Thanks for writing this. As a female developer with 60K followers on Instagram, I went through all this:
– “Programmers don’t look like that!”
– “You’re fake. Some dude writes your content.”
– “Are you a model or a coder?”
Bullies are not happiest people on the planet: some of them have been harassed or bullied by their parents, in schools etc. I discovered the hard way that when I pay back with the hate, it makes me feel bad and also feeds their hate. The hardest and probably wisest solution is to respond with love to those unhappy folks. Or not responding at all. It's very hard, but it works.
I never stop being amazed by how much time and energy people will put into being awful to other people.
It's so frustrating that after being in this industry for over 20 years nothing's really improved, and far too many arseholes are still getting a free pass for their arseholery.
It's getting worse. It used to be socially inadequate highly educated geeks who thought it was funny and/or couldn't really cope with anything other than highly intelligent white males. Now it's far broader than that. Logically because non-phd's can (luckily) work with computers and enter the industry now, but it has the good and bad side effect that people who I would not have to mingle with and who would've never made it to software developer 30 years ago, now suddenly are clients/colleagues etc. This means a rather large (and growing) share of racists, bigots, white supremacists (I thought those were some kind of fringe types living in the woods but then suddenly some rather good coder starts to talk politics to you...) and such. And a lot of guys I know act like they see women coders as equals, but from their subtle (and not so subtle sometimes) actions show they really don't, even while she might have superior skills/experience.
Free speech is a noble ideal, but it seems like the current implementation of the Internet has turned that ideal on its head.
Yes, everyone should be able to say whatever they want to say, but no one should be forced to hear it. The way we implement discussion forums, chats, issue trackers, wikis, etc. is perhaps giving too many privileges to the mob.
I am partial to the idea of someone getting to decide, in advance, who they can see or hear. Letting the mob in, and then muting or banning after the fact can be exploited too easily.
>I am partial to the idea of someone getting to decide, in advance, who they can see or hear.
Who decides? Why were they chosen? How were they vetted? Is the vetting process continuous throughout their stay?
In other words:
What checks and balances are in place to make sure they don't abuse the position for the advantage or disadvantage of a group due to personal motivation?
The idea of a constant lifetime blacklist/whitelist makes me envision a world filled with small echo-chambers, all supportive of their own ideas, and filled with ire towards anything they view as opposition.
> I am partial to the idea of someone getting to decide, in advance, who they can see or hear. Letting the mob in, and then muting or banning after the fact can be exploited too easily.
I see that that could be done in a private group setting where everyone knows each other. In a forum for the general public though I have difficulty seeing how that could be done. Do you have any implementation details in mind?
>Letting the mob in, and then muting or banning after the fact can be exploited too easily.
This seems like the popular wisdom online, but is it really something that's abused so much (at all, or relative to the problem it exists to solve)? I've seen many more places with people terrified of the concept of moderators abusing their powers and places that refused to ban outright harassment and bigotry because the moderators were too worried about being seen as power hungry than I've actually seen power abusing moderators issue too many bans. (If you count "refusing to kick out harassers" as a kind of power abuse through inaction though, then I've seen a lot of that. Maybe this reframing would be helpful in general online.)
I believe you can already block people on GitHub and it stops them from interacting with any of your repos, and that doesn't seem too exploitable or broken in my opinion. If anything, they need more features along these lines and what you mentioned.
All that is fine, but in this context you’re talking about placing gates over open source software. I hope the solution to this problem is much more well thought out that a simple comparison of free speech and hate speech.
Twitter for instance should be set to private by the user.
It's unacceptable to set it as public.
If you post in public you are the same as a newspaper. You need to take all that on-board. From mental health of employees to security to legal. Newspapers don't just write stuff and shove it out there.
I keep thinking back of the days of the wild west of the internet, when I was a teenager. Back then, 'trolling' felt like it was done in 'good spirit', and it seemed as though everyone was sort of 'in on it', maybe because people shared similar values and knew there was no ill-intent behind the 'trolling' of the old days.
