the sentence to avoid the pronoun.
    - bkirwi 12y ago
      The 'he' seems not to be the most important part here. (Though, as the GP points out in another comment, the singular 'they' is useful.) The particularly nasty part is this: > And I eventually leave, because now they're being really sexual and creepy. Mistaking someone's gender is a relatively small lapse (though I understand it gets painfully annoying when it happens all the time) but the subsequent creepiness is just actively toxic.
cousin_it 12y ago
> When a woman publicly tells her story and a man tells her that her experiences are invalid That's what happened with Zoe Quinn, except gender reversed. Her ex told the story of how she abused him, and it got censored and slammed everywhere. Edit: I'm a bit freaked out by the downvotes. What's wrong with my comment?
- spindritf 12y ago
  It goes against the preferred political outlook of downmodders. It could have been something as boring as a government statistic and it would have been downvoted just the same.
- Infinitesimus 12y ago
  I haven't heard of this side of the story, mind sharing some references to it? That would be really awful
  - cousin_it 12y ago
    It's all over the internet at this point, any references would be biased one way or another. You can look at http://thezoepost.wordpress.com/ http://thezoepost.wordpress.com/ for the original account that started that whole mess, but for the rest you're pretty much on your own. For example here's a Reddit thread where an admin gives a non-apology for censorship and says it was by mistake: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/2e7y4h/this_is_a_thingy_post_about_that_one_drama_thingy/ http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/2e7y4h/this_is_a_thi...
  - medecau 12y ago
    I'm not entyrelly sure but I believe that the event mentioned was the genesis for the GamerGate thing. Just search gamergate to get an idea of the mess.
- anu_gupta 12y ago
  She didn't abuse him, unless you think every man who's cheated on a woman is also abusive.
inglor 12y ago
It's very hard not to sympathize with this as most of our generation who went to tech are "misfits". As a minoroty that's even harder. I don't understand why randy would focus on making tools for blocking people on Twitter though - writing about it is more effective and less 'ragey'. It would also be nice if she adds how to help.
- edmccard 12y ago
  >I don't understand why randy would focus on making tools for blocking people on Twitter though... Usenet had killfiles, email has spam filters, Facebook has unfollow...no reason not to focus on something similar for Twitter. >It would also be nice if she adds how to help There is a second part to the post: Still Here, Part 2: Call to Arms[1] [1] http://randi.io/wp/archives/91 http://randi.io/wp/archives/91
- calibraxis 12y ago
  There's lots of lit on how to help: http://juliepagano.com/blog/2014/05/10/so-you-want-to-be-an-ally/ http://juliepagano.com/blog/2014/05/10/so-you-want-to-be-an-... Also just look up Model View Culture's writers: https://modelviewculture.com/ https://modelviewculture.com/ (Also, they recently published a handy guide on startups: https://model-view-culture.myshopify.com/products/your-startup-is-broken https://model-view-culture.myshopify.com/products/your-start...)
- freebsdgirl 12y ago
  I told myself that I wouldn't comment on any of this, but goddamnit. MY NAME IS RANDI. IT IS LITERALLY PART OF THE URL.
  - inglor 12y ago
    Sorry :) An honest DYAC mistake.
- glass- 12y ago
  > I don't understand why randy would focus on making tools for blocking people on Twitter though She received over 20k mentions in one month, mostly insults and attacks. Trying to actually talk to people while having to filter through all that noise is impossible.
sneak 12y ago
Randi Harper should be ashamed of herself for equating "reading words on the Internet" with being in an actual abusive relationship. There is a huge difference between intimate partner violence and not liking the text on webpages you choose to load on your computer.
- JonnieCache 12y ago
  It's a metaphor.
- drjesusphd 12y ago
  Domestic abuse can be emotional abuse, which certainly carries over to text communications. Especially if they include death threats.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  Not all abuse is physical. Verbal abuse is just as serious, if not moreso. The famous phrase "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" is really backwards. In truth, words can hurt far more than sticks and stones ever can.
  - deleted 12y ago
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- jacquesm 12y ago
  She got harassed IRL, that exceeds 'not liking the text on webpages' by a considerable margin.
- glass- 12y ago
  People published her info online, she received phone calls to her house, they called her employer and got her fired, her emails were hacked and posted online. Just recently she tweeted that she was called into a meeting at her current job because trolls upset with the ggautoblocker list had been calling her current employer to try and get her fired. But it's all just words on the internet, right?
- 12y ago
ivanca 12y ago
You had been target of completely sexist discrimination and many of the perpetrators should be on Jail, but Annita Sarkeesian and a few like her are a completely different subject: http://youtu.be/WuRSaLZidWI http://youtu.be/WuRSaLZidWI We always look for people with the same motivations and the same struggle than us so I blame no one who relates to her.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  Anita Sarkeesian isn't a completely different. She is a woman in tech (more specifically, video games) who is harassed for speaking out about sexism in video games. Perhaps some of her essays have inaccuracies, but none of this justifies the horrible abuse she gets on a constant basis. Also, Thunderf00t's videos on her seem to focus on single details as if her entire argument would fall down, when it wouldn't, and by repeating something enough times until it seems to be true. I'm hardly the best person to talk about these, though.
  - geographomics 12y ago
    Totally agree. Personally I think Anita provides quite a fresh look at the portrayal of women in video games and other pop culture, and it's interesting to hear her perspective even if one disagrees with it. It just seems thoroughly unhinged to mount a campaign of sexual harassment and death threats in response, rather than countering with a reasoned line of argument, or simply just shrugging it off.
    - XorNot 12y ago
      I haven't found Anita's videos particularly compelling as unique analysis, but that's become an utterly tertiary issue to the completely insane crap which has happened to her, and started happening, at the mere idea that she would make them.
      - ivanca 12y ago
        No, you don't understand, the crap that has "happened to her" is how she is making a living out of it, unlike the poster of this article and anyone actually suffering from it.
freshflowers 12y ago
I'm tired of the fact that this debate has deteriorated into sides lead by extremists. On the one side there is the gamergate crowd, who despite their constant denial are fundamentally sexist and misogynistic in pretty much every second sentence they utter. And the existence of these pricks serves as a cover for the ubiquitous but much more subtle sexism in the tech industry. Which in turn is being denied by the people smack dead in the middle of it (this thread to will see a lot that kind of denial). On the other side however are the consummate activist, the ones the bigots refer to as "Social Justice Warriors" who see sexism in everything, stifle any debate with finger pointing, bullying and witch hunts (as recently demonstrated with "shirtgate"). These people are no better than the pricks they claim to be fighting. They don't just fight sexism and inequality, they want to bury anything they are uncomfortable with, including basic human desires and freedom of any kind of non-politically correct form of expression. And from the tactics used and the collateral damage caused, I find it increasingly difficult to tell the two sides apart except for the the symbolism and rhetoric.
