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This article is so spot on and covers many of the things that have bothered me for years about people who try to join nerd communities and then immediately star

• arrrg 12y ago
  Uhm, I’m real confused. Why do you talk about “try to join nerd communities” with regard to the dongle thing? Do you know something we don’t? That seems more like a policy of exclusion from your side – ala obviously a real nerd wouldn’t ever find something inappropriate or be clumsy in how they complain about something. This whole thing is a way of cordoning yourself off, isolating yourself from criticism, shunning others, excluding others. It’s so, so weird. And hateful.
  • moonshinefe 12y ago
    Speak for yourself, it was clear to me what he meant and you're putting words in his mouth.
  • amirmc 12y ago
    I feel there's a lot of 'no true Scotsman' in the article and throughout the comments here.
  • hyperion2010 12y ago
    I can't tell if your last line is flagged with /s but all I will say that it perfectly illustrate the lack of tolerance that drives nerds away. I'm going to generalize here. The description of nerd withdrawal that you give actively implies that the nerd has aggressively attacked someone by TRYING NOT TO BE SEEN. The nerd is trying to avoid conflict because it is a giant waste of time and frankly is pretty depressing. This behavior is the interpreted exactly as your last line reads as "hateful" and "weird." This interpretation leads to a personal attack from the afflicted whereas the nerd was simply trying to avoid any of this. It is like saying that nerds should know better when the stereotype that is forced upon them (often correctly) is that they are often utterly unaware of their affect on other people. That the afflicted does not have the empathy to recognize the crippling social ineptness (in the eyes of appropriate society) of the nerd leads to directed attacks (often call bullying in the rest of the world). When a nerd withdraws it is directed at no one. I am NOT giving the nerd an out for bad behavior. I am saying that nerds often speak their minds without stopping to check who is listening because they don't do the primate thing of checking to see who is going to beat their ass every time they speak and they intentionally formed their own society so they didn't have to. Most nerds will apologize if someone reminds them that other people near by might not feel comfortable hearing certain discussions, but don't be surprised if some of them ask why that someone was listening in the first place. tl;dr Generalization: Nerd withdrawal is rarely directed at anyone, it is a defence mechanism. Responses to nerd withdrawal or nerds expressing themselves (in their blithely unaware way) are often direct attacks on the nerd. This asymmetry is what drives me nuts.
  • hueving 12y ago
    Some scumbag got a guy fired by publicly shaming him on twitter for making a joke to his friend in a private conversation. That is one of the most hostile, weird, and hateful ways I've ever seen someone behave. It's a perfect example of counter-productive, oppressive behavior that was outlined in this article. Do you think getting that guy fired is going to suddenly change his sense of humor? Not likely. If anything, it's going to poison his view of feminists in the field by coloring them all as psychopaths willing to do anything to push an agenda rather than focus on the actual technology the community was originally built around.
    • Potando 12y ago
      Hold on. The only scumbag that got the guy fired was his employer. Will your boss fire you if you get harassed on Twitter?
      • hueving 12y ago
        Yes, if someone launches an Internet lynch mob of social justice warriors at me that threatens the business, of course I would be fired. No company wants to be perceived as "the place that employs the most-hated sexist in the world" if they depend on selling to regular people. An Internet lynch mob can ruin SE rankings, launch DDoS attacks, etc. Anything that attracts one is a liability.
        • throwaway9324 12y ago
          It would never have reached the proportions it did if it wasn't for all the people "defending" the guy and then keep bringing it up time and time again to make an argument.
          • reitanqild 12y ago
            You got it kind of backwards. He was already fired by the time the "East side of Internet" reacted. As for this being brought up again and again: it is a very good example and I can't recall the person in question ever coming up with a real apology.
• Argorak 12y ago
  I don't see anything what you describe as inherent and necessary to nerd culture. What you want is an abrasive culture and I oppose that. I certainly never "left the world" and certainly not because I found all those things useless or oppressive. I can still nerd out on a multitude of subjects from music to board games to digital culture and I do prefer to do it with people that don't use this culture as a reason to be terrible to other people. I run 3 meetups (one of them now the biggest NoSQL UG for one technology in Berlin), organised 8 very well-received conferences and moderated multiple bulletin boards. All are nerdy to the core - and are successful because you can expect not to be met with aggressiveness. Our credo is that the baseline to attend is interest in the subject. Anything else is hindering. Your nerdiness is definitely not mine.
