I'm sorry that this is off-topic, but we can we please ban Medium links? I cannot read the article because of the paywall and I have no interest in spending my time hacking around it.
It would be trivial to, but it's more a matter of principle. You write content for a blog so Medium can monetize it and track your readers? that's good, but I would prefer not to have it on HN.
I'm not a luddite; I have been a subscriber of The Economist for like 20 years and I appreciate what they do. Still, I think that it is not appropriate for HN posts to point to paywalled content.
I’d rather know that the community thinks it’s worth reading and make my own decision to circumvent the paywall, because it keeps us in the good graces of those organizations and they produce interesting articles.
One can always choose not to read blogs/websites that don't suit their principles (hidden behind paywall). For example, I always look for a comment from some user who has pasted the article behind paywall on archive so as not to increase traffic to the website whose policies I dislike.
That way if the blogs get no significant traffic, they will be motivated to update their content policies. If they continue to get traffic, then the unwilling readers might reconsider to update their principles. It seems like an ideal ecosystem governed by compromise between writer, reader and intermediate the medium.
Keep an eye on this thread. I would not be at all surprised if it is flagged! Sometimes you'll see that posts with a ton of upvotes still slide down the front page very quickly and disappear. That's because users are flagging the post.
EDIT: this post has been flagged, 30 minutes after it was posted. So if you're looking for an example, look no further.
It's a good example of something being flagged because it's a baseless claim with no evidence-- one that tries to use an unarguable fallacy as a winning argument: "You're silencing me because I'm X", not because you're just wrong.
I worked in an office few years ago, we were mostly mens and a certain kind of (in my opinion) toxic jargon was developed there.
It might be an unpopular opinion but I do think that when men and women are at the same place the chances the environment will be come toxic is way lower.
I wonder if it will happen in online community such as HN or even /r/programming on Reddit.
I 100% agree. For most of my undergraduate, the male-female ratio was a close to 40:60 (yes there were more women in my undergraduate maths classes than men, sample size ~400-1000). When I moved overseas to study Part III in Mathematics at Cambridge, the male-female ratio soared to about 95:5. This was the first time I was in an absurdly male dominated environment since my karate classes in primary school and I found it to definitely be more toxic. My experience thereafter has been the same: more balanced environments are healthier and less prone to toxic weeding of viewpoints.
I don’t recall this being a problem in 4 years. Men weren’t put down or treated in derogatory ways because they weren’t women. If I try to enumerate typical toxic behaviours, it certainly wasn’t the case that any of this was systematically disadvantaging men. Contrast that with modern work environments ...
Agreed, this is what I've noticed as well. My bachelors program in electrical engineering was about 90:10 and was noticeably more toxic than my classes with a closer to 50:50 distribution.
Whether by age, gender, race, sexual preference, nationality, or religion, increasing diversity increases the pool of experiences and points of view.
When someone offers up some toxic behavior, it is less likely to be tolerated in a diverse group. We all have in-group attribution bias to some degree, and we find it easier to overlook transgressions in people who we view as like us.
I've been a Hacker News user since August 2007, and I still don't have the ability to downvote. For many many years I didn't even know it was possible to downvote.
I guess I'm not posting enough, but I didn't really feel any need to obtain the karma even after learning about downvoting was a thing. After reading this, I feel more obligated to get above the threshold and help weeding out in the comments.
Note that the highlighted comment was already downvoted, flagged and with a warning comment by the mods. Try to upvote good comments, and unjustly downvoted comments.
You need 501 points to downvote. Here you get one! Try to use the downvote button wisely when you get the ability.
Thank you for this article! If you are a minority of any kind and would like some more HN karma, please leave a comment in this thread and I invite everyone to upvote all of you!
It would not surprise me if the mods shut down this thread. But I question whether they should. And I question whether they would shut it down if they had more diversity.
Why should I not be able to upvote someone's comment just because they say "I'm a proud minority"? and I want to support their voice?
The flagging system on HN is terribly broken. I sent this to dang a while ago on the subject:
I realized something interesting the other day - users gain access to
downvote comments once they reach 501 karma. I've always inferred that
this is to make it so that users cannot downvote until they have
demonstrated some understanding of the community and an ability to fit
in with its norms.
However... users get access to flagging at 31 karma. A flag is basically
a super downvote in several respects:
- It works on comments and posts
- It works on direct replies to your own comments
- Just a few flags is enough to remove content entirely
- A flagged post cannot be vouched for until after it's been removed, whereas a post can be upvoted before it's downvoted.
It's a bit weird to me that the OP version of downvotes is available to
users 16 times sooner than the neutered version. I feel like HN has a
problem with flagging being abused for censorship - this might provide
an explanation.
Food for thought.
I won't disclose the response without his permission, but dang: if you're ITT, feel free to share.
> I’d love to downvote comments like: "Males have evolved to extract resources from the environment. Females have evolved to extract resources from males." But for a long time I couldn’t.
Yes well, because you didn't have enough magical points. Other HN participants had more magical points and downvoted that comment to oblivion. This isn't a good example to show how HN is sexist.
> That’s nice but like many well-meaning men they can’t seem to realize that more sophisticated forms of sexism cloaked in fancy language (“women are biologically programmed to XYZ”) aren’t any better than the crude type.
I'd like to think I'm well meaning and don't get that. Are you saying the phrase "women are biologically programmed to XYZ" is always sexist? What about "men are biologically programmed to XYZ" - is that also sexist? Why? What about "turtles are biologically programmed to XYZ"? Or "plants are biologically programmed to XYZ"?
Where is the boundary between what's ok and what isn't? (I am biologically programmed to ask these questions.)
> Yes well, because you didn't have enough magical points. Other HN participants had more magical points and downvoted that comment to oblivion. This isn't a good example to show how HN is sexist.
It is. Or at least, it's an example of how karma point systems like those on HN and Reddit reward groupthink. If you say something the majority of people agree with they'll give you points, and then you can use those points to upvote other people with the same opinions. If enough people holding the power to give karma are sexist, they'll reward sexist behaviour, and the site will become sexist.
In any case, this post has already been flagged so I guess the community won't be having that discussion, yet again. Until next time...
> If you tend to voice ideas that the majority of the group believes are not constructive, then you do not get to participate in deciding what comments are constructive to the group.
That is not the same thing as the group being sexist/racist/any-other-ist. It can lead to the same outcome of the majority of the group thinks various-ist comments are constructive (or, more specifically, if the majority of the group is unwilling to flag various-ist comments as unconstructive). However, the underlying cause is not the same. It's the difference between a person being racist and a person not taking a stand to help prevent others from feeling the effects of racism.
While I don't strictly agree with what's being said here (I have another comment explaining why), the sentiment being express IS constructive. The point of downvoting on HN isn't to express "I don't agree with this", it's for "this is not constructive to the conversation". I do not believe it should be downvoted.
That being said, discussing and/or complaining about another vote being downvoted is, I believe, also against the rules, so I'll take my punishment quietly.
> The point of downvoting on HN isn't to express "I don't agree with this", it's for "this is not constructive to the conversation". I do not believe it should be downvoted.
This is an ideal to be approached though, not one which is always reached. I can say with virtual certainty that there is overlap between opinions this group disagrees with and opinions it labels as not constructive to the conversation.
Acknowledged. I wasn't saying "you were downvoted because...". Rather, I was saying "This person should not have been downvoted, because...". I agree that there's overlap, and I was pointing out that it was happening here and shouldn't.
There is some ancient comment by pg that says something to the effect of "downvoting to express disagreement is fine," that people always bring out when this discussion happens. I think that should change. Downvoting simply because you disagree should not be the desired behavior, and flagging for disagreement especially shouldn't be desired.
I can't say that I live up to that standard. But, I do vouch probably 10x more than I flag. Browsing with showdead on, I get to see an interesting view of HN, and there are some bits of gold in the sluice there.
Arguments from biological essentialism are frequently but not universally poorly founded in genetics and biology, and when they are poorly founded, tend to reflect unexamined social prejudices.
You're right. Perhaps I understood it wrong and the quantifier was "for some XYZ" rather than "for all XYZ". In that case, it would have been clearer to provide some offending examples.
Curiously, I almost never read “for all XYZ” as an instance of universal quantification, because people seem to use it with sufficient abandon to dilute that meaning. Nonetheless, I would say that at least in this forum “most” arguments from biological essentialism are not well-founded, however they also tend to end up downvoted and flagged, so it’s clear the community disapproves.
People almost never write things like "Women are biologically programmed to frequently drink water" or some other biological statement, almost always its some "sociology by anecdote" to reinforce a negative stereotype.
If it's "by anecdote" or even a straight up negative stereotype, would it possible for it to nevertheless be true?
Does the statement "women are biologically programmed to XYZ" mean "some women are biologically programmed to XYZ" or "all women are biologically programmed to XYZ"?
I'm curious about what obviously true biological characteristics of women reinforce negative stereotypes about them, if you have any. Otherwise I don't really see the point in the hypothetical.
Fortunately, I can come up with one about men: Men are more physically aggressive than women. I believe this is true, a negative stereotype, and has biological basis.
Pop in an 'on average' and I would agree with you there. Bearing in mind that the intra-group variance is probably comparable to the difference in the means of the groups.
I'm not convinced that being true redeems any and every statement. For example you can lay out a case for eugenics unacceptable in almost any moderated forum while only making true statements.
As for the linguistic element in your question, "X is Y" in conversation typically means "X at large", allowing for some anomalies but otherwise making a statement about the whole group.
Selective ignorance is a dangerous strategy... Far better to evaluate the facts as fully as possible and find the actual reasons for and against. However a straightforward argument for eugenics is probably not very accurate or broad in its consideration. In that sense I guess it could be inaccurate or true but incomplete and/or misleading on its own.
I fear there's a deep anti freedom of speech sentiment in her complaint. Why is it not enough to reply with your alternate opinion and engage in a discussion about such issues? Why such emphasis on attaining an ability to downvote, if not to stamp out dissenting views? Such censorship should be reserved for malicious comments that are intended that way.
I'll probably get downvoted for this, which will be ironic. HN is becoming tiresome with these discussions.
There's nothing to engage with there, it's just not an interesting argument. There's a huge difference between just having a different opinion than most whilst still being able to defend it, vs. just $#!+posting like that flagged commenter did.
