There are some people that are so divergent from understanding and being able to perform or at least emulate normal social behaviour that they become harmful and problematic. I watched one, quite closely, develop through high school. I can still hear his smug “nah” any time you said something he didn’t agree with. Well, not “agree with” but “that he knew to be universally correct.”
Ultimately he ended up unemployable and bitter while his family tripled down on him being the victim because of an Asperger’s diagnosis. Moved to central Canada last time I heard.
I think what I learned from the experience is at some point you’ve got to compartmentalize harmful people from your groups and inevitably a growing number of segments of society, even if that feels wrong in some way. It’s more wrong to let them perpetually abuse people.
Edit: I’m not going to litigate this. If you don’t trust me or don’t want to accept that this person was truly abusive and harmful, or if you believe that victims should be made to tolerate abuse, I can’t help you.
It’s truly heartbreaking. The guy was one of my closest friends because we had a ton of hobbies in common. I loved when he would target fixate on some problem and his basement would turn into a mad scientist workshop. I remember him as “the person who would see through a ridiculous idea.”
But the abusive parts got worse and worse and became intolerable. I’m not sure what could have been done differently. Though as a teenager that was probably not my role to play.
It wouldn’t be reasonable for a teenager or even an adult to martyr themselves over that. I wouldn’t blame anyone really, though I guess we all have to overcome the cards we are dealt somehow?
>I think what I learned from the experience is at some point you’ve got to compartmentalize harmful people from your groups and inevitably a growing number of segments of society, even if that feels wrong in some way. It’s more wrong to let them perpetually abuse people.
You need to ban abusive people at the first possible time (after you have established that they are abusive and not, e.g just ESL who learned from an old TV show/book). The more moderation a community has, the better the community will be.
If somebody has Asbergers and can't adjust, ban them too. The why doesn't matter (unless it is easily correctable), the how does.
We had something like that go down between two of our children; we had to tell the one who got the worst of it "if the only way to feel safe is to never be in the same room as them again, that's okay"
Forgiveness is one thing, but deliberately putting yourself in position to be victimized again is another.
For some people, emulating “normal” social behaviour can be taxing on many levels and perhaps “normal” seems extremely odd to them.
I’d sleep on the idea of ostracising people with social issues because it can hasten a downward spiral.
In a lot of cases, people who don’t fit in are looking for love they don’t receive. Speaking from experience, if you can offer them that love in spite of challenging behaviour, you could be the key to them developing positive relationships that serve as models of how they can effectively fit in.
If you can muster the energy, instead of pushing these people away, as hard as it may seem, try drawing them closer - it’s not an exaggeration to say that you might be saving someone’s life.
>I think what I learned from the experience is at some point you’ve got to compartmentalize harmful people from your groups and inevitably a growing number of segments of society, even if that feels wrong in some way. It’s more wrong to let them perpetually abuse people.
this strikes me as similar to the concept of being for life imprisonment over the spending of resources towards rehabilitation.
To throw people to the wayside because YOU have determined them to be 'UN-fixable' IS wrong. It's useful for YOU to compartmentalize them out of your life because they represent a personal burden -- but this doesn't help them improve themselves or their conditions; it may not be your responsibility to help them improve -- but many of these people are hopeless without outsider intervention, they need help, not partitioning. If you can't help them then the next best thing is to make an effort to find them help, not to shut the door in their face.
>It’s more wrong to let them perpetually abuse people
what do you think happens when you make yourself lost contact with these people? Well, having been 'compartmentalized' earlier in life and never receiving any help or social training, they continue to perpetually abuse other people.
Ironically the strategy of isolating them from oneself likely increases or prolongs their time 'out of step' with society -- all it does is protects YOU from the damage the person might do.
All I can say is that i'm glad the entire world doesn't take your advice of 'compartmentalizing harmful people', otherwise this place would be a pretty brutal world to live in.
> what do you think happens when you make yourself lost contact with these people? Well, having been 'compartmentalized' earlier in life and never receiving any help or social training, they continue to perpetually abuse other people.
most societies believe that each individual must contribute to some degree. It's being lost, but for most societies historically the mentally ill were the burden of the immediate family.
Now we see the effects of the mental illness affecting society-at-large, it stands to reason that the entirety of the affected population is now somewhat responsible for making their own lives better by trying to assess and remediate the problems within their society.
If I walked past litter on the ground in my home-town, I wouldn't say "Hey, not my job." and walk past it, I would pick it up for the betterment of my town.
> If I walked past litter on the ground in my home-town, I wouldn't say "Hey, not my job." and walk past it, I would pick it up for the betterment of my town.
