[kelnos]

Why? You'd still have the same sense of doubt as to whether or not the non-anonymous person is telling the truth. The only extra information you'd have is a) you'd know it was coming from another GitHubber who could conceivably know these details, and b) if you know the person, you can weigh the words against his/her reputation and past action.

Not saying those two things aren't useful, but I would certainly not characterize this anon blog post as "worthless" by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it makes the whole situation make a lot more sense. The original one-sided account from Ms. Horvath always sounded a bit implausible to me, at least without more information to frame it.

[SEMW]

> Why? You'd still have the same sense of doubt as to whether or not the non-anonymous person is telling the truth.

The senses of doubt will only be ~the same if your prior for the probability of "someone out of ~200 github employees would lie about this and attach their name to it" is about the same as your prior for "someone out of the other ~3,000,000,000 people on the internet would pretend to be a github employee and make this up".

The larger someone's prior is for the latter relative to the former, the more worthless an anonymous blogpost is to them.

[neilk]

Adding to what SEMW said: for all we know, this story could be pure fiction, written by the Preston-Warners themselves, or someone else with a strong incentive to do so.

The fact that this story helps everything "make sense" is not a useful heuristic. Anybody can craft this kind of tale, and it might also be playing on our prejudices - the spurned, jealous, bitchy lover narrative.

But, as for myself, I don't have to make any judgment, nor do I want to. I don't want to do is pick a side based on my prejudices and a few blog posts.

By now we all should know that women are routinely harassed in tech companies to a preposterous degree. On the other hand, I've seen cases where mentally disturbed people invent (or self-delude) incredibly detailed narratives of persecution. We could be dealing with a situation where one, the other, both, or neither is happening. If you have evidence that settles the case, by all means please post it.

Something that is clear is that Github's investigation was flawed. And if Horvath really wasn't contacted until late in the process, it certainly makes it look like Github was more interested in a coverup than the truth.

[kelnos]

Very good points.

By now we all should know that women are routinely harassed in tech companies to a preposterous degree. On the other hand, I've seen cases where mentally disturbed people invent (or self-delude) incredibly detailed narratives of persecution. We could be dealing with a situation where one, the other, both, or neither is happening.

The thing that irks me about all this is that murky incidents like this, where the alleged victim is (to many) not a very sympathetic character, and possibly acted improperly herself and instigated the whole situation (if the anon blog post is to be believed), does little to help set an example for why the real instances of harassment are so wrong and terrible.

After this, I'm left with a very poor taste in my mouth. GH's investigation was likely somewhat flawed, though it's unclear to what degree. Horvath almost certainly wasn't telling the full story about what happened, and may even have instigated the entire thing, and is using the prevalence of sexism in tech (and the expected knee-jerk community outcry) to attack someone she's (unjustifiably?) angry with. Or maybe everything she's said is true, and the Preston-Werners are terrible people, and GH has/had a serious discrimination problem coming from the top. We'll probably never know.

The whole situation just stinks.

[neilk]

> the alleged victim is ... not a very sympathetic character

> does little to help set an example for why the real instances of harassment are so wrong and terrible.

Ah, but this is why most victims don't go public. Very few of us would look good under intense scrutiny. And I think this whole process has demonstrated how tilted the playing field is, against those who do go public.

Some people say that this is why people claiming to be victims deserve a kind of automatic support. I struggle with that, but only because I've personally witnessed a couple of the rare cases where that empowered someone who was slightly deranged.