- rmc 12y ago
  Here's a hint. One side is threatening "the greatest school shooting in American history"
  - Frozenlock 12y ago
    Yeah, too bad we don't know which one.
    - rmc 12y ago
      Gamergate
      - srslack 12y ago
        Care to back that statement up? Any proof, any proof at all? Randi's post does not have any proof linking #GamerGate, an amorphous hashtag to threats, or even casually proving that "GamerGate supporters" are the ones carrying out the threats. It's just an opinion. It'd be pretty easy going back in one's twitter timeline to make that determination, would it not?
Tryingtofeel 12y ago
As an outsider reading this, I feel like there is a missing side of the story. Did those people really do all those things for no reason? What prompted them to harass her? Edit: I'm not saying there are ever circumstances where what they did is warranted. The story just seems to be so one dimensionally against her, couldn't help but feel something was missing.
- matt_morgan 12y ago
  It would be better to ask if there are any circumstances under which those things were reasonable.
  - aw3c2 12y ago
    How does that actually help? Who would even think that those things are reasonable? It makes much more sense to try to understand why it happened and how it can be prevented.
- aw3c2 12y ago
  Careful, that question is forbidden. You will probably be accused of "victim shaming" in a minute. Sadly most people seem not interested in the psychological or sociological motivation of those abusers. There is always something that triggers abuse (no, I am not saying that it must be something the victim did). I wish we would investigate into that and help people stay clear of the psychopaths that way.
  - Frozenlock 12y ago
    Bill Burr made a sketch about this kind of reasoning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlvvCYUDHrQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlvvCYUDHrQ
  - ZeroGravitas 12y ago
    Kathy Sierra suggests that the fact that she was listened to by many people was what triggered the hatred for her: http://seriouspony.com/trouble-at-the-koolaid-point/ http://seriouspony.com/trouble-at-the-koolaid-point/ "I now believe the most dangerous time for a woman with online visibility is the point at which others are seen to be listening, “following”, “liking”, “favoriting”, retweeting. In other words, the point at which her readers have (in the troll’s mind) “drunk the Koolaid”. Apparently, that just can’t be allowed." Read the whole thing, it's heartbreaking and eyeopening. It also involves some of the same people that attacked the author of the current post. So whatever these two woman did to "incite" this harassment was shared by at least two kinda-succesful woman in tech.
unimpressive 12y ago
This is a good post, I want to make that clear because that's about all I'll say about the rest of it beyond the second part being marred by a flaw that deeply bugged me: Idle speculation about 4chan causing the Pilchuck shooting was uncalled for, and as somebody who lives fairly close to the events very insensitive. It's one thing to talk about Elliot Rogers where it was made very clear that his motivations were pertinent, but turning whatever shooting tragedy into a political billiard ball is one of those things that we should stop doing because it's not improving discourse.
Bahamut 12y ago
I will say this, from the perspective of someone who has been around online communities for approaching 20 years and moderating in various online mediums for 10+ years - women get harassed online far too much in most communities. The extent some of the harassment goes is mind boggling. One of my good friends had a beastiality erotica written about her as part of a campaign to defame her, where the people involved went as far as taking the ip addresses of the moderators and redirecting them to a harmless image whenever they attempted to load the actual image. The primary reason is because a group of people didn't like how she acted, including dating the founder for a short while of the site the community was based on. Another member of the community was naively coaxed into sending someone else some pictures of her naked, which was then gathered up and used to slut shame her - she was not even 18, which made it distribution of child pornography. I have had to ban countless harassers who would go on a public TF2 server I run and immediately try to harass the women who had the gall to use a microphone - I take a zero tolerance attitude towards this behavior, harassment of any kind is unacceptable. Whatever positive contributions some of these people might have, it certainly isn't worth accepting that sort of behavior as the norm, driving away good people who did nothing wrong.
- thyrsus 12y ago
  Your individual actions are laudable. Is responsible moderation the only way to create welcoming communities, or are there ways to scale that?
  - Bahamut 12y ago
    I'm of the opinion that it always starts at the top - even silence can be the wrong action, especially with behavior that normally gets decried as unacceptable at large. Moderators have such large power to influence the directions communities go - in a way, moderators are like unofficial judges. Bad decision making ruins everyone's quality of life who participates. This is in large part what makes places like 4chan and Reddit not great in my eyes. Some of the moderation policies here on HN are also highly suspect as well, and it is reflected in some of the comments you see here and in some other posts. Communities have often proven bad stalwarts of proper decorum and respectfulness - you can see it quite often in forums or boards of various types and various subjects. 4chan, Reddit, HN, sports forums, video game forums, etc. More community run forums tend to devolve into chaos, where many otherwise good people who would normally stand up to abusive behavior end up leaving since they get drowned in a sea of mob rule. The only way I have been able to see this situation get stopped is by strong moderation, since they have special authority to make or break situations. However, moderation also has to be mindful of the community as well - some actions, even if right, can drive away people. Communities can mold around how a moderator behaves, so one has to be careful not to be too strong armed. It's a delicate tightrope one has to walk as a moderator, and one managing moderators.
lohengramm 12y ago
Really, it's not about tech. It's about women in society, in general. Now, I will not say that she have to be ashamed of anything, but... this is just too much victimism. You know, she actually went to live with those guys she talked about. She actually put her information on-line. She actually took the pictures, she actually went to have the abortion... Well... I do not want anyone to think I am saying that anything that happened to her is good or deserved, but, hey... let's shoulder with the responsibilities of our decisions, please.
angryfeminist2 12y ago
Common tactic - assert overblown systemic issue when the issues discussed could very easily be explained by the personality of the "victim". In general, the golden rule applies here: Don't start no drama, won't be no drama. If you go into tech and are competent and not a raging drama queen with a chip on your shoulder people will generally leave you alone, though as with any section of humanity there are real assholes there as well.
angryfeminist2 12y ago
Randi sure likes to play the victim, but if her current trolling and pompous bloviating on twitter are any indication she is basically a troll who is upset when people respond to her trolling. She effectively gets in the mud and slings it along with the other mud-slingers then when the mud hits her she goes around and self-righteously claims that mud-slingers are everywhere.

