A Natural A/B Test of Harassment

http://developers.kongregate.com/blog/a-natural-a-b-test-of-harassment

by benologist • 12 years ago

123 76 12 years ago

developers.kongregate.com

chiaro2• 12 years ago

A shame the point needs to be repeatedly made. A five minute foray into the wasteland that is twitch chat will show some pretty stark differences between how men and women become targets for trolling and vitriol.

While some of the concerns of the whole gamergate mess were perhaps reasonable at some point in time, the whole thing has disappeared under a huge number of people who see their any supposed righteousness as license to indulge in the pettiest of attacks that aligns them with segments of society I'd foolishly thought we'd largely left behind.

Seriously, if you're looking for some injustices in the world to help make your life meaningful, you can do a hell of a lot better than "ethics in video game journalism", vitriolic element or no.

droopyEyelids• 12 years ago

I'm commenting to register my frustration with what I call the "harm reductionism fallacy".

At it's most extreme point, it can be parodied to something like "You have no right to complain about a problem in your privileged life because people are starving in $COUNTRY"

In all it's forms, it's a sort of ridicule directed towards people trying to make their lives better. I believe people have the right to complain about, and try to improve, any and every element of their lives- right down to asking for better/healthier free lunches from their employers.

Working for ethics in video game journalism and to reduce nasty sex related comments towards women stands to reform a genuinely nasty cesspool in modern society

vacri• 12 years ago

The impassioned hysteria over 'ethics in video game journalism' is the problematic part, not the issue itself.

And, to be frank, that ridiculous level of hysteria makes it clear that it's not really about ethics in video game journalism. No-one is dead or has been maimed by it. Lives aren't destroyed by it. Basically, it's a good example of dog whistle politics, using a term that is more palatable to push a less palatable agenda: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics

aptwebapps• 12 years ago

You can be concerned about ethics in game journalism and try to do something about it even though other injustices exist, by my book at least. But the gamergate tag has been effectively taken over by the misogynists and haters. That may not be fair, but it's a fact. If people in the first group continue to use that umbrella they are aiding the people in the second group. Again, not fair, but that's the way it is.

Pxtl2• 12 years ago

I tend to think Gamergate was a brewing culture war that was just looking for a spark to start the fire. Gamer culture has had a persecution complex for well over a generation, particularly with respect to the press - even the gaming press. Being repeatedly insulted and attacked by the media has made them circle their wagons instinctively. Combined with a substantial fraction of gamers that are intensely misogynistic and this ugliness was practically inevitable.

The problem is that gamers picked a fight with SJWs, which are effectively their own mirror image - the same obsessiveness and mean-spirited put-downs and in-group high-fives. I mean, the fact that the SJWs are right is almost immaterial - in the words of The Big Lebowski: "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole". Online social justice groups have a knack for utterly alienating and insulting everyone they could ever hope to convince, even those who broadly agree with them.

Combine that with Gawker media's spectacular ability to stir the pot, and a few prominent right-wing culture-war bloggers feeding the gamer-gaters' persecution complex, and we're seeing outright radicalization.

You isolate and insult a guy and then give him an online culture of like-minded outcasts and they start encouraging each other to do drastic things. There are obvious parallels to other movements of angry young men...

It's a perfect storm, and it's only going to get worse before it gets better since anybody who's trying to talk the gamergaters down from the ledge has to have infinite patience for their monomaniacal rationalizations. They see themselves as the defenders of rationality surrounded by SJWs who fling glib insults... and gaming is founded on endlessly grinding against a pointless task for fun.

It's profoundly sad to see so many gamers rally behind that gamergate banner. To see harassment and threats and ruining women's lives become the public image of core gamer culture.

I'm really worried that this is going to get worse before it gets better. The "us vs. them" mentality of the hardcore gamer world is too old and well-established, and everybody else involved is either feeding into it or is drowned out by the din.

ncallaway2• 12 years ago

I started seeing the phrase "Social Justice Warrior" used a lot as soon as #Gamergate happened. I have yet to see it well defined, though.

I realize it's tangential to your point, but I'm curious how would you define or describe a SJW?

DanBC2• 12 years ago

It's weird to see the term "sjw" used by someone who isn't a repellant fuckwit. It's been a reliable flag -at least on HN- so far. That's something you might want to be aware of.

chiaro2• 12 years ago

Very well put. The phrase "perfect storm" crossed my mind when I first heard of this.