It's not true, you are just overgeneralizing your personal opinion on what is interesting as if everyone should feel the same way. Other people might disagree and find it interesting to discuss for whatever reason, even without original poster defending his ideas, maybe it can serve as a gateway to go deeper into the topic and make it interesting even for you, while you think calling it shitposting is ok.
`As those claims often are not really evidence-based, seems to always target the same group and have unhealthy proponent, i might dismiss them a sexist, even if the author is in good faith and wants to understand why people dismiss his point. `
I'm not saying i'd downvote everything, but this is tiresome. Have a basic understanding on how genome works is really easy, you have free courses all over the internet and you only need ~2 hours of genetic 101 to understand than any biologic/genetic "fact" based on sociology, statistics and questionnaires and NO physiologic evidence at all is just dumb, unhelpful and uninteresting.
[edit] And if it's uninteresting and agressive, it should be downvoted.
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence"
Because it takes far more effort to carefully rebut a slur than it does to make it, and if you let it stands as is, you've lent it credibility. We all intuitively understand this, which is why overt arguments in favor of crimes against children (which arguments do occur!) are instantly flagged off the site; we don't entertain them or carefully rebut them, and practically no one on the site expects us to. It's just that a noisome faction on the site does expect us to entertain slurs against women.
“In this endeavor, deniers focus on many minor and obscure details and leave out crucial context. It takes them little effort to formulate a wrong assertion, but it takes historians a long time and a lot of words to refute one. Our early attempts to engage on these points have shown that length and nuance do not play well on the internet and do not interest the deniers. The point of JAQing off is not to debate facts. It’s to have an audience hear denialist lies in the first place. Allowing their talking points to stand in public helps sow the seeds of doubt, even if only to one person in 10,000.”
There is a difference between saying a species is "biologically programmed" and a sex is "biologically programmed". And I think there is also a difference between the things we say turtles are "biologically programmed" to do and the things we say men and women are "biologically programmed" to do. It is a lot more accurate to say that turtles are biologically programmed to eat a certain diet than to say men are better at Y and women are better at X because genetics and culture are so intertwined that it is difficult to accurately say which is which.
Is it always sexist to claim biological determinism? No, but I think it would be good to acknowledge that in many cases we really don't know what is nature and what is nurture.
Let's not forget blood ph is coded on over 7 different chromosome and more than a thousand genes.
The XY chromosome is certainly one of the most important in hormone differentiation, but its is still one of the smallest. Claiming that it "program" people with no physiological evidence and only sociological or worse, psychological data points is dumb and uninteresting, and one of my bias is to sometime group people with their claim.
Claiming that testosterone levels are linked to aggressiveness and risk-taking in male is less dumb but not that interesting if it does not explain why (and how it disprove double-blind randomized study on the effect of testosterone-based male contraceptive https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/89/6/2837/2870329).
As those claims often are not really evidence-based, seems to always target the same group and have unhealthy proponent, i might dismiss them a sexist, even if the author is in good faith and wants to understand why people dismiss his point.
Color blindness in men is about 1 in 1 vs 1 in 200 for women. That's strongly correlated with the X chromosome, and has a profound impact on one of your primary senses. If you have an extra 21st chromosome, there are significant developmental problems which arise out of it.
While we are genetically very similar to chimpanzees and may share many traits, that 1% difference makes for a completely unique creatures which require completely different alien existences to thrive.
Biology is incredibly messy, we are still the product of its process, and that means sexual dimorphism. We shouldn't be quick to dismiss this, as it does harm to both women and men in living fulfilling healthy lives.
> Color blindness in men is about 1 in 1 vs 1 in 200 for women.
I assume you meant "1 in 12" for men, otherwise it seems too much.
I wonder whether mentioning this fact is considered okay simply because the result is worse for men. If there is a parallel reality where 1 in 12 women and only 1 in 200 men are colorblind, mentioning this would probably get you in some trouble.
We have more than just statistical evidence. We have physiological evidence too. We know which kind of protein (opsin) is responsible for each wavelenght. We know what kind of genetic modification can change the protein substantially (if you change the Nth protide which is hydrophilic by an hydrophobic one, you can change the wavelenght perceived). This is exactly my point:
You have an observation: Dichromacy is more prevalent with men, tetrachromacy only ever appears with women. This prevalence is huge. Opsins are responsible for colour perceptions
You have a theory: the X gene is responsible for colour perception: the L and M opsin are encoded on the X gene.
You found the responsible gene.
Again, his is exactly my point: no physiological evidence => garbage bin (unless you're a researcher).
Ironically, this submission has now been flagged so won't appear on the frontpage anymore, only had about 25 minutes of visibility before disappearing into the ether.
Note that the comment highlighted in this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13020973 is already downvoted and flagged by the community. It has even a warning comment added by dang (that is the mod here) (and the warning doesn't use the usual polite tone).
My feeling over the last 2 years is HN has largely steered clear of topics related to gender, as they lead awful comment threads. That's an impression which implies the HN moderators have adopted this policy. And in general I think it's a good. thing - there's enough discussion of gender in tech elsewhere.
Ignoring the problem is a failure to recognize the problem and only to serves to entrench the viewpoints of the moderators. For some, shutting down the conversation may not be seen as harmful, but all it does is protect the people who most likely to have harmful views against non-males. This in turns makes it harder for other people to be heard. So maybe it is not a good thing, in general (strictly speaking).
That's not true though, the various gender gaps have been discussed here endlessly. I'm baffled when anyone says there's not enough discussion of these things when they dominated HN for months at a time.
What there isn’t a lot of discussion of is how the space functions in a holistic sense for women, but so it goes for other groups as well. I don’t think “more discussion” is what this situation is lacking, though I couldn’t tell you what it is.
Are you serious? Was this article really just FLAGGED? Was it flagged just because the article mildly criticises Hacker News and it's moderators for not having enough diversity?
I don't agree with what some of what the article says, but it certainly doesn't seem like clickbait. It appears to be an honest expression of someone's opinion and attempt to help others navigate shortcomings they see with HN.
What you call clickbait is something I think about _every_ time I visit this site - years and years. Your experience online is as gendered as mine is - it's just that your perspective is normal and mine is abstracted to 'clickbait'.
I didn't flag it, but I suspect it was flagged by users for the same reason Melissa recommends: "Don’t click on threads that discuss gender unless you’re prepared to wade through crap"
Caveat: I think it’s valuable to avoid creating threads that devolve into flame wars over gender politics, and largely respect the decision of moderators to flag these articles as a result.
However, I’m a woman, 21 years old, and I’ve been a Hacker News member since 2014 and a reader for much longer (perhaps since I was 11 or 12?). I passed 500 karma years ago. I lament that I cannot easily connect with other women over our use of this medium, because this article alone gave me a lot of valuable advice and more things like it would definitely help me feel more welcome in the community. It’s a complicated situation and I think dang and sctb have done a laudable job of splitting the difference in this space over the years, one that more internet moderators of tech spaces that want women to participate would do well to emulate.
I don't really understand what "welcome" means. Historically on the internet people are simultaneously "welcome" and "not welcome," i.e. people discover places of socializing and choose to participate or not. In my decades of socializing on the internet, most places are hostile to some degree. I also wouldn't bother to complain, because hostility is an unavoidable part of human nature, even hostility toward hostility. Some set of people within a given community will be "nice," and some will be "mean." Most people inhabit some indefinite point on the nice-mean continuum. It would be ideal if comments like "females suk lol" were removed, but something tells me that's uncommon.
I think that "I would feel more welcome if..." (a very common motif in modern activism) suggests a few things:
(1) The operators should care about me/my demographic
(2) The operators should signal that they care about me/my demographic
(3) The operators should preferentially signal that they care about me/my demographic
(4) The operators should counter-signal, i.e. counter-welcome other people/other demographics (determined by perceived opposition to me/my demographic)
This may seem like a trivial exercise, but consider how non-welcome a person with conservative political interests would be not only on HN, but in the tech industry as a whole. Consider how non-welcome a white male might feel on Twitter, etc.. Hell, consider how non-welcome a person who thinks Rust sucks would feel on news.ycombinator.com. (tip: very non-welcome)
It seems futile to resolve each individual's sense of welcome; to provide a safe-space concurrently for religious white nationalists and black trans activists, and assorted fringes.
> Hell, consider how non-welcome a person who thinks Rust sucks would feel on news.ycombinator.com. (tip: very non-welcome)
That would be me. I literally got shadowbanned for criticizing Rust when I first became a member on HN. But I don't feel unwelcome by HN, only by mods, who I don't think of highly anyway, as this pushed me to pay attention to what mods actually do over the years. Nowadays they punish my account again, at least they didn't ban it this time, presumably this time it was because of my opinion on something corporate capitalist they didn't like.
> It seems futile to resolve each individual's sense of welcome; to provide a safe-space concurrently for religious white nationalists and black trans activists, and assorted fringes.
No matter how fringe, if mods allow, people will still be able to defend and express their opinions here, so only mods can make them feel unwelcome here.
I've seen accounts with green usernames that seem to have been shadowbanned for less. Typically, it's a new account that says some reasonable things, and maybe one or two fairly unreasonable things. Getting flagged for the unreasonable things can really kill a brand new account with under 10 karma.
"Seem to have been shadowbanned for less" than...criticizing Rust? come on you guys. That's not even close. Perhaps you saw an account that was affected by a software filter, especially if it's new. We try to review the affected posts and immunize legit accounts against the software, but we miss some.
> Typically, it's a new account that says some reasonable things, and maybe one or two fairly unreasonable things.
Accounts get banned for the worst things they do, not the best. If one day I go get groceries, walk the dog, and set somebody's house on fire, "the majority of things I did were reasonable" is not much of a defense.
It's hard to speak in the general case though. People routinely overinterpret what they see based on what they assume is happening. If you haven't specifically asked and we haven't specifically answered, the explanation is probably wrong. It's not hard to get an answer if you try.
Yes, "seem to," as in, I have no idea why, because nobody tells me and it's not publicized anywhere how shadowbanning works.
> Accounts get banned for the worst things they do, not the best. Suppose one day I go get groceries, walk the dog, and set somebody's house on fire. It's not a defense that the majority of things I did were reasonable.
That user's subsequent comments have not been great, but, at the time that I encountered them, they had something like 10 karma. Note how I wasn't the only one who couldn't figure out why they were shadowbanned?
