Agreed. SF politics is profoundly broken, and many of the Supervisors are sclerotic and out of touch. But wishing death on them publicly is very very serious.
It's worse than childish. The people called out in that bizarre tweet would probably have a conversation with their staff or the police about whether they or their families are in any kind of danger from this apparently popular guy wishing death upon them from the internet, or perhaps from one of his idiot followers.
They might not know much about where Tan is coming from, but they know they work in a building where Moscone and Milk were assassinated.
They would be perfectly reasonable to hire private security and sue Tan for damages to pay for that and whatever other measures that seem prudent for their own protection along with the pain and suffering that goes along with the very reasonable fear this tweet and its effects caused.
What he wrote was more or less the limit to what you can say before it becomes a serious crime.
I think this modern internet trend of saying that every mistake is inexcusable and should lead to a breakup is super weird and destructive.
What he said was bad, and wrong. But he just needs a scolding and some minor punishment and to then learn and not do it again. If it becomes a pattern then sure, that's a different thing.
> Tan, for his part, apologized over the weekend, noting that his post was a reference to a Tupac Shakur lyric
How famous does someone have to be joke about a politician dying before it’s a problem? Tan is less famous than Charlie Sheen or Johnny Depp, who have joked about Trump dying.
Also, from Wikipedia: “Tan supported the 2022 recall campaign against progressive San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. Tan donated at least $100,000 to the effort. Tan blamed Boudin for physical attacks on Asians.”
There’s a fair argument that Tan is joking about violence against people whose policies are facilitating actual violence.
Not famous at all, really. It'd be reasonable (and good) to have a standard where people don't wish violence on their political opponents. Possibly even where cooperating with people they don't like is an option. Opponents of Trump please take note.
However, after acknowledging that Tan shouldn't have done this, it doesn't look serious. Drunken rants on Twitter are not important in and of themselves.
Boudin is just one example of the trend of progressive prosecutors all over the country. And Asians tend to be the victims of any reduction in law and order, because they are seen as easy targets by gangs and a large fraction of them live in areas where gangs operate. They also tend to own or work at small businesses in the place affected by the 2020 riots. If crime goes up in New York City, for example, the Bangladeshi is in Jamaica are going to be hit disproportionately hard.
Right right, I'm sure it's nothing to do with any prominent political figures stoking paranoia about Chinese communists to rile up a wilfully ignorant voter base.
It’s not just California, just look at almost anywhere. Same story across the UK - taxes and prices ever increase, quality of everything and every service continues to decline. The greed and corruption on display by nearly all politicians is beyond brazen. Lucrative contracts for friends that deliver no value, insider trading, tax avoidance, offshore accounts, communicating government business on burner phones, deleting emails, fiddling expenses, huge infrastructure projects running vastly over budget then being cancelled, etc. What amazes me is how few realise the level of outright theft of their own hard earned money, and seek some form of comfort in blaming the other side, believing their team will fix it next time. There are even some that try to put it down to incompetence.
The corruption is now so deeply rooted and endemic throughout all of society, government and media it’s impossible to know where rooting it out could ever start and end. So probably the only way to turn the tide is for everyday hard working people to start rejecting it and rejecting to support it in any way, shape or form, everyday throughout their own lives. No single person or group can fix this and any claiming to be able to is both a liar and a fraud.
This sort of discourse would be flagged, moderated and possibly result in a ban here on HN. His actions seem to undermine a lot of what this community is meant to be about.
You do realize that the first amendment protects individuals from prosecution for protected speech, right? It does not guarantee protection from professional or social consequences. For some reason this distinction is very hard to understand for people of certain political stripes.
Regardless, death threats are not protected under the first amendment, so you're even wrong under your idiotic assumptions of how the law works.
Most journalists are just propogandists and misinformed people stating option as fact. I don't understand why anyone holds them in high regard. Like yeah, there are many great individual journalists who take their job seriously and get real information out to people, but for the most part, no.
Sure, and that would be the system working as intended. I choose to post everything under random dictionary word pseudonyms just in case one of my hot takes is slightly too spicy. His real mistake was posting under his real name IMO.
I don't see how it makes it any better that it was a quote. The quote still had words in it. Does Garry Tan think the entire world listens to Tupac? And what wisdom does Tupac really have to offer in this case?
I mean, if someone says something like that and they’re conjuring it up directly or they’re quoting a piece of art, I think that’s obviously relevant to interpreting it. Without taking a position on how severe to interpret it, it’s plainly obvious this important detail is glossed over and ignored and the media coverage of this is desperately trying to leave readers walking away thinking this was a more direct straightforward statement not subject to interpretation of how much to take it at face value.
It's only technically better that it was a quote. That doesn't come close to excusing the behavior. It's still completely beyond that pale that he chose those specific lyrics to post on Twitter. The question of how honest the reporting was feels secondary.
It's also strange because I've seen Tupac Shakur glamorized in popular culture (for example, hagiographic discussions about him on NPR). But Shakur was rapping about killing people, while those people were being targeted and killed by associates of his, and he himself shot people. A 6 year old was even shot in the head and killed with his gun in one of the fights he got into (he claimed he dropped the gun and someone else fired it during the fight).
It's bizarre to see the level of outrage against Tan quoting Tupac compared the the veneration you usually find of Tupac.
Does it really matter? It's terrible judgement to post something whose intended meaning hinges on whether you know an American rap song from ~30 years ago to a public venue like Twitter. There are plenty of voters who weren't even born when Tupac was still alive.
Sure it matters. It doesn’t mean you ultimately would judge it appropriate, but take any scenario where violent rap lyrics are used and revoke a person’s ability to know they are quoting a song and it will be interpreted wildly differently.
I read HN probably more than I should, and I was pretty surprised to see this has over 500 comments and I didn't see it at all. Turns out it was only on the frontpage for 1 hr. https://hnrankings.info/39205676/
The way HN is set up, having 500 comments would have contributed to that. The "flamewar detector" the mods sometimes mention seems to take comments/votes and comments/time into consideration then penalises threads.
