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Comment by mtrimpe | Hacker News Reader

Let's not go there. Incorporating random anonymous posts will only make things worse.

For all we know Julie-Ann started dating someone close to Theresa Preston-Werner who shared that he, and several others, slept with her and could even be the father of Tom's child and then refused to distance himself from Theresa. When she shared this sad state of affairs in her private love life with some colleagues she was suddenly requested to meet with Theresa and....

See how that's both consistent and perfectly plausible yet still went from bad to worse pretty quickly? These things are messy enough as they are; let's not make them any messier than they need to be.

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>if Julie wants to share this story so publicly then everyone should at least have all of the story

the whole thing is crass and distasteful to my british sensibilities, but if this the future of how conflict in internet corporations is represented, then we shouldn't be surprised to see allegations from all sides. The key skills that we as audience have to develop is critical thinking, impartiality and a good sense of decency.

we shouldn't be surprised to see allegations from all sides.

The line is drawn at "anonymous internet sources". At least in the sense of euclidean geometry, that is not a "side" of the argument as much as it is a literary device to create an infinite attack surface.

We shouldn't be surprised, still, but we should be more on our guard when looking at the sources from any angle.

Since you don't have a means of contact in your profile, I'm just going to tell you directly. That was an incredible turn of phrase. Really nicely said.

Anyone speaking against Horvath would be publicly attacked, and GitHub employees aren't allowed to speak of the matter. Unfortunately anonymity is the only option.

How about it being true? You still want to ignore that? Or are you too biased?

Is a source any more reputable just because it's not anonymous?

Yes.

A named or pseudonymous source necessarily has an associated reputation, but an anonymous source has no reputation at all.

A reputation for lying is stronger evidence that the information might be false than is no reputation at all.

Not really...

Even taking all emotion out of it, a story from a source that is probably a lie convey s more emotion than a story from a completely unknown source.

I disagree. We must treat every anonymous source as if it has that reputation for lying, as otherwise a source can simply become anonymous to improve the credibility of their lies.

Until, of course, a source presents evidence, at which point we evaluate the credibility of the evidence instead of the source.

Maybe not by definition, but it's almost irrelevant because a not anonymous source is so much easier to verify / disprove. Sure, in theory an anonymous source could be 100% accurate, but since they are very tricky to back up, they almost always have the effect of stirring the pot without resolving anything, and thus quite often appear as nothing more than attempts to do just that. And after a while, people unsurprisingly start to treat them as such.

Well, certainly it's significantly more credible if it's an actual Github employee putting their name on it and standing behind that sort of statement. At least in that case you would hope that the possible repercussions of making such a bold lie would prevent most people from lying about something like that.

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