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8/20 GitHub troll pile

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From July 14 to August 17, 2020 (at time of publish), I experienced targeted harassment on GitHub-the company I'm employed at-via coordination happening on several "technology" 4chan threads about me. I wanted to share this story publicly to reiterate the bullshit marginalized folks in tech have to go through in order to be successful, visible, and just exist.

So as the dude in the screenshot says, I have plenty of material to write a post on all that fuckery.

The first round of trolling occurred in issues and PRs on one of my repositories that documents the food I ate with my friends on our spring Tokyo 2019 trip. It was only slightly concerning at first, until I realized that 40+ people were posting, commenting, and emoji reacting.

Here are a few examples. The most irritating ones used tech jargon ("fixing bloat") to mask their pathetic actions. As a bystander, you might not realize until viewing the proposed changes... and seeing all content deleted. This is also the most irritating because there is no obviously hateful or violent content, and can be written off as "just a joke." 🙄

This is a specific type of trolling I was experiencing, called "dogpiling":

Dogpiling: When a group of trolls works together to overwhelm a target through a barrage of disingenuous questions, threats, slurs, insults, and other tactics meant to shame, silence, discredit, or drive a target offline. - PEN America

This is not a new tactic used to silence, but it was the first time I've personally experienced it. Good thing I designed a lot of our moderation tools and have talked about the taxonomy of online abuse before, and recognized this type of harassment quickly. I was able to get help from amazing coworkers, Sarah Vessels and Denise Yu, to query my repo's referral data. The traffic was coming from 4chan... two 4chan threads totaling nearly 500 disturbing comments.

Seeing this shit was absolutely surreal. The GitHub content was annoying, but this made me feel sick. I still remember the feeling of being so overwhelmed and just sobbing at my desk. Reading disgusting, racist, sexist comments about me. Seeing screenshots of my face plastered across the threads. Understanding the exact moment where the dogpiling was coordinated. Realizing this was likely to keep happening (and it did).

And what still really creeps me out is that these people felt so emboldened to troll an EMPLOYEE using their actual GitHub accounts with legitimate work and contributions. These harassers are everyday software engineers.

I'm not famous and I don't have a very large platform, so why me?

Upon reading the threads, there were some pretty clear reasons why this happened to me. I'll dig deeply into each one. HUGE shoutout to my kat-ops counterpart Kathy Zheng for helping me compile screenshots!

I'm a woman.

Well, this was the most obvious reason. Women disproportionately experience online harassment, and very much so for sexual harassment. I included a few snippets but won't spend too much time on this one because it was some boring, basic bitch shit that we've all seen before 🤷🏻‍♀️

I'm an Asian woman.

I mean, I shouldn't have been surprised at this one, but here we are. I have a lot of privilege as an Asian American, but was quickly reminded how easy I can be reduced to stereotypes and slurs. And that the gross fetishization of Asian women still makes me a target:

There was one in particular I wanted to highlight:

This one in particular stood out to me because it's a very specific type of harassment I've received my whole life, usually from East Asians. This piece of trash is stating that I'm subhuman because of my Vietnamese heritage. Tbh, this hits harder than boring 'ol "chink." The colorism here makes me think this was an Asian dude. And speaking of which:

I also received an email from what appears to be an MRAsian... It's sadly not uncommon to see Asian men upholding white supremacy and targeting Asian women for living our damn lives.

I have a "radical" profile README.

My GitHub profile README includes my pronouns, support for #BlackLivesMatter, my values, and social links. The amount of transphobic and anti-Black racist comments because of this was sickening. Attacking allyship is yet another tactic to silence and isolate us.

I'm not a "real developer"

Yikes, there were a lot of comments about this. The dismissal of my skills and claiming I can only write Markdown is an intentional tactic to tear down my value and diminish my success. Very funny, as I've been writing code to production since 2016, despite not being a skilled developer. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Also, I think this comment deserves a blockquote:

women unironically think that's all there is to development - forking, pushing some spelling changes, etc

they literally have no concept of how involved any of it is

isn't it hilarious that these useless parasites are consuming at least 50% of employer resources? all the while shitting on actually productive geeks for political brownie points?