But at some point (and I suspect it has something to do with money, as always), it turned into a weird team-sport. And political. It's no longer acceptable and needs to end.
I was a little shit as a teenager and I hate that I was. Trolling was only "in good spirit" because I was a heartless asshole that completely lacked empathy for others. What comes to mind to me as the epitome of my teenage years was thinking this was funny:
A writer for the SA website made fun a website of a mother who was grieving her stillborn children. Forget any opinion you might have about the mother or her presentation: this a woman who had several children die before she ever got to know them. It's potentially one of the most traumatic things that can happen to someone, and this writer decided to ridicule how this mother grieved:
>Your poison womb is making heaven too fucking crowded.
I hate myself that I thought this was funny. I hate that I used words to belittle the LGBTQ community. I hate that I was that edgelord that held to statistics about crime rates and intelligence as they related to race. I hate that I made fun of people for their sexuality. I hate that I discounted sexism, racism, and ableism.
It was never in good fun. Some people grow out of it and others don't. I am still working constantly to better myself and catch myself when I have prejudice thoughts.
When was that? Because that is not how I remember the internet from 96 onwards at all. Even more if you were involved in gaming communities, as an example: early MMOs were prime time for dogpiling.
Trolling used to be more prank-ish but it would already at that time certainly devolve to doxxing and start affecting people's real lives. I remember it took me a long time to stop caring on not leaving traces that people could link to my real name, my real pictures or whatever online.
I remember people on online forums salivating when Google came out and was a much better search tool to link an username to an email and from there to your life outside the internet. It was scary to post something confronting these trolls because they could try to find you, they had enough free time for that.
So I don't know when the internet was really that naive and innocent place, it had more innocence but this bad side of it was very present from the get go, at least in my experience.
It's good that you used a throwaway account, because I think you already know: it was never done in 'good spirit,' not for the victims of your abuse.
What was amusing and fun to you and your friends drove people out of the industry, and is likely a very small part of why people lament imbalances in ethnicity and gender today.
Teenagers aren't great at understanding the consequences of their actions. I wasn't, you weren't, most of us aren't or weren't. It's hard to look back and realize that things you thought were in fun were not fun at all for the victims, but it's a good start.
When was it? Because while my own internet childhood was innocent too, I later found out a lot of very serious harassment was going on at exact that time - me seeing side pieces of it but not knowing full extend of what went on.
Back then, you was not supposed to "feed the trolls" so victims just left.
Charlie Gerard made a Github Action recently that uses tensorflow's toxicity classifier to block some of the more horrible PRs and comments on repos - https://github.com/charliegerard/safe-space - it'd be good if Github could roll something like that out across the entire platform.
While neat, this seems like an even more protracted version of the Scunthorpe problem just waiting to happen. We already know mass-automation of morals is problematic (see YouTube, Twitter, Facebook et al's attempts).
This stuff is deplorable, but for now it requires human eyeballs and judgement. Perhaps allow for more granularity on repo visibility and interactivity beyond public/private.
Yes, because we designed the internet and web "wrong".
I've commented with my opinion on this, here on HN, before. In my opinion, the world should have two internets: the current internet, and a "safe for life" internet.
The former would serve as a staging area and playground for new features. Just as the internet does today, it would provide, roughly speaking, no accountability and no security. My guess is that its main audience would be high-school seniors and college-age kids. In addition, you'd have a minority of techies, and — yes — some vile wingnuts.
The "safe for life" internet's network-layer would have baked-in authentication (eg: part of your IP is a user-id). It would have a protocol for notarization (ie: the ability to have a third party vouch for information. eg: the choice to tie your real name to your user-id, or remain pseudonymous). Its "web" markup would be far simpler and more semantic (no per-site styles, no dynamic features, no scripting).
When someone invents a very useful web feature/paradigm on the old internet/web, the new internet's web-standard could add special tags to support it. So, for example, the NewW3C could introduce a set of "store-front" tags with which one could create an entire online-store without any scripting. The NewW3C would include all sorts of functionality, eg: tags to host a Twitch-like site to stream video, with no JS whatsoever.
