March 27, 2007

• This is terrible. No one deserves this. Kathy Sierra's a really entertaining, thought-provoking speaker (and writer), and I hope this doesn't ultimately stop her doing something she's really good at.
• Holy Christ. I always assume most of the rage and misogyny I see online comes from weak and cowardly men lashing out from a safe distance, but it's not something you'd want to take a chance with when it gets so extreme and sustained.
• Disgusting.
• Is there no law enforcement agency that can help here? This behaviour is not illegal, and needs to be punished.
• IS illegal. I don't believe I did that. Very, very, go-to-jail illegal.
• The IP she references resolves to Spain. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition
• The photo she's disturbed by just looks like a fractal put over her face. Maybe a manta ray. What's it supposed to be?
• Ahem. Colour me conflicted. Not to make light of the hateful comments posted by this sick individual, but allowing an anonymous troll's posts to drive one off the Internet seems a pretty extreme and weak reaction. This is especially ironic in view the author's stated goal of inspiring her readers to confront their fears . I'm with Chaz on this. It shouldn't really be THAT hard to track this moronic sickoid; then trap the frikken creep in his filthy lair, and prosecute his disgusting azz.
• Has this been posted to MeFi? They would go at it like terriers.
• Never mind.
• precisely
• 1. I'd expect it's very easy to find who posted the comments. People who write that sort of nastiness generally leave lots of tracks. The meankids.org site could furnish the necessary information. 2. How long until the Blogosphere disappears up its own self-obsessed arse?
• I'd say roryk is so full of common sense, he's a member of the commonsensosphere. Where as I am a citizen of the lunchandanaposphere.
• I'm a member of the luchadorosphere. Arriba! *hurricanada upside yo head*
• *disappearuparseosphere*
• http://www.psfk.com/2007/03/are_scoble_sier.html
• It is downright eerie how closely this situation parallels one I was involved in back in 1998. (On Usenet, as you might expect.) In that case, person A and person B were friends. Person A made a few public snide remarks against person B, which was meant in fun. Person C, who had apparently been keeping her feelings under wraps for the prior several years, took this as a declaration of open season. Person C proceeded to spew out a remarkable torrent of abuse at person A. The entire group caught fire, and the whole thing was a smoking ruin within 48 hours, never to be revived. I have noticed that there seems to be a direct correlation between: 1. The scope of focus of an online community 2. Its tendency to destroy itself in a conflagration of vitriol For some reason, narrow-channel communities seem to ride closer to that flash point. Which is one reason why I generally stick to broad-spectrum communities like Monkeyfilter (in so far as I participate in online communities at all anymore).
• My thoughts are similar to mechagrue's. I got into some drama with someone on Usenet years ago, which I don't like to talk about concretely. It was a complicated situation, and at times, I behaved about as badly as anyone else involved. It was at least partly about personal stuff that didn't really come out in public, but I was so messed-up about the private stuff that I was acting like an idiot in public, which made it easy to be critical of me and make it look like it was entirely about the public thing. (It wasn't.) Eventually the two things made me such a nervous wreck that I went on medication for anxiety. What a lot of people don't realize is that many online flamewars are never resolved. They leave the sphere where they began, but if the parties don't make up via email and neither leaves the group & its offshoots, they can go on sporadically in "closed quarters" for a long time. IMs, chatrooms, invite-only boards, locked livejournal/myspace posts, etc. The friends of either party informing them of the online activities of the other, so that they can be ripped apart in one of those supposedly private sessions. Both parties making sure they have the home addresses of the other, in case legal action is required. Each side feels utterly victimized. This happened in the situation I got myself into, and it's happened in almost every similar situation I've ever heard of, often to a greater degree. What Kathy Sierra experienced with the MeanKids is like that. It's essentially a one-sided flamewar, where someone posts about how much they hate someone and like-minded friends respond in kind. Hurtful, but not dangerous. I don't think anything ever comes of these things. At least one of the parties usually gets bored and goes away, or both parties lock down and stop making material available to the other. In my case, the whole thing dwindled (which is good, because it was a childish waste of time on my part). I have since altered my online behavior to avoid drama as much as possible. This is one reason why I walk away from any discussion online as soon as I feel myself becoming emotional about it: fighting with people on the internet is never worth it. Online disagreements don't matter, & I now do whatever I can to thwart my need to have the last word in one. I never threatened the other party in my drama - only mocked them and complained about them a lot - but some of their friends threatened me, & I got a lot of anonymous "die ugly bitch" comments both because of that and just because I was online. Someone in one of these comment threads said that no matter what opinion you espouse online, there is someone out there to take OTT exception to it and write you hate mail - this is true. The latter has happened to me dozens of times, over many things, some really obscure & innocuous. Hide your info, and some ppl will still find a way to send nastygrams if they want, but most are too lazy when the info isn't right in front of them. The way a person reacts to the "threats" depends on how anxious a person they happen to be: you can make those comments about someone who doesn't have anxiety issues, and it may just make them roll their eyes, but if you make them to/about a sensitive person, they may be more strongly affected. When I was threatened (on a forum I shouldn't have been reading to begin with, like Kathy Sierra), my mom was really upset and wanted to involve the police, but I knew in my heart it wasn't that big a deal - it was basically someone volunteering to beat me severely if I happened to be in their area. I still found it frightening and unsettling, even had nightmares. Support from close IRL friends helped a lot. So... I feel bad for Kathy Sierra, but I doubt she's in actual danger, nor do I think any actual stalking is involved. A follow-up on the post from Spain will probably help her find out for sure.