I'm ruining GitHub as an employee...

There's a recurring narrative that I'm just a diversity hire who is ruining the coding sanctity of GitHub. I don't deserve to work at this company because I do nothing, while the engineers in this thread sit in their "1 room apartments." Damn, it's not my fault you aren't talented or successful. It also appears some watched my talks-thanks for the views.

I'd like to point out that the idea of avoiding "diversity hires" as to not lower the bar of quality is still a prevalent sentiment within tech. Again, these are not just nameless 4chan trolls-they're people in our industry.

... and should be punished.

Yeah, these are gross. Apparently I should get fired and deserve the harassment because I'm an attention seeking whore on a programming platform! The platform I work on and create more value to developers than you ever will in your life!!

That wasn't every screenshot from the threads, but is a good summary. The sheer volume of comments was definitely one of the more overwhelming aspects of this fuckery. Thanks for reading along this far.

So if it wasn't clear:

I was targeted by racist techies because of my background and visibility in order to be silenced and driven out of this industry. 🖕

It was particularly cruel to harass me on the platform I work on everyday, where I design for open source communities. I couldn't focus at work and ended up taking two weeks off. This experience has really impacted the way I view tech and my place in it-but I'll save that for another post.

I've already accepted that this won't be my last brush with online harassment, so long as I'm still a visible Asian woman in tech. And this is going to continue happening to me and less privileged tech workers for just existing and being successful. All we can do is protect and support each other, because it's not our job to fix this problem.

It's your move next, tech. Here are my suggestions, you can have them for free:

To the most privileged tech leaders:

When these events happen to your employees, are you investing actual money to support them? Are you monitoring content, encouraging time off, creating company policies, and covering their therapy? In lucky cases like mine, where the bulk of harassment may happen on the platform the victim works on, are you actively fixing pain points your employee experienced? Make sure you have a policy and detailed playbook, and definitely don't expect your marginalized employees to fix these problems for you. Don't wait until an incident arises- it's always an "edge case" until someone's personal safety is threatened.

By not having intentional protections for the most vulnerable in place, you're preventing employees from being productive at work (because they're dealing with bullshit!). And you're absolutely driving away diverse talent from joining your company. It's actually fucking up your business. Access and representation in tech isn't a pipeline or qualification problem. It's a white supremacy problem.

And what still really creeps me out is that these people felt so emboldened to troll an EMPLOYEE using their actual GitHub accounts with legitimate work and contributions. These harassers are everyday software engineers.

Lastly, I want to circle back to this point about users with legitimate coding work harassing me. It's easy to dismiss these trolls as incel 4channers that we shun and don't associate with. Lol no. These are your people. They work at your companies and write your code. They are harassing or doxxing your other employees. This toxic behavior is still very much a part of your tech culture, and you keep rewarding it.

Fix. This. Shit.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From July 14 to August 17, 2020 (at time of publish), I experienced targeted harassment on GitHub-the company I'm employed at-via coordination happening on several "technology" 4chan threads about me. I wanted to share this story publicly to reiterate the bullshit marginalized folks in tech have to go through in order to be successful, visible, and just exist.

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Now in its seventh major release, the Open edX platform is a free and open source course management system that is used all over the world to host Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as well as smaller classes and training modules. To date, Open edX software has powered more than 8,000 original courses and 50 million course enrollments. You can install the platform yourself with on-premise equipment or by leveraging any of the industry-leading cloud infrastructure services providers, but it is also increasingly being made available in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model from several of the project's growing list of service providers.

The Open edX platform is used by many of the world's premier educational institutions as well as private sector companies, public sector institutions, NGOs, non-profits, and educational technology startups, and the project's global community of service providers continues to make the platform accessible to ever-smaller organizations. If you plan to create and offer educational content to a broad audience, you should consider using the Open edX platform.

Installation

There are multiple ways to install the software, which might be an unwelcome surprise, at least initially. But you get the same application software with the same feature set regardless of how you go about installing Open edX. The default installation includes a fully functioning learning management system (LMS) for online learners plus a full-featured course management studio (CMS) that your instructor teams can use to author original course content. You can think of the CMS as a " Wordpress" of course content creation and management, and the LMS as a " Magento " of course marketing, distribution, and consumption.