With this sort of accountability, the alternate internet would finally provide the ability to effectively moderate — bad actors wouldn't easily "respawn" a sockpuppet or bot account, to evade a ban. It would make commerce and data-sharing much safer (via the lack of dynamic features).
The situation today is absurd. What content do we want the web to promote: interesting photos of Japanese food, by a serious developer... or hackneyed ramblings by a bunch of 20-year old trolls? The internet we have today is "wrong" for most people.
I'm curious, what did the poster do to cause 4chan/trols to focus on her?
I know she pointed out some stuff in her article (she's a woman, mixed asian background, lists her pronouns on her page), but, usually, there's some sort of inciting incident that causes people to dogpile.
To ward off any non-constructive replies, I'll point out from the beggining that I'm not blaming her of anything, and the trolls are _obviously_ in the wrong here.
You can trace it yourself by using one of the 4chan archives, but to save you the trouble it started over someone complaining about GitHub having a readme page with a random profile as the example pic, other users looked up that profile, at which point the usual 4chan process took over. Also something about food pics.
It's pretty straight-forward why they dog piled her: She was included in the first tweet that showed off the profile readme feature. You can see it in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/pifafu/status/1281001171352645633
I had the same question so I dug around. As far as I can tell it really is just one anon that hates her for no reason. He's posted a couple threads with vague insults egging people on to comment on her github.
I know she pointed out some stuff in her article (she's a woman, mixed asian background, lists her pronouns on her page), but, usually, there's some sort of inciting incident that causes people to dogpile.
To ward off any non-constructive replies, I'll point out from the beggining that I'm not blaming her of anything, and the trolls are _obviously_ in the wrong here.
> she's a woman, mixed asian background, lists her pronouns on her page
Not sure if you're familiar with how toxic trolls tend to be, but any one of those things could be reason enough for some (most?) of them.
Excellent post. Whenever I see the full extent of harassment that an acquaintance endures it usually turns out to be far more than I assumed. So if someone you know is dealing with this keep in mind that there is probably a lot more than they are initially letting on.
Normally I don't support going to peoples employers for shit they do outside of working hours, but I am willing to bet that some of those fucknuggets were using work email addresses/accounts. If I was their boss I would want Kat/Github to reach out and let me know about this.
By using their work accounts, they are stating that the company condones their behaviour - and I suspect that isn't the case in the majority of cases. I would definitely want to know if any of my employees were engaging in this shit so I could explain in very simple terms why it is unacceptable - because they clearly don't get it on their own.
I went through a couple of these GitHub usernames, they are all first deleted, but there's some presence in other sites, and it's clear that none of them likely hold a regular job in any place of consequence. One of these accounts seems to spend time finding other female GitHub accounts and making condescending PRs while another was busy on far right subreddits crapping on various groups of people.
I wonder the consequences of having an account blocked or suspended if your employer used Github. And including your employer to an account you used for harassment would not, I think, be unfair grounds for "disciplinary action".
>I also received an email from what appears to be an MRAsian... It's sadly not uncommon to see Asian men upholding white supremacy and targeting Asian women for living our damn lives.
This is a bit fishy. The email sender was asking her opinion on certain matters related to racial politics, and our dear author just accused him/them of "upholding white supremacy". This makes me lose sympathy for the author here.
I think you and author have different connotations of white supremacy. It seems to me as though you are thinking Skinheads, KKK, etc.
In typical equity/inclusivity language, the breadth of White Supremacy goes a lot farther. It's similar in concept to Structural Racism -- It's not that the MRAsian emailer literally supports Nazis, it's that they're parroting political and societal points that were created as a result of the White Supremacy being the default state in the USA.
White Supremacy (i.e, Whites, and in particular, (rich) White Males being the defacto "person" that US policy and culture was/is created for) is essentially the state of the world after centuries of actions and policy based on the idea that the White Man is most deserving the fruits of the world, and that their place must be defended from colored people and women. White Supremacy will remain a fact until the long and hard work of including and raising all other people up to the same level of consideration and opportunity is complete, and society stops transmitting toxic memes which are rooted in it.
