The dongle "thing" did not take place at a nerd community nor a professional conference. It took place in a private conversation between two people who happened to be at a professional conference.

The distinction is the same as if they were seated in a coffee shop. Conversations there are between private people, not with some coffee shop "audience". People who listen in to such conversation, and worse, reacts to it, are doing something which polite people consider very rude.

I'm not sure where I stand on this issue of conversation privacy in public spaces, but I will say that at worst the individual should have called the people making jokes out at the time and suggested that their conversation was not appropriate in context. To passively aggressively take to twitter to gather a mob strikes me as total overkill.

What Donglegate did is reveal how many different takes there are on what constitutes public, and how unwilling people are to discuss it.

I think you got it backwards. The "dongle thing" is about a feminist bully, not about two guys making a harmless joke. The consensus is that Adria was the problem here, how anyone could come to a different conclusion is beyond me.

I'm willing to stack my geek credentials against anyone, and I'm not in your consensus. Lots of people aren't. You might be inside a filter bubble.

I don't agree with what Adria did, in that she shamed these guys on Twitter, and furthermore, she's doubled down on some conspiracy theories afterwards. And maybe she has an itchy trigger finger on what might constitute a hostile environment.

But, the issue of hostile environments -- as created through a shared culture of sexualized talk -- that's real. The best intervention I think, would have been to talk to those guys. If she didn't feel comfortable confronting them, she was also justified in taking it to the PyCon organizers.

If I remember correctly, she made a joke about male genitalia on twitter just a few days beforehand.

Adria just made a tweet, repeating their words; the real problem was the internet hordes on both sides of the debate that went at all parties involved's throats. That was the real escalation. The problem is the huge audience, where one tweet can reach millions of people, each with their own opinion and the ability to voice it instantly, within seconds. It's dangerous, really.

I don't think anyone required anyone else to join that subculture when making that joke to their friend.