Open edX application software is device-agnostic and fully responsive, and with modest effort, you can also publish native iOS and Android apps that seamlessly integrate to your instance's backend. The code repositories for the Open edX platform, the native mobile apps, and the installation scripts are all publicly available on GitHub.

What to expect

The Open edX platform GitHub repository contains performant, production-ready code that is suitable for organizations of all sizes. Thousands of programmers from hundreds of institutions regularly contribute to the edX repositories, and the platform is a veritable case study on how to build and manage a complex enterprise application the right way. So even though you're certain to face a multitude of concerns about how to move the platform into production, you should not lose sleep about the general quality and robustness of the Open edX Platform codebase itself.

With minimal training, your instructors will be able to create good online course content. But bear in mind that Open edX is extensible via its XBlock component architecture, so your instructors will have the potential to turn good course content into great course content with incremental effort on their parts and yours.

The platform works well in a single-server environment, and it is highly modular, making it nearly infinitely horizontally scalable. It is theme-able, localizable, and completely open source, providing limitless possibilities to tailor the appearance and functionality of the platform to your needs. The platform runs reliably as an on-premise installation on your own equipment.

Some assembly required

Bear in mind that a handful of the edX software modules are not included in the default installation and that these modules are often on the requirements lists of organizations. Namely, the Analytics module, the e-commerce module, and the Notes/Annotations course feature are not part of the default platform installation, and each of these individually is a non-trivial installation. Additionally, you're entirely on your own with regard to data backup-restore and system administration in general. Fortunately, there's a growing body of community-sourced documentation and how-to articles, all searchable via Google and Bing, to help make your installation production-ready.

Setting up oAuth and SSL/TLS as well as getting the platform's REST API up and running can be challenging, depending on your skill level, even though these are all well-documented procedures. Additionally, some organizations require that MySQL and/or MongoDB databases be managed in an existing centralized environment, and if this is your situation, you'll also need to work through the process of hiving these services out of the default platform installation. The edX design team has done everything possible to simplify this for you, but it's still a non-trivial change that will likely take some time to implement.

Not to be discouraged-if you're facing resource and/or technical headwinds, Open edX community SaaS providers like appsembler and eduNEXT offer compelling alternatives to a do-it-yourself installation, particularly if you're just window shopping.

Technology stack

Poking around in an Open edX platform installation is a real thrill, and architecturally speaking, the project is a masterpiece. The application modules are Django apps that leverage a plethora of the open source community's premier projects, including Ubuntu, MySQL, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, Hadoop, and others.

Getting all of these components installed and configured is a feat in and of itself, but packaging everything in such a way that organizations of arbitrary size and complexity can tailor installations to their needs without having to perform heart surgery on the codebase would seem impossible-that is, until you see how neatly and intuitively the major platform configuration parameters have been organized and named. Mind you, there's a learning curve to the platform's organizational structure, but the upshot is that everything you learn is worth knowing, not just for this project but large IT projects in general.

One word of caution: The platform's UI is in flux, with the aim of eventually standardizing on React and Bootstrap. Meanwhile, you'll find multiple approaches to implementing styling for the base theme, and this can get confusing.

Adoption

The edX project has enjoyed rapid international adoption, due in no small measure to how well the software works. Not surprisingly, the project's success has attracted a large and growing list of talented participants who contribute to the project as programmers, project consultants, translators, technical writers, and bloggers. The annual Open edX Conference, the Official edX Google Group, and the Open edX Service Providers List are good starting points for learning more about this diverse and growing ecosystem. As a relative newcomer myself, I've found it comparatively easy to engage and to get directly involved with the project in multiple facets.

Good luck with your journey, and feel free to reach out to me as a sounding board while you're conceptualizing your project.

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Getting started with Open edX to host your course

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Now in its seventh major release, the Open edX platform is a free and open source course management system that is used all over the world to host Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as well as smaller classes and training modules. To date, Open edX software has powered more than 8,000 original courses and 50 million course enrollments.

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23 videos (eek) on learning to make a donut in Blender

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23 videos (eek) on learning to make a donut in Blender