Yes, this is correct from my observation, too. The comment-to-vote ratios go fast; up south, they will likely be out of the pages quickly. One might think that a post that falls off the homepage would linger on page 2 for a while, but it can be out of even the first 100 posts fast.
I have stopped thinking about HN's algorithms and just let it do its job.
If you or anyone read those and have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Edit: I've turned off both the flags and flamewar detector on this article now, in keeping with the first rule of HN moderation, which is (I'm repeating myself but it's probably worth repeating) that we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of a story (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). Please note: that doesn't mean we don't moderate at all; what it means is that whatever we would normally do, we do less of it in such cases.
Normally we would never late a ragestorm like this stay on the front page—there's zero intellectual curiosity here, as the comments demonstrate. This kind of thing is obviously off topic for HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If it weren't, the site would consist of little else. Equally obvious is that this is why HN users are flagging the story. They're not doing anything different than they normally would.
All this goes double when a story has already had extensive discussion, and 10x when the article is sourcing its content from Hacker News itself, as this one is. That's absurd. But I'm willing to take the hit because the first rule of HN moderation is more important.
Thanks Dan. When I wrote my comment I thought most people would already know that it was most likely an automated system that downranked the post. The next time I talk about this topic I'll make it extra clear I'm not insinuating any manual censorship.
With that said, it is a shame that in cases like this, you may not even know about a post with hundreds of comments unless someone sends you a link. Have you thought about implementing a view that ignores the flamewar detection? This could even be a historical view, like https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2024-01-31 . The post in question was one of the highest upvoted submissions of the day and yet it's not on the first page of this link.
I fully agree with you that in the majority of cases these comments are not encouraging intellectual curiosity, I still do like reading the comments because I do find some interesting stuff there sometimes.
I also missed original post but I would flag it as I’m against internet dramas of any kind. And I get it that many people are interested in this kind of politics but I don’t think they recognize that there are many who couldn’t care less.
This is the response I’d personally expect and moderation context and how it unfolds is the interesting part to me.
HN is different from Twitter. The reason users (correctly) flag such comments here is that we're trying for a specific kind of site (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). One thing I often say (to a certain type of commenter) is that this isn't an ethical or moral rule—it's more like a game. Different games have different rules. If you're playing chess you don't get to tackle the bishop. Think of the site guidelines like game rules, not a moral code.
>This is nothing more than activist journalists hating successful people for leading a stand against a self-destructive ideology ruining lives.
There's plenty of people in this very thread who profess a sympathy for Tan's causes but think his drunken remarks are deplorable and reflect poorly on him, even if not legally actionable. I'm among them.
Wagon-circling is a sad pathology of politics. Nobility requires that we rise above it.
Doesn’t the phrase “living rent free in your head” refer to someone being preoccupied with another individual with whom they have a disagreement to an unhealthy degree? You can’t waive rent if you’re the one doing the living, and by definition if someone is letting someone else “live rent free” in their head, the rent is already waived. Without any commentary on the rest of this (because I have no idea what’s actually going on), unless this is referring to something other than the common idiom, no this is actually a lousy clapback because it completely misunderstands the idiom.
I suppose if they're thinking like if any third party wants to get in his head, they will declare rent is not due (waive seems wrong not just if you're living but in general if you're not the landlord) - which kind of works because of their position I think (but I'm not from the US so I don't really understand or want to bother looking into it), but yeah we've probably both thought about it too much and more than they did before posting as a quick joke at this point.
It isn’t illegal to say what he said but it’s not the right tone for his position. The slow drop into political violence begins with speech normalizing calling for death and murder.
I just hope everyone outraged analyzes their own speech. I hold a lot of opinions outside the bounds of cocktail conversation, but I was having cocktails with my (blue city, professional) friends and they made a joke about someone needing to assassinate a certain right wing presidential candidate and everyone laughed really hard. The way she said it was funny and I laughed along but it’s easy to have outrage when you want it.
> The slow drop into political violence begins with speech normalizing calling for death and murder.
I have seen this a lot lately in online discussions of homelessness and people accused of crime. It's very unsettling.
That is the context of why Mr Tan wrote that -- there's a popular narrative that specific individuals are complicit in crime and homelessness in San Francisco. This leads to lots of ad hominem and in my view rises to the level of conspiracy theory in many -- it's not like every problem is the fault of a single office holder or even a "cabal" of them. Voting against someone or supporting different candidates is one thing. Calling them solely responsible for all that you consider evil, escalating to the level of death threats, is quite another.
And that's just politicians. It's also routine to see people call for violence on homeless people or people accused of crime.
On the other hand, where does the path we're on lead?
Let's not forget, there is a multi-dimensional spectrum in between, nobody is consistent across the spectrum, it is possible and often beneficial to speculate non-seriously, plenty of ~good people support intentional killing by our military if it has a well crafted (by literal professional thought shapers), just-so story to accompany it, and so forth and so on.
Optimal gameplay is difficult. Even aspiring to it is difficult.
I don't think it is very controversial and haven't seen anyone actively saying it is a good thing. I think all division and debate is around if and how much anyone should care.
I see a lot of declarations that it is bad, inexcusable, disgusting, ect. What I dont see is what people think the implications or consequences of that determination are. When someone says that, what do they want to happen?
Do they just want other people to acknowledge it was bad, and then everyone goes on with their life? Do the police make them wear a scarlet letter or send them out into the wilderness. Does it mean that people should unfollow them on twitter?
Also: even if we completely left out the actual contents of this tweet.
Then we are still left with an adult (who happens to be a CEO) who thought that it would be a rational thing to tweet that and couldn't predict the outcome of it.
I would have expected that to be almost worse to people here. And no, alcohol is not an excuse for that. Drinking enough not to be able to rationally think about whether that is a good idea anymore is a confirmation of it.
Post Elon acquisition, many influential tech figures have discovered that being a provocateur on Twitter/X is more consistently successful at building an audience than genuine insight.
Before Elon, posts on Twitter were sorted and hidden at the whim of engagement-maximizing algorithm. After Elon, the same is the case, maybe with the same tweak to the algorithm.