The account you mentioned isn't banned, so I'm not sure why you're bringing it up in this context. It has, however, shown signs of being an ideological battle account—quite distinctive signs in fact—and I've already warned it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23665090.
New accounts that have come here to use HN in the intended spirit don't typically post exclusively about racial statistics, immigration, China, why lynchings were not as commonplace as people suppose, and similar things for their first 52 comments. Could it be that that is just a random streak and a wave of intellectual curiosity is about to come? Sure. But at some point, if it walks like a duck, we ban it.
So, you're saying that both bans and shadowbans are manual interventions? I did not have that impression regarding shadowbans. What I, and the comment I linked to earlier saw was a combination of green username (new account) and every comment after a certain point marked as [dead]. If that's not "shadowbanned," I don't know what it is. This user also seems to attract downvotes to fairly reasonable comments for some unknown reason.
That said, yes, this user has some questionable comments, most of which seem to have come after the point where I initially noticed. I don't see any reason why posting about racial statistics, China, immigration, and lynchings is a big red flag, especially the way 2020's been going so far. It is certainly easier to troll on these subjects than it is about how much Rust sucks, but, in isolation, I'd call this a chartreuse flag, at best. I do agree with you about your assessment of this user's current comment history, however.
Sometimes it's manual and sometimes it's software. If it's software, it won't permanently ban the account, and you'll more likely see [dead] comments followed by live ones. On the other hand, a banned account can have its comments restored to live status by vouches from other users, which might be hard to tell apart. On the third hand, software sometimes will permanently ban an account, but that's linked to patterns of spamming. Spamming and trolling are different phenomena. Spam is easier.
> I don't see any reason why posting about [...etc...] is a big red flag [...] It is certainly easier to troll on these subjects than it is about how much Rust sucks, but, in isolation, I'd call this a chartreuse flag, at best. I do agree with you about your assessment of this user's current comment history, however
It isn't a red flag in principle but it's a big red flag in practice because these accounts pattern-match extremely reliably with certain classes of users who routinely end up getting banned. Once you've been doing this for 10 years you notice these things early. I don't mean to sound like this is some sort of special power. It's just gruntwork. Believe me, it's boring.
Occasionally someone comes along who (a) is truly a new user who hasn't been banned before; (b) walks like a troll and quacks like a troll on troll topics; but (c) turns out to be an intellectually curious person whose mind, let's say, functions a bit differently from most people's. They might even be that thing we all dream we are and basically none of us is: an independent thinker. Obviously we want such a user. But the sad truth is that the dreariness of pattern-matching turns out accurate the overwhelming majority of the time, and for every such outlier, there are hundreds of trolls - or dozens of trolls making hundreds of accounts. So we play splat-the-mosquito, the mosquitoes respawn, and the karmic wheel turns.
It's possible you could have been shadowbanned for other reasons. I really wish the mods at least sent a notification that you were shadowbanned at all with the reason; it would clarify things so much better.
I was personally shadowbanned when I made a new account, but I believe the reason was because I posted a link (to Imgur) in my first post. I emailed the mods and they fixed it for me, but only because I noticed my post wasn't visible after logging out.
To be clear I still don't know the exact reason, but it was apparently made in error.
That defeats the entire point of shadowbanning someone. Shadowbanning is used primarily _because_ it is opaque to the person who is banned. If you told them, they might then make a new account, rather than thinking that people aren't engaging with them and moving on. If you give them a notification that they have been banned and why in the interest of transparency, its no longer a shadowban.
Or, maybe the first ban shouldn't be a permanent shadowban. Maybe actually telling people what they're doing wrong would get them to not do it.
There is, in fact, research showing that this is how it works on Reddit: users who get told why they're being banned or their post removed go on to be better contributors than those who don't. I can dig up the paper if you're interested, but I don't have it on hand.
I 100% agree, and think that in general shadowbans are a gross idea. But my point is that if you send out info about why you banned someone, then you are explicitly not shadowbanning them, by definition. The whole concept of a shadowban is that it must be opaque to the person being banned; if you change that then you aren't shadowbanning them.
Personally, I think that moderation transparency is a noble goal: I'd be in favor of all forums keeping explicit, public moderation logs with all moderator actions. But then again I have never had to moderate a particularly large forum, so perhaps my opinion would change when forced to deal with the same spammers, day after day.
I don't disagree with shadowbanning as a concept; rather, I disagree with HN's implementation of it. Being shadowbanned should be a last resort, after a warning and a more transparent ban. Once you've gotten a certain amount of strikes within a certain period, then I have no problem with a shadowban.
I agree with you on moderator transparency. There should be a certain amount of it visible to all, and that amount should definitely be more than what's available here on HN and Reddit.
Reddit is far worse, because you can be banned for arbitrary things without recourse, even though it's theoretically against the site moderation guidelines. You can be banned from one subreddit simply for participating in another.
I don't think HN has the same degree of problem, but I think the solution is the same. Sometimes, sunlight really is the best disinfectant.
It's a bimodal distribution. With established accounts, we warn them before banning, usually several times, and then tell them we're banning them and why. With new accounts, we don't say we're banning, because banned-new-accounts are overwhelmingly spammers and trolls—often serial trolls who have been banned many times and know exactly what they're doing. The cost-benefit of explaining why we're banning the account in those cases is completely different. To repeat from one of the comments I just linked to:
it is a balance between transparency and defending the site against abuse. If we tried to give every banned account the same high-effort attention that we give established users, we'd do nothing else all day and still not get through them all. That would just be a new vector for people to DoS the moderators. A small number of abusive users can create a large number of disruptions. There is also a significant amount of spam, and if we told spammers we were banning them, they would spam us with emails demanding attention, asking why, and telling us how high-quality their articles really are. Actually they do this a lot already, and it's a pain.
This does leave one class of accounts who unfortunately are the losers in this cat-and-mouse game: new accounts that get shadowbanned even though they were neither spammers nor trolls. It sounds like that is what happened in your case. Sometimes a new account shows up, and in its first post(s) behaves like a spammer or a troll would. That's when we use shadowbanning, but since we don't see the future, later it sometimes turns out to be a legit user who goes on to make good posts that get killed because we banned them.
This happens and it sucks. We can't see into the account's future posts, nor can we ever know for sure that an account is spamming or trolling...it's all just pattern matching and sometimes a pattern matches on the early data points and diverges later on. The only solution I know of in such cases is to correct it later: either because we notice good comments that are [dead] and investigate, or because we hear from other users "hey, are you sure $username should be banned"? - and we look them up, see the mistake and unban them. It's particularly helpful to alert us to such cases, so if anyone notices an account that is banned and shouldn't be, we'd greatly appreciate hearing about it at hn@ycombinator.com.
>It seems futile to resolve each individual's sense of welcome; to provide a safe-space concurrently for religious white nationalists and black trans activists, and assorted fringes.
That's easy: I don't want to participate in spaces where religious white nationalists feel safe, as don't I suspect a lot of people on HN (most?). Spaces that prioritize making religious white nationalists feel safe are not interesting spaces to participate in in general (check out the front page of Gab (edit: I think I meant Voat) if you need a sense of what I mean).
It's also not really about being nice or mean, it's about comments like these suggesting I want preferential treatment from moderators. If my original post wasn't clear: I think the moderators are basically doing the best job that they can at weeding out obviously sexist, racist, and otherwise unproductive comments.
So, I'm not really complaining about how the space is moderated, I think it's at a pretty stable equilibrium and I'm pessimistic about it getting much better than this for women, with what it prioritizes (primarily, open discussion about controversial topics, so long as it remains civil, even when one side is expressing repellent views in a civil manner). Obviously, this is not disqualifying for me, because I'm still here, and I have a lot more karma than you.
However, in my years of being here, I had never read this piece before, and I frequently feel pretty alone as a woman when there are comments that make me uncomfortable. It is just nice to know that there are other women in the space who share my experience, and I wish there was something like a women HNers social group or something, I guess.
> That's easy: I don't want to participate in spaces where religious white nationalists feel safe, as don't I suspect a lot of people on HN (most?).
I agree with that approach (which is why I don't use Twitter).
> It's also not really about being nice or mean, it's about comments like these...
You've just unintentionally identified the exact problem. You think my response was somehow "sexist" or hostile. I don't. I do think it mostly contains critical thought. If you think my comment should be censored, you've lost all credibility as far as I'm concerned.
> ..., and I have a lot more karma than you.
(1) This is perhaps one account of 10+ I have made over the years. I don't know how much karma you have because I do not care and won't be clicking through to your account. I also have no idea how much karma I have, totaling all accounts together. I would estimate ~ 100.
(2) My relationship with HN (and most of the internet outside of IRC) is almost entirely parasitic; I rarely comment or submit articles to HN. I certainly wouldn't do so specifically in order to increase my karma rating.
(3) If you care enough about karma to brag about it, you probably are a terrible contributor to HN anyway.
>You've just unintentionally identified the exact problem. You think my response was somehow "sexist" or hostile. I don't. I do think it mostly contains critical thought. If you think my comment should be censored, you've lost all credibility as far as I'm concerned.
You'll notice I didn't say any of the things of which you accuse me, nor do I think them (yet).
> If you care enough about karma to brag about it, you probably are a terrible contributor to HN anyway.
I'm confident about what this situation says about me and my contributions here and feel no need to defend myself further.
> That's easy: I don't want to participate in spaces where religious white nationalists feel safe,
As a white, religious person, - but not a nationalist: I always felt safe on HN and I hope most HNers are OK with that as long as I play by the rules?
Why shouldn't everyone feel safe as long as they play by the rules?
Edit: I'm not hurt. I'm hoping to get a better worded explanation from you :-)
Edit 2: The reason why I ask is because sentence is quite absurd and cannot be what you mean. Just try to imagine someone saying: "I don't want to participate in spaces where atheistic colored globalists feel safe," here on HN.
You are arguing in bad faith. Obviously one should be made welcome no matter whether they're white, a nationalist, religious, or all of these, but it should be easy enough to infer from context that this is not what the parent comment was about. It is about making clear that this welcome does not extend toward making other groups feel unwelcome, that is, toward prioritizing that welcome over others.
One possible explanation could be that I'm not a native speaker.
However if anyone wrote: "I don't want to participate in spaces where atheistic colored globalists feel safe," I'd flag it instantly as I originally did with this before I unflagged it and asked instead because while I think some kind of nazi crap could write that I don't think that is what she means.
