
The Developer Formerly Known as FreeBSDGirl - tshtf
http://blog.randi.io/2015/12/31/the-developer-formerly-known-as-freebsdgirl/
======
dang
We've closed this thread to comments by new accounts because of trolls.

If you have a new account and want to comment here, you're welcome to email us
at hn@ycombinator.com.

~~~
gravypod
Hopefully this will help keep discussion civil, thanks for jumping on this one
quickly.

------
Tomte
She's talking about some guy and his "campaign to legalize rape".

I thought she was exaggerating or maybe misunderstanding something. Sure, this
guy is probably an asshole, but legalizing rape, come on!

I followed the link and... it is kind of almost entertaining. He means it.
Literally. You can't stop reading that trainwreck of an argument, because it
gets worse and worse.

And then you've lost all hope in mankind. I thought I knew what misogyny was
about, but that is absolutely breathtaking.

~~~
draw_down
He writes such extreme things to get a reaction (and a following of complete
morons). Attention is oxygen in that business. Not that that makes it any
better of course. Notice how you said it's "almost entertaining", well, that's
what he's aiming for.

~~~
geofft
OK, so if that's true, then by treating him as a legitimate member of the
community and not making any sort of statement against his views, the FreeBSD
project is giving him attention, and they should stop doing that. Which is
exactly what Randi asked for.

It's one thing if you keep your horrible-person persona separate from your
technical one (as e.g. the Strange Loop thing earlier this year), although I
still think it's legitimate to say that's too much. But when someone is
deliberately tying their work in a project with their views that drive out
other people from that same project, it's not giving them attention to kick
them out. It's giving them attention to keep them in.

~~~
lillian-lemmer
He should have been expelled the second he was harshly transphobic to me,
e.g., calling me a "tranny." I'm the _trans woman_ Randi talks about in that
article. There were many times he should have been kicked out, but in the end
nobody cared enough about women's issues, or there was no real recourse for
such.

But since that didn't happen, Randi is trying to bring attention to the fact
that the above isn't how things work.

EDIT TO CLARIFY: the man I'm referring to is the FreeBSD contributor Randi
Harper speaks of in the article, not the voosh guy.

~~~
dogma1138
I would bet you that I've been called "jew" more times than you been called a
"tranny" over the internet usually followed by about 20min of heil hitler spam
and other funny jokes from various IRC bots, I just shrugged it off....

~~~
lillian-lemmer
Every time you step out the door do you wonder if you'll be killed for who you
are? Do you worry that you can't go to the police for who you are? Do you ever
worry about fighting an entire legal and medical system to be who you are?

Etc.

~~~
dogma1138
>When (Every time) you step out the door do you wonder if you'll be killed for
who you are

Yes.

>Did (do) you worry that you can't go to the police for who you are

Yes.

Most recently in Malmo.

------
nske
Before googling Randi's name with some relevant keywords I had no idea about
the amount of people past puberty that are behaving like this. I was about to
say that I'm glad I've never met their kind, but then I remembered that I
actually have: in highschool.

No idea what happened to them, I assumed they grew up and the few that didn't,
found their place at the very bottom of society that is not good for anything.

To them usually it's not really about genre, race or any particular property,
their disturbed mentality causes them to look for ways to attack and
inconvenience anyone they don't like for any reason. I actually think they're
even looking for an excuse to find a target, because they are amused by the
whole thing and it makes them feel good and important.

I can see how many of them would make it as gamers, I'm just surprised that a
person like this would also make it as a FreeBSD committer.

I wonder why they silently forced him to turn his commit bit off, but they
don't want to update their CoC or condemn this behaviour in public.

The stealth editing of the Trademark Policy to include this particular case
(even though they missed the exception for old uses, which made that change
pointless) also deserves some explanation, it's wrong.

------
meesterdude
Wow, really disgusting to hear how FreeBSD core reacted to this. I've read
through a lot of the source materials; she hasn't been perfect in every move;
but that's she's been able to be so level headed and professional about it in
the face of an onslaught of sexism, intimidation and smear campaigns is...
nothing short of a miracle.

I don't care about any argument of if she's ever committed, or if her code is
any good; that's bike shedding and irrelevant to the fact that no HUMAN BEING
should be treated this way, let alone in a leading open source project.

> The next communication from core asked me to stop talking about this
> publicly. They told me to tell everyone it was being solved through private
> mediation, and that the problem committer was on vacation for a week, so
> they didn’t want to do anything about it until he got back.

WHAT

> I had talked to someone from the FreeBSD Foundation earlier on the phone
> about what was happening. During this same conversation, they actually said
> “maybe you should be nicer.”

THE

> A week later, I received an email from this person threatening to involve
> the FreeBSD Foundation lawyers if I didn’t change my username immediately.
> They tried to pass it off as a trademark infringement

ACTUAL

> The FreeBSD Foundation had stealth added ‘usernames’ just prior to her
> sending that email, adding the word but not updating the date at the top.

FUCK

The shit she's had to go through makes me lose hope for humanity. While the
way she's handled it has restored it. We need more people in tech like this,
and I'm glad she's putting up such a fight.

It would be easy for anyone to just be a loudspeaker for change; but she's
actually getting her hands dirty, talking to people, and engaging about it,
and learning and sharing along the way. I seriously doubt most of us would
have the gumption and fortitude to handle this the way she has.

