
A Natural A/B Test of Harassment - benologist
http://developers.kongregate.com/blog/a-natural-a-b-test-of-harassment
======
andrewvc
What I urge people in this thread to do is not to pick up a google search, or
read a book, but to just go out and ask a few female friends what their
thoughts are about being online, being safe, and being respected, and to
listen with an open mind.

I see a lot of denial in here, people rooting around for reasons to think that
there isn't a serious fucking problem with intimidation and psychological
violence taking place on the net. I see a lot of cognitive dissonance, and
that's sad, that's not a scientific mindset. You all need to get out of your
comfort zone.

I'm a straight white male software developer, I don't need to care about this
for any reason other than a life that doesn't have truth and fairness as a
cause isn't worth living. I encourage you all to calm down, reach out, and
really understand what it's like on the other side.

~~~
ddingus
Well said.

We have a similar dialog going on among the power users at Quora. The trouble
women were having really escalated when the first influx of general users
showed up.

It got to the point where many of them were going to leave.

All of us had a discussion, and Quora had a discussion in private with the
women.

The ban hammer came down on a surprisingly large number of users. And it still
comes down.

Most of us men, who participated in this, got to understand a lot. Due to the
nature of that site, and that we have real life meetup events, many women felt
it OK to just share with us, no filters.

And I was stunned. Thought I had some idea, and just didn't. Of course, now I
do.

Honestly, that these stronger women were able to experience that, share it
with others including men and continue on in seemingly normal ways is kind of
amazing to me.

If more people were able to have these kinds of conversations, I suspect
social norms would start to shift quickly, as would actions to remedy the
problem.

Not that we don't have actions now. We do. People are supporting others who
need it and we are beginning to speak out more and discuss it more.

But that ban hammer session was notable. A lot of the community got the
message right away.

------
chiaro
A shame the point needs to be repeatedly made. A five minute foray into the
wasteland that is twitch chat will show some pretty stark differences between
how men and women become targets for trolling and vitriol.

While some of the concerns of the whole gamergate mess were perhaps reasonable
at some point in time, the whole thing has disappeared under a huge number of
people who see their any supposed righteousness as license to indulge in the
pettiest of attacks that aligns them with segments of society I'd foolishly
thought we'd largely left behind.

Seriously, if you're looking for some injustices in the world to help make
your life meaningful, you can do a hell of a lot better than "ethics in video
game journalism", vitriolic element or no.

~~~
Pxtl
I tend to think Gamergate was a brewing culture war that was just looking for
a spark to start the fire. Gamer culture has had a persecution complex for
well over a generation, particularly with respect to the press - even the
gaming press. Being repeatedly insulted and attacked by the media has made
them circle their wagons instinctively. Combined with a substantial fraction
of gamers that are _intensely_ misogynistic and this ugliness was practically
inevitable.

The problem is that gamers picked a fight with SJWs, which are effectively
their own mirror image - the same obsessiveness and mean-spirited put-downs
and in-group high-fives. I mean, the fact that the SJWs are _right_ is almost
immaterial - in the words of The Big Lebowski: "You're not wrong, Walter,
you're just an asshole". Online social justice groups have a knack for utterly
alienating and insulting everyone they could ever hope to convince, even those
who broadly _agree_ with them.

Combine that with Gawker media's spectacular ability to stir the pot, and a
few prominent right-wing culture-war bloggers feeding the gamer-gaters'
persecution complex, and we're seeing outright radicalization.

You isolate and insult a guy and then give him an online culture of like-
minded outcasts and they start encouraging each other to do _drastic_ things.
There are obvious parallels to other movements of angry young men...

It's a perfect storm, and it's only going to get worse before it gets better
since anybody who's trying to talk the gamergaters down from the ledge has to
have infinite patience for their monomaniacal rationalizations. They see
themselves as the defenders of rationality surrounded by SJWs who fling glib
insults... and gaming is founded on endlessly grinding against a pointless
task _for fun_.

It's profoundly sad to see so many gamers rally behind that gamergate banner.
To see harassment and threats and ruining women's lives become the public
image of core gamer culture.

I'm really worried that this is going to get worse before it gets better. The
"us vs. them" mentality of the hardcore gamer world is too old and well-
established, and everybody else involved is either feeding into it or is
drowned out by the din.

~~~
ncallaway
I started seeing the phrase "Social Justice Warrior" used a _lot_ as soon as
#Gamergate happened. I have yet to see it well defined, though.

I realize it's tangential to your point, but I'm curious how would you define
or describe a SJW?