Edit: also I think it is bad for the conversation to state as fact that I argue in bad faith. If you'd be kind enough to rewrite that I'll also try to remove this edit.
What I meant was that white nationalists feeling safe in a space (particularly them feeling safe expressing white nationalist views) is a decent heuristic for that space being poorly moderated or of poor quality overall. At the very least I’m not interested in the content of that space and I find white nationalists repugnant.
Just for clarity's sake: I spent a year monitoring HN (somewhat primitively, but with automation) for white nationalist content, and I stopped because it's become increasingly clear that the site itself finds white nationalism repugnant.
Though it's not explicitly stated in the guidelines (the guidelines would be long indeed if they had to state every pathology that emerges on an Internet message board), it's abundantly clear from the "informal moderation log" (the feed of comments from 'dang) that overt appeals to racial, national, or religious superiority are against the site rules. People are routinely banned for this stuff.
It's also just pretty clear that the community on the site has much less patience for racism and misogyny than the rap it gets on Twitter (which is an objectively worse site, for whatever that's worth). The real reason monitoring for white nationalism got boring is that practically every comment I'd catch would get modded down and flagged. I used to report things to Dan when I saw them, but I was batting less than .200 on reporting things that weren't flagged by the time Dan saw them.
What's problematic about evaluating the site --- and you don't have this problem, because you're a regular, but lots of other people do --- is it can be extraordinarily bad if you snapshot it at the wrong time. Anyone can join! Without a credit card or a phone number! They can post whatever nonsense they want! You have to watch the site in action over the course of hours to see what the community actually thinks about something. That's plenty of time to make an effective Orange Site Dunk on Twitter.
I don't believe the status quo is really acceptable, and there must be room to improve it. But it's better than a lot of people think it is.
> I don't believe the status quo is really acceptable, and there must be room to improve it. But it's better than a lot of people think it is.
This is basically my position. I have a hard time convincing others of it because of the reputation, though. It’s been an invaluable space for me in learning from people like you posting and I have no doubt that I have gained a significant amount of social savvy and also technological sophistication in using the site. I have trouble thinking of specific ways that it could be improved, specifically because of what you mention.
It's hard! Like, I don't think it's reasonable to say "the site needs 6 more Dans" because it's hard enough to find one Dan that no other site like HN has managed to accomplish it.
I appreciate you sticking through it, though. I know this place can get hard to take.
Part of it is a flip side of hiding comment scores. I think it's helped, but it also means that horrible comments that are too young to have been modded down yet are just as prominent as comments that the community agrees with. (If not more, due to the comment-order-semi-randomizer.)
One thing I have noticed in that vein is that it's impossible to tell whether a particular thread of comments is representative of a commonly held viewpoint, or if it's one commenter with an axe to grind. And if it's one commenter, they may have an entirely valid axe to grind! And then, even if it is valid, that axe may be totally off-topic for the post and dominate the conversation, retreading tired old ground and sucking up all the air in the room for interesting, relevant, new conversation. (Collapsable threading helps a lot though.)
Maybe HN is anti-white-nationalism, but there's definitely a lot of ignorance about how the people here are impacting the system. For example look at the comments on this article that talked about paying for the news:
You'd be a good hitter batting .200 in the majors. I don't think reporting an additional 2 egregious comments for every 8 that have that have already been flagged, downvoted, and / or otherwise dealt with is a loss. Unless it's just a matter of "if I wait a little longer, these will get taken care of, too," then I would say continuing your efforts is worthwhile.
After a little research, it seems that "good" is a bit of a stretch. But, the current median batting average in MLB is .248, so you're not really that far off. And, I think it's fair to say that given your other contributions to HN, .200 is enough to be above the "Mendoza line." ;)
Perhaps because you are not a native speaker you might not know, but "white nationalist" is basically the polite term for Nazis(and other groups with similar beliefs).
It's not an American cultural norm. It's just English grammar.
Things which are written as compounds in other languages often have a space in English, and English does not distinguish between word classes so that Noun-Noun compounds and Adjective-Noun phrases are ambiguous.
But if you hear “white nationalism” five times, when you hear “white nationalist” you don't hear it compositionally as “(white) (nationalist)” but as “(white nation)alist” - someone who advocates for a white nation.
“White nationalism” is a word. It has a different meaning than Nazism in my experience, so calling for substitution would be wrong. For instance, a person could support a multi-party white nationalist pseudo-democracy like the US during slavery. But nazism is going to be a form of dictatorship.
Based on this (actually enlightening, thanks) I have a new idea of what it meant had it been written in a more Germam way:
(religious whitenation-alism)[0]
That's kind of unfortunate because I read it as just the opposite of:
non-religious colored globalists
In hindsight it is possible to see, but right there and then it seemed obvious, and I guess we should come up with a better term.
Also, for what it is worth: I might have been able to catch that if "religious" hadn't been thrown in there.
> “White nationalism” is a word. It has a different meaning than Nazism in my experience, so calling for substitution would be wrong.
Good point.
We could need some clear words and definitions for this as I'm fairly convinced I'm not the only one to misunderstand the wording, kind of like a DSL for discussing bad ideas.
A positive side effect of this whole thing is that I am fairly certain I actually got to feel in my body what it feels like to be triggered :-D
If I should ask certain other people here to learn something from this thing it would be to be precise, and to not alienate people for no good reason, because I am fairly certain a number of people here would say I was dog-whisteling or something to that effect while I was legitimately confused.
[0]: Although when white-nation-alism (to be very clear) becomes religious about itself I think it is some form of nazism.
It's possible you interpreted this differently than it was intended as a non-native speaker. In case that's true, I'll note that rather than referring to people who are "religious", "white", or "nationalist", the OP was likely referring to people who are "religious" and "white nationalist". White nationalists are people who want to establish a white ethnostate, and typically this label is adopted by white supremacists who want to leave behind the "white supremacist" label but maintain the same ideology.
>However, in my years of being here, I had never read this piece before, and I frequently feel pretty alone as a woman when there are comments that make me uncomfortable. It is just nice to know that there are other women in the space who share my experience, and I wish there was something like a women HNers social group or something, I guess.
i would like to point out that there are some men that are made uncomfortable by comments that echo masculinity here as well and criticisms from such men never get much traction either. so it'd be nice if there were space (a space or just space) on HN for someone that wishes question the culture and all of the "high-minded" structure. r/twox is a good model - predominantly patronized by women but welcoming of good faith discussion from other genders as well.
I didn’t realize r/twox allowed trans women; the name has always made me a bit skeptical because rhetoric about chromosomes is so common amongst transphobes.
FWIW, I don't read any of your comments as wanting preferential treatment from moderators.
Edit (sorry, got interrupted while writing this) - and I particularly appreciate the even keel of your comments in this thread, when it would be so easy to get thrown off balance by the sharp elbows of others. It's clear that you've worked at developing a reflective rather than reflexive style [1]. I wish we could convince/teach more users to do this.
I also agree that there is an issue with this place coming across as unwelcoming in a number of important respects, including (the topic of this thread) to women. My sense is that it has been changing, but slowly. If you have any ideas about how to encourage that, I'd love to hear them.
@tptacek and I discussed this a bit downthread. I’m not an expert in community moderation and I’ve seen a lot of them go from decent to terrible very quick, so I know roughly how much effort it takes to prevent that. I do think it’s improving, and I think slow is the only way it ever improves.
I think a lot of women see terrible stuff come up here either in comments or on the front page and assume (wrongly) that the community as a whole is ok with it, before it ends up flagkilled by everyone else and often you will come into the thread and warn them if it’s particularly bad. I know I’ve had a good few “why the FUCK is this garbage on the front page” reactions over the years, but those submissions inevitably end up flagged too.
I do recall being warned by you for responding in kind to somebody writing inflammatory stuff or acting in bad faith, and this is a reaction I have had to learn to control as a result. That doesn’t feel great, because in the moment it feels like being scolded for hitting back from a position of less power, and this happens a lot to minorities in tech. However, over time I’ve learned that there’s a discursive norm against flamey stuff in general, and that this norm prevents the conversation from being drowned in pile-ons about one person’s bad behavior, which of course ends up Streisanding bad comments too. HN seems like one of the few places where “don’t feed the troll” is actually sensible advice, because there is sufficient enforcement against trolls (community based and explicit moderation) that they aren’t allowed to fester and multiply.
I think a lot of women are jaded and burnt out from having to deal with ugly comments and bad actors in less-well-moderated areas of the web where the community sentiment is actually against us participating. I know it was really difficult for me to learn to set aside my gut reaction and ignore the ugly bits, but I did it because I believed it would be ultimately worth it. It’s a question of trust, right? People have to trust that this space is actually different, that misogynistic pot-stirring and verbal abuse aren’t actually welcome, and that they will be treated as equals. These are depressingly common and even quotidian almost everywhere else, which is I think what builds the reputation.
Yes to all this. I am a woman who has been online since 1989. For me, what has to happen is not so much moderation difference but about the inner work. Understanding that categories gender and race are always at play, and putting things in that context. That is what we as women or bipoc _have_ to do. My bad experiences are not rages and threats to rape me (that I can place in the category of ridiculous) but these get all the focus. For me it is the 1000s of times I have something to add but when I do, because it is from my gendered perspective, it is considered outside the field of the conversation. The technical term for this is the differend.
> Consider how non-welcome a person who thinks Rust sucks would feel on news.ycombinator.com. (tip: very non-welcome)
I [an occasional mod] welcome people who think Rust sucks as long as they give some details why.
I don't welcome people who just post snarky dismissals of projects.
I'd say the majority of people who complain about their opinion being unwelcome here have been stating their opinion as a big loud raspberry, rather than making a substantive argument people can engage with. It's just the raspberry that's unwelcome.
I think this was the hardest part for me to learn: the site cares a lot about what I would describe as "tone," which is generally a good heuristic for interesting and productive discussions (but this can feel stifling for a lot of people, particularly but not exclusively minority groups in tech). Early on I definitely engaged in a manner that was less than pleasant, and the culture here seems to take a dim view of that no matter who it's coming from, which is the part I find the most impressive. I have since learned how to say what I want to say without just blowing raspberries (for the most part) and I am generally rewarded for it with interesting comments and upvotes.
> Early on I definitely engaged in a manner that was less than pleasant...