If for 3 years I am constantly picking up litter as fast as other residents throw it on the ground, at what point to I just move to as different town where people litter less?
> If I walked past litter on the ground in my home-town, I wouldn't say "Hey, not my job." and walk past it, I would pick it up for the betterment of my town.
This is this and that is that. Litter won't stab you, whereas I've had a friend get stabbed by a mentally ill person who asked for their restaurant leftovers, and were given them, only to then do just that. (Which is a bit different than what the OP is talking about, but you mentioned mental illness in society in general, so it seems fair to bring it up.)
If someone slaps you in the face every time you meet them, how many times are you obligated to correct them before you decide you don't want to be slapped in the face anymore?
>this strikes me as similar to the concept of being for life imprisonment over the spending of resources towards rehabilitation.
Even societies "without" life imprisonment have legal ways of putting people away for life if they're deemed too incompatible with society. Take Norway; longest sentence is 21 years, but for especially vile crimes, that sentence can be extended at the end of the 21 years if the convict is found to not have been rehabilitated.
Speaking as someone who was stalked by a former acquaintance with mental illness: yeah, I realized the person didn't choose this, and I didn't judge them or wish harm on them. But they were also harassing friends and family members, and it got to the point where I had to send this person's photo/name/phone number to a number of people I cared about, and warn them to avoid any contact.
I don't wish any harm on Bryan, but it sounds like the guy is a textbook stalker—unstable, obsessive, and potentially dangerous—so I absolutely understand why things have reached the point where others need to be warned about him.
That's true but what does it have to do with the price of tea in China? The commenter raised a valid point that we may need to decide to compartmentalize for the sake of our own well being. This does not necessarily imply any measure of judgement against the other person.
I have absolutely been abusive at times growing up and probably in my professional life. I’ve been put in my place many times. And I learn and grow from that. I was not a perfect teenager and I’m definitely not a perfect adult.
I hope people wouldn’t tolerate it if I did it to them.
My friend was stabbed by a schizophrenic who lived in the flat opposite and believed that my friend was stalking him. Ten years later and my friend still has virtually no feeling in his hand as the nerves did not grow back correctly and he had to give up being a professional musician.
I know the guy didn't choose to be the way he was and I'm sure what was going through his mind was hell. But that doesn't mean that the rest of us should just live with the consequences of harmful actions.
>I know the guy didn't choose to be the way he was and I'm sure what was going through his mind was hell. But that doesn't mean that the rest of us should just live with the consequences of harmful actions.
ok, but aside from a time-machine and time-cops, what do we do?
We 'compartmentalize' the ill out of our lives -- they don't just disappear, they roam the streets and poorly interact with societies ..
-OR-
certain professionals sacrifice aspects of their lives in order to facilitate treatment and professional isolation for such individuals in an effort to keep them off the street and out of interactions with regular society.
which one results in less violent crimes towards regular citizens?
It should be obvious to anyone with their eyes open that someone has to interact with these people to provide rehabilitation and growing potential for people in need.
> certain professionals sacrifice aspects of their lives in order to facilitate treatment and professional isolation for such individuals in an effort to keep them off the street and out of interactions with regular society.
That was literally my dad’s job. In the UK in the 80s they implemented a policy called “care in the community” which was about ensuring that people with serious mental health issues were not institutionalised. For the most part this was a good thing but my dad actually made the decisions over the care and freedom they would receive. Eventually he quit because he felt too many dangerous people were being released - and in the end worked at Rampton, which is a prison hospital, looking after serial killers.
the point that OP made that the negative should be cut from your life, or the greater point that if the entire world cuts the negative from their life then those people -- 'the negative' -- are doomed to roam the world and be negative towards the rest of the world ad nauseum?
Hey please don't cross into personal attack in HN comments, even if another comment is wrong or you feel it is.
I appreciate that you're fundamentally making a plea for empathy, but putdowns/attacks are definitely not the right tool for the job, and are against the site guidelines in any case:
Edit: looking through your comments, you've been breaking the site guidelines so badly that I've banned your account. Please don't create accounts to do that with. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
It seems that every big project attracts that one persistent weirdo who comes by from time to time and posts silly stuff. I've noticed this pattern for a while now. I don't want to give names but I've at least seen some... bizarre issues on the LLVM tracker, for example.
Oh man, yeah there has been some absolute dogshit ones on LLVM. The Docker one has also seen some pretty freaky weirdos.
It’s a bit sad, we’re all on the same OSS team in the end. I’ve never found it that difficult to keep it cut and dry on software repos, I don’t know why people don’t just save the venom for forums and social media like the good ol days.