At least, this is how I understand it. (as a member of the most privileged class; happy to be educated by someone more knowledgeable than I)
I think the call for action by teams/management to ensure sufficient support (including time off) is a really important one. Lots of organisations are investing time and effort into trying to build a more diverse workforce, but the bulk of that attention tends to be in hiring, rather than retaining and supporting minority groups in the workforce.
This sounds awful and she obviously does not deserve this. No one does or could. These people attacking her are being absolutely horrible and disgustingly wrong. It's sickening.
I hope that one day their employers (and really, their friends and family) end up finding out the kinds of things they have been saying. It's a lot harder to be a horrible racist bigot in real life than it is to be a semi-anonymous one on the internet.
That said, I would have liked to see more in the "so why me?" section. There are other Asian women in tech, and her "radical" profile honestly seems pretty mundane to me. It's definitely possible that she was just targeted at random like she suggests, but it would be nice if she linked the threads (in addition to screenshotting them) or otherwise provided some more context.
She mentioned giving talks, and those are floating around online, as well as a decent twitter following. Chances are they just stumbled upon her randomly and decided that pure vitriol was the natural response, as is the way with certain communities.
ICT has a huge problem. We've been collectively in denial about it for far too long. My cohort at compsci classes in uni was a class of ten, in an industry only 20-30 years deep at best and already the gender ratio was in decline. (This is the seventies)
I might say I think gamer culture is bound up in this but it's not just about that. Something very toxic is empowered by current s/W engineering.
I'm retiring inside ten years. I worry it won't be fixed before I leave the field.
Even if you completely removed all factors deterring women from going into CS tomorrow, drastically improved the gender ratio in courses beginning next year, it would still take years for that to affect the ratio in industry.
And then you still have to fix any issues pushing them out of industry once they're already there.
You are never going to be able to control others' speech. The internet went wrong in my opinion when folks started using their real identity and their real life information. When I was growing up and getting online in the early 90's it was the most common of knowledge to use a handle, and never endanger yourself or contaminate your real life with your online persona. I have an ongoing theory that quite a lot of modern day anxiety and stress levels is due to making this switch to always being connected to online conversations with your real identity that you cannot back out of or turn off.
All that aside and not trying to go really in depth into that whole pocket theory of mine, it's the same as in real life, it's just amplified. You can't do a whole lot about other's opinions about you, or what they say to you and if you're online and you become a target for any reason it just becomes something you have to deal with on your own terms.
It's nasty, it's petty and it's a hurtful thing to continually attack someone else, but it's the internet. All celebrities deal with the way they are talked about online in their own terms. You do understand all the mainstream Brad Pitts, Britney Spears and whoever get death/sexist/racial harassment all the time as well I assume. It's being a public persona that now becomes the problem. You are willingly putting yourself out there where essentially millions of people can online swarm you. It's a responsibility to have all your personal information online, and to talk about what you like, who you are, hobbies and passions and associate these things to your identity on platforms in which millions can hate/obsess/harass.
I think it's a very serious mental and social problem, a load that is taxing the entire human psyche right now. It's obvious to me what this is doing to humans, with everyone trying to be a public celebrity for likes and fans. I don't think it's good.
Not trying to defend the bullies but people shit talking on Internet is pretty common thing. If you decide to share your photos and lifestyle, that is if you open the gate to your private space, you have to account for consequences. People mocked other people before the dawn of Internet and unless there's verifiable harm being done I think this should fall under freedom of speech. It was her decision to go public with her private life. I don't see any way to fix this except being tied into mind rewriting program like in Clockwork Orange. If people mock you behind your back, that's life. You may as well ignore them.
US Cultural hegemony is inevitable, but please, try to contain this stuff in your anglo world, everytime it spills over other countries it's not an improvement.
She's already done step one - highlighted the issue - I had no idea this kind of behaviour was prevalent and if I ever caught one of my employees engaging in it, they'd be out the door.