• This whole thing is a sick reminder of how far men as a group have to go.. I doubt she's in actual danger I hope you're right. But when it's you being gruesomely photoshopped and virtually vivisected, the fear becomes much more palpable. How often does the line from virtual to real violence get crossed? Am I willing to take the chance that letting my guard down will allow this scumbucket to make his move? Also every person who uses the internet needs to read A Rape in Cyberspace.
• Now there's even a Kathy Sierra poll!
• poll ...via http://balloonballoon.blogspot.com
• Here's the direct link to the Kathy Sierra poll
• So close! You need < a href = "url" > text < / a >, without any spaces except the one after "a"
• On t'other hand, it's your own blog, so perhaps you already know enough html.
• *snif**sniff*
• 's'not illegal, but maybe a tad sneeeeky.
• Not sneeky, and not illegal, and not on purpose. It's in the comments section. And I referred it as my own blog but unfortunately did so within part of the href code, hence the whole no show. But also, this is the only Kathy Sierra poll out there (at least it's the first), so I thought that Kathy Sierra being the subject of this post... Anyway, thanks for the tip though: Kathy Sierra poll
• Got it that time! Sorry, flic, I shouldn't have been so accusatory, I'm just used to people saying "I posted a such-and-such here" or "there's a whatsit related to this on my blog here".
• It's generally good form to point it out, yes, but no biggie.
• As I pointed out, it pretty much was me going through something a little like this, though I mostly knew who the people were and I didn't get freaky pictures. It seems like Kathy Sierra also pretty much knows who the people are, with the possible exception of the threatener from Spain, which someone may have outed in her comments area. Also, a couple of people have pointed out that the photo of her has a pair of sheer panties over her face, not a gaping wound. (Yeah, I know what it looks like.) Taken as what it is, the noose thing is probably the scarier of the "alarming photos." None of the freaky pictures were sent to her, IIRC: she found them while snooping on a board full of people who dislike her. They seem to have been intended as hateful mockery rather than a death plot of any kind. This isn't a "group of men" problem - some of the people involved are women. The woman recently in the hospital, and the woman at burningbird or whatever who's friends with some of the people on the other side, doesn't like Kathy Sierra, and thinks she's attacking them unnecessarily. It doesn't seem to be all men doing the attacking, and it doesn't seem like all the women who have commented on it support her - some have told her to get over herself. (I do support her, but if I were talking to her in person I would say that what they're doing to her is mostly creating anxiety and messing with her head, and that I don't think there's any real chance someone is going to assault her physically. The situation sucks regardless of whether or not you're overreacting, and the temptation to overreact in that situation can be great. Because - how should you feel, you know? Even if someone is just pushing your buttons, it doesn't hurt to be self-protective.) The fact that I don't think she's in actual physical danger doesn't make the threats and comments right, but I think people are too quick to cast it as fully a sexism issue. It is partly a sexism issue, but there seems to be more to it than that. The fact that she is a woman influences the tenor of some of the stuff that frightened her, but it probably has less to do with the fact that comments were made about her than people are assuming. The noose thing, for example, could easily have been done with a man's photo. In other words, people do this because they don't like you, not always just because you're female. You being female just adds a few particular trigger buttons that can be pressed, and sometimes it's only or mostly about that. In other words, I don't think the basis of the argument is necessarily about "tech guys feeling threatened by a woman because she's a woman," but I do think that when some men want to mess with a woman they dislike, regardless of whether they feel threatened by her - maybe they just think she's irritating - they will see stuff like rape threats as part of the available arsenal. (Most straight men won't use the same thing in an argument against men because of the homosexual stigma involved.) And as far as actual sexism - and sexual violence - goes, I don't think men as a group will ever change much until an entire generation of men teaches their sons that that kind of thing isn't appropriate. The kind of men who perpetuate it aren't interested in hearing protests from women about it, and if they are called on it by other men, it seems like the other men are automatically dismissed as womanized sissies or "ungodly" or whatever (depending on the particular man's reasons for claiming male superiority). I think this will take generations to change, but hopefully progress will be made in each generation. Even the men I know who are generally respectful to women are mostly a little sexist in some way or another, decrying certain things as "too girly" for them.
• Online obnoxiousness is hardly limited to men, and ugly behaviour isn't gender-specific. The nastiest people I've encountered online have all been female. That said, some people have no sense of common decency .
• Men who hate women on the Web
• Well, colour me speechless. What can you say about a society that tolerates, nay encourages, travestys like this perverted idea of entertainment? Truly despicable.
• Why women shouldn't apologize for being afraid of threats on the Web.