The "4chan crowd" usually only needs some token amount of motivation, and a target. It doesn't matter of they care about the 'core values' at stake. IIRC, in the case of Adria Richards, it was posted somewhere on 4chan, and that's when things really took off (at least in terms of volume). The '4chan crowd' really only had to take offense to her 'name and shame' attitude, without caring about the larger 'sexual harassment policies at tech conferences' issue.
Re:Sexual Harassment in the Tech Industry
by charleslmunger on Monday May 20, 2013 @02:59PM
(#5739303)
The first time I ever saw "brogrammer" was in a Facebook ad from Intel. I didn't think of it as negative, I thought it was a way of saying that programming was no longer (at least in the view of the general public) the purview of socially awkward dorks.
Then when visible evidence of how hostile the community can be shows up such as a thousand terrible comments on a blog it's discounted as 4chan, or "trolls". As though a bunch of 14 year olds care about a tech conference implementing a sexual harassment policy.