Free speech shouldn't be anonymous speech. You can say what you think, but you should be ready to face the consequences of it as the view society has on you will change.
Also I think not all kinds of speech should be free. Racism and hate speech should be something to be clearly defined and prohibited (in my country, Brazil, Racism is a crime with clear consequences).
[+] [-] codingunicorn|5 years ago|reply
– “Programmers don’t look like that!” – “You’re fake. Some dude writes your content.” – “Are you a model or a coder?”
Bullies are not happiest people on the planet: some of them have been harassed or bullied by their parents, in schools etc. I discovered the hard way that when I pay back with the hate, it makes me feel bad and also feeds their hate. The hardest and probably wisest solution is to respond with love to those unhappy folks. Or not responding at all. It's very hard, but it works.
– Julia
[+] [-] noneeeed|5 years ago|reply
It's so frustrating that after being in this industry for over 20 years nothing's really improved, and far too many arseholes are still getting a free pass for their arseholery.
[+] [-] tluyben2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squibbles|5 years ago|reply
Yes, everyone should be able to say whatever they want to say, but no one should be forced to hear it. The way we implement discussion forums, chats, issue trackers, wikis, etc. is perhaps giving too many privileges to the mob.
I am partial to the idea of someone getting to decide, in advance, who they can see or hear. Letting the mob in, and then muting or banning after the fact can be exploited too easily.
[+] [-] serf|5 years ago|reply
Who decides? Why were they chosen? How were they vetted? Is the vetting process continuous throughout their stay?
In other words: What checks and balances are in place to make sure they don't abuse the position for the advantage or disadvantage of a group due to personal motivation?
The idea of a constant lifetime blacklist/whitelist makes me envision a world filled with small echo-chambers, all supportive of their own ideas, and filled with ire towards anything they view as opposition.
[+] [-] smcphile|5 years ago|reply
I see that that could be done in a private group setting where everyone knows each other. In a forum for the general public though I have difficulty seeing how that could be done. Do you have any implementation details in mind?
[+] [-] AgentME|5 years ago|reply
This seems like the popular wisdom online, but is it really something that's abused so much (at all, or relative to the problem it exists to solve)? I've seen many more places with people terrified of the concept of moderators abusing their powers and places that refused to ban outright harassment and bigotry because the moderators were too worried about being seen as power hungry than I've actually seen power abusing moderators issue too many bans. (If you count "refusing to kick out harassers" as a kind of power abuse through inaction though, then I've seen a lot of that. Maybe this reframing would be helpful in general online.)
I believe you can already block people on GitHub and it stops them from interacting with any of your repos, and that doesn't seem too exploitable or broken in my opinion. If anything, they need more features along these lines and what you mentioned.
[+] [-] fellellor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|5 years ago|reply
It's unacceptable to set it as public.
If you post in public you are the same as a newspaper. You need to take all that on-board. From mental health of employees to security to legal. Newspapers don't just write stuff and shove it out there.
[+] [-] mproud|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway77384|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dencodev|5 years ago|reply
https://www.somethingawful.com/news/were-all-gonna/
A writer for the SA website made fun a website of a mother who was grieving her stillborn children. Forget any opinion you might have about the mother or her presentation: this a woman who had several children die before she ever got to know them. It's potentially one of the most traumatic things that can happen to someone, and this writer decided to ridicule how this mother grieved:
>Your poison womb is making heaven too fucking crowded.
I hate myself that I thought this was funny. I hate that I used words to belittle the LGBTQ community. I hate that I was that edgelord that held to statistics about crime rates and intelligence as they related to race. I hate that I made fun of people for their sexuality. I hate that I discounted sexism, racism, and ableism.
It was never in good fun. Some people grow out of it and others don't. I am still working constantly to better myself and catch myself when I have prejudice thoughts.
[+] [-] piva00|5 years ago|reply
Trolling used to be more prank-ish but it would already at that time certainly devolve to doxxing and start affecting people's real lives. I remember it took me a long time to stop caring on not leaving traces that people could link to my real name, my real pictures or whatever online.