I thought the idea that timeline sorting order on social media sites is deterministic or scrutable to the viewer is long dead by now - it's not been the case for at least a good decade now!
While that's true, the thing where ~all bluetick replies are promoted above ~all normal replies is a post-Musk 'innovation'. Stupid idea; there's 25 years of experience showing that pay-for-attention is corrosive to social sites (dating/hookup sites have been trying to make it work basically forever, and have generally ended up having to ration it).
Eh? Trump was never there post Elon acquisition. I don’t think that timing makes sense. The tone of Twitter has been like this for years if not the beginning.
It's human nature. People are social creatures and they love to join some fight as long as they have their own comrades with them.
My wife spent years on Twitter embroiled in a very long running and bitter political / rights issue. She was always thoughtful, insightful etc. She'd spend 10 minutes rewording a single tweet to make sure it got the real point across in a way that wasn't inflammatory, and that had a good chance of being persuasive. With 5k followers, I think her most popular tweets might get a few hundred likes. The one time she got drunk and angry, she got thousands of supportive reactions, and her followers increased by a large % overnight. And that scared her. She saw the way "the crowd" was pushing her. Rewarding her for the smell of blood in the water.
Audience capture is real. Chronically online people with polarised followers will play to their crowd. Inch by inch, day by day, as social creatures, we automatically and subliminally seek approval from our social group. I've seen this type of dynamic push people into the extremes.
My wife got out. First she asked me to block twitter on all of her devices. A month of cold turkey later, she quit for good ,and she's far happier for it.
At the same time, a thoughtful post today can change the entire life direction of a ten years younger you and end up providing far more value to the world overall.
I know that was the case for me. I spent hundreds of hours of reading blog posts by intelligent, optimistic, philosophically transgressive at times but not actually rude or crass folks, all trying to grapple with how to live best in this world. I think this reshaped me to be a much better person in a whole bunch of ways. Very happy for it.
People gathered up to see public hangings. We just love to see a fight. When Gary Tan acts like a monkey, people line up to see it. Same reason why Elon draws a crowd. Calling people a pedo is the online equivalent of a fist fight and we humans love it.
Should Gary Tan quit over this? Of course not. I think the fact that people put others on a pedestal is a mistake in the first place.
But which audience? It seems like with social media nowadays only the absolute numbers count. Influencers are very happy to have an army of dumb followers. I guess it’s easier to well influence them.
I haven't met him, but as someone who reads and engages in online discussion about SF quality of life issues, this is NOT shocking at all, there are a LOT of people openly wishing violence on politicians, homeless people, and people accused of petty crime.
Vile and disgusting? Yes. Shocking? Absolutely not. Sorry that your buddy lacks empathy.
A tweet is a thought with cheap delivery, therefore offers no insight at all. It's just like an anecdote from executive leadership to get something over the line to meet a goal. That person has absolutely forgot they said it the next day.
This message confused me on a few dimensions, so I translated it a bit:
"State subjective perspective as objective fact. Cast shame upon the OP for not pre-aligning with said belief. Put the responsibility on the OP to prove that they are not deserving of shame."
I grew up in an environment where this kind communication was sort of the default, hence why I was curious and wanted to drill down a bit and give it some thought. Of course, many people agree that Twitter is more unhealthy than healthy. But that's not entirely the point here, I think.
I followed Garry since the old days of Posterous. Seems like 5 years ago he took a turn and got obsessed with edge lordy SF politics. Finally I had to unfollow. Too much money has corrupted all the original startup role models
The reaction feels like pearl-clutching to be honest.
This is the kind of shitpost most people would be able to get away with, but Tan is now too important -- and will have to curate his communications more. Especially if he's going to take such a strong position against incumbent politicians cautious of their own images.
It also feels like a smart political play by his targets to discredit him. They were probably waiting for him to slip up and say something like this.
Anyways, his position is a sympathetic one - the city is not well managed. I say this as someone who frequently disagrees with Tan.
The fact it’s a Tupac lyric is not like common knowledge. I doubt a random poll of Twitter users would show most people would know the reference immediately.
Sure, and that was the misstep here. He clearly wasn't threatening to kill anyone, it was misinterpreted, he thought people would get a reference that they clearly did not. He's apologized, it's time to move on. There's better things to spend our outrage budget on IMO than someone who cares a little too much about city politics and has probably learned not to overestimate his audience's knowledge of Tupac.
It’s an election year. People will use the tweet as they see fit. Voters will ultimately decide whether it matters or not concerning candidates who have received money from Tan. But I don’t think this is the last we’ll hear about it.
They were probably waiting for him to slip up and say something like this.
This is a touch paranoid.
it was misinterpreted, he thought people would get a reference that they clearly did not
As a general matter, people should spend more time saying what they mean instead of engaging in meta-discourse of quoting cool references to each other for vibes. It's an unhealthy way to communicate; online discourse is totally irony-poisoned and (imho) this is partly why there's such a breakdown of social trust.
And really, don't you think throwing out lines like 'die slow motherfuckers' in public for cool points is a little...juvenile?
He did not threaten to kill anyone anymore than anyone saying they hope Trump has a heart attack is threatening to kill him. He made a twitter post in poor taste and apologized.
This entire comments section is a poignant example of the spiritual dichotomy present in our society: those who have ever been immersed in 4chan-and-adjacent culture, and the bitchless and cringe.
How is he important? Would a person on the street know who he is?
I guess this goes with the idea that he can wish death on people and be an asshole but that’s ok, as long as it’s hidden.
Assuming he is so critical or important should the public then know better what his thoughts or attitudes are?
“Gosh, wish someone handed him a twitter account earlier so we knew before signing a contract or something…”
On the other hand one can take a more compassionate view and say maybe he had a mental breakdown or some trauma. Not knowing or caring about his importance, I’d default to that, as I would most strangers in that situation.