~~~
jfarmer
Sounds like they're a bunch of dude-nerds who want to handle every problem as
if it were a technical problem. Their "process" seems tantamount to separating
the two sides and telling them to sit down and shut up.

That's a not-unreasonable policy when we're talking about a technical debate
that becomes acrimonious It's a terrible policy when we're talking about
_threats_ or _threatening behavior_ by one party against another.

My experience is that most dude-nerds are oblivious by default to those sorts
of non-technical, purely human issues. It's made all the worse because their
behavior is more-or-less indistinguishable from genuinely malicious behavior.
From the perspective of the person being threatened, it doesn't make much
practical difference whether they're doing it out of ineptitude or malice.

------
kevinbowman
I still, deep inside, hold a dwindling hope that all humans can one day learn
to treat humans as humans. Basically, literally, to treat others as they
themselves would like to be treated. As humans.

It saddens me to hear of times when that doesn't happen, particularly in such
devastating ways that affect someone's life so fundamentally.

------
Globrazu
If you look at the actual facts of the matter you will see a vastly differing
view of who was "harassed" and who was the "harasser" than this Blog post
tries to paint, here's where most of this started:
[https://twitter.com/xmjEE/status/613083223086768128](https://twitter.com/xmjEE/status/613083223086768128)
[https://archive.is/9KGyX](https://archive.is/9KGyX)

And here's a "discussion" on the matter between Randi, Colin and Johannes on
/r/FreeBSD: [https://archive.is/wH4Rg](https://archive.is/wH4Rg)

~~~
joeemison
I just spent far too long reading both of those links, and I don't see
anything there that contradicts anything Randi said in her post.

If someone is regularly and routinely attacked (and all the bullshit about
"Randi can't code" / "Randi hasn't contributed" is just obnoxious), it's
reasonable for them to be pissed off and get angry. That doesn't somehow
negate the fact that they were badly mistreated.

In hindsight, it's telling that people making the above comments are posting
links to longreads and not citing anything specific--just seems like more of
the misogynistic campaign.

~~~
Globrazu
I think it's rather telling that this "exposé" Blogpost doesn't link to
anything actually incriminating and tries to call someone a "rape apologist
with neonazi friends" based on supposedly who they might have talked to once
on Twitter, since there are links to RooshV who doesn't seem to have anything
to do with the entire matter or FreeBSD in any way, but no links to what the
accused supposedly did wrong. The links I posted indicate the moment these two
people intersected, after Randi Harper was furious someone didn't like the
idea of "safe spaces" and "Code of Conducts" and went after him, herself
acting like a harasser on IRC and otherwise.