~~~
meowface
Traditionally, the term has been used to describe people who make comments
like [http://i.imgur.com/QMbGVLG.png](http://i.imgur.com/QMbGVLG.png) or
[http://i.imgur.com/vJgiov8.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/vJgiov8.jpg) or
[http://i.imgur.com/fMcjKsg.png](http://i.imgur.com/fMcjKsg.png).

Essentially, radical social justice viewpoints taken to absurd extremes.
Sometimes to the point of expressing highly racist, homophobic, or transphobic
views in the course of supporting some other group they feel is even more
persecuted than those groups.

Now, the term is being thrown around by some people to describe those who are
left leaning and support a viewpoint they disagree with.

So-called "Social Justice Warriors" are indeed an actual and rather ridiculous
(yet amusing) group on the Internet, mostly centered around Tumblr, but their
overall population density is pretty low compared to progressives and
feminists in general.

~~~
ANTSANTS
More examples of the first group, because we could all use a laugh:

[http://a.pomf.se/vrwobd.png](http://a.pomf.se/vrwobd.png)

[http://a.pomf.se/mdiqol.jpg](http://a.pomf.se/mdiqol.jpg)

[http://a.pomf.se/jdwkkw.png](http://a.pomf.se/jdwkkw.png)

[http://a.pomf.se/brsunc.png](http://a.pomf.se/brsunc.png)

[http://a.pomf.se/wcjfcv.jpg](http://a.pomf.se/wcjfcv.jpg)

Some examples of the second group might include the people who flagkilled half
of my comments in this thread. Man, I know political threads on Reddit News
are a steaming pile, but y'all could at least _pretend_ to be capable of
talking to people you don't agree with and downvote me into oblivion instead.

------
jzwinck
Disclaimer: I agree there is a real social problem here. The rest of this
message is solely about statistics (inspired by the language of statistics
used in the article, like "A/B Test," "statistical significance," and "99.9%
confidence level").

The article opens with an analysis of messages to one male and one (self-
selected) female from a community which has a large male majority.

Most people in the world are heterosexual, and in my opinion people are more
likely to sexually harass the gender they "like." Let's say 3/4 of people are
straight and 1/4 are gay. Let's also say that 2/3 of sexual harassment is
directed at the "preferred" gender" of the perpetrator.

Imagine a population of 80 boys and 8 girls, all equally "good." Half of them
never say a bad thing to anyone. The other half lash out once a month and say
something disgusting.

Now, we have 60 straight boys, 30 of whom behave badly once a month. That's 30
nasty messages a month, 20 of which go to girls and 10 to boys. We also have
20 gay boys generating 10 nastygrams monthly, 7 to boys and 3 to girls.

As for the girls, there are 6 straight ones, 3 of whom are bad, so they send 2
threatening topics to boys and 1 to a girl each month. Of the 2 gay girls only
one is malfeasant, so let's say she sends her only "love letter" to a girl.

How many total bad messages are sent each month? 20 + 3 + 1 + 1 = 25 to girls,
and 10 + 7 + 2 + 0 = 19 to boys. With 80 total boys, each will receive about
one salacious message per four months. But each of the 8 girls will absorb, on
average, just over 3 per month.

I tried to use conservative numbers here, and still the girls in a male-
majority group get 13 times as many unwanted notes as boys. This is
deplorable, but it is also unsurprising given the population.

~~~
raquo
That's good statistics, and probably explains generic nastygram data quite
well. However, my non-data-backed bet is that males are much more likely to
send _sexually harassing_ messages than females, so even in an environment
with 50% males and 50% females, females will get much more _sexual_ nastygrams
than males.

~~~
verroq
You also need to account for technical ability. There's way more technical
male users who know how not only to harass, but to get away with it.

On sites like Facebook where it's tied to a real life identity, I'd expect to
see harassment drop significantly.

~~~
silencio
Identities don't change anything. I don't know what the solution is, but
that's not it.

My current, occasional stalker - someone in the tech industry, a fellow dev,
someone probably reading HN, even - gave away his name, phone, address... and
it checks out. Police won't take him as a serious threat though, so neither
will anyone else (like Twitter). Police also won't just check on him because I
think he's schizophrenic from the very weird things he has sent me in the
past. I just block him everywhere after the fact and hope that he has
family/friends that will eventually check on him.

