I don't think this accurately characterizes the article and the discussion. Saying that this is a "teachable moment" is sugar-coating the character of the responses here. I'm not arguing that the agency of the harassment victim, and what should be "common sense" precautions, can't be discussed at all. But it's a distraction and a cop-out, and it fits a destructive pattern. When our first response, collectively, is to dismiss the person whose life is still being actively dismantled with "well that's what happens," then all we're doing is blaming the victim. We talk about what the victim of this harassment campaign should have done differently, but not about what the perpetrators should have done differently. "Common sense" should dictate that you don't try to get someone fired and harass them relentlessly in this way because they took a jab at you on the internet.

I don't think that the basic facts of what she did to "provoke this" are in dispute, at least if we take the article's account at face value. What I'm saying is that it's stupid that we don't talk about the nature of the harassment. That's what's really hidden from the discussion.

The peanut-gallery reaction to things like this ALWAYS centers on what the victim did, and there's an extra edge to it when the victim is a woman. (see the later "clarification" by the original commenter in this thread -- why use that language instead of "she definitely deserved it"?) And when somebody points out that we're blaming the victim, everyone's ready to jump in and make sure it's clear that that's appropriate this time. Well, there's almost always someone arguing that it's appropriate "this time."

I'd like this to be a teachable moment about how we excuse and perpetuate this behavior by focusing solely on what the victim could have done differently. That starts with somebody saying "hey, you're blaming the victim" and it'd be nice to get to "why focusing on the victim is a distraction from the actual problem" and then "how and why is this kind of thing happening and what do we do about it?" but we don't get to go there in this forum. It's trivialized to the point where even suggesting that it could be an alternative course of discussion is snarked at (see other responses). Yes, I'd argue that talking about the intersection of anonymity and technology that enables and encourages wanton and massively effective harassment campaigns is what I'd like to see from a hacker news discussion. (I'll put my thoughts on that in another comment, if anyone's still paying attention a day later.)

I got dinged for talking about the real nature of how a woman's sexuality is used both as a weapon of harassment and an excuse for that harassment, and for pointing out that hypothetical landmine analogies have no bearing on reality. Well, that seems a lot more relevant to me than trying to construct a thought experiment proving that the victim of this harassment had agency in order to defend a useless thats-what-happens comment. And while comparing it to how we lock up and take precautions in general is entirely reasonable in isolation, the comments here aren't isolated and they mostly add up to "she provoked it, end of discussion." The pattern of people responding that way reinforces the culture that accepts this as normal. I'm not ignorant of the argument that risks can't be entirely mitigated, or that anonymous groups also do good things. But the perpetrators of this harassment are liability-distributed and unaccountable in ways that individuals and even organized groups aren't. That's interesting, and scary, and we're not talking about it.