Not to say that this is not the only or first time Randi has behaved like this
or done this to someone if you are aware of her larger Online presence, for
instance she did it to Vivek Wadhwa:
[http://www.stopthegrbullies.com/2015/06/01/randi-harpers-
bul...](http://www.stopthegrbullies.com/2015/06/01/randi-harpers-bully-
review/)

She said this about Anne Rice, the 74 year old female author of The Vampire
Chronicles / Interview With A Vampire:
[https://twitter.com/randileeharper/status/605650789348995073](https://twitter.com/randileeharper/status/605650789348995073)
[https://twitter.com/randileeharper/status/605736216625938432](https://twitter.com/randileeharper/status/605736216625938432)
[https://twitter.com/freebsdgirl/status/605636162653417472](https://twitter.com/freebsdgirl/status/605636162653417472)

She even did this to Open Source developers like Ted Neward (who she wanted to
"drive out of the industry" over a single inappropriate comment) and pulled
his supposed "target" Iris Classon into it, upon which she had to defend both
herself and him from Randi:
[https://twitter.com/randileeharper/status/535151831027302400](https://twitter.com/randileeharper/status/535151831027302400)
[http://archive.is/g2556](http://archive.is/g2556)
[http://archive.is/T9Hvm](http://archive.is/T9Hvm)
[http://archive.is/9GUle](http://archive.is/9GUle)

Another Open Source developer, who was chairman of the IGDA Puerto Rico and
part of several Open Source communities, and was subsequently forced to step
down from the IGDA any Python Cuba she did it to was Roberto Rosario:
[https://twitter.com/siloraptor/status/624257540948393988](https://twitter.com/siloraptor/status/624257540948393988)
[https://twitter.com/siloraptor/status/625866078925647872](https://twitter.com/siloraptor/status/625866078925647872)
[https://twitter.com/siloraptor/status/588123915488223232](https://twitter.com/siloraptor/status/588123915488223232)

What exposing someone who pretends to lead an "Online Abuse Prevention
Initiative" while being one of the biggest abusers has to do with a
"misogynistic campaign" you'll have to explain.

It's very basic DARVO. It's a pattern of pathological behaviour with this
person of attacking/going after someone and calling everyone that calls it out
"bullies" or "harassers".

~~~
meesterdude
I have zero problem with everything you've listed here that she's said and
done. You link to these things like they are incriminating evidence; I just
see someone pushing back against an onslaught on bullshit.

Your first example is literally a bad amazon book review. Did you see what she
said?

> The author Vivek Wadhwa spends his time harassing women on twitter when they
> try to call him out on his approaches to feminism. He's not interested in
> inviting conversation, but instead thinks it's acceptable to intimidate and
> silence women from his book's twitter account when criticism is directed at
> his personal account. He's using feminism to profit, and not because he
> actually believes in empowering women. This is despicable behavior, and it's
> been confirmed by multiple women at this point.

> If you want to read about how to empower women, actually buy a book that has
> a woman listed first on the cover, at the very least. Even the highlighted
> review on his website is by a man. Men that are actually trying to help
> feminism don't profit off of it, financially or with cred. They empower
> women's voices and amplify them. While this may be a collection of
> contributions by women, Vivek's behavior online casts doubt on his
> intentions.

> No, thanks. I already know what it's like to be an empowered woman in tech,
> and to have men like Vivek Wadhwa speaking down to me.

Yeah she's REALLY going after someone with that kinda language. You know want
that is? that's her OPINIONS. She's not attacking him, calling him names,
trying to intimidate him.

At no point did she say he was fat, ugly, should go join ISIS, that she's rape
his ass with a dildo at his next book signing, or leave a project he's been
involved with for years.

She's attacking his behavior, not his personhood. That's called being mature,
and civil.

That you had all these links ready to go... leads me to question your bias
towards the matter.

But nothing you posted is of any actual merit or counterpoint to what she's
said in her post.

~~~
13thLetter
"You link to these things like they are incriminating evidence; I just see
someone pushing back against an onslaught on bullshit."