My last favorite game I stopped playing because people were harassing me,
people that were easily tied to their FB accounts with their full name,
employer, address, and more. They didn't give a shit. Neither did Blizzard. No
care about rape threats. Okay. I'm done.

I'm also super disillusioned given what some people I know in this industry
are saying about GG. They don't care that their real name and sometimes their
employer is on their Twitter profile, even if they harass people with it. And
of course, brace myself for the "but that was out of bounds and evil!", the
handful of folks I can remember that have been fired for harassment on twitter
- all happened because they had a real name+employer written down somewhere,
and they thought they would get away with it.

Not to mention I'm really glad I'm out of the dating market because my okc and
other dating site inboxes were cesspools. Again, real names or more than
enough info to tie a person to their real name, and still they persist. I had
the courtesy to reply to every message that wasn't some variation on "wanna
suck my %&#$"/"your hot"/"i wanna do _____ to you" and yet some people still
ended up going "you're a bitch"/"you're so fat i feel sorry for you i bet you
don't get laid"/(rape threats).

I only wish real life identities were a deterrent, but that only happens if
there are consequences. Given what's going on, apparently there are no
consequences except in the oddest direction ever (with all the doxxing going
on).

~~~
ncallaway
I'm really sorry you had to (and still have to) deal with that kind of
harassment and threatening behavior.

The only question I'm left with is what can I do as an individual to help
curtail it? I almost never see this behavior myself (presumably because bad
actors intentionally hide their behavior) in real life so it's hard for me to
call it out directly. How can I help out people that are being harassed in
this way? Providing moral support doesn't feel like enough in the situation...

~~~
silencio
My husband spends practically 24/7 around me as he works next to me, but he
still rarely sees that behavior directly or aimed at me until I
copypaste/screenshot/link it to him. And I get a lot of direct and indirect bs
in general that some people would have mental breakdowns over, mainly cause I
help moderate /r/twoxchromosomes and I help with a yearly event or two for
women in tech. All he hears until I bring it up is me muttering to myself
about misogyny/misandry, me going 'for fucks sake' at yet another doxxing, or
me rage-typing on irc (thankfully for him I don't have a clicky keyboard). One
of my closer friends too, works at Big Name Dating Co., didn't understand it
too much until he created a female test account for development. Ha. So don't
worry about not seeing it.

Moral support is a lot more than many are offering, so don't feel bad in the
slightest. Do exactly what you pointed out. Ask around and help people around
you. They may not just be women, they may come from all kinds of backgrounds.
Don't be silent, because some of the worst people are assuming that silence
means support.

After you feel comfortable doing that, there's a lot of other hard questions
to ask. How do you know that your workplace or community or product/service
isn't complicit in similar problems? How do you do what you can to help others
before a problem occurs? What if you make a mistake? What if you do see
something awful but there's no good way to call it out? They're questions I
struggle with all the time, and I think the biggest misconception with tech
folks is that they're one-off problems easily/already solved when they're not.
People going "why don't you report it to Twitter" that have never actually
used Twitter's abuse/harassment reporting form. People going "ignore that"
like it's not a problem that rears its ugly head for me daily given how many
other women I know. People going "you could just not say anything" but then I
wouldn't be moral support for even a single other person out there.

It's tough, welcome to the club ;) Making an effort to do anything is a good
thing.

~~~
undersuit
>I help moderate /r/twoxchromosomes

So the sexism definitely existed before you entered this position, but maybe
the fact that you've exposed yourself is why you receive so much vitriol?

Look at Obama, do you think all the racism directed at him would have ever
been as prominent if he stayed a Senator or a Chicago Lawyer?

People in positions of power always have their detractors. Could you provide
some anecdotes of people attacking the normal users of twoxchromosomes seeing
as you've probably dealt with quite a few.

------
A_COMPUTER
Every f*ing video on Youtube by a woman has that one jackass who posts "make
me a sandwich" complemented with 10-100 upvotes.

~~~
wnevets
people read youtube comments?

------
gohrt
Hi, mods: Look at this thread. What does it mean for the appropriateness of
"GamerGate" on Hacker News?

~~~
JulianMorrison
It's not just appropriate, it's overdue.

Look at all these ugly, ugly critters crawling out of the woodwork. They were
already here before the scent of mass misogyny drew them out into the open.

------
mesozoic
Gamergate is leaking again.