From your top-level comment, it sounds like you started when you were 15? So, um... I and a number of others don't really want to be judged by how we commented when we were 15. (In my case, not on HN - it didn't exist yet. But yeah, I was "less than pleasant" a lot of the time.)
Don't be too hard on yourself for the teen-age years.
Mostly I said a lot of inflammatory stuff when calling out sexism and racism, and was probably ignorant and worse on other subjects too. I learned relatively quickly that my assumptions about the site were incorrect.
> This may seem like a trivial exercise, but consider how non-welcome a person with conservative political interests would be not only on HN, but in the tech industry as a whole.
And here is a bit of a paradox. Not only are "conservative" (right wing) views marginalized here, but so are many leftist ideas that aren't one of HN's pet topics (UBI, land value tax, etc.)
You simply cannot criticize capitalism or the "free market" here without expecting downvotes. You can't talk about things that, for instance, the Soviet Union did right (e.g. going from an agrarian country of peasants to an industrial power in under 50 years) among all the wrongs it committed (gulags, the Holodomor, etc). The same, I suspect, for China, Cuba, Venezuela, or any other country that isn't the US and to which the US has not "brought democracy." Speaking of "bringing democracy," I strongly suspect that serious discussion of Western imperialism is off the table, as well. And, let's not even think about the US's broken immigration system.
On the world political scale, none of these things are remotely controversial. You can consistently say all of them, while holding a center-left ideology in basically all of Europe.
I don't particularly think having a "safe space" is all that productive, but I would appreciate if some of these topics got a little bit of lively and reasoned debate. Instead, people just mash that downvote button, which frustrates me to no end.
I've accepted that by pointing these things out, I end up losing a few fake internet points, and I'm okay with that. I'm so far about the downvote/flag threshold that it doesn't matter. But, I don't like it.
Apologies, I didn't mean to imply that you had flagged the article, and I didn't think that you had in this instance. Thanks for clarifying what [flagged] means, I was unsure about this.
Your engagement with this article here makes me see that we are in a new sort of space for these discussions. And I really appreciate the moderator too. I am 47 and it's been a lonely, long haul. Thank you.
The thing is discussing it easily ruins the mood of feeling productive when opening HN.
Also the benefit of discussing the same mindless discussion over internet where you already know the points of both sides are minimal in my opinion. There are better ways to spend time to benefit the minorities/females than discussing it here.
I'm no fan of censorship but even so I vote for 3. This is hacker news, so these topics should only be aired where they intersect, and are in the context of, the tech world. IMHO.
Sure, but it's going to come up whenever sexism comes up, which is often.
I guess I feel very conflicted here. We have people who--riggt or wrong--think that there is at least partial biological explaination behind this.
Then we have women who are saying that this opinion is so toxic that it makes them feel uncomfortable\unwelcome.
There is no solution that will make everyone happy. Either we must accept that there will be views aired that are uncomfortable (you don't have the right to not be discomforted), or we restrict the opinions that can be aired (you don't have the right to say what you really think).
Moderators did exactly the opposite of what you said in that tweet. We turned the flags off as soon as we saw them.
Btw, https://twitter.com/newsycombinator is a third party account that is not connected to any of the people working on HN or at YC. There are many such third party feeds.
Although my account is recent, I've lurked HN for many years, almost daily.
I'm not dismissing the experience in the post, and I'm more surprised by it since I rarely find examples of open bigotry or sexism in the comments (although I noticed that in recent years some discussions are getting very polarized).
People in here seem to me to be open to rational discussion, and, yes, you do get controversial opinions, but mostly I think people are open for discussion.
It’s gotten better over the years, to the moderators’ credit, but it’s still very difficult if not impossible to have civil and compassionate discussions about articles like this here.
I am always a bit surprised how often people call hacker news toxic. Has that word changed or am I just to old and jaded?
I mean, sure, it's opinionated, it's got quite a few blind spots, it's a bit rough around the edges sometime. But the only comments I would really call toxic are already dead
[0].
Now, I am not saying hacker news could not be nicer, but many people here seem to at least try to make reasonable arguments and I have yet to see it devolve into shouting matches like so many other places on the Internet. Maybe I just read to many Forums back in the day, but Hacker News by and large seems civil enough to me.
This is of course enforced through the only thin sheer of community, where you really have to look out for peoples usernames to get even an idea of who you are talking to.
While probably beneficial in this regard, I often wish there were some sort of avatars or other features to more easily recognize people from thread to thread.
[0] Though it is interesting, that among the dead comments is nearly always one that just seems harmless and often even a valid argument. So turning dead comments to display seems kind of important to not miss those. I wonder what is up with that?
I too am surprised at that label for HN. I agree that compared to other popular social media forums (Twitter, Reddit, facebook, etc) Hacker News by and large seems civil. There are certainly some trolls and bad-faith arguments, but it's only a small subset of comments.
I think it depends where you hang out on HN. I also think it is civil for the most part, but there are a few threads I have been apart of where I was shocked at the racist, homophobic, sexist comments coming in. They did get downvoted pretty quickly, but I was still surprised by them appearing in the first place.
I guess this has to be expected these days. This is not a small, tight knit community and there seems to be a part of the general population who revels in this kind of comments.
But I see far more of them on other platforms, for example in comments sections on news sites.
The fact that the most egregious ones get downvoted quickly here is something that speaks in favor of this community, I would say.
It's also important to be aware of the fact that you don't have to see too many horrible, bigoted comments before a space feels unsafe.
It's not a matter of "not all HN posts", it's a matter of "too many HN posts". And "too many" can be a relatively small number in absolute terms, especially in the context of an industry that has a strong gender imbalance.
> They did get downvoted pretty quickly, but I was still surprised by them appearing in the first place.
Apparently many people feel like this is not enough, but what more can be done? I can imagine a few policies that would reduce the chance of such comment even appearing, such as:
- Some problematic comments could be instantly removed algorithmically, e.g. by having a list of forbidden substrings/regexps. Trying to avoid that list e.g. by intentional misspelling would result in a manual ban. (And the misspelling would be added to the list.)
- Moderation could be so strict that even a hint of heresy would result in a ban. If you merely seem like a person who probably would say something racist or sexist in the future, let's ban you before you actually do it.
- The values embraced by the website should be expressed by (e.g. anti-racist and anti-sexist) slogans at the top of the page, along with explicit warnings against heresies, so that people would immediately know which opinions are allowed and which are not.
I do not really think any of these suggestions is good. My question is, without them, how can you avoid the situation, apparently very unpleasant to some people, where problematic comments sometimes appear, even if they are soon downvoted/flagged.
(I suspect than a combination of the second and third option is what the author of the article would like to see. But I'd rather hear it explicitly from people who mean it.)
>> They did get downvoted pretty quickly, but I was still surprised by them appearing in the first place.
> Apparently many people feel like this is not enough, but what more can be done?
I don't think much more can be done. On a public forum where literally anyone can make an account and post, there's no way to control what content appears, and you can't accurately assess the community by that. The tail of the internet is long, and the bottom of the barrel is deep.
You have to assess the community by how its immune system reacts. It has to be enough if, after a while, the worst comments are downvoted and/or flagged. Unfortunately "after a while" takes time, perhaps several hours, and in the meantime many readers encounter the worst shit before the immune system has gotten to it. Some of those readers are shocked—understandably, because it's shocking shit. Some of them don't understand the dynamics well enough to read the situation accurately—they just think "OMG Hacker News said $SHIT". And some of those take to Twitter and post shocking things, and another scandal cycle repeats. At this point there have been so many scandal cycles that I can at least say that it's second-order trauma to run into them. They used to upset me for days.
If you stop and think about it, it's clear that this is the price for hosting a public forum—there's no way to avoid the shit. The best we can hope for is an ever-improving immune system. HN's immune system—consisting of users, software, and moderators—at least functions reasonably well, and there's room for it to get better.
It's easy to forget the good side of having a public forum: anyone can show up to post, regardless of who they are or who they know. If they have something interesting to say, they automatically and instantly belong. This is precious. It's how we get magical threads like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23676862 (still on the front page), where the founder of a beloved publisher gets to talk to his devoted fans 20 years later.
I don't know if you guys remember, but 6 years ago, just before he handed over HN to us, pg implemented a feature called "pending comments" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484304) in which comments were all placed into a queue to be approved of before they would appear in the threads. This is a technical solution that would actually work to prevent the worst shit from appearing here. But it sparked a huge firestorm and the first thing that I did on taking over HN was to roll that back. It was clear that the community didn't want it (not so surprising) but also the social critics of HN, the kind who write articles like the OP or post critiques of HN on Twitter, felt that it was elitist and would put too much power in the hands of entrenched users.
Here is my take on the social dynamics: a subset of group A discriminates against all of group B. In defense, a subset of group B accuses all of group A. In return-defense, a greater subset of group A accuses all of group B of unfair accusations... and so on.
One of the interesting things about the 500 vote threshold for downvoting is that it kind of incentivizes incendiary comments. If you make a comment that picks a side on a hot-button topic and delight 50% of users and annoy the other 50%, you will on net get upvotes, because the half who like the comment have more sway on the voting than the half who don't. I like that we limit downvoting, but it has side-effects.
Please. I’ve read plenty of biologically motivated drawbacks of the male sex, both here and other more “enlightened” corners of the interwebs Supposedly, they are bunch of pre-verbal, emotionally out-of-touch nitwits so focused on competition they can’t figure out how to cooperate.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadI'm not a luddite; I have been a subscriber of The Economist for like 20 years and I appreciate what they do. Still, I think that it is not appropriate for HN posts to point to paywalled content.
A more fair approach would be to mark Medium articles and other with sort of an icon that will let us know they have signup/paywall
That way if the blogs get no significant traffic, they will be motivated to update their content policies. If they continue to get traffic, then the unwilling readers might reconsider to update their principles. It seems like an ideal ecosystem governed by compromise between writer, reader and intermediate the medium.
EDIT: this post has been flagged, 30 minutes after it was posted. So if you're looking for an example, look no further.
It might be an unpopular opinion but I do think that when men and women are at the same place the chances the environment will be come toxic is way lower.
I wonder if it will happen in online community such as HN or even /r/programming on Reddit.
Whether by age, gender, race, sexual preference, nationality, or religion, increasing diversity increases the pool of experiences and points of view.