206 points by panic 12y ago

song 12y ago

I have a seething hatred for weev, his clique and anyone who behaves similarly. I hope to think they're a small minority of people but it's amazing how many women they've tried to turn off tech with their idiocy, their defamation, their death threats and their abuse. When I see what happens to women in tech and a lot of the abuse they have to withstand, I admire those that can stand the trolls. I don't think I would be this resilient faced with this abuse. I wish we could be in a world where everybody would be accepted in the tech community regardless of gender, race or sexual orientation. I hoped before that due to the relatively higher education level of tech workers, people would be more tolerant but it seems that's not the case. PS: Now, in the case of weev and his AT & T conviction, I of course support reversing it and support the work that EFF is doing defending him but that's despite weev. It's because, in this particular issue, he's innocent. That doesn't stop him from being an horrible person.

jacquesm 12y ago
Horrible people are the best touchstone for principles. If you can stand up for the rights of horrible people then you're probably doing ok. EDIT: It's weird, I'm so conflicted about 'weev'. I have serious problems with him going to jail the way he did (and I know he's been released), but at the same time I feel that I'd probably be A-ok with him serving jail time for the wanton destruction of other peoples lives (and then pretending he never did it whereas he first proudly claimed he had) that he inflicted with so much carelessness, some of which is detailed in this article. He's right up there with the child pornographers. I recall my frustration with the way /. got overrun by weev and his buddies in their eternal quest for negative attention and griefing. Total jerks, the lot of them.
- tomp 12y ago
  So wait, in the first paragraph you're saying that we should stand up for horrible people's rights, and in the second, you're saying he should go to jail because he's a horrible person. Which one is it? Personally, my principles are perfectly clear: just because I disagree with someone's opinions or behaviors, that doesn't mean they should go to jail (actually, that shouldn't even be a debate!). As long as he has not physically harmed anybody, he should be a free man. If we start jailing people for the psychological harm they cause, we would jail a lot of people (including most of the politicians). It's better if we (as the society) learn how to ignore the trolls, and give less fuck about what other people think/say/do. Thankfully, that's mostly the problem in USA, not in Europe so much. We don't freak out every time someone curses on TV or shows her boobs. (On the other hand, we have other issues, e.g. xenophobia, gag orders, lack of free speech, ...)
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    > If we start jailing people for the psychological harm they cause, we would jail a lot of people (including most of the politicians). Perhaps we should, then.
    - tomp 12y ago
      I didn't think I would need to explain this... The problem with that is that it's a very slippery slope. Everything you do, someone will complain, and be hurt. You're pro choice? You hurt Christians. You're pro life? You hurt women. You're pro immigration? You hurt domestic workers. You're against immigration? You're hurting foreigners living in oppressive countries. Most any binary choice will have some people pro and others against, and unfortunately everybody can pretend they're emotionally hurt, which effectively means you'll be jailing people whose opponents are the loudest.
      - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
        "Pretend to be emotionally hurt" If we were just talking about mere offense and hurt feelings (which are still serious), I wouldn't be talking about jail time.
      - DanBC 12y ago
        I'd be interested to know how you would cope with the persistant vicious attacks from people like Weev, lasting many years. And what you'd actually do in that situation, now what you'd think you'd do.
      - wpietri 12y ago
        It is not particularly slippery. In theory, I could also have you arrested because your sleeve accidentally brushed mine in a crowded elevator. "Assault!", I cry, while I flop to the ground like a soccer player. But that's not a big problem because it turns out that legislators and prosecutors and judges and juries are not total idiots. The flopping thing has been attempted, seen as a problem, and generally dealt with. It's also not even a slope. Blasphemy has been a crime in plenty of places, but we're moving away from that. Ditto crimes like insulting the king or harming the state. We move away from it because we get better at discerning actual harm from societally valuable dissenting speech.
- knowtheory 12y ago
  Kathy Sierra made her feelings on the subject very clear on twitter before she left. Weev is a horrible person, and probably he even deserves to go to jail. But he does not deserve to go to jail based on bullshit. We should never forget that injustice done to Weev is not the same as justice for the things he done.
  - geographomics 12y ago
    I'm surprised weev hasn't been prosecuted for the numerous campaigns of individual harassment he's instigated and been involved with. Does the USA not have any law against such behaviour? He's been responsible for deliberate and persistent personal abuse, causing much alarm and distress, and has bragged about it openly. Does this genuinely come under the protections of "free speech", as is claimed by those who defend him?
