Reddit mob threatens 16 year old girl coder with rape threats and abuse

boing
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I started programming when I was 4. And I wrote two very simple games when I was 5. One of them a spaghetti of IF-THEN-GOTO for a choose-your-own-adventure story.

My Mom taught me how to program. She isn’t a programmer herself (she’s a nurse), This was the 80’s and after she finished typing in by hand a lot of programs found in magazines, she picked up a few of the basics.

I now have a career as a software engineer, in part because a woman got me started.

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Does anybody have a link to the Hacker News discussion? I searched for it but couldn’t find anything.

Never mind, I found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16307697

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You know what? I’m just gonna feed the whole internet a bunch of goddamn TidePods. Humanity clearly is too stupid and horrible to handle its own creations.

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Yeah, almost like he is jealous or something.

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… of a womans hands, yes. Yes. Yes there are. It’s that simple.

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Gamergate man-boy types aren’t humans, they’re larvae that failed to mature.

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Welcome to Boing Boing. You may find this forum disappointing as we don’t tolerate rape-threats against children, even very smart young women.

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Even if this were true it doesn’t justify abuse and rape threats.

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Having given the evidence a pretty fair look-over, from what I can see the “blatant lie” camp is reading so much into a few out of context statements by someone whose English isn’t very good and making such strong claims based on very circumstantial evidence that I can’t help but feel there’s a lot of motivated reasoning involved.

Someone might plausibly claim that the Arora’s claims about the app might be “vaguely misleading”, but frankly the evidence for that isn’t exactly slam dunk either, and presumably people don’t engage in witch hunts because of something that is “vaguely misleading”.

Some of the haters seemed to think Arora’s claims would be undone via Streisand effect, but the hilarious thing is that the Streisand effect pushed in the opposite direction: the app is getting incredible amounts of free publicity and sympathy because the “blatant lie” campaign (whose evidence is circumstantial and whose moral rationalizations are also fairly weak) was so outraged.

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  1. Convincing you and proving something are two different things.
  2. Reading just one story I can find that she does not even claim to have written the app single-handedly (she regards herself as a designer, not a coder).
  3. We litigate theft of intellectual property in courtrooms, not with rape threats online.

I’d really like to see a study comparing use of the word “dishonest” to attacking women online. I think it’s become a thing.

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Well these guys can go piss right the fuck off.

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So the “proof” in question is a screencap of a git commit history where some other dude checked in most of the code by line count, and a comment where he said he “let her say she wrote the app” or something like that.

  1. Line count doesn’t mean much when it comes to app authorship. The app in question is demonstrably heavy in framework usage and light in logic. If the dude checked in a bunch of framework code for her to leverage, that wouldn’t make him the primary author of the app.
  2. Arora’s claim that she sent the guy code and he checked it over and then committed it from his account seems utterly plausible. While there’s no simple way to prove it isn’t a lie, there’s also no a priori reason to assume it is one.
  3. The guy’s comments make it clear that his English is not strong. Thus when he says he “allowed her” to claim authorship of the app, it’s not at all obvious that this is an admission of fraud rather than a less-than-optimal way of expressing the sentiment that she put most of the thought and effort into the app. In fact, in context he said something like “I allowed her to say it was hers because she worked her butt off” or similar, which does indeed sound like a not-English-as-first-language way of explaining that even though he provided significant help, she did most of the actual work involved in creating the app.

None of which is meant to disprove the notion that they’re giving Arora credit for the app as some kind of underhanded marketing scheme, but it does show that the evidence that Arora didn’t write the app is pretty weak.

I’ll go a step further, though: the reaction from the haters shows that if this was a marketing scheme, then it was an absolutely brilliant one because the haters ended up promoting the marketing scheme, making the app much more widely known and successful than it otherwise would have, cementing this lady’s future in viral marketing if not coding.

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yeah, but I remember about 19 years ago I was sitting in a hospital room watching the only thing on TV, daytime talk shows, and these were really something -

1 was a roomful of adults talking shit to teenagers for liking some gothy type of guy and dressing freaky, shouting at teenagers threatening them, telling them what shit they were.

  1. was a roomful of adults giving some people shit for what they had done as teenagers that hurt other people’s feelings but never apologized for (like I don’t think I’ve ever gotten contacted by anyone who said oh I hurt your feelings 20 years ago and was insensitive sorry, it might be nice if people did this but they don’t so why the judgemental attitude)

3 was some sort of show telling kids they were messed up for being gay or trans or whatever.

I mean maybe these audiences full of adults emotionally beating these kids are too numerous to discount them as immature larva.

but on the other hand I am in the misanthropic camp.

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Tabloid shock shows like Maury Povich don’t model behavior to which anyone with a modicum of emotional maturity aspire.

I’m not. Contrary to belief, these cackling hyenas aren’t even close to the entirety of the human race. Even most toddlers eventually grow out of throwing tantrums.

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If he added a ‘she was asking for it’ he’d have hit a BINGO!

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Which is probably the source of his frustration.:smiley:

Imho the biggest problem on reddit is not that these sort of losers exist, the biggest problem is the mob mentality. This give people the safe feeling they’re part of a herd, so they can fire at will.

It’s more the biggest problem of the internet as a whole, come to think of it.

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Sexist losers like the ones on Reddit helped get America’s foremost public con man elected to the Oval Office, so i’m willing to consider this as an alternate theory.

@TJ_Jacobson might have an opportunity to co-ordinate some of his unsuspecting Reddit buddies and monetise this idea but … wait … his mom is calling from upstairs offering him pizza pockets and Mountain Dew. Oh well…

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Reading the linked apology, it’s sad/interesting to note that it’s pretty clear the one accuser still thinks she didn’t create the app, just that he shouldn’t have been so public and incendiary with his criticisms.

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Well I get busy with work and miss out on commenting early…
So wanna know why there are not a lot of young women going for it in STEM fields. THIS. THIS. THIS. They start out and run into much milder versions of this and nope the fuck out of it. If we want diversity we are going to have to push out the broflakes no matter how talented they are.

If I had a way to purchase this app w/out having an iOS device I would do so now.

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The police need to be involved so they can put all those who threatened her in jail. What the fuck is wrong with people.

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