[raganwald]

As a journalist, I think it would have been irresponsible not to inform _why of the article and not to try to interview him.

Your repeated emails and messages left for him obviously informed him. We’ll have to agree to disagree about what constitutes responsible journalism with respect to “trying to interview him.”

Once he’s aware that you want to interview him and chooses not to respond, I’d say you tried. Your actions seem to suggest that “responsible journalism” consists of going further and pressing yourself on people who have already made their feelings about the matter clear.

I don’t wish to single you out, so I will say the next thing in a general way. I have trouble with flinging the words “public figure” around. There was a man. He constructed a persona. That persona was public. The man was private. The man worked very hard to separate the two. Compare and contrast to hollywood stars of both sexes who practically invite the world into their bedrooms.

I think reporting about _why is fair game, _why was a public figure. I think hunting down the man who created _why is intrusive and is at the level of a paparazzo, invading the privacy of a person who from the outset was clear about separating the two.

I have a public persona, “raganwald.” I don’t try to hide the man Reg Braithwaite behind the persona. But I don’t think that blogging or speaking at conferences or commenting here somehow invites the world to call me at work if I don’t answer emails, or to hunt down my cellphone records or to waylay me in the street or to take pictures of my children. I am not a public figure in the way that a politician is a public figure.

I likewise believe that the man behind _why is not a public figure. _why? Public. Pictures of _why in character? Public. The man who walked away from creating and maintaining _why? Entitled to privacy and to not worrying about people calling him when he chooses to ignore their emails and entitled to have his friends and associates left alone.

p.s. As I noted, however, I liked almost everything I read in the article.

[davidw]

A few phone calls do not a paparazzo make. _why, with virtually no effort, maintained his privacy.

The upvotes demonstrate that people are interested in the person, and it's a journalist's job to probe. Sometimes more so than other people would be comfortable with. While that can be awkward, I think it's a good thing, although in this case it doesn't matter so much.

[thaumaturgy]

It may be a journalist's job to probe, but it is a fellow human's job to have empathy. raganwald is perfectly correct in distinguishing between _why as a public figure, and the man behind _why as a private one. The man behind _why clearly wished to remain private; why are his wishes not being respected?

I think that you are being dismissive when you say, "a few phone calls". From the article, the author tried: asking RubyConf attendees, asking people he had been known to have a working relationship with, wrote him a letter, called his home phone, contacted a former employer, searched patent records to discover his current employer, and contacted his current employer, not to mention in the process naming his wife's Twitter account, publishing his real name, and publishing the name of his current employer.

That's pretty poor form, and I don't think that "journalism" is an appropriate excuse.

Like raganwald, I really liked every other aspect of the article. It's well written and I enjoyed taking the time to sit down and read it with a cup of hot chocolate. But -- and this is a big "but", one that eclipses everything in the article that I enjoyed -- I was tremendously disappointed at seeing the private man behind _why outed as he was in the article.

[AnnieLowrey]

Hi thaumaturgy, Annie here.

I'm completely receptive to the criticism of my treatment of the public persona / private person question -- as I wrote before, I expected it and appreciate everyone's insightful comments here.

But I'd just like to push back on the idea that my reporting somehow constituted harassment, rather than straightforward reporting on a public figure – and one who had unfortunately already been outed and whose offline identity was widely known.

We're talking about a phone message, an email forwarded from his office's receptionist, and a note, spaced over the course of a few months. I don’t think that constitutes harassment. My central objective was just making sure he had the opportunity to respond, if he wanted to, and would not be surprised when the piece came out.

I did extensive interviewing among Rubyists and other programmers for the piece, and would often ask them about _why's work, his guide's influence, his work's influence on them, etc. A bunch delightedly brought up old war stories about him, some of which made it into the piece. The back channeling about his offline identity came, unsolicited actually, from those conversations.

At any rate, I do appreciate all of the comments and criticisms of how I treat it in the piece. And am very appreciative of everyone’s compliments of the article as well.