  • hyperion2010 12y ago
    I don't want to get into the nerd vs geek debate here but my interpretation of TFA was that it was specifically talking about the types of people that simply didn't want to play the social hierarchy game. Just being interested in and doing nerdy/geeky things does not place you in that group (unfortunately the terminology we have does a poor job of distinguishing this). I also don't think there is any implication that I want an abrasive culture. I do not think that early google style corporate culture is a good thing. I think we need to dissociate nerds behaving badly from simply not picking up on social signals or not caring about them. The reason I say this is because when you treat someone as a villain who is simply thinking out loud you basically stop any potential for real dialogue in its tracks.
    • thequux 12y ago
      > Just being interested in and doing nerdy/geeky things does not place you in that group (unfortunately the terminology we have does a poor job of distinguishing this). The two groups are not identical, but the probability of being uninterested in playing the hierarchy game increases significantly when conditioned on being a nerd (and even more so, being in the infosec scene, where the author and I spend most of our time) to the point that they dominate the social scene.
• dagw 12y ago
  The dongle thing didn't take place at a "nerd community" event, but at a professional conference. The problem, as it where, is that computers and programming is no longer the exclusive domain of the so called "nerd" and I don't think we should make joining a subculture a prerequisite for joining a career path.
  • nailer 12y ago
    I don't think anyone required anyone else to join that subculture when making that joke to their friend.
  • belorn 12y ago
    The dongle "thing" did not take place at a nerd community nor a professional conference. It took place in a private conversation between two people who happened to be at a professional conference. The distinction is the same as if they were seated in a coffee shop. Conversations there are between private people, not with some coffee shop "audience". People who listen in to such conversation, and worse, reacts to it, are doing something which polite people consider very rude.
    • mkr-hn 12y ago
      What Donglegate did is reveal how many different takes there are on what constitutes public, and how unwilling people are to discuss it.
    • Thriptic 12y ago
      I'm not sure where I stand on this issue of conversation privacy in public spaces, but I will say that at worst the individual should have called the people making jokes out at the time and suggested that their conversation was not appropriate in context. To passively aggressively take to twitter to gather a mob strikes me as total overkill.
  • MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
    I think you got it backwards. The "dongle thing" is about a feminist bully, not about two guys making a harmless joke. The consensus is that Adria was the problem here, how anyone could come to a different conclusion is beyond me.
• calibraxis 12y ago
  I'm in "nerd culture". If it's too brittle to fit the needs of people in it, to hell with it. Change or die. I'm reminded of Grigori Perelman's critique of mathematicians: "But almost all of them are conformists." "It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens. It is people like me who are isolated." If anyone of us is a nerd and can't improve their own culture, GTFO. And take your "dongles" and Big Bang Theory goofiness with you. No special privileges for those who simply preceded others temporally. Dinosaur.
  • leereeves 12y ago
    > Change or die. Change or be killed, at your hands, it sounds like. Can you blame people for fighting back against that?
  • sgift 12y ago
    Or "nerd culture" could eliminate you and all the others trying to force change. There's no evidence that you are anything but a oxygen waster, so why should it hold back when you attack first?
  • dang 12y ago
    > Dinosaur. Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News.
• kaitai 12y ago
  Re: the dongle incident, the woman involved has been in the community for years. Why this "people who try to join" and "immediately start complaining" business? You're distorting the facts. I'm not quite as socially oblivious as the original writer. I do agree with her that being completely oblivious to social cues is really useful for women in tech. However, you can't turn off that fact that many women are pretty conscious of social cues. If "no one should ever be allowed to determine what is appropriate", why don't you guys just lighten up and deal with what women say at face value? Why do you take it so personally? You can't tell me it's inappropriate after a statement like you just made!
• ZeroGravitas 12y ago
  > people who try to join nerd communities and then immediately start complaining about "inappropriate behavior" (eg the dongle thing) You seem very sure about when Adria Richards (the lady involved in "donglegate") "tried" to join the nerd community. And yet you're wrong. Here's a partial bio from a recent article: "She was introverted, smart, and "weird" (according to the other kids)—a burgeoning nerd. By age 17, she'd fallen in love with computers. A year later, she was working at Geeksquad, employee #26, and she absorbed everything she could about hardware, operating systems, and networks. That summer, she registered her first domain name for a client for whom she was building a website, and learned about DNS. She buried herself in books and scoured websites, learning new things and trying them out, relying on friends whose parents had more resources to get access to hardware." http://www.shakesville.com/2015/02/the-falsest-of-false-equivalencies.html http://www.shakesville.com/2015/02/the-falsest-of-false-equi...
  • dropit_sphere 12y ago
    Is the dongle thing even remotely defensible? She got a man fired over a private conversation. One of the rules of civilized behavior is that you don't do that.