Here’s lattner telling some guy off. There’s none that I can think of that are super memeworthy or anything. It’s usually just insecure devs with a little Dunning Kruger cocktail in the mix.
Certainly not anybody bothering dozens of people manually, for months, like in the link. That’s pretty wild.
While we are sharing eye rollers.. I had this person plonk into our issues once with a “revolutionary” encryption technique. I wish I could remember the concoction he described.. Now that I’m trying to find it, it seems they deleted the github account. Seems like he saw the light, or got banned. Either way SNR increased and I’m all for that.
Two longstanding projects, two different weirdos I've had to deal with. At this point I've gotten unfortunately good at spotting a certain type of crazy.
Luckily, most projects seem to have a few supporters who want to help the project but don't have the technical skills yet to do so. For these people, managing the forums and bug reports is a valuable way contribute.
They can keep the noise and disruption of the craziest spammers to a minimum.
I had an embedded project once that was a personal one, but a few dozen people seemed to have used parts of it in their own stuff (it was MIT licensed). Then along came "Henry" (made up to protect the not so innocent). He had some ideas on the architecture. They weren't bad but I didn't care to change the core of my project and told him I would be happy if he forked my stuff and reused whatever he liked and I'd put an "alternatives" section in the github readme and that would be that. Henry was having -none- of that, he wanted to "work with me", etc, etc. Somehow he eventually got my phone number and was actually calling me out of the blue. Luckily it was a google voice number that I could easily drop. I just shut down the project, sent the people I knew who were actively using it notice and final git checkin of my RC changes, put a notice on the page I was shutting it down and to get it before I deleted my repo and account. The other stuff I had on there was private so I just created a new github moved it out and then closed out the other account after a month. It's quite scary how far people will go to troll and interfere in your life over something so unimportant as a small github side project.
It's fascinating how reading the post makes me think, "well, it's one person's side of the story, and I don't really know how bad the behavior is," but then this HN comment thread, when compared to typical HN discourse, appears to be solid evidence for the claims in the post. (turn on showdead and read some flagged messages to see what I mean)
This accusation of “doxxing” by a few people seems a bit unjustified to me. As a drive by viewer of this internet spat, you’ve probably got zero idea how much this person implicates their real-life identity in their online presence. If you want to both-sides this, there was much more credible arguments to make.
But also, doxxing is totally acceptable to protect people from threats including harassment.
We are well past the era where we maintained the fantasy that the internet was separate from real life. People who are acting out online sometimes also act dangerous IRL and it is therefore prudent to figure out who they are IRL if they've proven to be bad actors online.
yeah, this whole idea that "doxxing" is a universal harm needs to be corrected. not exposing people's real-world identities is a courtesy we obey to protect each other from harassment. if it becomes a way to protect the harassers, then we've lost the point.
nobody has a natural right to anonymity, and if your actions are causing real harm then you should expect some of the real-world consequences that come from having your identity exposed.
> Doxxing is an escalation intended to cause real harm in the real world
Correct. And is the necessary escalation when online-only tools have failed and the attacker will not relent (such as this circumstance, where the actor in question is taking active steps to bypass methods to down-sample their signal).
I'm assuming most people holding a position in this conversation aren't absolutists (for example, they recognize why the FBI honeypots / tricks people / subpoenas information to de-anonymize those suspected of crime). Is the issue which hands hold the power / take the step of de-anonymizing someone? If that is the issue, what is the recommend course of action in this scenario (which exceeds people's tolerance to continue to operate freely in the OSS community without harassment but does not meet the threshold of an FBI criminal investigation)?
> And is the necessary escalation when online-only tools have failed and the attacker will not relent
other tools are available (captcha, TLS fingerprinting, browser fingerprinting). if the moderator is not using these, its not a free permission for them to doxx someone.
In fact, the opposite right (the right to face one's accuser) is enshrined Constitutionally in the United States when we bring the force of law to bear on a citizen.
Anonymity has value in specific contexts. It is not a universal right in all contexts.
If your position is "Well they should involve the courts first," we are probably reaching agreement, but we're all aware of how weak the legal system is regarding online harassment, right? Most cyber-crime falls way outside the jurisdictions that are traditionally designed to handle harassment (as harassment was traditionally a very geographically-localized crime).
I'm personally willing to let the bar for "Disclosing enough information about someone's handle that they can be found IRL" lower than "a warrant is out for their arrest."