When someone offers up some toxic behavior, it is less likely to be tolerated in a diverse group. We all have in-group attribution bias to some degree, and we find it easier to overlook transgressions in people who we view as like us.
I guess I'm not posting enough, but I didn't really feel any need to obtain the karma even after learning about downvoting was a thing. After reading this, I feel more obligated to get above the threshold and help weeding out in the comments.
There also seem to be 2 treasholds - one for topic and one for users.
You need 501 points to downvote. Here you get one! Try to use the downvote button wisely when you get the ability.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23677936
Why should I not be able to upvote someone's comment just because they say "I'm a proud minority"? and I want to support their voice?
So, sorry.... But you have to admit it would have been a simple hack for redistributing some much needed karma to minorities.
I realized something interesting the other day - users gain access to downvote comments once they reach 501 karma. I've always inferred that this is to make it so that users cannot downvote until they have demonstrated some understanding of the community and an ability to fit in with its norms.
However... users get access to flagging at 31 karma. A flag is basically a super downvote in several respects:
- It works on comments and posts
- It works on direct replies to your own comments
- Just a few flags is enough to remove content entirely
- A flagged post cannot be vouched for until after it's been removed, whereas a post can be upvoted before it's downvoted.
It's a bit weird to me that the OP version of downvotes is available to users 16 times sooner than the neutered version. I feel like HN has a problem with flagging being abused for censorship - this might provide an explanation.
Food for thought.
I won't disclose the response without his permission, but dang: if you're ITT, feel free to share.
Yes well, because you didn't have enough magical points. Other HN participants had more magical points and downvoted that comment to oblivion. This isn't a good example to show how HN is sexist.
> That’s nice but like many well-meaning men they can’t seem to realize that more sophisticated forms of sexism cloaked in fancy language (“women are biologically programmed to XYZ”) aren’t any better than the crude type.
I'd like to think I'm well meaning and don't get that. Are you saying the phrase "women are biologically programmed to XYZ" is always sexist? What about "men are biologically programmed to XYZ" - is that also sexist? Why? What about "turtles are biologically programmed to XYZ"? Or "plants are biologically programmed to XYZ"?
Where is the boundary between what's ok and what isn't? (I am biologically programmed to ask these questions.)
It is. Or at least, it's an example of how karma point systems like those on HN and Reddit reward groupthink. If you say something the majority of people agree with they'll give you points, and then you can use those points to upvote other people with the same opinions. If enough people holding the power to give karma are sexist, they'll reward sexist behaviour, and the site will become sexist.
In any case, this post has already been flagged so I guess the community won't be having that discussion, yet again. Until next time...
> If you tend to voice ideas that the majority of the group believes are not constructive, then you do not get to participate in deciding what comments are constructive to the group.
That is not the same thing as the group being sexist/racist/any-other-ist. It can lead to the same outcome of the majority of the group thinks various-ist comments are constructive (or, more specifically, if the majority of the group is unwilling to flag various-ist comments as unconstructive). However, the underlying cause is not the same. It's the difference between a person being racist and a person not taking a stand to help prevent others from feeling the effects of racism.
That being said, discussing and/or complaining about another vote being downvoted is, I believe, also against the rules, so I'll take my punishment quietly.
This is an ideal to be approached though, not one which is always reached. I can say with virtual certainty that there is overlap between opinions this group disagrees with and opinions it labels as not constructive to the conversation.
I can't say that I live up to that standard. But, I do vouch probably 10x more than I flag. Browsing with showdead on, I get to see an interesting view of HN, and there are some bits of gold in the sluice there.
Does the statement "women are biologically programmed to XYZ" mean "some women are biologically programmed to XYZ" or "all women are biologically programmed to XYZ"?
Fortunately, I can come up with one about men: Men are more physically aggressive than women. I believe this is true, a negative stereotype, and has biological basis.
As for the linguistic element in your question, "X is Y" in conversation typically means "X at large", allowing for some anomalies but otherwise making a statement about the whole group.
What does that mean?
I'll probably get downvoted for this, which will be ironic. HN is becoming tiresome with these discussions.
`As those claims often are not really evidence-based, seems to always target the same group and have unhealthy proponent, i might dismiss them a sexist, even if the author is in good faith and wants to understand why people dismiss his point. `
I'm not saying i'd downvote everything, but this is tiresome. Have a basic understanding on how genome works is really easy, you have free courses all over the internet and you only need ~2 hours of genetic 101 to understand than any biologic/genetic "fact" based on sociology, statistics and questionnaires and NO physiologic evidence at all is just dumb, unhelpful and uninteresting.
[edit] And if it's uninteresting and agressive, it should be downvoted.
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence"
Hitchens
“In this endeavor, deniers focus on many minor and obscure details and leave out crucial context. It takes them little effort to formulate a wrong assertion, but it takes historians a long time and a lot of words to refute one. Our early attempts to engage on these points have shown that length and nuance do not play well on the internet and do not interest the deniers. The point of JAQing off is not to debate facts. It’s to have an audience hear denialist lies in the first place. Allowing their talking points to stand in public helps sow the seeds of doubt, even if only to one person in 10,000.”
Is it always sexist to claim biological determinism? No, but I think it would be good to acknowledge that in many cases we really don't know what is nature and what is nurture.
The XY chromosome is certainly one of the most important in hormone differentiation, but its is still one of the smallest. Claiming that it "program" people with no physiological evidence and only sociological or worse, psychological data points is dumb and uninteresting, and one of my bias is to sometime group people with their claim.
Claiming that testosterone levels are linked to aggressiveness and risk-taking in male is less dumb but not that interesting if it does not explain why (and how it disprove double-blind randomized study on the effect of testosterone-based male contraceptive https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/89/6/2837/2870329).
As those claims often are not really evidence-based, seems to always target the same group and have unhealthy proponent, i might dismiss them a sexist, even if the author is in good faith and wants to understand why people dismiss his point.
While we are genetically very similar to chimpanzees and may share many traits, that 1% difference makes for a completely unique creatures which require completely different alien existences to thrive.
Biology is incredibly messy, we are still the product of its process, and that means sexual dimorphism. We shouldn't be quick to dismiss this, as it does harm to both women and men in living fulfilling healthy lives.
I assume you meant "1 in 12" for men, otherwise it seems too much.
I wonder whether mentioning this fact is considered okay simply because the result is worse for men. If there is a parallel reality where 1 in 12 women and only 1 in 200 men are colorblind, mentioning this would probably get you in some trouble.
This is probably the point I would have wanted to make, had I realized it :)
You have an observation: Dichromacy is more prevalent with men, tetrachromacy only ever appears with women. This prevalence is huge. Opsins are responsible for colour perceptions
You have a theory: the X gene is responsible for colour perception: the L and M opsin are encoded on the X gene. You found the responsible gene.
Again, his is exactly my point: no physiological evidence => garbage bin (unless you're a researcher).
I think the main reason these posts are flagged is because the discussion turns toxic quickly, and not because users are adverse to these posts.
However, I’m a woman, 21 years old, and I’ve been a Hacker News member since 2014 and a reader for much longer (perhaps since I was 11 or 12?). I passed 500 karma years ago. I lament that I cannot easily connect with other women over our use of this medium, because this article alone gave me a lot of valuable advice and more things like it would definitely help me feel more welcome in the community. It’s a complicated situation and I think dang and sctb have done a laudable job of splitting the difference in this space over the years, one that more internet moderators of tech spaces that want women to participate would do well to emulate.
I think that "I would feel more welcome if..." (a very common motif in modern activism) suggests a few things:
(1) The operators should care about me/my demographic (2) The operators should signal that they care about me/my demographic (3) The operators should preferentially signal that they care about me/my demographic (4) The operators should counter-signal, i.e. counter-welcome other people/other demographics (determined by perceived opposition to me/my demographic)
This may seem like a trivial exercise, but consider how non-welcome a person with conservative political interests would be not only on HN, but in the tech industry as a whole. Consider how non-welcome a white male might feel on Twitter, etc.. Hell, consider how non-welcome a person who thinks Rust sucks would feel on news.ycombinator.com. (tip: very non-welcome)
It seems futile to resolve each individual's sense of welcome; to provide a safe-space concurrently for religious white nationalists and black trans activists, and assorted fringes.
That would be me. I literally got shadowbanned for criticizing Rust when I first became a member on HN. But I don't feel unwelcome by HN, only by mods, who I don't think of highly anyway, as this pushed me to pay attention to what mods actually do over the years. Nowadays they punish my account again, at least they didn't ban it this time, presumably this time it was because of my opinion on something corporate capitalist they didn't like.
> It seems futile to resolve each individual's sense of welcome; to provide a safe-space concurrently for religious white nationalists and black trans activists, and assorted fringes.
No matter how fringe, if mods allow, people will still be able to defend and express their opinions here, so only mods can make them feel unwelcome here.
That can't be true. We couldn't care less whether people criticize Rust.
> Typically, it's a new account that says some reasonable things, and maybe one or two fairly unreasonable things.
Accounts get banned for the worst things they do, not the best. If one day I go get groceries, walk the dog, and set somebody's house on fire, "the majority of things I did were reasonable" is not much of a defense.
It's hard to speak in the general case though. People routinely overinterpret what they see based on what they assume is happening. If you haven't specifically asked and we haven't specifically answered, the explanation is probably wrong. It's not hard to get an answer if you try.
> Accounts get banned for the worst things they do, not the best. Suppose one day I go get groceries, walk the dog, and set somebody's house on fire. It's not a defense that the majority of things I did were reasonable.
I'm not talking about "set someone's house on fire" though. I'm talking about a comment that triggers a handful of people to mash the downvote or flag link. Specifically, this account: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rbecker which, obviously someone else noticed as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23585354
That user's subsequent comments have not been great, but, at the time that I encountered them, they had something like 10 karma. Note how I wasn't the only one who couldn't figure out why they were shadowbanned?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The account you mentioned isn't banned, so I'm not sure why you're bringing it up in this context. It has, however, shown signs of being an ideological battle account—quite distinctive signs in fact—and I've already warned it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23665090.
New accounts that have come here to use HN in the intended spirit don't typically post exclusively about racial statistics, immigration, China, why lynchings were not as commonplace as people suppose, and similar things for their first 52 comments. Could it be that that is just a random streak and a wave of intellectual curiosity is about to come? Sure. But at some point, if it walks like a duck, we ban it.