[thaumaturgy]

Hi Annie,

I think it's really neat that you're taking the time to respond to comments here. Thank you for that.

I avoided the word "harassment" because I don't really think that what you did was harassment. But, I don't think I can agree to describe it as straightforward reporting, either. Straightforward reporting would have been statements like, "but the person behind _why remains a mystery to many after his infosuicide, having chosen for unknown reasons to remain as anonymous as possible..."

It's true that his identity was known in some circles, but Slate isn't exclusive to those circles; regardless of how you or I want to describe it, in the end, you published the identity (and other personal information) of a person who wished to remain anonymous.

Sometimes that can make for great journalism, but in this case, I think your article would have been even better if you hadn't done that.

Thanks again for participating.

[davidw]

It's pretty obvious from the style of the story that it's more than just straight reporting. It's not a news piece.

[MatthewPhillips]

I'm pretty sure _why is aware that people wonder about him. He'd be in touch if he wanted to.

[redthrowaway]

Being aware that people are curious about you is not the same thing as being given an opportunity to contribute and respond to an article in which you play a central role.

Annie was entirely right to seek his input, and did nothing untoward in trying to track him down. I suspect the indignation here is a result more of the mythology surrounding _why and his place in the community than any actions on Annie's part. Were it some random person, an author perhaps, with whom HNers felt no bond, we wouldn't be seeing this issue as the dominant response to the piece.

[thaumaturgy]

I find it hard to imagine that people would have been as stirred up if she had tracked him down and given him the opportunity to respond to or contribute to the article, and then written only that the person behind _why wished to remain anonymous.

I think the indignation here is that _why's real name and past and current places of employment have now been published on Slate.

[al2]

It is harassment because it's not up to YOU to decide if a) he is a public figure and b) if he cares for such information to be shared.

You can couch it in different terms but I view this as much more self-serving than any else.

[MaysonL]

Suppose you were writing about a rape? Would naming the victim, their current employee, partner's name, along with a picture, constitute harassment? You have no idea why _why needs privacy: destroying it was a somewhat evil act.

[wpietri]

So just running with your analogy, you're saying that _why is like the victim of a shocking, horrible crime. One that thrust him unfairly in the public eye. And that evildoer was who? Apparently it was _why: he's the one who chose to create a very public persona.

It really dumbfounds me when people make idiotic rape analogies. Rape is a violent crime that can leave victims emotionally scarred (and sometimes physically scarred) for life. And it's incredibly common; odds are that some woman in your not-too-distant family was raped.

Please put your rape analogies on the same shelf with Hitler analogies. Rape victims, like holocaust victims, deserve more respect than being used as part of your polemical point-scoring.

[MaysonL]

No, I'm saying that _why was the victim of an assault and an unwarranted and offensive invasion of his privacy.

[muyuu]

You outed him, there is no two ways about it.

You can be appreciative of the comments, receptive to criticism blah-dee-blah but you outed him and you know why.

As far as I'm concerned that defines you as a person above anything else.

[AnnieLowrey]

I didn't out him. That had already happened.

The debate -- a debate about journalistic ethics I consider really interesting, by the way -- is about whether I should have publicized the outing, whether I overstepped boundaries in reporting, and whether I should have published additional details that were not common knowledge.

[lusr]

Fact is the guy created a persona that many people found themselves intellectually and emotionally invested in, and it doesn't appear as though he ever made a clear statement about wanting to be left alone. Disappearing doesn't count as a clear statement because there's obviously much contention about the situation. His actions had consequences, whether he likes it or not.

While people here can theorize and debate about what should and shouldn't happen with respect to those consequences, the most straightforward thing to do is just to ask him for a definitive statement - which is precisely what you did. And now that his response and statement is on record the matter should never be an issue again. I really don't see a problem with your actions.