(This does raise an interesting question: perhaps we do need some kind of new cross-jurisdictional legal organ to decide when harassment raises to the bar of "doxxing acceptable" whether or not it raises to the bar of "prosecutable." That'd be nice to have; then we could have a generally-accepted standard for when it is and is not okay).
It may be a component of another crime, such as slander or incitement to violence.
If the individual in question believes this organization has done either of those things, they are welcome to involve the law (as the other party is doing).
Can you please make your substantive points without snark or swipes? We ban accounts that do the latter things since they destroy what HN is supposed to be for.
My apologies; I'm trying to follow you, but as best I can tell 15 USC 43 is "The principal office of the Commission shall be in the city of Washington, but it may meet and exercise all its powers at any other place. The Commission may, by one or more of its members, or by such examiners as it may designate, prosecute any inquiry necessary to its duties in any part of the United States." (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/43)
Do you have some snippets of the text of the law you're thinking of that I can search to see what you mean?
no, this is not acceptable. If you have an issue with someone online, ban their email, ban their IP and move on. It is not appropriate to go hunting this person in real life. you yourself have then become the creep, the person acting inappropriately. you've become the very person you have issue with.
to anyone reading this, DO NOT listen to the person I am replying to. Even if this extreme case seems "justified", its all too easy to fall down a slippery slope, where you start doxxing anyone that slights you. I have been the victim of this, its NOT OK.
Slippery slope is absolutely a risk. Claims that a person transgressed should not be taken lightly.
... but in the presence of persistent harassment that will not cease online, tying the behavior to the person behind the behavior and bringing proper consequences to bear is the only regulatory system that actually works. There's a reason that you can be fined or imprisoned for trying to pull crap like that IRL.
But I am sorry that you were falsely accused. That is a possibility (both in doxxing attempts and in more "traditional" harassment).
False accusation is entirely possible, but it doesn't imply we just let harassers get on unchecked.
> tying the behavior to the person behind the behavior and bringing proper consequences to bear is the only regulatory system that actually works
nope. trolling online is not a crime, so no regulations are needed. its the same as if someone walks up to you in real life and calls you a jerk. you dont get to do anything about that. you just move on.
> no, this is not acceptable. If you have an issue with someone online, ban their email, ban their IP and move on
Here's the thing: they did do that. But the banned person would not move on, and continued to evade the ban and be a pile of misery for everyone involved. "Ban them and move on" is the sort of advice that works great until it doesn't.
this is just more rationalizing. to justify doxxing, which is itself essentially stalking (or worse) should be a quite high bar, which hasn't been crossed, even in this situation.
If the troll was threatening life or some other crime, then fine do what you need to do. but the person is just essentially being annoying, that is not grounds to doxx someone. if they do not have the skills to keep out harmful users, thats their own fault, they should implement a captcha or some other tactic.
A captcha doesn't keep out harassing users; they're human, after all.
Changing the communications policy of the organization to only allow people a communications forum after they've been vetted might. That's a significant change that puts an OSS project at a severe disadvantage towards gathering support / interest. Also, it wouldn't even work in this situation; the actor in question proved willing to use every communications channel they could find to attack project volunteers.
In this case, they're policing their own forums by, having exhausted other options, disclosing the bad actor's name and warning others of the bad actions.
What crime? Be specific. You could perhaps suggest slander, incitement to violence, or invasion of privacy.
High bar to satisfy a case for any of those three. Consider everything a private investigator could do IRL if one retained their services to track down an unknown individual; in general, none of those actions are considered criminal (though the spied-upon person would certainly wish the PI wasn't tailing them).
They buried the lede. At the bottom they say they are working on a lawsuit against Kirk and want other people who have been harassed to share their story. How could they do that without saying who they are preparing to sue?
I have mixed feelings on calling him out by name. It sounds like the person is going through tough times. This obsessive behaviour doesn't describe someone who's living a happy, fulfilling life. The bug reports might be his flawed way to reach out and be part of the community. I'm not arguing for people to enable his negative behaviour. I just wish there was another solution than the nuclear option: this public warning might severely affect his mental state and career prospects. If he lacks any support network, this could mean years of downward spiral and isolation. Would you consider adding a sort of "way out" clause to soften the blow? Something along the lines of waiting for an apology and his public promise not to harrass other people?
This person has had a way out for aa long as the behavior has been going on. They simply need to stop doing it! Literally just stop and never interact with the ReactOS project again. After that, nobody from said project will need to worry about them ever again, and they won't have to go public about this sort of thing.
The way out has always been there: said person just disengages. People like this refuse to use it.
Continued harassment and stalker-like behavior over years with obviously no intention of stopping his behavior.