~~~
htns
Yeah, I've heard about Gamergate in a couple of wildly different contexts.
What's the deal with it?

~~~
defen
The extreme nutshell version is that a female indie game developer supposedly
slept with a male video game journalist, and this supposedly let to favorable
coverage for her game that would not have happened otherwise.

The surface phenomenon is that a lot of people united under the banner of
#gamergate to protest this breach of journalistic ethics. The dark side is
that it seems like it's really just a bunch of people who want to see
someone's life ruined, and they are wildly overreacting.

I think the underlying phenomenon is similar to what happened to Brendan Eich,
even though the ostensible cause and the people involved are completely
different.

~~~
knowtheory
Those are the _stated_ reasons.

It's worth noting no such review was ever written for Zoe Quinn's game.

GamerGate has now doxxed and threatened a number of women in the gaming world
(developers, critics, actresses) and Phil Fish the creator of Fez. They
publicly organize to drive advertisers away from publications which disagree
with them or call Gamergate out as misogynistic or threatening.

~~~
gohrt
The thing that confuses me (as a non-"Gamer" netizen) is that I am constantly
bombarded with the "meta' arguing and hand-wringing about "GamerGate" on HN
etc, but have yet to see anything actually from the core activity of the
"movement" or whatever.

~~~
rtpg
Intel pulled advertising from Gamasutra under pressure from these people, some
women independent game developers have "ragequit"(read: harassed beyond belief
so did the only logical thing) from twitter and the like. It's violent if you
follow the independent games scene

These are also the same group of people who forced Phil Fish off the internet,
basically.

~~~
slash3r
You seem to believe that Intel can be intimidated by internet trolls. It also
seems that you don't know nothing about Phil Fish and that almost (if not all)
the awards that Fez won were from the investors of Fez themselves. [don't get
me wrong, I actually loved Fez] (let the downvotes pour)

~~~
ijk
The accusations about Phil Fish, Fez, Polytron's investors, and the IGF
judging process are blatantly false. It's a conspiracy theory that's mostly
based on misinformation about the IGF voting process and misinterpretation of
dates.

[http://igf.com/2014/09/igf_statement_re_judging_proce.html](http://igf.com/2014/09/igf_statement_re_judging_proce.html)

~~~
slash3r
The issue is about IGF lying and you give me a link to an IGF article to prove
your point. They have their right to defend themselves, but that doesn't mean
that whatever they say in their defense is actually true. Everything should be
taken with a grain of salt, and more than one independent report should be
taken into consideration when forming an opinion, especially on controversial
topics.

~~~
ijk
Well, there's the small matter that the backers weren't actually on the 2012
jury. [1] And the fact that Fez got its first win before IndieFund existed.
[2] And the video that made the original accusation against Phil Fish was
taken down, probably because it was a combination of libel and evidence of the
illegal hacking. So it's become a source-less accusation that gets trotted out
with no evidence to support it, as it was here.

[1] [http://theflounce.com/gamergate-seem-understand-ethics-
nearl...](http://theflounce.com/gamergate-seem-understand-ethics-nearly-well-
thinks/)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/508734779617849344](https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/508734779617849344)

------
HonorSworn
Hrmm looks like someone needs to make some sort of filter that parses tweets
and messages for insults and removes them.

~~~
judk
It would be nice if HN talked more about technical and other ways to solve the
actual problems here, and less repeating the same insults at each other over
and over again.

------
_pmf_
> A Natural A/B Test

Or, as more honest and less conceited people would call it, an anecdote.

------
Natsu
I don't think I've ever seen a story with so many dead posts.

EDIT: Everyone is downvote-happy. I'm going to do my best to upvote anyone who
was downvoted unfairly.

------
slash3r
How is this HN front page worthy? It's just a case study on only two people
that ends up making a generalization about countless others. I could make a
pro gamer gate statement for all I care, it would still be irrelevant.

------
paulnechifor
I thought better of HN before this. It looks like if you don't toe the line
you get downvoted and your comments get [killed].

~~~
wismer
There's a really good reason for it and it's up to you to figure that part
out.

~~~
meowface
There is no reason to delete a post that presents a rational argument without
use of insults or ad hominem attacks, regardless of if you think the viewpoint
is "destroying [insert any topical political or current events issue here]".

~~~
DanBC
There's plenty of reason to downvote trolls.

~~~
meowface
I did not see the posts that were deleted, but so far nothing I've seen in
this thread seems like trolling.

