this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
208 points (96.8% liked)
Programming
16715 readers
524 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is the best summary I could come up with:
"You are charging attendees money and they might be making their purchasing decision based on the list of speakers shown to them on the conference website," wrote former Google developer advocate Kelsey Hightower in a post on the social media platform X confirming that he can no longer participate.
The controversy arose after Gergely Orosz, the author of a popular tech newsletter called Pragmatic Engineering, first posted the allegations on X on Friday.
"To spell it out why this conference generated fake women speakers," Orosz alleges, it was "because the organizer wants big names and it probably seemed like an easy way to address their diversity concerns.
Howard—Amazon Web Services' head of developer relations and the only woman still scheduled to speak at DevTernity—told Ars that the situation is "baffling," confirming that she has not heard from Sizovs since he emailed her to verify that the event was cancelled.
Sizovs claimed that Boyko, "a demo persona from our test website version," was added to DevTernity's speaker list "by mistake" after two real women cancelled their conference appearances due to "reasons out of our control at the worst possible time."
But perhaps most striking is the fact that an administrator told 404 Media that both Sizovs’ and Kirsina’s accounts were banned "multiple times" by the Lobst.ers coding forum for "sockpuppeting"—using a false identity to deceive others—in 2019 and 2020.
The original article contains 810 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Wouldn't it be easier to, say, invite real people to deliver real talks? How exactly is it easier to spend multiple years maintaining sock puppet accounts than simply sporadically extend an invitation to someone?