I’m not sure how anyone can say this when he’s notorious for blocking thousands and thousands of people on Twitter/X for the smallest perceived critique, including people who have never interacted with him at all because they engaged with some tweet he didn’t like
The only kind of person who’d ever go that far is someone with a very fragile ego
I’ll never get this. He doesn’t owe those people anything. Just because you start talking doesn’t give everyone the right to listen, just because someone is talking doesn’t require you to listen…
So he sees someone interacting with some other tweet in a way he doesn't like, and then blocks them from following him?
Having not used twitter, is this easy one-click thing that takes no time nor thought, or is he having to switch screens and spend time on doing this?
(Technically I became a twit yesterday because nitter stopped working and there is just one person's posts that I like to check up on, so I ended up giving in and logging in... :( But I still don't know the UI well enough to answer my own question :) )
There are also tools that allow you to block everyone who’s liked a tweet, everyone who follows a particular person, etc. I don’t know if Garry Tan uses such a tool, but maybe he does.
I'm not sure what Tan's specific beef is, I could never endorse violent rhetoric in politics, but the level of avoidable human misery caused by the dysfunction of politics in San Francisco is sickening. If you can walk through the Tenderloin without becoming utterly enraged at the people responsible, there's a piece of your soul missing.
> I could never endorse violent rhetoric in politics
In literally the next sentence:
> the level of avoidable human misery caused by the dysfunction of politics [...] sickening [...] utterly enraged [...] there's a piece of your soul missing
So you'll deploy extreme emotional hyperbole, but not "violent rhetoric"? Seems like those are two rather nearby points on the same spectrum, no? Tan just slipped a bit off the edge. If you're going to deny someone's soul, it's not that big a leap to wish them dead.
Only according to external rules about what you're supposed to say. The emotional content of the rhetoric seems pretty identical. No one thinks Garry Tan was actually wishing death on anyone, he was expressing anger and doing that by invalidating the target's existence. "You should die" and "you have a piece of your soul missing" are coming from the same place, they both mean "you're worthless".
It's just that Tan forgot the rules in the heat of the moment. And so would the grandparent poster after a few drinks, I suspect.
To wit: cool the fuck down, everyone. Shitposting on the internet is a slippery slope to an accidental death threat.
Many were enraged with by the soulless tech gentrification of the city. But they couldn't compete so they had to move. Some don't have the means to move. It must be sickening for many to have to deal with the externalities.
Or they can just agree with Gary that correlation is never causation.
I think the failing here is using Twitter at all - or at least without an intermediary like an editor. Twitter is almost purpose made for stripping context. Tweets are, traditionally, short and pithy and so are easy to misinterpret or misrepresent. If you're even a semi public figure, Tweeting a lot is a huge liability.
That's the conundrum of being a modern tech CEO - you're supposed to forever pretend you're the high school buddy with everyone, even if the "startup" you're running is a billion dollar+ multinational corporation, and you yourself are wealthier than anyone except the world leaders and other corporate... er startup CEOs.
That's just par for the course when it comes to sports commenting.
I'm a little surprised though that a tech person of Asian ethnicity would be interested in boxing, good for him for going against all the ingrained stereotypes.
Alcohol disinhibits and makes people show sides they usually suppress. He probably has pent-up anger and let it all out in that tweet. I guess he's neither fully the person you know nor the person from that tweet, but both are part of the "real him"
I am not an alum but I did have a short chat with him about 6 years ago: "gentle" is definitively not how I would describe him, at least from that interaction.
Everybody has a bad day though so I did gave him the benefit of the doubt, but I'm really not surprised by this tweet "scandal" at all and the way he's dealing with it.
It was a song lyric. Dumb, cringe tweet for sure. But not violent. People are so inclined to look for reasons to be mad. They all must be perfectly well-adjusted, down to earth, basically flawless people themselves. Clearly.
We can disagree on politics, but calling for the death of politicians publicly — especially as an influential member of an already regionally important company — is disgusting.
This behavior cannot be tolerated. I don’t care how inebriated someone is.
I say this as someone who worked for a YC company (that is still in business) for almost a decade.
You know, like a Che T-shirt doesn't mean you're endorsing the killing of political prisoners and stuff. Or that a George Washington statue endorses slavery. It's like a "you came at me but I'm going to beat you" lyric, not literally as Tupac meant it.
Whatever, it's not intended to mean killing someone. But you have to be a colossal dumbfuck to say it like that to a bunch of people wise in the ways of the street political machine.
Most people who see a Che t-shirt don't know who he was, only that his face shows up a lot.
The problem isn't referencing something or someone, but doing so expecting those on the receiving end to know the reference and not take it at face value.
Yeah, I think there's a big difference between wearing Che's face, and posting a quote of Che where he ordered people to kill someone.
One, without context, is just a face. The other, without context, promotes murder. Context matters of course, but so does the actual quote itself without the context.
>You know, like a Che T-shirt doesn't mean you're endorsing the killing of political prisoners and stuff. Or that a George Washington statue endorses slavery.
What a load of bullshit. He put names of specific people in his tweet who have subsequently received threatening letters in paper mail.
The intended audience heard the message loud and clear.
I wonder if you took that message the same way if Tran said "Die slow, Rene Wiltord" and you received personal paper mail afterwards that said "Tran was right. Die, Rene."
These discussions here wouldn't exist if he'd just posted Tupac's portrait on Twitter. But he specifically quoted a sentence with a very clear and unambiguous meaning.
The fact that it is a quote (which I didn't know) moves it out of the extremely disturbing category and into the extremely cringe & very disappointing category.
SF politics is a clown show on all sides - Garry has lost serious credibility that he could play some part in cleaning it up. I think he knows that.
To me, it's extremely disturbing that someone would consider this whole thing as extremely disturbing in the first place.
Whether people in the US are extremely oversenstive to tweets and words, or that the tweets and words have the power to suddenly make regular people hateful and violent - neither of those states are normal.
Either that, or the country really is a few Twitter sparks away from civil war, which again would... not be a normal state of things.
Posting that you want a group of city councilors to die is not normal behavior. It's not normal when sober, it's not normal on alcohol, it's not normal for any functioning member of society. Anyone saying these things is disturbing. The fact that someone who a number of people believe is intelligent and worth listening to would say such things is extremely disturbing.