    - knowtheory 12y ago
      Yeah. So there's a lot going on with harassment charges. First things first, i'm not a lawyer. I'm just a dude who cares about civics. The internet makes harassment considerably more problematic. Even setting aside constitutional defenses of speech, just trying to figure out which agency should be in charge of investigating and prosecuting harassment is confusing at best. Do you go to your local police? Do you go to a federal agency? Which one? Even when you do approach a law enforcement agency after receiving threats, do they think its worth their time to investigate? (Amanda Hess's piece on harassment is an interesting for her interactions w/ the police alone: http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-arent-welcome-internet-72170/ http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-ar... ) Revenge porn is an analogous (but not identical) problem, and even in that case, where basically everyone can agree it's a bad thing, it's clear first that states don't have statutes which they can use to prosecute (until very recently at least: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_porn#U.S._laws http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_porn#U.S._laws ), and in several cases some of the laws being written are complete clusterfucks. The truth of the matter is that you can get away with a whole lot of bullshit before anybody starts trying to drop hammers on you. And harassers live in that space between what is legal and what is enforceable (a lot of other interesting stuff lives in that space too).
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calibraxis 12y ago
Reminds me of what Grigori Perelman (who quit math professionally) said about mathematicians: "Of course, there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest." Sometimes you see programmers mulling over why someone would leave math over this. Unfortunately, it doesn't strike them to use their own profession's lack of ethics as an analogy: racism and sexism. Many more leave programming over this. (Or at least stop helping their fellow programmer, because they don't like them overall.)
yummyfajitas 12y ago
I wonder though, has he actually turned a statistically significant number of people off? Suppose field X had a crazy person so dedicated that he shot a US president in order to send a message to a woman working there (far more than Weev has done). Suppose that pervert letters to women in field X were completely expected and commonplace, and had been for many years. Would women flee from X? Surprisingly, acting has no shortage of women. Pervs sending creepy letters is a topic of humor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmeh7EHpIE0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmeh7EHpIE0 Journalism has similar issues. Still plenty of women. Seems like there must be something else at play. [edit: replaced the word "anyone" with "a statistically significant number". This better expresses what I meant to say.]
- empthought 12y ago
  Idle speculation: tech attracts more than its fair share of introverts relative to those career choices, and for someone who needs just a little positive social interaction from time to time, the risk of extremely negative social interaction being the norm is too great.
  - wpietri 12y ago
    This is definitely an issue. One of the people I mentor is a shy young woman. She will make an awesome developer. A few weeks back I had to sit her down and have The Talk explaining that if she rose to prominence, she could well be the target of hideous attacks where guys would have no problem at all. Her eventual conclusion was to stay in the field, but it was definitely something she had to weigh. I've talked with a number of women with established tech careers who have been questioning whether their work to get women into the field is even a good idea. Women drop out of the field at twice the rate men do.
    - empthought 12y ago
      This could be a third-rail question, but I wonder how that "dropout" rate compares to any arbitrary field when measured by the same yardsticks. Women are still the primary caregivers for 95% of infants born, and hence will always show up as more frequent "dropouts," so that statistic really needs to control for this factor somehow to be compelling. Without that control, the anecdotes are more convincing than the statistic, so why bother with the statistic?
ZeroGravitas 12y ago
Weev's own words are probably the best way to expose him: http://weev.livejournal.com/409913.html http://weev.livejournal.com/409913.html The fact that he goes to such lengths to sound reasonable and yet fails adds a very dark cast to the whole affair and appropriating the "politically correct" language of what he considers the enemy is a big part of Gamergate too. He struggles to keep it up for long periods of time though, e.g. his reponse to a comment question, "do you support gamergate?": "As much I can support a bunch of beta faggots crying about vidya. I agree that feminist nutjobs are ruining the tech industry, of which I suppose the video game development industry is a subset. I'll agree that #GamerGate probably has moral superiority to a bunch of useless whores whining about shit that they profess to dislike yet still want to dominate and destroy anyways. However, probably all of the /v/ and /gg/ faggots need to be more admirable and brutal in their tactics. This reasoned and polite dialogue that they are attempting with these degenerates and their histrionic shills is obviously not going to work. They need to start putting jackboots on the ground."