Great article by the way. Your experience attempting to create a program in a Word document made me laugh and reminded me of when I started teaching myself how computers worked. 20 years ago when I was 8 and disk space was expensive, I thought I was very clever when I found a program that could change the size of files on my computer. It didn't make any sense how it could possibly work, but I went ahead any way and "shrunk" a bunch of files down to zero size, effectively deleting everything important on the computer. Nowadays banks and other financial institutions trust me to program for them; little do they know! ;)

[kragen]

Although I'm peripherally connected to the Ruby world (I spent much of today programming in Ruby for money, occasionally go to the local Ruby user group, etc.), and I saw _why perform a punk rock song about the grammar of Ruby at OSCON one year, I didn't know his name until you outed him in this article.

[wyclif]

Let's be clear about something: she did not out _why. Some other people did that years ago, and I've known his true identity for longer than that but the people who were his real fans never outed him even though they knew, too. _why was a little like Santa Claus in that way.

[tptacek]

The concern isn't with the probing; the concern is (eg) with documenting the specific firm for which he worked.

[mbreese]

He was at one point a very public figure - at least in this community. Just because the persona was his public face doesn't mean that the "person" was completely private. Attempting to reach out of a formerly public figure for a comment (or even a heads-up) is entirely acceptable. It is obviously something that he has taken steps to deal with.

What if _why had some comment about his info-suicide or the concept in general? What if he had replied back "good luck with your story - just don't use my real name"?

[raganwald]

Serious question here: Where do you draw the line? What makes someone a “public figure?"

Does publishing open source make you a public figure? How about speaking at a conference? Playing in a band under a pseudonym? Playing in a band under your real name? Commenting under a pseudonym on Hacker News? How about commenting under an identifiable handle like rbraithwaite?

I honestly don’t have a pat answer to this question.

[anigbrowl]

My short (and overly legalistic) definition would be attractive public activity with a persistent identifier. By attractive, I mean designed to attract attention, however little. Nobody posts on HN in order to have a record of their private thoughts or avoid public engagement, for example; people post their thoughts specifically in order to share them. Insofar as one engages in acts designed to attract attention (not necessarily approval), and maintains a persistent identity such that one's acts are temporally/spatially connected, then one is a public figure in proportion to the attention those acts attract.

The persistence is important. Consider 4chan, where people can post anonymously. The downside of this, especially to the casual reader, is that people abuse the anonymity to say hateful things - although most of the time it's kids trying out the language of sexism or racism to see how the words feel in their mouths, so to speak, in order to reflect and understand the wider society they live in. (This might sound optimistic, but my view is that the bigotry there is only skin-deep and serves a function similar to that of hazing.) The upside is that one can engage in experimental social interactions without consequences - for example, making an embarrassing social admission in different fashions to gauge the variety of reactions. Now, someone might make brilliantly insightful contributions in an anonymous environment, but if they have the same discussion a week later they must rebuild any intellectual or social consensus from scratch. With a persistent identity, one can trade to some extent on one's social standing. Some online fora, such as HN, make this standing semi-explicit through karma scores and the like. If you say something that I find counter-intuitive, your high karma (expressing others' approval of your previous contributions) signals to me that your odd-seeming remark is probably not the product of mere foolishness, but rather has some rhetorical or specialist basis.

One of the tricky things about the world we live in, where video and text live on and on long after verbal conversations are forgotten, is that private individuals are increasingly creating public records. We wouldn't say that Joe Blow was a public figure just because he went to his neighborhood bar once a week and held forth on the state of the world to his neighbors. Sure, he is in public, but his 'public' consists of only a small group. Unless he starts speaking of controversial matters like having a plan to shoot the mayor, those conversations are ephemeral and weighed by society as such - unlike the situation faced by those who make foolish comments on Facebook, say.

There was a man. He constructed a persona. That persona was public. The man was private. The man worked very hard to separate the two.