If one's own side of the horeshoe [1] had made the gaffe, it's sticks and stones. We're a bunch of evolved apes. Sometimes we say things we don't mean. They'll get over it.
If the other side said it, oh dear. We'd best remove them from their job, their payroll, shun them forever, and make sure they never have power again.
I think the correct approach is to have a conversation, to seek an apology, and to hold the party to being better. Strike one; it's water under the bridge.
> If one's own side of the horeshoe [1] had made the gaffe, it's sticks and stones.
Some of us have enough principles to complain even when "our" side does horrible stuff. When a friend does it, I might be more inclined to talk to them in private rather than blast them in public, but that's a mix of "I am more likely to change their mind if I don't antagonize them by making this public" and "I have absolutely no social media presence, so me calling someone out doesn't really make a difference."
> If one's own side of the horeshoe [1] had made the gaffe, it's sticks and stones. We're a bunch of evolved apes. Sometimes we say things we don't mean. They'll get over it.
> If the other side said it, oh dear. We'd best remove them from their job, their payroll, shun them forever, and make sure they never have power again.
When a group of people routinely cause harm to other people that is in aggregate much greater than the harm involved in them dying, I think it's understandable for the thought to come to mind.
Are we sure about that? There are politicians who have coordinated/enabled things with consequences that would justify capital punishment if someone believes in that as an option. For example, from a raw moral perspective a reasonable person could support executing the entire congressional Aye vote for the US sending the army into Afghanistan.
That would be a terrible mistake, because the incentives don't check out, politics would become a bloodbath when people make honest mistakes, bloody vengeance helps no-one and there is a plausible question around whether the person voting is making a personal decision or just trying to channel their voters. But since it is a superficially reasonable position I assume people would say that sort of thing regularly. To argue it out and learn why it is a bad idea, if nothing else.
In the situation you posit, that sort of action would come from a vote, not a single person's vigilante call for action. That is the difference.
While I'd argue for a normal person that posting something like that would just fly under the radar and disappear into the aether of the internet, the same does not apply to someone who heads a large publicly visible company, and who posts publicly on an account associated (implicitly) with that company.
1. Votes come at the end of a process starting with someone calling for action. Has to be a first person to bring the idea up; and Twitter is as good a place for public debate as we have. (If only people could master the longform paragraph, or even essay-length debate and move to somewhere a bit more nuanced.)
2. Reflecting on the "Die slow motherfuckers" for a little while - Tan didn't actually make a call for action. Exactly what that means is ambiguous, and it is without a doubt poor form.
> someone who heads a large publicly visible company
If the board wants to sack him I could certainly see that happening. Although as a practical matter, I don't think this is a sustainable standard. A good CEO is worth their weight in gold, sacking them over being a Twitter troll from time to time seems like a bad call. Musk is an example; both a troll and also a pretty amazing CEO. The right thing to do might be to tolerate the situation unless the pressure gets overwhelming.
On that point we've been tolerating outward displays of political speech from corporations for a while. I'm against it both on principle and because it is typically left-wing-aligned but since it happens I don't see why this sort of political diatribe is needs to be stepped on. Dude has political opinions. We all do.
To your last point, it might be more constructive to point out the specifics of why you are against corporate political speech as opposed to a somewhat-binary left/right of the political spectrum.
One benefit I see of it is normalizing the presence of historical out-groups (racial minorities, gender minorities, etc.) that have always existed in society.
But, in practice, the "support" can be paper-thin and the chasing of support from out-groups simply as a means to push profit margins is sometimes obvious and thinly-veiled enough to the point of growing discontent towards the groups that they're ostensibly supporting.
This sort of critique (even if I can't guarantee its accuracy) is a bit more nuanced and feels a little bit less cargo-culty than just left/right.
There exist people who see benefits of any political stances. That is why the stance is taken. Arguing about whether it is a benefit is at the core of politics. For example, Mr Tan probably sees benefit from certain SF supervisors resigning immediately and is frustrated that they don't.
But it is better to keep businesses out of that, I believe we're better off if they are relatively neutral and thoughtless engines to achieve highly specific goals.
> But, in practice, the "support" can be paper-thin ...
1) This situation is also paper thin. I'd bet money that Tan doesn't do anything that would cause the supervisors to die a slow death. Most attack on politicians are.
2) I've had it made quite clear to me in companies I've worked at that if there was a candidate with different skin colour or gender to me they'd be before me in the line for hiring and promotions. That is paper thin support, but it is due to political ideology and I still don't like it. I would like companies to promote equal treatment and be scrupulously neutral on politics.
That's a government person calling for an attack on another government. This is a citizen calling for an attack on a group of individuals, government-involved or not. It's not even remotely the same.
It's literally illegal to give death threats (not that I think this qualifies as a particularly serious one). But that's the difference between this and your argument with politicians rattling sabres. (Just to make it clear, I don't feel so strongly about the whole situation, but I do think making false equivalences is misleading)
Is it just me, or does nobody here remember the random baloney they did or said when they were in high school or college? People being frustrated and saying things that aren't quite acceptable is fairly common, seemingly especially when alcohol is involved.
Can we all just like I dunno chill out a bit? Who cares, and how does this affect me?
Did you also share that random baloney on a public account with your company logo on it? Probably not. And alcohol is not an excuse just because it happens to be legal compared to other drugs.
And that's just the last president. If you search, you'll find plenty of similar examples for Obama and Bush too. Going further back than that will probably be harder to find records for, but yeah we have a long tradition of wishing death on our politicians and expressing that quite loudly. And almost all the time, it's certainly legal, whether or not the local community is keen on it varies.
While on one hand I agree that getting this worked up over speech is weird, Gary is a (not so) unique case in that when he is able to incite the Twitter activist mob mentality on his side, against other people’s speech, he will happily do so with no hesitation whatsoever.
