> They don't give a damn about "Women in Tech", her or anything else.
I disagree. If this was a pure love of fucking with people, men and women would get equal levels of this. But that's definitely not the case. They have a strong opinion on women in tech (and in gaming): they're vigorously opposed.
> The only way to discourage them is to introduce concrete risk to the unwanted activity.
I'm all for that. But it's tricky. There are good reasons names are rarely named in situations like this: the consequences of a public fight are often worse for the victims than the abusers. If we want consequences, we'll have to find ways to make it safe for victims to come forward, and we'll have to give them confidence that reporting abuse will actually do some good.
> If this was a pure love of fucking with people, men and women would get equal levels of this. But that's definitely not the case.
Women in tech and gaming are targeted because they are juicy targets. They have a high reward/effort ratio. It's easy to get hooks into a woman in tech/gaming. Vigorously opposing them is a means to the end of getting a reaction. It's relatively much harder to get a reaction from a man for being in tech or gaming. So, the trolls go for the low-hanging fruit.
> I'm all for that. But it's tricky.
Definitely. If this was easy, it would have been solved long ago. This is a problem as old as the internet. I'm just trying to direct attention to the actual problem. Indictments of whole industries are worse than distractions. The confused, heated, misguided, highly emotional arguments are troll dessert! Watching people in this discussion get angry at each other is the cherry on top of all the effort they put into Jessi.
I agree that they can cause more damage to women, but I think that's mainly because the culture (and the tech industry) is still substantially sexist.
But it's precisely that endemic sexism that makes me suspicious of your theory that of all the people being terrible mainly to women (misogynists, cat-callers, street harassers, pick-up artists, date rapists, abusive partners, exploitative bosses, etc, etc, etc), these trolls are the only ones who happen to be perfectly free of bias.
Do you have some explanation of how all of these people happen to be so unusually free of bias and then take up a hobby where they abuse women for fun? Otherwise, Occam's razor suggests that this is just the on-line form of the culturally endemic male abuse of vulnerable women.
> Indictments of whole industries are worse than distractions.
Nope! Definitely not. People are perfectly happy to let problems exist when they're on a large enough scale, because they don't see themselves as having a way to act. But this problem exists in our industry, and we can fix it here if we want. I sure do.
I disagree. If this was a pure love of fucking with people, men and women would get equal levels of this. But that's definitely not the case. They have a strong opinion on women in tech (and in gaming): they're vigorously opposed.
> The only way to discourage them is to introduce concrete risk to the unwanted activity.
I'm all for that. But it's tricky. There are good reasons names are rarely named in situations like this: the consequences of a public fight are often worse for the victims than the abusers. If we want consequences, we'll have to find ways to make it safe for victims to come forward, and we'll have to give them confidence that reporting abuse will actually do some good.