No. You are depersonalizing her actions as "pushing back" against some
impersonal force. What she actually did was engage in sustained harassment,
bullying, and blacklisting campaigns against specific individual human beings.

~~~
meesterdude
That's an interesting, albeit distorted, perspective of the events that
transpired.

------
SliderUp
You can, and lots of people will, wave their hands and ignore/belittle
FreeBSDGirl's account. Certainly the trolls will.

But, it is just another example that the larger tech community has a problem.
GamerGate et al, they are not fantasies. Women who want to create, same as any
developer, getting SWAT teams sent to their homes, this stuff is real, and
indicates a real problem.

Ask yourself, are you helping fix this behavior? Because if not, then you are
part of the problem.

------
eeZi
:(...

As someone who didn't really follow the whole controversy the past years, this
was an eye-opener for me. Did it really get that bad?

Stop tolerating the intolerant! Also, I don't understand the point of
GamerGate. As an outsider, all I see is two groups making themselves look
really bad and everyone else loosing. You don't convince others by threatening
and harassing them, something the extremes at both sides seem to do. Why?

By the way, note how she did not mention the harasser's username in her post.

~~~
andallas
I don't follow you on that last bit, about noticing how she didn't mention the
username. I feel like you mean to imply something, but maybe I'm not
following?

~~~
eeZi
I like that she didn't, since it emphasizes that this is not about that
particular conflict, but the way it has been handled. She could have mentioned
his name in an effort to make him look bad (this post will probably get a lot
of attention), but she didn't.

~~~
andallas
ahh, thanks for clarifying, wasn't sure if you were implying something else.

In regards to your question, yes things got bad, unfortunately what is hard to
see from the outside, is that the vast majority of the harassment was
originally done by outside third parties who just wanted to troll two groups.
They harassed some people (mostly women) then said they were part of
GamerGate. This wasn't even remotely true, and they admitted to this.
Unfortunately the other side got caught up in the harassment and the claim
that was done by GamerGate to ever actually think, "Why would this person who
is harassing me (which is illegal) mention they were part of GamerGate (which
was originally about Games Media, and had literally nothing to do with women
in tech)?"

Follow that up with lots of mudslinging on both sides, and neither side being
that willing to 'dig-deep' into the facts, and you get a year long 'cyber-war'
between two groups of people who probably have much more in common than they
think.

~~~
MaysonL
Did anybody in GamerGate ever criticize any male gaming journalists? Citation
requested.

~~~
DanBC
They don't limit their idiocy to misogynistic attacks on women.

------
wila
@freebsdgirl, thank you for sharing your story. Hope it helps in improving the
community to handle this better in the future.

------
fche
There is a thread on KiA where references to the original materials
(transcripts of Randi's dispute with the freebsd developer) are available. The
raw materials paint a rather less flattering portrait of who was attacking /
harassing / abusing whom. This may be one of those cases where discretion
(withholding names / evidence) does a disservice to the truth.

------
kev009
I know most of the people involved in this and it's just a shit sandwich.
Randi wanted a person crucified, that's not how companies and foundations
function, and thankfully so. I hope she finds success in new endeavors and am
sad she had to leave under gross circumstance.

~~~
dietrichepp
"Randi wanted a person crucified…"

I didn't see that in the article, could you point us to that information?

~~~
geofft
"Crucified" is an obvious exaggeration, but the article does contain "Last, I
wanted this developer removed from the project and the IRC channel."

I don't know anything about what happened here more than what's public, but
it's totally imaginable to me that if you make that an ultimatum, and the
project leadership hasn't given itself a reasonable way to do that, it's
difficult for them to respond usefully.

