Looks like she doesn't want this to be posted here.
"Thanks, it's ok. It seems to be being moderated well for once. And I can take any stupid comments these days."
It is distributing to find somewhere you thought of as a "safe place" seems like such an upsetting place to others. I'm not sure what HN should do about this, but it is a very disturbing turn of events. Perhaps it is time to pack up and leave?
Someone finds HN to be upsetting, this is such a shock, it's time to pack up and leave...
Can't say I'm following your line of thought. What, people should stop visiting and/or revamp communities that someone else doesn't like?
Particularly when in this case (front-end developer, reading the title of Anna's blog), you would hope these would be exactly the kind of people HN would want to attract, both as articles to link to, and people to come and comment.
Ha, you must not read a lot of the comments then. HN likes to whip out the sexist and/or victim blaming rhetoric quite often; it doesn't surprise me at all that someone would like to distance themselves from this site.
This thread is one hour old and there's already some victim blaming going on.
As someone who's been on the receiving end of HN traffic, its a lot of eyeballs. Its one thing to write a personal blog posting for your 500 readers and whole other to find 500,000 hits that day.
> meta-discussion about HN which is unhelpful.
Why is this unhelpful? Why isn't discussing sexism and bigotry on HN important?
- start texting you and calling you (at all [distracting] times) making your primary number useless?
Get a new number. In 2004, not everybody had cell phones (or especially texting plans) If a cell phone loses its utility of being a tool, then ditch it.
- Messaging on Hotmail
This is [the known attacker version of] why many parents concern their kids with not being searchable or using their real name. Don't have your real age or name on hotmail. Further, don't accept unauthenticated im friendships and give out private information.
- Blog comments
How did they know her URL, if not just for her class? Is the easy solution to just not allow comments, or at least require authorization to post comments?
For those clicking down arrow on this -- am I wrong? In fact, the author said, essentially, exactly this by this backing down from their thin threat, encouraged that everyone is dancing to their tune. Personally I find that simply reprehensible.
Instead of moderators saying "oh, better start deleting" when facing claims like this, simply remove the submission and blacklist the domain.
And you're essentially accusing them of trying to pull a cynical PR move. Have a think about that.
It is sensitive and I applaud them for talking about it and taking control. But when you post something to twitter as a public post, it is a public post and you simply don't have control over the discussion.
As someone who grew up with the internet, as they say, they surely understand this.
People might be mean. People might point out that "bullies are people too". People might post stupid jokes or asinine comments or talk about it being one side of the story.
Avert thy gaze. Geez, when I post technical articles and they get linked here or on Reddit, I don't even read the comments to that because I'm overly sensitive to disagreement. But that disagreement and the normal course of discourse is important, and I understand that I can't suppress it, nor should I.
Which is why I noted that when someone says something that the author said, the submission should be removed, as seems to be their desire regardless. The invisible hand of coercion is corrupting. Alternately HN should abide by some sort of robots.txt agreement or something.
And just to be clear, instead of simply making the post private or researching how to block sites, they instead called out HN specifically, to exactly the expected results: Lots of navel gazing and people talking about how mean HN is, so we really better keep it civil for them. They withdraw the threat. How can anyone argue that isn't explicit, obvious coercion?
To put it another way, the comments on HN are for the service and edification of the members of HN. They are not to serve the interests of the linked content or the people involved. This is a point that so often is missed in these "woe be us" discussions.
There are always shades of publicity. If I took any stupid comments / drunk photos of you on Facebook or Twitter and ran a full-page ad in the NYTimes featuring them, would you say, "well, public is public"? That would be just giving into the slippery slope fallacy.
Personally, if I'd been subject to the sort of ongoing campaign of abuse Ms. Debenham describes, I doubt I'd have held up under it one fourth as well. If I'd found the fortitude to post about it in the first place, seeing the post linked on HN might well be enough to convince me it'd been a bad idea talking about it in public at all. She seems to have found a happy medium between the need to protect herself and the desire to put her experiences out there where they might be of benefit to others, and I say good on her for it.
If you're coping with a trauma, it's not a pleasant thing to have happen.
That's as bad as the AP trying to charge people for links years ago.[1] It's just fundamentally against the nature of the internet: you don't get to control who links to you.
That being said, I have sympathy for experience and could absolutely see why she might be disturbed by the (potential) HN response. Probably the best solution in such cases is to not post the article, or to protect it with a password.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2008/06/16/heres-our-new-policy-on-ap-...