Here's the problem: we have no way of knowing what someone's motivation for privacy is, and such motivations can be good or bad. Privacy is a basic right (implicit or explicit depending on your legal system), but to the extent that a person acts publicly that right is necessarily attenuated. Most public figures maintain a single identity and seek privacy for certain activities (family life, financial affairs and so on). Where someone maintains a private identity we tend to ask why, because the ability to recognize and distinguish between individuals is a basis of survival and social credit. A famous musician or artist may adopt a pseudonym to develop a personal brand: 'Picasso' or 'David Bowie' are such unusual names that we want to know more about the persons who adopted them. On the other hand, a famous villain may adopt a pseudonym to intimidate enemies or awe the public. Or an innocent person with enemies may adopt one to hide from them while still exercising the right to public speech...there are as many reasons to obscure one's identity as there are people in the world.

_why obviously fits within the former case - but that's only obvious if you're within the community of people to whom he largely addressed himself, and familiar with its norms. to an outsider, such as the Slate author), the sharp divide between public and private identities is mysterious, enigmatic; few people go to such lengths to separate their identities in this fashion, and enough of those who do are motivated by questionable reasons that it's worth asking why in this case, at least for a journalist. This would not have happened if, for example, _why had published a message saying 'Oh hi, my name is Jonathan Gillette aka _why, and although Ruby hacking is totally awesome I need to take a break from this sort of work to focus on family/ personal/ whatever matters. Thus, I won't be maintaining Hackety Hack (etc.) for the foreseeable future and you won't be seeing me at Rubyconf or other public events either. Thanks a lot and happy hacking.' If one disappears suddenly like Judge Crater [1], then it's inevitably going to attract a lot of attention and invite speculation - and indeed it did. Insofar as one chooses to pop a balloon rather than simply let the air out of it, one can hardly be surprised at the echoes that result. Even now, _why opts to maintain an air of mystery, as opposed to spending a few minutes on the phone explaining 'yeah, I was just tired of the whole thing and was drinking way too much coffee, so I chose to retire and now teach high school/ breed gophers/ live as a hermit.' This is a perfectly reasonable choice, but so is the choice of the journalist to follow up a mystery that piqued her curiosity, and that of a great many others.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Force_Crater

[jcrites]

Well said. I agree that a person more genuinely seeking to be left alone would leave at least a short message stating their departure, if not explaining. Since that is the norm (in basically all human society, hacker and otherwise), deviation from that norm is unusual, attention-drawing, and mysterious. _why seems socially aware enough to know that, so it is reasonable to assume that something unusual and deliberate went on.

[mechanical_fish]

What makes someone a “public figure?"

This is one of the biggest problems of our time. Because omnipresent, eternally persistent tracking technologies threaten to make everyone and even every thing into a public figure.

Worse, while publicity has both costs and benefits, they're usually asymmetric: It's hard to derive much benefit from a wave of publicity unless you're carefully and consciously prepared to surf that wave, whereas destroying someone's happiness, career, or relationships via stalking or character assassination can be cheap and easy.

[mbreese]

Neither do I... and I think people will disagree on this. Programmers like being able to make strict rules for stuff, but I think that this is one of those "you know it when you see it" moments.

And to make it more complicated - I don't necessarily think that it is up to the person to decide. Unfortunately, to some degree, the public gets a say.

[thaumaturgy]

The public gets a say, true, but the public is made up of individuals, and each individual has the ability and responsibility of deciding how to handle someone else.

We aren't talking so much about the public here as we are about one person -- Annie Lowrey -- who made the decision to publicize the contact information for someone who clearly wished to remain more private.

[mbreese]

Don't forget though, she is a professional journalist writing a story for a professional publication. She didn't setup some 'whyisfoobarbaz.wordpress.com' blog with the sole purpose of outing him. That's already happened.

[thaumaturgy]

That's true, and in my mind, that makes her actions more reprehensible, not less, because the consequences of becoming the subject of a professional publication are greater than those of being the subject of someone's blog.

As someone else already pointed out, his name can now be cited in the Wikipedia article on him.

[lrobb]

I think you could make a convincing argument that _why would fit the legal definition of a Limited-Purpose Public Figure. http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/proving-fault-actual-...