I remember people on online forums salivating when Google came out and was a much better search tool to link an username to an email and from there to your life outside the internet. It was scary to post something confronting these trolls because they could try to find you, they had enough free time for that.
So I don't know when the internet was really that naive and innocent place, it had more innocence but this bad side of it was very present from the get go, at least in my experience.
[+] [-] pwinnski|5 years ago|reply
What was amusing and fun to you and your friends drove people out of the industry, and is likely a very small part of why people lament imbalances in ethnicity and gender today.
Teenagers aren't great at understanding the consequences of their actions. I wasn't, you weren't, most of us aren't or weren't. It's hard to look back and realize that things you thought were in fun were not fun at all for the victims, but it's a good start.
[+] [-] watwut|5 years ago|reply
Back then, you was not supposed to "feed the trolls" so victims just left.
[+] [-] onion2k|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Qub3d|5 years ago|reply
This stuff is deplorable, but for now it requires human eyeballs and judgement. Perhaps allow for more granularity on repo visibility and interactivity beyond public/private.
[+] [-] educationcto|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uniqueid|5 years ago|reply
The former would serve as a staging area and playground for new features. Just as the internet does today, it would provide, roughly speaking, no accountability and no security. My guess is that its main audience would be high-school seniors and college-age kids. In addition, you'd have a minority of techies, and — yes — some vile wingnuts.
The "safe for life" internet's network-layer would have baked-in authentication (eg: part of your IP is a user-id). It would have a protocol for notarization (ie: the ability to have a third party vouch for information. eg: the choice to tie your real name to your user-id, or remain pseudonymous). Its "web" markup would be far simpler and more semantic (no per-site styles, no dynamic features, no scripting).
When someone invents a very useful web feature/paradigm on the old internet/web, the new internet's web-standard could add special tags to support it. So, for example, the NewW3C could introduce a set of "store-front" tags with which one could create an entire online-store without any scripting. The NewW3C would include all sorts of functionality, eg: tags to host a Twitch-like site to stream video, with no JS whatsoever.
With this sort of accountability, the alternate internet would finally provide the ability to effectively moderate — bad actors wouldn't easily "respawn" a sockpuppet or bot account, to evade a ban. It would make commerce and data-sharing much safer (via the lack of dynamic features).
The situation today is absurd. What content do we want the web to promote: interesting photos of Japanese food, by a serious developer... or hackneyed ramblings by a bunch of 20-year old trolls? The internet we have today is "wrong" for most people.
[+] [-] maest|5 years ago|reply
I know she pointed out some stuff in her article (she's a woman, mixed asian background, lists her pronouns on her page), but, usually, there's some sort of inciting incident that causes people to dogpile.
To ward off any non-constructive replies, I'll point out from the beggining that I'm not blaming her of anything, and the trolls are _obviously_ in the wrong here.
[+] [-] tomatotomato37|5 years ago|reply
https://rbt.asia/g/thread/76729744/
https://rbt.asia/g/thread/76735740/
[+] [-] trynumber9|5 years ago|reply
I wonder if pifafu was similarly harassed.
[+] [-] anon43255463|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ShamelessC|5 years ago|reply
To ward off any non-constructive replies, I'll point out from the beggining that I'm not blaming her of anything, and the trolls are _obviously_ in the wrong here.
> she's a woman, mixed asian background, lists her pronouns on her page
Not sure if you're familiar with how toxic trolls tend to be, but any one of those things could be reason enough for some (most?) of them.
[+] [-] klyrs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] itronitron|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] catbuttes|5 years ago|reply
By using their work accounts, they are stating that the company condones their behaviour - and I suspect that isn't the case in the majority of cases. I would definitely want to know if any of my employees were engaging in this shit so I could explain in very simple terms why it is unacceptable - because they clearly don't get it on their own.
[+] [-] ramraj07|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swiley|5 years ago|reply
But using a work account to harass someone is a completely new level of stupid.