aw3c2 12y ago

To maybe save some from reading through this rambling who like to stay away from the topic: It does not seem to be about women in tech generally but seems to boil down to the work of a few socio-/psychopaths caught in a feedback loop.

nounaut 12y ago
You sound like you're probably part of the problem.
- aw3c2 12y ago
  Uh... Please elaborate?
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    > It does not seem to be about women in tech generally but seems to boil down to the work of a few socio-/psychopaths caught in a feedback loop. I think it's more than just a few and I think she's trying to broaden the scope by showing (fairly clearly) that outside of the BSD community these issues are pervasive. Hard for me to judge if that's true or not but I'll take her word for it.
    - aw3c2 12y ago
      It is my honest belief that a few dedicated abusers can easily attract and steer an army of trolls. They feed on the affirmation of comments, upvote points, whatever. The worst ones enjoy hearing about the misery of their victims. Just look at how easily online groups can turn pro/contra certain issues. A good friend of mine is biologically male, identifies as female though. He was public about that online and also due to other circumstances attracted a dedicated abuser. That abuser is so perfidious and persistent, that he (we assume) still manages to rally communities against my friend several years after it started.
      - niconii 12y ago

JonnieCache 12y ago

I stopped hanging around on IRC because of people always being weird to women, it's just depressing to watch. Maybe I should have stayed and made a stand...