It seems to me issuing a public warning about this persons "paper trail" is probably the only real option to shut down this behavior that these OSS projects can see.
I used to know Bryan, a long, long time ago. He would stand and stare into the windows of girls he fantasized about. Very creepy. Not surprised he's doing this. The guy has no boundaries.
That's kind of what I meant, it will just be believable enough to make people think it's a real conversation but maintainers waste time on it and it really doesn't go anywhere.
On the other had, as much as I've had fun with ChatGPT, it does really seem quite a long ways off being able to understand context and write a meaningful response that people would believe is a real person.
Indeed... If I had to ban a community member for bad behaviour, I would want to do it in the most professional way possible, and never to directly accuse OP of anything not backed up with a direct link to evidence of wrongdoing.
In my experience (And observations), depending on _interest_ posts start gathering comments after at least the hour mark. This post right now is 25 mins old, although its' weird that it's so high in the front page (Probably a slow Saturday)
The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.
Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.
Indeed, the "overheated discussions" factor probably downgrades (ed: rather, tends to downgrade) heavily-commented stories, not the other way around. I for one tend to regard a high upvote/comment ratio as a positive sign about a story.
Measures of “overheated discussion” probably can't distinguish easily between matters that are purely divisive and those that are genuinely complex/interesting/ground-breaking/surprising/etc (so deserving of that much of people's time). Whether punishing based on this measure for this reason is beneficial overall or not is a divisive discussion in its own right!
Not easily, no, but I think a very fast reply frequency, especially between lots of pairs of two people, is more indicative of heat than light. :) (who knows, maybe the algorithm will think that about this reply) Genuinely interesting topics probably require more time to write worthwhile comments on, and draw in more people.
(To be clear, I'm not implying nor do I think that HN uses raw comment-count as a signal of overheating, just expressing my surprise at the previous poster's surprise at seeing high-ranked stories with few comments, since the correlation should run the other way if at all.)
I have no affiliation with the ReactOS project but I honestly think that the doxxing could and should have been avoided (assuming the name included in the title is a person's real name). It probably also goes against some HN rules, but I may be wrong on that.
Yes it is, especially if it's posted with no evidence backing up the claims.
For all we know, this might be a private dispute between two people, and, if presented all the information, Bryan's side might be the side that sounds more reasonable...
While the post fails to directly present evidence, and could be improved by doing so, given the nature of the complaint perhaps simply searching in the bug tracker and related forums would easily surface said evidence.
I was on HN when the Boston bombings happened, trust me, you don't want to let random people on the Internet doxx other people, no matter how smart or righteous the people doing the doxxing think they are.
"I saw some random crap on the internet so now other people have to start behaving in a certain way" is certainly one of many possible ways to navigate the world.
Starting a crusade against anime pfps (one of the most ubiquitous styles on the entire internet) after you watched a youtube expose of an evil online forum is not a reasonable thing to do.
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting unsubstantive comments.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
While I'm sure it's annoying, this post is not a good look and reads rather unhinged. I'm also not sure what it's meant to accomplish other than venting.
For those that don't believe doxxing is a problem, it is superficially easy for a troll to fake an identity online, slowly spilling fake personal data, and then be "doxxed" to the Fake persona.
I may have done this 15 years ago to someone that I felt deserved it at the time, on a forum I enjoyed trolling and to a coworkers identity that eventually came through.
Does this kind of behavior meet the bar for legal harassment? In California it seems not per https://www.courts.ca.gov/1258.htm?rdeLocaleAttr=en which requires a threat of violence to rise to the level of harassment.
Does the post's recommendation rise to the level of legal advice? This all feels very childish to me.
A number of jurisdictions have legally codified definitions specifically for online harassment and this behaviour certainly counts in some of them.
I suspect that in most jurisdictions this behaviour could be of legal concern.
The other word they used, which I note you don't question, is stalking. This sort of behaviour is even more likely to infringed on laws (which may not exist, or are well enforced, in all jurisdictions but certainly do and are in some) intended to manage that more specific form of harassment.
Ultimately he ended up unemployable and bitter while his family tripled down on him being the victim because of an Asperger’s diagnosis. Moved to central Canada last time I heard.
I think what I learned from the experience is at some point you’ve got to compartmentalize harmful people from your groups and inevitably a growing number of segments of society, even if that feels wrong in some way. It’s more wrong to let them perpetually abuse people.
Edit: I’m not going to litigate this. If you don’t trust me or don’t want to accept that this person was truly abusive and harmful, or if you believe that victims should be made to tolerate abuse, I can’t help you.