[+] [-] xen0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notmyname9173|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] trabant00|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TurkishPoptart|5 years ago|reply
This is a bit fishy. The email sender was asking her opinion on certain matters related to racial politics, and our dear author just accused him/them of "upholding white supremacy". This makes me lose sympathy for the author here.
[+] [-] eutropia|5 years ago|reply
In typical equity/inclusivity language, the breadth of White Supremacy goes a lot farther. It's similar in concept to Structural Racism -- It's not that the MRAsian emailer literally supports Nazis, it's that they're parroting political and societal points that were created as a result of the White Supremacy being the default state in the USA.
White Supremacy (i.e, Whites, and in particular, (rich) White Males being the defacto "person" that US policy and culture was/is created for) is essentially the state of the world after centuries of actions and policy based on the idea that the White Man is most deserving the fruits of the world, and that their place must be defended from colored people and women. White Supremacy will remain a fact until the long and hard work of including and raising all other people up to the same level of consideration and opportunity is complete, and society stops transmitting toxic memes which are rooted in it.
At least, this is how I understand it. (as a member of the most privileged class; happy to be educated by someone more knowledgeable than I)
[+] [-] mrkwse|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teraku|5 years ago|reply
Stay strong!
The amount of malice is just very sad
[+] [-] D13Fd|5 years ago|reply
I hope that one day their employers (and really, their friends and family) end up finding out the kinds of things they have been saying. It's a lot harder to be a horrible racist bigot in real life than it is to be a semi-anonymous one on the internet.
That said, I would have liked to see more in the "so why me?" section. There are other Asian women in tech, and her "radical" profile honestly seems pretty mundane to me. It's definitely possible that she was just targeted at random like she suggests, but it would be nice if she linked the threads (in addition to screenshotting them) or otherwise provided some more context.
[+] [-] reeestandard|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peltier|5 years ago|reply
Interesting read.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ggm|5 years ago|reply
I might say I think gamer culture is bound up in this but it's not just about that. Something very toxic is empowered by current s/W engineering.
I'm retiring inside ten years. I worry it won't be fixed before I leave the field.
[+] [-] xen0|5 years ago|reply
And then you still have to fix any issues pushing them out of industry once they're already there.
[+] [-] BTCOG|5 years ago|reply
All that aside and not trying to go really in depth into that whole pocket theory of mine, it's the same as in real life, it's just amplified. You can't do a whole lot about other's opinions about you, or what they say to you and if you're online and you become a target for any reason it just becomes something you have to deal with on your own terms.
It's nasty, it's petty and it's a hurtful thing to continually attack someone else, but it's the internet. All celebrities deal with the way they are talked about online in their own terms. You do understand all the mainstream Brad Pitts, Britney Spears and whoever get death/sexist/racial harassment all the time as well I assume. It's being a public persona that now becomes the problem. You are willingly putting yourself out there where essentially millions of people can online swarm you. It's a responsibility to have all your personal information online, and to talk about what you like, who you are, hobbies and passions and associate these things to your identity on platforms in which millions can hate/obsess/harass.
I think it's a very serious mental and social problem, a load that is taxing the entire human psyche right now. It's obvious to me what this is doing to humans, with everyone trying to be a public celebrity for likes and fans. I don't think it's good.
[+] [-] inshadows|5 years ago|reply
Not trying to defend the bullies but people shit talking on Internet is pretty common thing. If you decide to share your photos and lifestyle, that is if you open the gate to your private space, you have to account for consequences. People mocked other people before the dawn of Internet and unless there's verifiable harm being done I think this should fall under freedom of speech. It was her decision to go public with her private life. I don't see any way to fix this except being tied into mind rewriting program like in Clockwork Orange. If people mock you behind your back, that's life. You may as well ignore them.
[+] [-] iagovar|5 years ago|reply
How? I mean, what do you suggest?
> It's a white supremacy problem.
US Cultural hegemony is inevitable, but please, try to contain this stuff in your anglo world, everytime it spills over other countries it's not an improvement.
[+] [-] lvturner|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ric2b|5 years ago|reply
Not hiring people like this is a way to fix the culture.
[+] [-] dakial1|5 years ago|reply