The post is tagged "sexual assault" by the publisher, so I assume there was some sort of lewd messages. That would make it not ok.

It is really hard to tell from the article if there was criminal behavior by members of our community targeting an underage girl or if she got a bunch of followers that happened to be older men and freaked out.

I think that's an important distinction. We all know it's not ok to solicit underage people. I'm not sure if it's still ok for older people to talk to younger people.

There is no mention of "sexual assault" or even "sexual" in the submitted story, not sure where you get that from.

"unwanted attention" simply means (for me at least) that someone gave you attention, that you didn't expect. I would assume that people expect that to happen when you write in a public place and also submitting it to places like HN and elsewhere.

If this really is about "sexual harassment" and not saying "Hi, cool story" via Twitter, then I can understand the frustration and it's obviously not ok.

But the article doesn't make this clear and I don't want to make the assumption either...

I don't think the issue is 'any contact', it's specifically "Harassment of our Authors" and "unwanted attention". This indicates that it's inappropriate content, regardless of the source, and it also may not have stopped when asked, hence harassment. It may also be specifically from older men in this case, but the behavior isn't appropriate for anyone. This needs to stop.

I think you're severely missing the point of the article if you think the messages she was getting boil down to "older people trying to talk to young people"

I think they're insinuating that this 16-year-old girl is getting unwelcome attention from older men in a way that a 16-year-old boy would not. If I had to guess, I would imagine many of them take the form of "Wow, you're very smart for your age, and very pretty too!"

I'm assuming that they didn't want to go into detail, not that they meant to imply that older people and younger people shouldn't talk.

Try again. It's more like, "hey baby, I want to rape you while you're sleeping then fuck you in the ass while you cry ... fucking bitch, why don't you want it?"

That's not a direct quote from my inbox, but it's close.

You raise an interesting point...

As an adult male there is a bit of a stigma around men mentoring younger women. At least in the U.S. we often assume a sexual context when we see older men with younger woman (older could mean 20 vs 16 not necessary a huge gap) when it often times may actually be a professional interest. I know of many men who will not mentor younger woman because "how it will look" to others and their significant others. Which is really unfortunate.

On the other hand, I have also seen many many situations which I'd call sexual harassment. Which is also unfortunate (to say the least) and discourages woman from participating in STEM.

There is not enough context here to know which it was. I'm guessing the later.