A_COMPUTER• 12 years ago

Every f*ing video on Youtube by a woman has that one jackass who posts "make me a sandwich" complemented with 10-100 upvotes.

wnevets• 12 years ago

people read youtube comments?

mesozoic• 12 years ago

Gamergate is leaking again.

htns• 12 years ago

Yeah, I've heard about Gamergate in a couple of wildly different contexts. What's the deal with it?

defen3• 12 years ago

The extreme nutshell version is that a female indie game developer supposedly slept with a male video game journalist, and this supposedly let to favorable coverage for her game that would not have happened otherwise.

The surface phenomenon is that a lot of people united under the banner of #gamergate to protest this breach of journalistic ethics. The dark side is that it seems like it's really just a bunch of people who want to see someone's life ruined, and they are wildly overreacting.

I think the underlying phenomenon is similar to what happened to Brendan Eich, even though the ostensible cause and the people involved are completely different.

michaelbuckbee• 12 years ago

Good overview here: http://deadspin.com/the-future-of-the-culture-wars-is-here-a...

ijk3• 12 years ago

An article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10/...

A video (Folding Ideas S4E7):

http://blip.tv/foldablehuman/s4e7-gamergate-7071206

mindslight• 12 years ago

In 2037, this exact question will be quoted in a Supreme Appstore verdict on the illegality of tabphlets advocating dodging the interplanetary draft.

tzs• 12 years ago

Surprisingly, one of the best overviews I've seen was in Reason: http://reason.com/archives/2014/10/12/gamergate-part-i-sex-l...

Unlike most of the other references people tend to cite in answer to questions like yours, they don't have an obvious stake in the matter.

andrewvc• 12 years ago

What I urge people in this thread to do is not to pick up a google search, or read a book, but to just go out and ask a few female friends what their thoughts are about being online, being safe, and being respected, and to listen with an open mind.

I see a lot of denial in here, people rooting around for reasons to think that there isn't a serious fucking problem with intimidation and psychological violence taking place on the net. I see a lot of cognitive dissonance, and that's sad, that's not a scientific mindset. You all need to get out of your comfort zone.

I'm a straight white male software developer, I don't need to care about this for any reason other than a life that doesn't have truth and fairness as a cause isn't worth living. I encourage you all to calm down, reach out, and really understand what it's like on the other side.

ddingus• 12 years ago

Well said.

We have a similar dialog going on among the power users at Quora. The trouble women were having really escalated when the first influx of general users showed up.

It got to the point where many of them were going to leave.

All of us had a discussion, and Quora had a discussion in private with the women.

The ban hammer came down on a surprisingly large number of users. And it still comes down.

Most of us men, who participated in this, got to understand a lot. Due to the nature of that site, and that we have real life meetup events, many women felt it OK to just share with us, no filters.

And I was stunned. Thought I had some idea, and just didn't. Of course, now I do.

Honestly, that these stronger women were able to experience that, share it with others including men and continue on in seemingly normal ways is kind of amazing to me.

If more people were able to have these kinds of conversations, I suspect social norms would start to shift quickly, as would actions to remedy the problem.

Not that we don't have actions now. We do. People are supporting others who need it and we are beginning to speak out more and discuss it more.

But that ban hammer session was notable. A lot of the community got the message right away.

paulnechifor• 12 years ago

I thought better of HN before this. It looks like if you don't toe the line you get downvoted and your comments get [killed].

wismer• 12 years ago

There's a really good reason for it and it's up to you to figure that part out.

meowface4• 12 years ago

There is no reason to delete a post that presents a rational argument without use of insults or ad hominem attacks, regardless of if you think the viewpoint is "destroying [insert any topical political or current events issue here]".

rcfox• 12 years ago

I saw all of the dead comments, and my first thought was that the mods had probably done a good job of cleaning up the vitriol. I was curious though, so I enabled showdead, and while I'm not sure that I agree with many of the dead comments, most of them are not noise. It's clear that there has been some emotional voting going on.

jhgfj6575hgf• 12 years ago

I find this very unfortunate to be honest. Instead of allowing dissent, the people here are actively deleting speech that they disagree with. Imagine if a conservative professor at Stanford silenced supporters of Edward Snowden.

ANTSANTS5• 12 years ago

I feel the same. I don't think I want to post here anymore. I mean, I should have known that it's not worth discussing politics on HN, but there's something really demoralizing about putting sincere and civil comments together just to have them deleted, all because a few people took their disagreement personally.

When I'm trying to keep it civil here and upvoting people I don't agree with when they make good points, and I get silenced in return, all it does is polarize me further. gg folks, have fun thinking I'm evil/brainwashed/sexist in your echo chamber.

jzwinck• 12 years ago

Disclaimer: I agree there is a real social problem here. The rest of this message is solely about statistics (inspired by the language of statistics used in the article, like "A/B Test," "statistical significance," and "99.9% confidence level").