A while back somebody put up some stickers with his face on an octopus and the tentacles holding his various assets. The Twitter mafia went all out saying this was clearly racist and totally unacceptable in civil society, because of some prior art where an asian individual was offensively caricaturized atop an octopus. I tired to point out that the octopus has been used as a symbol of a many faceted organization since forever, and the racist aspect of the prior art wasn’t the octopus but rather the ridiculous caricaturization. The picture of Gary used in his octopus was a totally normal photo, so the racist prior art was of no consequence. Gary somehow saw my comment and decided to launch a tweet thread telling his hundreds of thousands of followers what a terrible racist horrible idiotic person I am, which resulted in a huge hacking campaign being launched against various little personal projects I had posted on my Twitter.
Your comment seems to suggest that you're viewing this event from outside the US. If so, perhaps you're unaware of the dangerous and recent rise in violent political rhetoric here. Garry Tan is a prominent and powerful person in the tech industry, and his words carry weight. When he rips violent lyrics out of a hip-hop song and refashions them into a political rant, he's pouring more fuel on a fire that's starting to burn out of control.
Garry Tan should know better. As an earlier article mentioned [1], he was previously quoted as saying "this kind of stuff should have zero place in San Francisco politics," referring to an activist's taunt that millionaires and landlords should be guillotined.
Where or what do you consider normal? The United States is far from the only place where harsh words provoke outrage, rightly or wrongly. It's actually a cultural and historical norm.
> The United States is far from the only place where harsh words provoke outrage, rightly or wrongly
Elsewhere in the world, only retroactively - in retellings, in legends, in K12 history lessons. The nice, patriotic fiction of good person saying something, galvanizing the population, and then large changes happening.
> It's actually a cultural and historical norm.
It's not. Broadcast media are barely 100 years old. The ability for any rando to broadcast thoughts outside their direct social circles exist for less than two decades.
Randos telling other randos within their social circles that they want bad things to happen to public personas - that is a cultural and historical norm. Nothing ever coming out of it, except maybe said randos landing in shit if the word reaches the public personas - that too is the cultural and historical norm. For such talk to be an actual danger to anyone else, and especially the subject of discussion? That is a very recent historical and geographical aberration (or rather, I suspect believing such talk to be dangerous is the aberration).
In such case, my pants would be in laundry too, but I (perhaps mistakenly) assume writing angry comments about politicians - up to and including even worse kind of violent wishes - are kind of normal since forever, and nothing ever comes of it. Maybe I'm misjudging the power/prominence of Garry Tan (of whom I never heard of before today) relative to SV politicians?
>Either that, or the country really is a few Twitter sparks away from civil war, which again would... not be a normal state of things.
We're pretty much there, yup.
But stochastic terrosism[1] isn't a new or unique thing.
Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated after similar remarks were said by Netanyahu[2], which was arguably a pivoting point towards the war in Gaza we have today.
Public figures talking about specific people dying should always be treated seriously. It's not disturbing that we do.
>Rallies organized by Likud and other right-wing groups featured depictions of Rabin in the crosshairs of a gun. In July 1995, Netanyahu led a mock funeral procession featuring a coffin and hangman's noose at an anti-Rabin rally where protesters chanted, "Death to Rabin".
>Netanyahu denied any intention to incite violence
Rabin was subsequently shot dead.
The definition in Wikipedia says:
>Stochastic terrorism refers to political or media figures publicly demonizing a person or group in such a way that it inspires supporters of the figures to commit a violent act against the target of the speech.
Of course, direct "kill this person" language is not a requirement for that. "Won't someone rid me of this meddlesome priest?"[1] is a famous example from the 12th century.
>If "XXX of party YYY is a disgusting piece of human garbage" than I don't think that should be called terrorism.
By itself, it wouldn't be. However, if XXX of party YYY subsequently starts getting death threats or other harrassment as a result of this statement being made, there is a problem.
Which language a public person uses to indicate a target to their followers highly depends on the context and history of the particular public person and the group they are addressing.
Hopefully, you understand why doxxing[2] is problematic. There are real-life consequences for the person being doxxed. However, the language is perfectly benign; after all, there is no explicit call to action in an address, a phone number, a name.
Stochastic terrorism similarly leverages context and publicity to highlight targets. It's not about how you would interpret the message; it's about how the target audience interprets it.
In Tran's case, both the message (die slowly) and the target audience's interpretation (a call to harrasment) indicate that there was no miscommunicaiton.
>>However, if XXX of party YYY subsequently starts getting death threats or other harrassment as a result of this statement being made, there is a problem.
How can you control that, though? Are people responsible for the mental state of all their followers? Or do they have to ensure that every utterance is so milquetoast that no action would ever come of it?
I'd have less of an issue if these rules were to be applied in a politically neutral fashion, but we know they never will be.
I wish I could find the clip, I think it's another Tupac song, where it plays a news clip of a stressed sounding woman saying "he says he wants to see his rivals deceased" (roughly) in response to what I assume is a line in "Can't C me". Anyway, it's funny because that clip was making fun, but sounds a lot like all the "calling for someone to die is never ok" feigned pearl clutching I've seen here. The tweet was dumb, insisting on taking it literally in spite of all evidence, for the purpose of outrage is worse.
I can quote all kinda of people to make very disturbing, threatening statements. Unless I am writting fiction, quote or not, it is still a threat.
At the very least, tweeting bat shit crazy stuff while drunk is nothing a CEO should be excused for, at the very least it is a sign of aerious self-control and judgement issues. Regardless of what politicak side said CEO, or anyone else really, is on.
Also, the name of a great song by Wang Chung. I had never heard it until asking Google to play To Live And Die in LA and it played the Wang Chung song instead of Tupac.
It's nothing new that words have power. Death threats have the power to silence or coerce people just as much as blackmail does. There's a good reason these are both forms of illegal, punishable speech. Because they can hurt others, even if you don't actually execute the threat.
I agree; I probably wouldn't go as far as "extremely disturbing." But at minimum it's pretty lame and cringe. I want our leaders to be held to a higher bar, and the head of YC should be above this stuff. The sad thing is that it feels fairly in character with what I've seen from Tan in the past.
can confirm this is taken almost word for word from "Hit 'em up", 2Pac's infamous and apparently (at least partially) sincere response to B.I.G.'s "Who shot ya?"
this song played an important part in the public exchange that concluded with both artists dead from fatal gunshot wounds.
the seemingly out of place "as a record label" portion of Tan's quote probably should have engendered some pause in the discerning reader.