[droithomme]

From that article:

> Individuals who are considered to be limited-purpose public figures remain so as long as the public has an "independent" interest in the underlying controversy.

I would argue that _why's retreat to privacy is no longer a "controversy" of interest to the general public, assuming it ever was.

[cbs]

>Your repeated emails and messages left for him obviously informed him. We’ll have to agree to disagree about what constitutes responsible journalism with respect to “trying to interview him.”

Journalists are used to having to do real legwork for fact checking and interviewing. Hell, I'm willing to bet that on a daily basis more hoops have to be jumped through to finally contact someone who is ready and willing to be interviewed.

As far as "obviously informed him", obvious to whom? Someone who doesn't know if their messages have gotten through to the guy or are waiting in an inbox somewhere only to be read after the writer's deadline? You know what would have made it obvious? Relaying back a simple "no comment" message to acknowledge that contact had been made. Otherwise the reporter doesn't really know.

[ArtB]

>"I think reporting about _why is fair game, _why was a public figure. I think hunting down the man who created _why is intrusive and is at the level of a paparazzo, invading the privacy of a person who from the outset was clear about separating the two."

Sorry, but I find that rediculous. If Brian Warner kills someone, or James Osterburg overdoses that is not appropriate for public news because they did it under their private personas? Or can Brittney Spears claim that she has two different personas that both just happen to be named "Brittney Spears"?

Frankly, as I see it, once you develop a reputation based on name in a wider community you are now a public figure regardless under which persona you'd like to hide.

[icebraining]

Killing someone is a very different issue - it's not a private matter, but a public crime. But for the rest, why not? Why should one be forced to have his life publicized just because he creates something that many people like?

You're essentially punishing people for doing good things. That feels very wrong to me.

[ArtB]

You are not being punished even if you perceive as such. One could say that an obese women that loses weight and gets in shaped gets punished because men hit on her.

[icebraining]

If that hypothetical woman was getting hit by men after she made it clear that she dislikes it, then I'd say it is punishment. Well, not punishment exactly, because that's a response to a behavior considered wrong, but in a "no good deed goes unpunished" sense.

[al2]

First off, it's spelled "ridiculous".

Next, it's not for you to decide if someone wants to have multiple personas. It's also going to vary over time.

Here's an example taken to the extreme: because you have posted publicly (at least several times on HN), is it okay for me to decide that that fits my personal definition of a public figure because you have now a reputation of being kind of a tool and then proceed to investigate and post personal details about you?

I didn't think so.

[lrobb]

It's a rather bizarre argument... That would exclude about half of the celebrities that we know... "Prince", Lady Gaga, et al...

[sesqu]

And you consider that to be a bad thing?

It's a perfectly sensible argument, as any person who has played both sides of the same chess game can tell you. People can and do have multiple conflicting personas, and attempting to identify [ed: coalesce] them is rarely useful. It can server to debase or solidify credentials or to explain fractures, but those are all exceptional purposes.

People have the right to put words in a different location from their money, and they have the right to invite a few friends in for a beer while the regent takes care of official matters. The press has special liberties to infringe on these rights, as they are expected to do so responsibly.

[lrobb]

Whether I consider it bad or not is irrelevant. It's the (US) law.

[scott_s]

That's interesting that you consider your online persona distinct from yourself. I find addressing you as raganwald here on HN as awkward, so I have instead called you by your first name. Do you have a preference? Is that preference related to the distinction you wish to maintain?

[raganwald]

Call me whatever you like, as long as you don’t call me late for whiskey’o’clock. In truth, my personality IRL is very different from my personality online.

[ugh]

I think it's every journalists’ duty to do their due diligence in contacting who they are writing about. That's all that was done here. To call it stalking or to compare it to paparazzo is preposterous.

[wpietri]

I'm interested in your assertion that creating a very public persona doesn't make you a public figure. Could you say more about your theory behind that?