The article opens with an analysis of messages to one male and one (self-selected) female from a community which has a large male majority.

Most people in the world are heterosexual, and in my opinion people are more likely to sexually harass the gender they "like." Let's say 3/4 of people are straight and 1/4 are gay. Let's also say that 2/3 of sexual harassment is directed at the "preferred" gender" of the perpetrator.

Imagine a population of 80 boys and 8 girls, all equally "good." Half of them never say a bad thing to anyone. The other half lash out once a month and say something disgusting.

Now, we have 60 straight boys, 30 of whom behave badly once a month. That's 30 nasty messages a month, 20 of which go to girls and 10 to boys. We also have 20 gay boys generating 10 nastygrams monthly, 7 to boys and 3 to girls.

As for the girls, there are 6 straight ones, 3 of whom are bad, so they send 2 threatening topics to boys and 1 to a girl each month. Of the 2 gay girls only one is malfeasant, so let's say she sends her only "love letter" to a girl.

How many total bad messages are sent each month? 20 + 3 + 1 + 1 = 25 to girls, and 10 + 7 + 2 + 0 = 19 to boys. With 80 total boys, each will receive about one salacious message per four months. But each of the 8 girls will absorb, on average, just over 3 per month.

I tried to use conservative numbers here, and still the girls in a male-majority group get 13 times as many unwanted notes as boys. This is deplorable, but it is also unsurprising given the population.

rtpg4• 12 years ago

I think the question here is "will gamers harass men or women more". In this case you want your community to be representative of the community at large, so this gender imbalance makes sense.

Your point makes sense, but seems irrelevant to the discussion here.

ObviousScience2• 12 years ago

I think it's exactly to the point: the question is if we have a fundamentally more sexist male population online than female population, or if we're seeing confounding variables introducing an apparently difference. I mean, there's clearly a problem with the experience women have with many online communities - just ask them, they're not shy about admitting it. The hard questions are why is their experience like that and what are the main contributing causes.

In fact, the last time we had a discussion about sexism here, someone posted a study to me claiming that it's often confounding community values that create a hotbed of apparent sexism.[1]

So if we're talking about the situation where what we see is a normal (and consistent at large with society) rate of men harassing women, we should be asking what we can do to fix the other parts of the community that enable these people to be unduly felt, such as not properly spam filtering messages between users. Why is it, for instance, I can tell my email client to never display a message with the word 'cunt' in it, except for whitelisted users, but I can't do this when trying to interact with people in public, such as reddit or Kongregate?

I believe what we see time and again when we analyze the numbers is not that we're seeing an inherently higher rate of sexism, to which we need to do something to fix the attitudes of men in general, but rather that we're seeing the undue influence of the usual rate of problematic actors - that is, it's way easier to bother a lot of people as a troll and dominate the conversation online than in person, and its this difference that is the cause of the problems, not the background rate of problematic actors.

[1] http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4291/33...

raquo• 12 years ago

That's good statistics, and probably explains generic nastygram data quite well. However, my non-data-backed bet is that males are much more likely to send sexually harassing messages than females, so even in an environment with 50% males and 50% females, females will get much more sexual nastygrams than males.

verroq• 12 years ago

You also need to account for technical ability. There's way more technical male users who know how not only to harass, but to get away with it.

On sites like Facebook where it's tied to a real life identity, I'd expect to see harassment drop significantly.

gohrt2• 12 years ago

Hi, mods: Look at this thread. What does it mean for the appropriateness of "GamerGate" on Hacker News?

JulianMorrison• 12 years ago

It's not just appropriate, it's overdue.

Look at all these ugly, ugly critters crawling out of the woodwork. They were already here before the scent of mass misogyny drew them out into the open.

HonorSworn• 12 years ago

Hrmm looks like someone needs to make some sort of filter that parses tweets and messages for insults and removes them.

judk2• 12 years ago

It would be nice if HN talked more about technical and other ways to solve the actual problems here, and less repeating the same insults at each other over and over again.

Natsu4• 12 years ago

I don't think I've ever seen a story with so many dead posts.

EDIT: Everyone is downvote-happy. I'm going to do my best to upvote anyone who was downvoted unfairly.

_pmf_• 12 years ago

A Natural A/B Test

Or, as more honest and less conceited people would call it, an anecdote.

slash3r4• 12 years ago

How is this HN front page worthy? It's just a case study on only two people that ends up making a generalization about countless others. I could make a pro gamer gate statement for all I care, it would still be irrelevant.

A Natural A/B Test of Harassment

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