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
I was aware of sexism in tech but it had never caused me problems. And then one day I enter some Hackintosh IRC channel and I get mad at them calling me 'he', and then they figure out I'm trans... And I eventually leave, because now they're being really sexual and creepy. It's really horrible. You start to rationalise it or try to ignore it. You become insensitive to it. You don't want to leave because they're helpful and talk about interesting stuff and all, but they're also nasty to you.
- Svenstaro 12y ago
  This is more or less a practical thing. I think you would agree that there are more males in IRC than females. Which personal pronoun would you choose by default to address someone without explicitly knowing their gender? Would you always ask them beforehand? That might get weird. Would you use some weird Internet pronoun like "xe"? Statistically speaking, going "he" is not a bad first guess. I'm not saying it's helping, though.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    Um, I'd just use singular they (which has been in use in English for literally centuries), or rework the sentence to avoid the pronoun.
  - bkirwi 12y ago
    The 'he' seems not to be the most important part here. (Though, as the GP points out in another comment, the singular 'they' is useful.) The particularly nasty part is this: > And I eventually leave, because now they're being really sexual and creepy. Mistaking someone's gender is a relatively small lapse (though I understand it gets painfully annoying when it happens all the time) but the subsequent creepiness is just actively toxic.

cousin_it 12y ago

> When a woman publicly tells her story and a man tells her that her experiences are invalid That's what happened with Zoe Quinn, except gender reversed. Her ex told the story of how she abused him, and it got censored and slammed everywhere. Edit: I'm a bit freaked out by the downvotes. What's wrong with my comment?

spindritf 12y ago
It goes against the preferred political outlook of downmodders. It could have been something as boring as a government statistic and it would have been downvoted just the same.
Infinitesimus 12y ago
I haven't heard of this side of the story, mind sharing some references to it? That would be really awful
- cousin_it 12y ago
  It's all over the internet at this point, any references would be biased one way or another. You can look at http://thezoepost.wordpress.com/ http://thezoepost.wordpress.com/ for the original account that started that whole mess, but for the rest you're pretty much on your own. For example here's a Reddit thread where an admin gives a non-apology for censorship and says it was by mistake: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/2e7y4h/this_is_a_thingy_post_about_that_one_drama_thingy/ http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/2e7y4h/this_is_a_thi...
- medecau 12y ago
  I'm not entyrelly sure but I believe that the event mentioned was the genesis for the GamerGate thing. Just search gamergate to get an idea of the mess.
anu_gupta 12y ago
She didn't abuse him, unless you think every man who's cheated on a woman is also abusive.

inglor 12y ago

It's very hard not to sympathize with this as most of our generation who went to tech are "misfits". As a minoroty that's even harder. I don't understand why randy would focus on making tools for blocking people on Twitter though - writing about it is more effective and less 'ragey'. It would also be nice if she adds how to help.

edmccard 12y ago
>I don't understand why randy would focus on making tools for blocking people on Twitter though... Usenet had killfiles, email has spam filters, Facebook has unfollow...no reason not to focus on something similar for Twitter. >It would also be nice if she adds how to help There is a second part to the post: Still Here, Part 2: Call to Arms[1] [1] http://randi.io/wp/archives/91 http://randi.io/wp/archives/91
calibraxis 12y ago
There's lots of lit on how to help: http://juliepagano.com/blog/2014/05/10/so-you-want-to-be-an-ally/ http://juliepagano.com/blog/2014/05/10/so-you-want-to-be-an-... Also just look up Model View Culture's writers: https://modelviewculture.com/ https://modelviewculture.com/ (Also, they recently published a handy guide on startups: https://model-view-culture.myshopify.com/products/your-startup-is-broken https://model-view-culture.myshopify.com/products/your-start...)
freebsdgirl 12y ago
I told myself that I wouldn't comment on any of this, but goddamnit. MY NAME IS RANDI. IT IS LITERALLY PART OF THE URL.
- inglor 12y ago
  Sorry :) An honest DYAC mistake.
glass- 12y ago
> I don't understand why randy would focus on making tools for blocking people on Twitter though She received over 20k mentions in one month, mostly insults and attacks. Trying to actually talk to people while having to filter through all that noise is impossible.

sneak 12y ago

Randi Harper should be ashamed of herself for equating "reading words on the Internet" with being in an actual abusive relationship. There is a huge difference between intimate partner violence and not liking the text on webpages you choose to load on your computer.

