Comment by pedalpete | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pedalpete | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently working in a team that is 50% women, and I'm amazed at how many stories they have of previous work experiences and the culture of acceptance in medium sized companies.

I hope Jessie doesn't give up. Not only for the sake of our industry, but also for the sake of girls who want to make it in this industry and not have to put up with what jessie has had to put up with.

Her (or any person) having to leave our industry because of any sort of harassment hurts the rest of us the most.

Rather than going the law enforcement harassment route, is there any way we as an industry can stand up for Jessie and the rest of the woman who are being abused by a few assholes?

Just yesterday I met a friends niece who wants to become a game developer. She's only 14 now, but what a shame it would be for her to give up on her dream because some idiotic moron, mentally incapable of forming real normal relationships, has ruined our industry for her.

This doesn't need police action (though nothing wrong with that), it needs us to be outspoken and supportive. Maybe also a bit creative in how we handle this. I'm all for finding ways of kicking these offensive guys out and bringing more women in.

This absolutely needs police action.

Regardless of what your stance is on unwanted sexual attention, sending death threats is not acceptable.

Death threats are illegal in most countries. So yes, police action.

Agreed. What Jessie is dealing with is classic internet trolls. They don't give a damn about "Women in Tech", her or anything else. All that interests them is finding a target to dig a reaction out of "for the lulz". They do it because it gives them little endorphin pops to think about how upset their victim must be and because it's very low risk. That's all there is to it. If there was any perception of risk in their activity, they wouldn't do it.

Making it clear that "this is simply unacceptable" will only encourage trolls. They aren't ignorant. They don't even have an agenda. They're simply selfish. The only way to discourage them is to introduce concrete risk to the unwanted activity.

You're thinking about Something Awful around 2005, or 4chan's /b/ in 2007 or so. That's not what we're seeing.

While I'm hardly a rigorous ethnographer of the Internet's cesspits, my (often firsthand) observations suggest that "for the lulz" was never as significant a motivation as it was made out to be, and it's less so now than then.

Too, trolling "for the lulz" tends to show a pretty typical pattern of high intensity combined with short period -- people doing it just for fun tend to get bored and wander off after a little while, save in the relatively rare case of a high-value "lulzcow" who can be trolled over and over to good effect (i.e., producing responses which lulz trolls consider funny.)

Meanwhile, the attacks directed at our female colleagues seem to vary widely in intensity, but to occur over a relatively long period; sometimes it ebbs, and sometimes (as for example in the wake of increased public prominence, such as a conference presentation) it hits high tide, but pretty much all our colleagues who've chosen to speak up about it have described it as an overall ongoing thing.

That's not a characteristic pattern of lulz trolls; for one thing, they don't have the staying power, and for another, lulz trolls actually do go away if you don't feed them. Instead, that's a pattern characteristic of people who are doing what they do, not for its own sake, but as a tactic to advance some purpose -- in this case, I think a reasonable surmise is that they actually are trying to drive women away from the industry, by making it just not worth putting up the bullshit involved in staying in it.

Maybe I'm wrong. Since I got bored of 4chan, I've only seen trolls when they're being well fed --such as right now. I guess it comes down to:

Which is most likely to be the more prevalent source of the problem?

A) There is a small, but significant population of men in technology who aggressively harass prominent women in tech and they do it primarily because they want to actively work against the growth of female participation in the general tech community.

B) There is a small, but significant population of people on the internet who enjoy aggressively and anonymously harassing anyone they think they can get a good reaction out of. Some of these trolls participate in the tech industry. Their distant familiarity with prominent women in tech makes those women into particularly fun targets.

The problem of aggressive, anonymous harassment in tech is almost always portrayed as A). But, I believe B) is by far the more prominent source. This misportrayal distracts the conversation from discussing real solutions. Instead, it actually feeds the trolls by generating highly entertaining, heated arguments where neither side is even talking about the real source of problem: them.

It is A, as the responses above, and hundreds of blog posts and similar discussions have made clear. There are big disparities in the gender balance, specifity, longevity, and personal nature of the attacks. And it happens to women who are not prominent in any sense of the word.

I think you want it to be B, because you don't want to believe it's A. But it is definitely A.

> They don't give a damn about "Women in Tech", her or anything else.

I disagree. If this was a pure love of fucking with people, men and women would get equal levels of this. But that's definitely not the case. They have a strong opinion on women in tech (and in gaming): they're vigorously opposed.

> The only way to discourage them is to introduce concrete risk to the unwanted activity.

I'm all for that. But it's tricky. There are good reasons names are rarely named in situations like this: the consequences of a public fight are often worse for the victims than the abusers. If we want consequences, we'll have to find ways to make it safe for victims to come forward, and we'll have to give them confidence that reporting abuse will actually do some good.

> If this was a pure love of fucking with people, men and women would get equal levels of this. But that's definitely not the case.

Women in tech and gaming are targeted because they are juicy targets. They have a high reward/effort ratio. It's easy to get hooks into a woman in tech/gaming. Vigorously opposing them is a means to the end of getting a reaction. It's relatively much harder to get a reaction from a man for being in tech or gaming. So, the trolls go for the low-hanging fruit.

> I'm all for that. But it's tricky.

Definitely. If this was easy, it would have been solved long ago. This is a problem as old as the internet. I'm just trying to direct attention to the actual problem. Indictments of whole industries are worse than distractions. The confused, heated, misguided, highly emotional arguments are troll dessert! Watching people in this discussion get angry at each other is the cherry on top of all the effort they put into Jessi.

> So, the trolls go for the low-hanging fruit.

I agree that they can cause more damage to women, but I think that's mainly because the culture (and the tech industry) is still substantially sexist.

But it's precisely that endemic sexism that makes me suspicious of your theory that of all the people being terrible mainly to women (misogynists, cat-callers, street harassers, pick-up artists, date rapists, abusive partners, exploitative bosses, etc, etc, etc), these trolls are the only ones who happen to be perfectly free of bias.

Do you have some explanation of how all of these people happen to be so unusually free of bias and then take up a hobby where they abuse women for fun? Otherwise, Occam's razor suggests that this is just the on-line form of the culturally endemic male abuse of vulnerable women.

> Indictments of whole industries are worse than distractions.

Nope! Definitely not. People are perfectly happy to let problems exist when they're on a large enough scale, because they don't see themselves as having a way to act. But this problem exists in our industry, and we can fix it here if we want. I sure do.

They're (the trolls) are the kind of people who think "better to be hated by someone, than to be ignored by everyone."

You are correct nightcracker, I guess I should have said, along with police action.

I think police action may be more difficult than us taking responsibility ourselves. Should be both.

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