That said, yes, this user has some questionable comments, most of which seem to have come after the point where I initially noticed. I don't see any reason why posting about racial statistics, China, immigration, and lynchings is a big red flag, especially the way 2020's been going so far. It is certainly easier to troll on these subjects than it is about how much Rust sucks, but, in isolation, I'd call this a chartreuse flag, at best. I do agree with you about your assessment of this user's current comment history, however.
> I don't see any reason why posting about [...etc...] is a big red flag [...] It is certainly easier to troll on these subjects than it is about how much Rust sucks, but, in isolation, I'd call this a chartreuse flag, at best. I do agree with you about your assessment of this user's current comment history, however
It isn't a red flag in principle but it's a big red flag in practice because these accounts pattern-match extremely reliably with certain classes of users who routinely end up getting banned. Once you've been doing this for 10 years you notice these things early. I don't mean to sound like this is some sort of special power. It's just gruntwork. Believe me, it's boring.
Occasionally someone comes along who (a) is truly a new user who hasn't been banned before; (b) walks like a troll and quacks like a troll on troll topics; but (c) turns out to be an intellectually curious person whose mind, let's say, functions a bit differently from most people's. They might even be that thing we all dream we are and basically none of us is: an independent thinker. Obviously we want such a user. But the sad truth is that the dreariness of pattern-matching turns out accurate the overwhelming majority of the time, and for every such outlier, there are hundreds of trolls - or dozens of trolls making hundreds of accounts. So we play splat-the-mosquito, the mosquitoes respawn, and the karmic wheel turns.
I was personally shadowbanned when I made a new account, but I believe the reason was because I posted a link (to Imgur) in my first post. I emailed the mods and they fixed it for me, but only because I noticed my post wasn't visible after logging out.
To be clear I still don't know the exact reason, but it was apparently made in error.
There is, in fact, research showing that this is how it works on Reddit: users who get told why they're being banned or their post removed go on to be better contributors than those who don't. I can dig up the paper if you're interested, but I don't have it on hand.
Personally, I think that moderation transparency is a noble goal: I'd be in favor of all forums keeping explicit, public moderation logs with all moderator actions. But then again I have never had to moderate a particularly large forum, so perhaps my opinion would change when forced to deal with the same spammers, day after day.
I agree with you on moderator transparency. There should be a certain amount of it visible to all, and that amount should definitely be more than what's available here on HN and Reddit.
Reddit is far worse, because you can be banned for arbitrary things without recourse, even though it's theoretically against the site moderation guidelines. You can be banned from one subreddit simply for participating in another.
I don't think HN has the same degree of problem, but I think the solution is the same. Sometimes, sunlight really is the best disinfectant.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21288858
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666742
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20289994
It's a bimodal distribution. With established accounts, we warn them before banning, usually several times, and then tell them we're banning them and why. With new accounts, we don't say we're banning, because banned-new-accounts are overwhelmingly spammers and trolls—often serial trolls who have been banned many times and know exactly what they're doing. The cost-benefit of explaining why we're banning the account in those cases is completely different. To repeat from one of the comments I just linked to:
it is a balance between transparency and defending the site against abuse. If we tried to give every banned account the same high-effort attention that we give established users, we'd do nothing else all day and still not get through them all. That would just be a new vector for people to DoS the moderators. A small number of abusive users can create a large number of disruptions. There is also a significant amount of spam, and if we told spammers we were banning them, they would spam us with emails demanding attention, asking why, and telling us how high-quality their articles really are. Actually they do this a lot already, and it's a pain.
This does leave one class of accounts who unfortunately are the losers in this cat-and-mouse game: new accounts that get shadowbanned even though they were neither spammers nor trolls. It sounds like that is what happened in your case. Sometimes a new account shows up, and in its first post(s) behaves like a spammer or a troll would. That's when we use shadowbanning, but since we don't see the future, later it sometimes turns out to be a legit user who goes on to make good posts that get killed because we banned them.
This happens and it sucks. We can't see into the account's future posts, nor can we ever know for sure that an account is spamming or trolling...it's all just pattern matching and sometimes a pattern matches on the early data points and diverges later on. The only solution I know of in such cases is to correct it later: either because we notice good comments that are [dead] and investigate, or because we hear from other users "hey, are you sure $username should be banned"? - and we look them up, see the mistake and unban them. It's particularly helpful to alert us to such cases, so if anyone notices an account that is banned and shouldn't be, we'd greatly appreciate hearing about it at hn@ycombinator.com.
That's easy: I don't want to participate in spaces where religious white nationalists feel safe, as don't I suspect a lot of people on HN (most?). Spaces that prioritize making religious white nationalists feel safe are not interesting spaces to participate in in general (check out the front page of Gab (edit: I think I meant Voat) if you need a sense of what I mean).
It's also not really about being nice or mean, it's about comments like these suggesting I want preferential treatment from moderators. If my original post wasn't clear: I think the moderators are basically doing the best job that they can at weeding out obviously sexist, racist, and otherwise unproductive comments.
So, I'm not really complaining about how the space is moderated, I think it's at a pretty stable equilibrium and I'm pessimistic about it getting much better than this for women, with what it prioritizes (primarily, open discussion about controversial topics, so long as it remains civil, even when one side is expressing repellent views in a civil manner). Obviously, this is not disqualifying for me, because I'm still here, and I have a lot more karma than you.
However, in my years of being here, I had never read this piece before, and I frequently feel pretty alone as a woman when there are comments that make me uncomfortable. It is just nice to know that there are other women in the space who share my experience, and I wish there was something like a women HNers social group or something, I guess.
I agree with that approach (which is why I don't use Twitter).
> It's also not really about being nice or mean, it's about comments like these...
You've just unintentionally identified the exact problem. You think my response was somehow "sexist" or hostile. I don't. I do think it mostly contains critical thought. If you think my comment should be censored, you've lost all credibility as far as I'm concerned.
> ..., and I have a lot more karma than you.
(1) This is perhaps one account of 10+ I have made over the years. I don't know how much karma you have because I do not care and won't be clicking through to your account. I also have no idea how much karma I have, totaling all accounts together. I would estimate ~ 100. (2) My relationship with HN (and most of the internet outside of IRC) is almost entirely parasitic; I rarely comment or submit articles to HN. I certainly wouldn't do so specifically in order to increase my karma rating. (3) If you care enough about karma to brag about it, you probably are a terrible contributor to HN anyway.
You'll notice I didn't say any of the things of which you accuse me, nor do I think them (yet).
> If you care enough about karma to brag about it, you probably are a terrible contributor to HN anyway.
I'm confident about what this situation says about me and my contributions here and feel no need to defend myself further.
As a white, religious person, - but not a nationalist: I always felt safe on HN and I hope most HNers are OK with that as long as I play by the rules?
Why shouldn't everyone feel safe as long as they play by the rules?
Edit: I'm not hurt. I'm hoping to get a better worded explanation from you :-)
Edit 2: The reason why I ask is because sentence is quite absurd and cannot be what you mean. Just try to imagine someone saying: "I don't want to participate in spaces where atheistic colored globalists feel safe," here on HN.
I'm not. I also read and re-read it too.
One possible explanation could be that I'm not a native speaker.
However if anyone wrote: "I don't want to participate in spaces where atheistic colored globalists feel safe," I'd flag it instantly as I originally did with this before I unflagged it and asked instead because while I think some kind of nazi crap could write that I don't think that is what she means.
Edit: also I think it is bad for the conversation to state as fact that I argue in bad faith. If you'd be kind enough to rewrite that I'll also try to remove this edit.
Though it's not explicitly stated in the guidelines (the guidelines would be long indeed if they had to state every pathology that emerges on an Internet message board), it's abundantly clear from the "informal moderation log" (the feed of comments from 'dang) that overt appeals to racial, national, or religious superiority are against the site rules. People are routinely banned for this stuff.
It's also just pretty clear that the community on the site has much less patience for racism and misogyny than the rap it gets on Twitter (which is an objectively worse site, for whatever that's worth). The real reason monitoring for white nationalism got boring is that practically every comment I'd catch would get modded down and flagged. I used to report things to Dan when I saw them, but I was batting less than .200 on reporting things that weren't flagged by the time Dan saw them.
What's problematic about evaluating the site --- and you don't have this problem, because you're a regular, but lots of other people do --- is it can be extraordinarily bad if you snapshot it at the wrong time. Anyone can join! Without a credit card or a phone number! They can post whatever nonsense they want! You have to watch the site in action over the course of hours to see what the community actually thinks about something. That's plenty of time to make an effective Orange Site Dunk on Twitter.
I don't believe the status quo is really acceptable, and there must be room to improve it. But it's better than a lot of people think it is.
This is basically my position. I have a hard time convincing others of it because of the reputation, though. It’s been an invaluable space for me in learning from people like you posting and I have no doubt that I have gained a significant amount of social savvy and also technological sophistication in using the site. I have trouble thinking of specific ways that it could be improved, specifically because of what you mention.
I appreciate you sticking through it, though. I know this place can get hard to take.
One thing I have noticed in that vein is that it's impossible to tell whether a particular thread of comments is representative of a commonly held viewpoint, or if it's one commenter with an axe to grind. And if it's one commenter, they may have an entirely valid axe to grind! And then, even if it is valid, that axe may be totally off-topic for the post and dominate the conversation, retreading tired old ground and sucking up all the air in the room for interesting, relevant, new conversation. (Collapsable threading helps a lot though.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23372570
This kind of ignorance is going to end up making society a worse place. It's not white nationalism, but it's not a lot better either.
I think if that's what people mean they should just say nazi.
Most of us (and I am definitely in that group) can agree on disliking/hating nazis.
In my opinion there's no reason to mix skin color or religion into this.
Again, thanks. Certain American cultural norms aren't obvious to me.
Things which are written as compounds in other languages often have a space in English, and English does not distinguish between word classes so that Noun-Noun compounds and Adjective-Noun phrases are ambiguous.
But if you hear “white nationalism” five times, when you hear “white nationalist” you don't hear it compositionally as “(white) (nationalist)” but as “(white nation)alist” - someone who advocates for a white nation.
“White nationalism” is a word. It has a different meaning than Nazism in my experience, so calling for substitution would be wrong. For instance, a person could support a multi-party white nationalist pseudo-democracy like the US during slavery. But nazism is going to be a form of dictatorship.