Notch is Markus Presson, the creator of Minecraft. He got $2.5 billion in cash from Microsoft when he sold it. In the years since he had a whole lot of controversial tweets, but that didn't' seem to affect him due to his wealth.
it's already incredibly expensive for a developer to even go through the review process for a development, let alone build it. a vacancy tax would further deter developers from building in SF (as it's already happening due to the terrible review process)
That story is a bit dated. The California laws are forcing municipalities like SF to fix the review process and in fact a new plan was submitted in December and initially rejected before an updated plan was submitted at the end of December. The hope is that this fixes things and if it doesn’t SF is at risk of losing its zoning powers wholesale which may not be such a bad idea.
the story might be dated but the research that drove the story isn't dated, that's what i was trying to share. the action from the state and the municipalities was informed by a research project from UC Berkeley.
Correct, I was only highlighting that the news story itself is way late and not really relevant as news. The research around zoning laws and their impact on housing development was known probably 5-10 years ago if not more, the state law changes passed within the past 1-2 years ago, and we are in the middle of the time period of the state enforcing all municipalities to conform or lose zoning privileges and SF nominally claims to have ratified changes to be conformant (the initial plan was rejected by the state and they submitted a revision at the deadline)
no this research is new and came out like two years ago. it was a different take on the typical research about zoning. it basically looked at the time it took project to get approved. this was a novel approach (believe it or not)
There's no such thing as a property that can't find a renter, only a property whose rent is too high.
Many landlords are bad at math from what I've found. If you're asking for $2400 and no one is biting, it makes more sense to drop to $2200 than hold out for a month to try and get $2400, because at $2400 it will take a year to catch up.
Not with rent control. If we're in a low price market, it and a renter snags rent at a low price, he gets you locked in at that low price even when the market recovers.
Rent control incentivizes empty housing during bear markets.
This is true, rent control adds a complicated calculus to it. At first they were doing things like "first month free" to get around it, but the city caught on and made that against the rules too. I wonder if they've looked at how that affected vacancy rate.
> it unfairly punishes property owners in soft rental markets like the one we have now.
Eh? I mean, conversely, allowing the property industry to leave properties vacant unfairly punishes ~all other industries, along with the general public. What's special about the property industry here?
"We should leave people without anywhere to live, and harm the economy in general, to facilitate a small part of the economy" is a pretty weird argument.
(I do think that possibly some individual property investors believe that, rather than running a rather complex and highly regulated business, they are buying into a passive investment magical money machine. These people should probably consider just buying shares in a REIT, instead.)
as a lifelong tenant, i think it's time that the property owners got punished instead of renters. those poor property owners, what happens if we don't look after them?
It's not just that. It's the way property owners in renter-majority jurisdictions buy off just enough of the renters to keep other measures to raise housing costs on the books, which both erases the benefit of rent control even for the people who have it and screws over anyone without a rent controlled apartment twice.
Taxing vacancies breaks the rent logjam caused by financing agreements that allow you to tack missing rent onto the end but require recapitalization for lower rent.
Individuals and small landlords raise or lower rents in response to market conditions as they prioritize cash flow--it's very difficult to make up for lost rent. It's the private equity financed stuff that is artifically keeping rents too high as they have enough cash to ride across an empty property almost indefinitely.
Vacancy taxes stop the idiocy and force the private equity financed stuff to be market responsive as well.
Dan Preston is a NIMBY dressed in wolves clothes. Like most progressive agendas in SF they do very little to actually secure more housing. They make for great tag lines to pull support in and NOTHING changes.
> Dan Preston is a NIMBY dressed in wolves clothes.
Citation?
> They make for great tag lines to pull support in and NOTHING changes.
Two questions, independent
* Is that the fault of those advocating for change? Are they failing to introduce legislation or is their legislation not making out of committee or whatever due to opposition? Sincere question
* Is there a candidate which would walk the walk better on actually implementing the popular policies which Dan advocates for?
Preston used to represent me before redistricting happened.
His office is accessible and he very clearly cares about the work he is doing. I often see him walking to work and talking to constituents along the way.
557 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 353 ms ] threadThis sort of childish behaviour is not just dragging YC down but the startup community as a whole.
They might not know much about where Tan is coming from, but they know they work in a building where Moscone and Milk were assassinated.
What he wrote was more or less the limit to what you can say before it becomes a serious crime.
It wouldn’t be the marginally funded that’s for sure.
More likely the hottest startups with multiple offers.
What he said was bad, and wrong. But he just needs a scolding and some minor punishment and to then learn and not do it again. If it becomes a pattern then sure, that's a different thing.
How famous does someone have to be joke about a politician dying before it’s a problem? Tan is less famous than Charlie Sheen or Johnny Depp, who have joked about Trump dying.
Also, from Wikipedia: “Tan supported the 2022 recall campaign against progressive San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. Tan donated at least $100,000 to the effort. Tan blamed Boudin for physical attacks on Asians.”
There’s a fair argument that Tan is joking about violence against people whose policies are facilitating actual violence.
And remember Comedy equals tragedy plus time…
Apart from the ending how was the show mrs. Lincoln?
I doubt he meant it particularly literally, but there’s little question it was written with malice.
However, after acknowledging that Tan shouldn't have done this, it doesn't look serious. Drunken rants on Twitter are not important in and of themselves.
Instead of oddly defending them maybe you should follow his lead and not act like saying someone should die slowly is a joke.
Especially in this world where politicians have been subjected to credible death threats.
There’s a fair argument that Tan is joking about violence against people whose policies are facilitating actual violence.
Were that so, why would there be a rise in crime targeted at Asians across the the US in recent years?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-year-after-atlanta-and...
The corruption is now so deeply rooted and endemic throughout all of society, government and media it’s impossible to know where rooting it out could ever start and end. So probably the only way to turn the tide is for everyday hard working people to start rejecting it and rejecting to support it in any way, shape or form, everyday throughout their own lives. No single person or group can fix this and any claiming to be able to is both a liar and a fraud.