Maybe the lesson here is that good projects should give their leadership the
explicit ability and the political authority to do that, including for forums
like IRC. There are many examples of projects / communities that are wonderful
places until things go wrong. (This is, essentially, the argument for having a
written code of conduct even though nobody would be violating it.)

~~~
dietrichepp
I'm sorry, but this post (yours) and the original post (kev009's) seem like
unreasonable exaggerations. Emphasis on the "unreasonable". Unreasonable
exaggerations of other people's viewpoints fosters low-quality discussion,
which is why I don't like it.

Banning is a common response to harassment. Hacker News uses it, we even have
multiple types of banning, including the shadowban and hellban. We know that
"crucifixion" is hyperbolical language, and we can ordinarily forgive someone
for being hyperbolical, but in this case it's simply an unreasonable
exaggeration.

The same applies to your use of the term "ultimatum". That's an unreasonable
exaggeration. It depicts the contents of the original article inaccurately.
She detailed no consequences nor threatened retaliation in her request that a
user be banned. You can call it a "demand" instead of a "request", but
"ultimatum" is simply incorrect.

Honestly, I can understand and relate to both her request and the core
developers' response, but I'm not convinced that a code of conduct is a
prerequisite for banning abusive community members. Explicit political
authority is great, but we shouldn't be automatically afraid to use implicit
political authority.

~~~
geofft
Yeah, "ultimatum" is a somewhat strong word. I do want to be clear that I
don't mean that it was in any way an ridiculous request/demand/ultimatum:
expelling them from the community would in my opinion have been the right
thing to do, and in my opinion is an entirely fair thing to insist on and not
be willing to compromise on.

What I mean to convey is that, if someone makes a demand that they're
unwilling to compromise on or discuss, and you're are unable to satisfy the
demand as stated, regardless of whether you want to seek a resolution along
those lines, you have no good options. Of course in a healthy project there
wouldn't be much _need_ to discuss banning people who are harassing other
community members. But mechanically it still has the downside of an ultimatum,
even if the connotation of the term is wrong.

That is why I chose that word, and I apologize for not having been clearer
about what I meant with it.

I do agree that greater willingness to use implicit political authority is
generally a good thing for healthy projects. (Though maybe there is something
complicated like not actually having technical control of the relevant IRC
channels or something annoying like that, I don't know. In some open-source
projects I'm active in, the core teams' ability to respond to harassment is
somewhat weakened or at least rate-limited by using IRC servers, code-review
forums, etc. run by unrelated teams, and I've seen people be hurt by abusers
taking advantage of this technical limitation.)

~~~
dietrichepp
I simply didn't get the idea that she was unwilling to compromise or discuss
the matter, apparently you got a different impression.

And I think it is—unfortunately—normal for a healthy community to discuss
banning users who harass others, because users who harass others are
everywhere, until they are kicked out.

------
engi_nerd
Here's what confuses me. What actually happened to her? Without any context,
all this can really be is her word against someone else's. She says she
forwarded on relevant harassment incidents, but without context, the actual
truth of what happened to her is unknown.

>Don’t tell people to stay quiet about abuse. This removes them from their
support network of friends and family.

Didn't they just tell her to stop talking about it in public, though? And
really what mechanism does anyone have to force her to do this?

>If you’re a dude, don’t reach out to women leaving other open source projects
saying “join us here!”

On the surface, that sounds like she wants men to...not be welcoming? This is,
perhaps, poorly worded.

>You have no idea if women in the community have problems or not. Women will
talk to other women about the quality of the community. But it’s also just
really bad taste. Instead, find someone in your community that is also part of
that minority group to reach out. They’ll know more about potential issues
than you will.

Not sure how this follows from the previous sentence. How is it in bad taste
to reach out to someone in a welcoming way? Does this mean that I, as a
straight white male, should only communicate with other straight white males?

She probably doesn't mean it this way, but boy, am I confused.

>Publicly stand behind the women in your community, or eventually they will
leave and write a post just like this.

I find it amusing that someone who has written a tool that allows you to
filter out a specific block of individuals (as trollish as they may be) can
write this post at all. The cynical side of me thinks the attitude shown here
is, "Hear me, but here's a way you can systematically ignore people that I
fundamentally disagree with".

I often feel like tolerance and progressivism has wrapped all the way around
to discrimination. Am I wrong to feel that is part of what's happening here?

EDIT: I'd like to make it clear that I'm genuinely not trying to troll. If I'm
being wrongheaded, then please show me how my thinking is wrong.