JonnieCache 12y ago
It's a metaphor.
drjesusphd 12y ago
Domestic abuse can be emotional abuse, which certainly carries over to text communications. Especially if they include death threats.
TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
Not all abuse is physical. Verbal abuse is just as serious, if not moreso. The famous phrase "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" is really backwards. In truth, words can hurt far more than sticks and stones ever can.
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jacquesm 12y ago
She got harassed IRL, that exceeds 'not liking the text on webpages' by a considerable margin.
glass- 12y ago
People published her info online, she received phone calls to her house, they called her employer and got her fired, her emails were hacked and posted online. Just recently she tweeted that she was called into a meeting at her current job because trolls upset with the ggautoblocker list had been calling her current employer to try and get her fired. But it's all just words on the internet, right?
12y ago

ivanca 12y ago

You had been target of completely sexist discrimination and many of the perpetrators should be on Jail, but Annita Sarkeesian and a few like her are a completely different subject: http://youtu.be/WuRSaLZidWI http://youtu.be/WuRSaLZidWI We always look for people with the same motivations and the same struggle than us so I blame no one who relates to her.

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
Anita Sarkeesian isn't a completely different. She is a woman in tech (more specifically, video games) who is harassed for speaking out about sexism in video games. Perhaps some of her essays have inaccuracies, but none of this justifies the horrible abuse she gets on a constant basis. Also, Thunderf00t's videos on her seem to focus on single details as if her entire argument would fall down, when it wouldn't, and by repeating something enough times until it seems to be true. I'm hardly the best person to talk about these, though.
- geographomics 12y ago
  Totally agree. Personally I think Anita provides quite a fresh look at the portrayal of women in video games and other pop culture, and it's interesting to hear her perspective even if one disagrees with it. It just seems thoroughly unhinged to mount a campaign of sexual harassment and death threats in response, rather than countering with a reasoned line of argument, or simply just shrugging it off.
  - XorNot 12y ago
    I haven't found Anita's videos particularly compelling as unique analysis, but that's become an utterly tertiary issue to the completely insane crap which has happened to her, and started happening, at the mere idea that she would make them.
    - ivanca 12y ago
      No, you don't understand, the crap that has "happened to her" is how she is making a living out of it, unlike the poster of this article and anyone actually suffering from it.

freshflowers 12y ago

I'm tired of the fact that this debate has deteriorated into sides lead by extremists. On the one side there is the gamergate crowd, who despite their constant denial are fundamentally sexist and misogynistic in pretty much every second sentence they utter. And the existence of these pricks serves as a cover for the ubiquitous but much more subtle sexism in the tech industry. Which in turn is being denied by the people smack dead in the middle of it (this thread to will see a lot that kind of denial). On the other side however are the consummate activist, the ones the bigots refer to as "Social Justice Warriors" who see sexism in everything, stifle any debate with finger pointing, bullying and witch hunts (as recently demonstrated with "shirtgate"). These people are no better than the pricks they claim to be fighting. They don't just fight sexism and inequality, they want to bury anything they are uncomfortable with, including basic human desires and freedom of any kind of non-politically correct form of expression. And from the tactics used and the collateral damage caused, I find it increasingly difficult to tell the two sides apart except for the the symbolism and rhetoric.

rmc 12y ago
Here's a hint. One side is threatening "the greatest school shooting in American history"
- Frozenlock 12y ago
  Yeah, too bad we don't know which one.
  - rmc 12y ago
    Gamergate
    - srslack 12y ago
      Care to back that statement up? Any proof, any proof at all? Randi's post does not have any proof linking #GamerGate, an amorphous hashtag to threats, or even casually proving that "GamerGate supporters" are the ones carrying out the threats. It's just an opinion. It'd be pretty easy going back in one's twitter timeline to make that determination, would it not?

Tryingtofeel 12y ago

As an outsider reading this, I feel like there is a missing side of the story. Did those people really do all those things for no reason? What prompted them to harass her? Edit: I'm not saying there are ever circumstances where what they did is warranted. The story just seems to be so one dimensionally against her, couldn't help but feel something was missing.

