[donutte]

This is really interesting:

It was then that the realization set in in the subreddit: after all these years, after hundreds of thousands of hours of theorizing and plotting and thinking and organizing, they might never find out the true identity of Lyle Stevik. His identity was known to the police, and to DNA Doe, but it was never revealed to the subreddit. And it might never be; as of press time, the family has declined to share the information.

It seems like there’s two ways to look at this. The first is... the subreddit didn’t materially contribute to solving the case, apart from putting up $1500 for DNA sequencing. The critical research was done by a specialist volunteer org, and law enforcement located and contacted the family.

It seems like being able to identify folks using genetic ancestry is a really valuable service; it also seems like a good thing that, to the average redditor, this service is a black box that produces a single bit of output. If the person (family, in this case) who has been identified doesn’t want their name to be public, that should be their choice.

So, that all is working as intended. But at the same time...

In 20 years, nobody ever put up the money for DNA testing. Why would they? There must be millions of cases like this, and for most of that time sequencing cost a lot more than $1500.

The price is still going down, so eventually someone would have done this. Maybe once the cost of sequencing hit $50, or $1. I don’t know, at what point do we start DNA testing every single cold case Doe, since forever? Probably not for a long, long time. Maybe long enough to be forgotten entirely.

The folks on the subreddit cared, is my point, when no one else did. They picked this person to care about, out of all the unsolved mysteries to choose from. I don’t think there’s any particular explanation; he just happened to catch their fancy, and then they spent a lot of time thinking about him. In a weird digital-era way, he was kind of their friend.

And it makes a lot of sense that there would be some shock and isolation at having their care rejected, having their “friendship” invalidated. I can get that. And I kind of think that if the family grokked how much these folks cared about their person, and how little anyone else did, their response might be a little different.

[sverige]

What you say makes sense, but no one asked them to care. Further, those feelings do not in any way give them the right to intrude into the life of a family they've never even met. It's a classic case of "none of your business."

But perhaps some still feel otherwise. What happens if some stranger starts "caring" about their depression and anger over their "loss"? There's a real problem when people cannot recognize that some boundaries should not be crossed.

[donutte]

That seems stronger than what I’m saying. The folks who can’t let it go, who are still trying to circumvent the family’s privacy, they obviously are motivated by something besides concern for the victim and his kin. I don’t have any sympathy for them.

But I think the point I’m trying to make is that there’s a lot of distance between “right to intrude” and “none of your business”. The fact is that the identity of this person was their business, for a decade, simply because it wasn’t the business of anyone else.

Of course there’s no right to know the name of a stranger. But I am glad they made it their business — I’m glad someone cared — and I’m sorry the outcome hurt them. It’s not any more complicated than that.

[sverige]

In hindsight, I think my strong reaction is directed more toward those who want to intrude than toward you.

I get that a lot of people invested a lot of time into this, but there's a suggestion in TFA that implies that this effort merits some special privileges, whether that inlcudes knowing the identity of the suicide or some other kind of recognition. It doesn't.

It was a voluntary act, perhaps a kind act, perhaps not from the perspective of the family. The implication is that the family either wanted to know or ought to have wanted to know. We have no information to evaluate those judgments, and there's enough gray there that it's irritating as an assumption.

The reality is that it is morally no different than participating in a subreddit on cats or submitting articles and commenting on them on HN. We're all voluntarily spending time on the internet rather than doing something else.

[donutte]

I hear where you’re coming from, and we seem agreed that there’s nothing internet sleuths are entitled to. I do think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this:

The implication is that the family either wanted to know or ought to have wanted to know. We have no information to evaluate those judgments, and there's enough gray there that it's irritating as an assumption.

I think if someone has died — even if it was a fairly long time ago — it’s safe to presume that there are people somewhere who still care about them, still think about them, would like to know what happened. From a state of ignorance about who those people are, I think it’s compassionate to try to let them know, especially when no one else is trying.

And naturally, the same compassion instructs one to respect their wishes after that point. Again, all working as intended.