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mjg59After Jesse Frazelle blogged about the online abuse she receives, a common reaction in various forums[1] was "This isn't a tech industry problem - this is what being on the internet is like"[2]. And yes, they're right. Abuse of women on the internet isn't limited to people in the tech industry. But the severity of a problem is a product of two separate factors: its prevalence and what impact it has on people.
Much of the modern tech industry relies on our ability to work with people outside our company. It relies on us interacting with a broader community of contributors, people from a range of backgrounds, people who may be upstream on a project we use, people who may be employed by competitors, people who may be spending their spare time on this. It means listening to your users, hearing their concerns, responding to their feedback. And, distressingly, there's significant overlap between that wider community and the people engaging in the abuse. This abuse is often partly technical in nature. It demonstrates understanding of the subject matter. Sometimes it can be directly tied back to people actively involved in related fields. It's from people who might be at conferences you attend. It's from people who are participating in your mailing lists. It's from people who are reading your blog and using the advice you give in their daily jobs. The abuse is coming from inside the industry.
Cutting yourself off from that community impairs your ability to do work. It restricts meeting people who can help you fix problems that you might not be able to fix yourself. It results in you missing career opportunities. Much of the work being done to combat online abuse relies on protecting the victim, giving them the tools to cut themselves off from the flow of abuse. But that risks restricting their ability to engage in the way they need to to do their job. It means missing meaningful feedback. It means passing up speaking opportunities. It means losing out on the community building that goes on at in-person events, the career progression that arises as a result. People are forced to choose between putting up with abuse or compromising their career.
The abuse that women receive on the internet is unacceptable in every case, but we can't ignore the effects of it on our industry simply because it happens elsewhere. The development model we've created over the past couple of decades is just too vulnerable to this kind of disruption, and if we do nothing about it we'll allow a large number of valuable members to be driven away. We owe it to them to make things better.
[1] Including Hacker News, which then decided to flag the story off the front page because masculinity is fragile
[2] Another common reaction was "But men get abused as well", which I'm not even going to dignify with a response
Much of the modern tech industry relies on our ability to work with people outside our company. It relies on us interacting with a broader community of contributors, people from a range of backgrounds, people who may be upstream on a project we use, people who may be employed by competitors, people who may be spending their spare time on this. It means listening to your users, hearing their concerns, responding to their feedback. And, distressingly, there's significant overlap between that wider community and the people engaging in the abuse. This abuse is often partly technical in nature. It demonstrates understanding of the subject matter. Sometimes it can be directly tied back to people actively involved in related fields. It's from people who might be at conferences you attend. It's from people who are participating in your mailing lists. It's from people who are reading your blog and using the advice you give in their daily jobs. The abuse is coming from inside the industry.
Cutting yourself off from that community impairs your ability to do work. It restricts meeting people who can help you fix problems that you might not be able to fix yourself. It results in you missing career opportunities. Much of the work being done to combat online abuse relies on protecting the victim, giving them the tools to cut themselves off from the flow of abuse. But that risks restricting their ability to engage in the way they need to to do their job. It means missing meaningful feedback. It means passing up speaking opportunities. It means losing out on the community building that goes on at in-person events, the career progression that arises as a result. People are forced to choose between putting up with abuse or compromising their career.
The abuse that women receive on the internet is unacceptable in every case, but we can't ignore the effects of it on our industry simply because it happens elsewhere. The development model we've created over the past couple of decades is just too vulnerable to this kind of disruption, and if we do nothing about it we'll allow a large number of valuable members to be driven away. We owe it to them to make things better.
[1] Including Hacker News, which then decided to flag the story off the front page because masculinity is fragile
[2] Another common reaction was "But men get abused as well", which I'm not even going to dignify with a response
This is not a social justice problem, this is an communication/education problem
Date: 2015-08-08 04:56 am (UTC)This is not a unique problem to social justice, this is a problem about large groups with information asymmetry more generally. September is still not over: every year millions of people get added to the internet, get old enough to enter academia, and in general -- become members of the global conversation and system of thinking beings on earth. Every year those millions have to pick up the beginning markers of discussions that have been going on for a *long time*. And unfortunately, some of us have to participate in that.
Threaded conversation is miraculously better that flat conversation, which is better than the combination of paper and your local community, in terms of allowing viewpoints to both be present on complex issues, and for large groups to coherently converse, but the problem comes when we get to the point where complex threads have been gone over, as you point out, for the nth time, and we statistically speaking speak past eachother more often than not.
There is a tradeoff between allowing for diverse viewpoints in a global conversation, and filtering those who don't know that what they are trying to say has been said a thousand times before, and the learning that comes along with those very same rehashed arguments in practice. A tradeoff between having the ability to learn, as a group, and the ability to communicate, as a group, on the order of millions at least.
One thing's for sure: subreddits fails after the first million users or two. Splitting back into subcultures that interact haphazardly doesn't work: we end up talking mostly about pictures of cats, and technical forums become a clusterfsck of drama.
I think part of the problem is who owns the commanding heights, right now -- reddit has tools for detecting high level patterns in conversations -- meme detection. Instead of using these tools to resolve these complex, multi-million person arguments, they are currently used for the benefit of advertisers.
There's little glimpses of what the next step could be, but no whole picture. In the bitcoin subreddit, someone wrote a bot for the purposes of identifying sockpuppets, which failed miserably at its task but which actually succeeded at pairing users together who had different opinions on the same topic but who thought most similar to eachother. Think of it as a kind of meiosis of ideas -- after the community found itself in a position where it was too big to make progress on a complex issue, and the issue wasn't going away, what *could* have happened would be a splitting of the issue into a bipartite graph, with the two sides of the graph being the two sides of the issue, and the links being between those who had the best chance of being at the level of understanding/wavelength. This kind of tool has never been used at scale to solve social justice problems.
We won't know whether it could work unless it could be credibly tried.