matt_morgan 12y ago
It would be better to ask if there are any circumstances under which those things were reasonable.
- aw3c2 12y ago
  How does that actually help? Who would even think that those things are reasonable? It makes much more sense to try to understand why it happened and how it can be prevented.
aw3c2 12y ago
Careful, that question is forbidden. You will probably be accused of "victim shaming" in a minute. Sadly most people seem not interested in the psychological or sociological motivation of those abusers. There is always something that triggers abuse (no, I am not saying that it must be something the victim did). I wish we would investigate into that and help people stay clear of the psychopaths that way.
- Frozenlock 12y ago
  Bill Burr made a sketch about this kind of reasoning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlvvCYUDHrQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlvvCYUDHrQ
- ZeroGravitas 12y ago
  Kathy Sierra suggests that the fact that she was listened to by many people was what triggered the hatred for her: http://seriouspony.com/trouble-at-the-koolaid-point/ http://seriouspony.com/trouble-at-the-koolaid-point/ "I now believe the most dangerous time for a woman with online visibility is the point at which others are seen to be listening, “following”, “liking”, “favoriting”, retweeting. In other words, the point at which her readers have (in the troll’s mind) “drunk the Koolaid”. Apparently, that just can’t be allowed." Read the whole thing, it's heartbreaking and eyeopening. It also involves some of the same people that attacked the author of the current post. So whatever these two woman did to "incite" this harassment was shared by at least two kinda-succesful woman in tech.

unimpressive 12y ago

This is a good post, I want to make that clear because that's about all I'll say about the rest of it beyond the second part being marred by a flaw that deeply bugged me: Idle speculation about 4chan causing the Pilchuck shooting was uncalled for, and as somebody who lives fairly close to the events very insensitive. It's one thing to talk about Elliot Rogers where it was made very clear that his motivations were pertinent, but turning whatever shooting tragedy into a political billiard ball is one of those things that we should stop doing because it's not improving discourse.

Bahamut 12y ago

I will say this, from the perspective of someone who has been around online communities for approaching 20 years and moderating in various online mediums for 10+ years - women get harassed online far too much in most communities. The extent some of the harassment goes is mind boggling. One of my good friends had a beastiality erotica written about her as part of a campaign to defame her, where the people involved went as far as taking the ip addresses of the moderators and redirecting them to a harmless image whenever they attempted to load the actual image. The primary reason is because a group of people didn't like how she acted, including dating the founder for a short while of the site the community was based on. Another member of the community was naively coaxed into sending someone else some pictures of her naked, which was then gathered up and used to slut shame her - she was not even 18, which made it distribution of child pornography. I have had to ban countless harassers who would go on a public TF2 server I run and immediately try to harass the women who had the gall to use a microphone - I take a zero tolerance attitude towards this behavior, harassment of any kind is unacceptable. Whatever positive contributions some of these people might have, it certainly isn't worth accepting that sort of behavior as the norm, driving away good people who did nothing wrong.

thyrsus 12y ago
Your individual actions are laudable. Is responsible moderation the only way to create welcoming communities, or are there ways to scale that?
- Bahamut 12y ago
  I'm of the opinion that it always starts at the top - even silence can be the wrong action, especially with behavior that normally gets decried as unacceptable at large. Moderators have such large power to influence the directions communities go - in a way, moderators are like unofficial judges. Bad decision making ruins everyone's quality of life who participates. This is in large part what makes places like 4chan and Reddit not great in my eyes. Some of the moderation policies here on HN are also highly suspect as well, and it is reflected in some of the comments you see here and in some other posts. Communities have often proven bad stalwarts of proper decorum and respectfulness - you can see it quite often in forums or boards of various types and various subjects. 4chan, Reddit, HN, sports forums, video game forums, etc. More community run forums tend to devolve into chaos, where many otherwise good people who would normally stand up to abusive behavior end up leaving since they get drowned in a sea of mob rule. The only way I have been able to see this situation get stopped is by strong moderation, since they have special authority to make or break situations. However, moderation also has to be mindful of the community as well - some actions, even if right, can drive away people. Communities can mold around how a moderator behaves, so one has to be careful not to be too strong armed. It's a delicate tightrope one has to walk as a moderator, and one managing moderators.

lohengramm 12y ago

Really, it's not about tech. It's about women in society, in general. Now, I will not say that she have to be ashamed of anything, but... this is just too much victimism. You know, she actually went to live with those guys she talked about. She actually put her information on-line. She actually took the pictures, she actually went to have the abortion... Well... I do not want anyone to think I am saying that anything that happened to her is good or deserved, but, hey... let's shoulder with the responsibilities of our decisions, please.

angryfeminist2 12y ago

Common tactic - assert overblown systemic issue when the issues discussed could very easily be explained by the personality of the "victim". In general, the golden rule applies here: Don't start no drama, won't be no drama. If you go into tech and are competent and not a raging drama queen with a chip on your shoulder people will generally leave you alone, though as with any section of humanity there are real assholes there as well.

angryfeminist2 12y ago

Randi sure likes to play the victim, but if her current trolling and pompous bloviating on twitter are any indication she is basically a troll who is upset when people respond to her trolling. She effectively gets in the mud and slings it along with the other mud-slingers then when the mud hits her she goes around and self-righteously claims that mud-slingers are everywhere.