    • picks_at_nits 12y ago
      What exactly did she do? I recall she complained on Twitter, and exercised her freedom of speech to express her opinion. A number of people shared that opinion and also spoke freely about their opinion. In the fullness of time, his employers acted like craven cowards and sacked him. Did she sack him? No. Was he scarred for life? Ostracized? No, he found work again quickly. But what happened to her? A bunch of other people exercised their freedom of speech and shared their opinion of her choices, and she was also fired. Was she ostracized? Yes. People said things like, “She should never work in tech again.” To anyone on the outside of that incident, it’s quite obvious that the treatment of the two persons involved was completely asymmetrical, especially considering that what she did was express an unpopular opinion. Which is something that hackers, especially hackers here, often say is something that ought to be protected. But there’s always the weasel words that “speech has consequences,” which mean that in reality, “privilege” is being insulated from those consequences, and lack of privilege is being exposed to the maximum consequences. Getting back to your rules, she didn’t get anyone fired. She spoke out about something that was said in a public place loudly enough for her to hear it. I’ll gladly defend that. There is nothing remotely civilized about saying that she shouldn’t be allowed to object to anything she hears, or express her opinion about how a civilized society should respond. White males do that all the time. Why is a black, Jewish female not afforded the same option?
• mcguire 12y ago
  Note: "The only way forward is REAL tolerance for all kinds of behavior and a good faith attempt to see people in context." This only applies when a member of the group has been caught doing somethings stupid. If someone "trying to join" the group has complaints, there is no need for tolerance. "Nerd culture", for example, has its own standards of "appropriate".
• gadders 12y ago
  Out of interest, how would you apply the above to Brendan Eich?
  • reitanqild 12y ago
    That is a sad case of people proving that once the tables got turned the once who once was oppressed will happily deny others the right of free speech. And, the majority, the ones who care less about right and wrong as long as they are on the correct side, will happily follow along, just as they did when Catholics ruled, just as they did when White Straight ruled.
    • anon1385 12y ago
      The right to free speech doesn't mean the right to not face any social consequences for your speech.
      • reitanqild 12y ago
        Funny that you should bring that up: Until recently it was the other way around - tell someone you aren't straight and risk losing the job. Why is it suddenly be acceptable the other way around?
        • seba_dos1 12y ago
          Telling someone you're straight and supporting oppression of not straight people are two completely different things.
      • philwelch 12y ago
        It's interesting which way the double standard swings on this; for instance, the McCarthy-era Hollywood blacklist was exactly the same kind of "social consequence".
    • gadders 12y ago
      FWIW I'd apply a "does it affect how they behave at work?" test. If I had a very good developer who was perfectly courteous and professional at work but in his spare time was (say) a member of the Westborough Baptist Church or the Socialist Workers Party I'd not be concerned.
• tedks 12y ago
  It's definitely spot-on. I think it has a great example of anti-feminist/male-privileged mindset: > Desire for civility and freedom from objectification is "censorship" > Wanting to not support misogynists/rape apologists/rape denialists/sexual predators is worse than the soviets > My fear of social ostracism is as or more valid than your fear of being raped > My chosen "identities" are as important as the assigned social castes you've been placed in and are violently oppressed into staying in > Not having friends in high school is the same as being a woman, or black Eventually feminism will win; anti-racism will win; these are inevitabilities we can trace from the first slave revolts in Sumeria to John Brown to the Black Panther Party to even Barack Obama, in his own way. The ratchet of history turns only ever in one direction. Reactionaries howl over lost ground, but they'll never reclaim it. I eagerly await this world, where finally we will have real hackers, hackers that bring their skill to bear against real enemies, fight real battles, and are strong, rather than weak, building on a foundation of just conflict between the oppressors and the oppressed, rather than being mentally locked in the 3rd grade in the moment of shame when their lunch money was taken. One day the creeps will be gone. Only the strong will survive. Choose your side wisely, for you can only be on one side of history, and one it has left you behind you will be behind it forever. >Trying to convince hacker culture to change its norms by appealing to progressive values alone won’t work. You’re going to have to appeal to hacker values, and nobody’s done that yet. If progressive values are not hacker values, the hacker values will be, should be, and must be destroyed.
  • rthomas6 12y ago
    I agree with you 100%, but I feel the need to point out that you can still be a "weird nerd" and have progressive values. I do not think hacker values and progressive values are mutually exclusive, but I think they are orthogonal.
    • mkr-hn 12y ago
      Some of the weirdest nerds I know are more progressive than I am, and I'm pretty good at checking my biases and listening to people unlike myself.
    • tedks 12y ago