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Comment by Gualdrapo | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how that validates the response of the public mocking and harassing them.

Unfortunately for her the mocking is to teach other fools not to be one!

Some people are the shipwrecks on the rocks that help others navigate.

Yeah very commonly people say, "I have identified this as a scam but given that other victims weren't mocked relentlessly enough, I shall part with my money." /s

I think you know that's not what the comment is saying. They're saying people who fall victim to these scams would be less likely to talk about it, knowing they'll be the Internet's lolcow for a day. That hurts everyone, because now a scam is getting less coverage, leading to more people falling for it.

Has nothing to do with recognizing it as a scam in the moment it's happening. They're talking about what comes after falling for the scam.

That's a nonsense argument. Mockery obviously makes people LESS likely to talk about their victimization.

What you're actually trying to say is, "mockery amplifies the signal to get in front of more people's eyes" and my counter to that is: it doesn't need to. The article itself does a perfectly fine job communicating what's going on without making mockery. You're just choosing to layer mockery on top of it for, as far as I can tell, net negative effect.

It's the human condition to teach each other via positive and negative reinforcement.

If she didn't come forward publicly her story would've via the human telephone game. As well fabricated stories on this topic will and are created. So the mob is mocking fiction but in the end in a valuable societal manner to teach the fools.

I don't even know what argument you're trying to make here.

We don't need to spread the story because it'd do it by human telephone? We do, and it needs mockery? The stories are fake and the mob is mocking a fake story?

How about: Don't be a bully to people on the Internet?

Human telephone game ... you tell your story to one person that person tells it to another and to another and so on. Then someone writes about it and her story is out. She didn't have to stand up in public per say and tell her story it gets out anyway. Her story and the mockery from it teaches other fools not to be such.

I, myself am not one to ever bully a person or an entity online. It's just not good energy to put out there.

As for my belief that not all of what we see on the Internet is real (in the media too).. i won't go down that rabbit hole. Your point is do not bully people online whether they are really real people or not.

I would think that public mocking of scam victims would just encourage them to keep quiet about the crime.

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