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).
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...
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.
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.
I'm sorry to hear that :( I'm lucky in that I've never really had to deal with that yet. The few times that could have happened it didn't, and I mainly work for myself now so it's easy to take myself out of a problem when it arises.
Thanks though. I have a reasonably thick skin and I'm used to it so I'm not too worried. I'm mostly worried about what this means for others. Hopefully more awareness means a better solution for this problem so others don't face it. I don't have enough relevant expertise or passion though, so I'm hoping until there's a YC funded company that focuses on fixing that ;)
It was stupidly blatant and my employer dealt with it once it was brought to their attention. Not fun by any means.
Oh, I've also faced internet crazies, but I've always practiced a reasonable level of anonymity as self-defense, so they've never been real threats. Actually it was amusing when one person sent all these harassing emails because they screwed up the Sendmail exploit and highlighted the real IP with something like SHADOW_SHADOW_SHADOW. Their ISP dropped them quickly once I explained all the interesting things I knew about that particular customer.
EDIT: It's a bit disheartening to see the two posts in this thread as my only posts that have not yet been downvoted on this story as these are honestly the least relevant to the topic at hand.
On sites like Facebook where it's tied to a real life identity, I'd expect to see harassment drop significantly.