(religious whitenation-alism)[0]
That's kind of unfortunate because I read it as just the opposite of:
non-religious colored globalists
In hindsight it is possible to see, but right there and then it seemed obvious, and I guess we should come up with a better term.
Also, for what it is worth: I might have been able to catch that if "religious" hadn't been thrown in there.
> “White nationalism” is a word. It has a different meaning than Nazism in my experience, so calling for substitution would be wrong.
Good point.
We could need some clear words and definitions for this as I'm fairly convinced I'm not the only one to misunderstand the wording, kind of like a DSL for discussing bad ideas.
A positive side effect of this whole thing is that I am fairly certain I actually got to feel in my body what it feels like to be triggered :-D
If I should ask certain other people here to learn something from this thing it would be to be precise, and to not alienate people for no good reason, because I am fairly certain a number of people here would say I was dog-whisteling or something to that effect while I was legitimately confused.
[0]: Although when white-nation-alism (to be very clear) becomes religious about itself I think it is some form of nazism.
i would like to point out that there are some men that are made uncomfortable by comments that echo masculinity here as well and criticisms from such men never get much traction either. so it'd be nice if there were space (a space or just space) on HN for someone that wishes question the culture and all of the "high-minded" structure. r/twox is a good model - predominantly patronized by women but welcoming of good faith discussion from other genders as well.
https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/fe6y66/im_...
Edit (sorry, got interrupted while writing this) - and I particularly appreciate the even keel of your comments in this thread, when it would be so easy to get thrown off balance by the sharp elbows of others. It's clear that you've worked at developing a reflective rather than reflexive style [1]. I wish we could convince/teach more users to do this.
I also agree that there is an issue with this place coming across as unwelcoming in a number of important respects, including (the topic of this thread) to women. My sense is that it has been changing, but slowly. If you have any ideas about how to encourage that, I'd love to hear them.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I think a lot of women see terrible stuff come up here either in comments or on the front page and assume (wrongly) that the community as a whole is ok with it, before it ends up flagkilled by everyone else and often you will come into the thread and warn them if it’s particularly bad. I know I’ve had a good few “why the FUCK is this garbage on the front page” reactions over the years, but those submissions inevitably end up flagged too.
I do recall being warned by you for responding in kind to somebody writing inflammatory stuff or acting in bad faith, and this is a reaction I have had to learn to control as a result. That doesn’t feel great, because in the moment it feels like being scolded for hitting back from a position of less power, and this happens a lot to minorities in tech. However, over time I’ve learned that there’s a discursive norm against flamey stuff in general, and that this norm prevents the conversation from being drowned in pile-ons about one person’s bad behavior, which of course ends up Streisanding bad comments too. HN seems like one of the few places where “don’t feed the troll” is actually sensible advice, because there is sufficient enforcement against trolls (community based and explicit moderation) that they aren’t allowed to fester and multiply.
I think a lot of women are jaded and burnt out from having to deal with ugly comments and bad actors in less-well-moderated areas of the web where the community sentiment is actually against us participating. I know it was really difficult for me to learn to set aside my gut reaction and ignore the ugly bits, but I did it because I believed it would be ultimately worth it. It’s a question of trust, right? People have to trust that this space is actually different, that misogynistic pot-stirring and verbal abuse aren’t actually welcome, and that they will be treated as equals. These are depressingly common and even quotidian almost everywhere else, which is I think what builds the reputation.
I [an occasional mod] welcome people who think Rust sucks as long as they give some details why.
I don't welcome people who just post snarky dismissals of projects.
I'd say the majority of people who complain about their opinion being unwelcome here have been stating their opinion as a big loud raspberry, rather than making a substantive argument people can engage with. It's just the raspberry that's unwelcome.
From your top-level comment, it sounds like you started when you were 15? So, um... I and a number of others don't really want to be judged by how we commented when we were 15. (In my case, not on HN - it didn't exist yet. But yeah, I was "less than pleasant" a lot of the time.)
Don't be too hard on yourself for the teen-age years.
Just wanted to echo this and extend it for the older of us: don't be too hard on yourself for the past.
And here is a bit of a paradox. Not only are "conservative" (right wing) views marginalized here, but so are many leftist ideas that aren't one of HN's pet topics (UBI, land value tax, etc.)
You simply cannot criticize capitalism or the "free market" here without expecting downvotes. You can't talk about things that, for instance, the Soviet Union did right (e.g. going from an agrarian country of peasants to an industrial power in under 50 years) among all the wrongs it committed (gulags, the Holodomor, etc). The same, I suspect, for China, Cuba, Venezuela, or any other country that isn't the US and to which the US has not "brought democracy." Speaking of "bringing democracy," I strongly suspect that serious discussion of Western imperialism is off the table, as well. And, let's not even think about the US's broken immigration system.
On the world political scale, none of these things are remotely controversial. You can consistently say all of them, while holding a center-left ideology in basically all of Europe.
I don't particularly think having a "safe space" is all that productive, but I would appreciate if some of these topics got a little bit of lively and reasoned debate. Instead, people just mash that downvote button, which frustrates me to no end.
I've accepted that by pointing these things out, I end up losing a few fake internet points, and I'm okay with that. I'm so far about the downvote/flag threshold that it doesn't matter. But, I don't like it.
We didn't see it until someone pointed it out to me just now, and I'm just taking a look now.
Also the benefit of discussing the same mindless discussion over internet where you already know the points of both sides are minimal in my opinion. There are better ways to spend time to benefit the minorities/females than discussing it here.
Who is doing the ruining?
Who benefits by lack of discussion?
(My view is that silence on contentious issues benefits the status quo.)
I know this is controversial, but it's hard (perhaps impossible) to discuss something controversial without either:
1. adopting groupthink/wrongthink patterns 2. making some group uncomfortable 3. limiting the topics that can be discussed
I guess I feel very conflicted here. We have people who--riggt or wrong--think that there is at least partial biological explaination behind this.
Then we have women who are saying that this opinion is so toxic that it makes them feel uncomfortable\unwelcome.
There is no solution that will make everyone happy. Either we must accept that there will be views aired that are uncomfortable (you don't have the right to not be discomforted), or we restrict the opinions that can be aired (you don't have the right to say what you really think).
https://twitter.com/syllablehq/status/1277616493149196293
Btw, https://twitter.com/newsycombinator is a third party account that is not connected to any of the people working on HN or at YC. There are many such third party feeds.
I'm not dismissing the experience in the post, and I'm more surprised by it since I rarely find examples of open bigotry or sexism in the comments (although I noticed that in recent years some discussions are getting very polarized).
People in here seem to me to be open to rational discussion, and, yes, you do get controversial opinions, but mostly I think people are open for discussion.
This is of course enforced through the only thin sheer of community, where you really have to look out for peoples usernames to get even an idea of who you are talking to. While probably beneficial in this regard, I often wish there were some sort of avatars or other features to more easily recognize people from thread to thread.
[0] Though it is interesting, that among the dead comments is nearly always one that just seems harmless and often even a valid argument. So turning dead comments to display seems kind of important to not miss those. I wonder what is up with that?
But I see far more of them on other platforms, for example in comments sections on news sites.
The fact that the most egregious ones get downvoted quickly here is something that speaks in favor of this community, I would say.
It's not a matter of "not all HN posts", it's a matter of "too many HN posts". And "too many" can be a relatively small number in absolute terms, especially in the context of an industry that has a strong gender imbalance.
Apparently many people feel like this is not enough, but what more can be done? I can imagine a few policies that would reduce the chance of such comment even appearing, such as:
- Some problematic comments could be instantly removed algorithmically, e.g. by having a list of forbidden substrings/regexps. Trying to avoid that list e.g. by intentional misspelling would result in a manual ban. (And the misspelling would be added to the list.)
- Moderation could be so strict that even a hint of heresy would result in a ban. If you merely seem like a person who probably would say something racist or sexist in the future, let's ban you before you actually do it.
- The values embraced by the website should be expressed by (e.g. anti-racist and anti-sexist) slogans at the top of the page, along with explicit warnings against heresies, so that people would immediately know which opinions are allowed and which are not.
I do not really think any of these suggestions is good. My question is, without them, how can you avoid the situation, apparently very unpleasant to some people, where problematic comments sometimes appear, even if they are soon downvoted/flagged.
(I suspect than a combination of the second and third option is what the author of the article would like to see. But I'd rather hear it explicitly from people who mean it.)
> Apparently many people feel like this is not enough, but what more can be done?
I don't think much more can be done. On a public forum where literally anyone can make an account and post, there's no way to control what content appears, and you can't accurately assess the community by that. The tail of the internet is long, and the bottom of the barrel is deep.
You have to assess the community by how its immune system reacts. It has to be enough if, after a while, the worst comments are downvoted and/or flagged. Unfortunately "after a while" takes time, perhaps several hours, and in the meantime many readers encounter the worst shit before the immune system has gotten to it. Some of those readers are shocked—understandably, because it's shocking shit. Some of them don't understand the dynamics well enough to read the situation accurately—they just think "OMG Hacker News said $SHIT". And some of those take to Twitter and post shocking things, and another scandal cycle repeats. At this point there have been so many scandal cycles that I can at least say that it's second-order trauma to run into them. They used to upset me for days.
If you stop and think about it, it's clear that this is the price for hosting a public forum—there's no way to avoid the shit. The best we can hope for is an ever-improving immune system. HN's immune system—consisting of users, software, and moderators—at least functions reasonably well, and there's room for it to get better.
It's easy to forget the good side of having a public forum: anyone can show up to post, regardless of who they are or who they know. If they have something interesting to say, they automatically and instantly belong. This is precious. It's how we get magical threads like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23676862 (still on the front page), where the founder of a beloved publisher gets to talk to his devoted fans 20 years later.
I don't know if you guys remember, but 6 years ago, just before he handed over HN to us, pg implemented a feature called "pending comments" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484304) in which comments were all placed into a queue to be approved of before they would appear in the threads. This is a technical solution that would actually work to prevent the worst shit from appearing here. But it sparked a huge firestorm and the first thing that I did on taking over HN was to roll that back. It was clear that the community didn't want it (not so surprising) but also the social critics of HN, the kind who write articles like the OP or post critiques of HN on Twitter, felt that it was elitist and would put too much power in the hands of entrenched users.