~~~
DanBC
> I find it amusing that someone who has written a tool that allows you to
> filter out a specific block of individuals (as trollish as they may be) can
> write this post at all. The cynical side of me thinks the attitude shown
> here is, "Hear me, but here's a way you can systematically ignore people
> that I fundamentally disagree with".

Give me your twitter handle, and your employer's email address, and I'll send
800 death threat tweets and I'll spend _weeks_ bombarding your employer with
stuff.

One thing that is often said to the victims of trolls is "just ignore it" (we
see that in this thread), so she wrote a tool that allows her to just ignore
it and you're telling her that she's wrong.

~~~
5F36B5F62640
Her blocking tool is idiotic. It blocks people whose only offense it to follow
more than one account on Twitter from a small list of accounts that she
considers to be GG leaders. It ends up blocking many anti-GG people who are
following those accounts because they want to know what their opponents are up
to.

~~~
engi_nerd
[https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2no4me/im_a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2no4me/im_a_developer_on_the_blocklist_what_do_i_do_now/)

There's no good mechanism for this case, either.

~~~
engi_nerd
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/14iu4XVTKw2tSAlv3x8ktxQfz...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/14iu4XVTKw2tSAlv3x8ktxQfz550bB_EtoUjNYIdPCpk/edit)

There is an appeals process, it turns out.

------
Esau
I believe Ms. Harper to be both abuser and abused. And it should be noted that
she now has a financial interest in keeping these kind of things active.

------
eadler
does this same thing eliminate the upvote option?
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/ub98ewlux598o8p/Screenshot%202015-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/ub98ewlux598o8p/Screenshot%202015-12-31%2015.09.48.png?dl=0)

sorry if this is off-topic :\

~~~
dang
No, that's unrelated. The vote arrow disappears once you've voted.

We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820149)
and marked it off-topic.

------
ps4fanboy
This is why no one will ever take them seriously, by spamming this thread out
to their followings in this way they are attempting to create outside focus on
the HN community not within it.

I invite you to see how Hacker News responds to an inherent problem with
misogyny in open source.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819778](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819778)
…
[https://twitter.com/LilyLemmer/status/682688557018828802](https://twitter.com/LilyLemmer/status/682688557018828802)

Admittedly really curious to see how the HN community responds to this.
[https://twitter.com/randileeharper/status/682683554447265792](https://twitter.com/randileeharper/status/682683554447265792)

~~~
freebsdgirl
A lot of my followers are in the tech community and part of HN. My apologies,
and if people find it to be a problem, I'll gladly delete the tweet.

I think it's interesting watching how HN responds to posts like this, because
they are kind of political, and HN is a good representation of how a lot of
people in tech feel. I'll get a lot of support on Twitter (because I've
blocked most of the trolls), and 140 characters isn't very much to leave a
detailed response, anyways.

I like seeing thoughtful criticism, and the HN community is (mostly) good at
that. It's why I don't excessively comment in these discussions, except maybe
to clear up a point here and there. HN brings up points I haven't thought
about, and I don't want necessarily to be part of the discussion about things
I've written except as an observer.

~~~
DanBC
You can ignore the person you replied to. Do you have "showdead" turned on in
your profile? They've written an abusive post about you in this thread, but it
got flagged.

~~~
freebsdgirl
I saw. But it didn't make this comment necessarily invalid. If there's a
policy against putting an HN post on social media when said post involves the
person publicizing it, I'm not aware, and I'm happy to fix it if it's a
problem. I knew when I posted it that this made the post more likely to
attract trolls (sorry, dang), but I know I'm not the only one that watches how
HN responds to this kind of topic.

------
bendbro
Notice that this blog post provides zero in the way of evidence. Before
assuming everything written here is true, it would be worthwhile to fact
check.

~~~
geofft
"Zero" seems like a bit much! There's a link to trademark policy as archived
by the Wayback Machine. It indeed seems correct that they added "usernames" to
the policy without updating the date on it.

The rest of it is generally consistent with what's been reported about this
elsewhere, including on /r/KotakuInAction. But I'm not going to point you at
each individual piece of evidence when there are things literally linked in
the article that you didn't see.