The doers are checking out, entire system designed to discriminate against talent.
"Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" –King Henry VII
"he's dead now so that's that" –Microsoft founder
Regardless, death threats are not protected under the first amendment, so you're even wrong under your idiotic assumptions of how the law works.
This is unironically the kind of shit that authoritarians love to say about journalists.
Tupac wasn’t kidding or putting on a show. He was killed by the people he refers to there not long after. Tupac meant those words literally.
Ever met a Tupac fan? They do seem to think this, yes.
It's bizarre to see the level of outrage against Tan quoting Tupac compared the the veneration you usually find of Tupac.
No one cares when the village idiot threatens to blow up China but when the President does it suddenly it's a problem? /s
That's not how people quote things though. That's how you get drunk and let the world know how you really feel about some people lol.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I have stopped thinking about HN's algorithms and just let it do its job.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39210947
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39172045
If you or anyone read those and have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Edit: I've turned off both the flags and flamewar detector on this article now, in keeping with the first rule of HN moderation, which is (I'm repeating myself but it's probably worth repeating) that we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of a story (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). Please note: that doesn't mean we don't moderate at all; what it means is that whatever we would normally do, we do less of it in such cases.
Normally we would never late a ragestorm like this stay on the front page—there's zero intellectual curiosity here, as the comments demonstrate. This kind of thing is obviously off topic for HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If it weren't, the site would consist of little else. Equally obvious is that this is why HN users are flagging the story. They're not doing anything different than they normally would.
All this goes double when a story has already had extensive discussion, and 10x when the article is sourcing its content from Hacker News itself, as this one is. That's absurd. But I'm willing to take the hit because the first rule of HN moderation is more important.
With that said, it is a shame that in cases like this, you may not even know about a post with hundreds of comments unless someone sends you a link. Have you thought about implementing a view that ignores the flamewar detection? This could even be a historical view, like https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2024-01-31 . The post in question was one of the highest upvoted submissions of the day and yet it's not on the first page of this link.
I fully agree with you that in the majority of cases these comments are not encouraging intellectual curiosity, I still do like reading the comments because I do find some interesting stuff there sometimes.
Yes. That exists in https://news.ycombinator.com/active, which is listed in https://news.ycombinator.com/lists, which is linked in the footer.
I also missed original post but I would flag it as I’m against internet dramas of any kind. And I get it that many people are interested in this kind of politics but I don’t think they recognize that there are many who couldn’t care less.
This is the response I’d personally expect and moderation context and how it unfolds is the interesting part to me.
There are plenty of unmoderated, or less moderated, places for if we want that chaos. Both have their place.
Freedom for me but not for thee.
"Oh but that's differe.." fuck off
There's plenty of people in this very thread who profess a sympathy for Tan's causes but think his drunken remarks are deplorable and reflect poorly on him, even if not legally actionable. I'm among them.
Wagon-circling is a sad pathology of politics. Nobility requires that we rise above it.
'Added District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan: “I will waive rent for living in his head.”' Absolutely savage clapback.
I just hope everyone outraged analyzes their own speech. I hold a lot of opinions outside the bounds of cocktail conversation, but I was having cocktails with my (blue city, professional) friends and they made a joke about someone needing to assassinate a certain right wing presidential candidate and everyone laughed really hard. The way she said it was funny and I laughed along but it’s easy to have outrage when you want it.
What he said won’t cause someone to kill any of those people. Thats just nonsense.
However, ranting drunk and incoherent publicly as the CEO of company shows terrible character.
I have seen this a lot lately in online discussions of homelessness and people accused of crime. It's very unsettling.
That is the context of why Mr Tan wrote that -- there's a popular narrative that specific individuals are complicit in crime and homelessness in San Francisco. This leads to lots of ad hominem and in my view rises to the level of conspiracy theory in many -- it's not like every problem is the fault of a single office holder or even a "cabal" of them. Voting against someone or supporting different candidates is one thing. Calling them solely responsible for all that you consider evil, escalating to the level of death threats, is quite another.
And that's just politicians. It's also routine to see people call for violence on homeless people or people accused of crime.
Let's not forget, there is a multi-dimensional spectrum in between, nobody is consistent across the spectrum, it is possible and often beneficial to speculate non-seriously, plenty of ~good people support intentional killing by our military if it has a well crafted (by literal professional thought shapers), just-so story to accompany it, and so forth and so on.
Optimal gameplay is difficult. Even aspiring to it is difficult.
I see a lot of declarations that it is bad, inexcusable, disgusting, ect. What I dont see is what people think the implications or consequences of that determination are. When someone says that, what do they want to happen?
Do they just want other people to acknowledge it was bad, and then everyone goes on with their life? Do the police make them wear a scarlet letter or send them out into the wilderness. Does it mean that people should unfollow them on twitter?
he should lose his job
Then we are still left with an adult (who happens to be a CEO) who thought that it would be a rational thing to tweet that and couldn't predict the outcome of it.
I would have expected that to be almost worse to people here. And no, alcohol is not an excuse for that. Drinking enough not to be able to rationally think about whether that is a good idea anymore is a confirmation of it.
Anyone who knows Gary knows he’s a (relatively) gentle human being. I can’t imagine him hurting a fly.
His tweets seem totally out of character compared to the Gary Tan I personally knew. Maybe he has changed?
I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Post Elon acquisition, many influential tech figures have discovered that being a provocateur on Twitter/X is more consistently successful at building an audience than genuine insight.
I thought the idea that timeline sorting order on social media sites is deterministic or scrutable to the viewer is long dead by now - it's not been the case for at least a good decade now!
The players and ordering has changed only.
Eh? Trump was never there post Elon acquisition. I don’t think that timing makes sense. The tone of Twitter has been like this for years if not the beginning.
It's human nature. People are social creatures and they love to join some fight as long as they have their own comrades with them.
My wife spent years on Twitter embroiled in a very long running and bitter political / rights issue. She was always thoughtful, insightful etc. She'd spend 10 minutes rewording a single tweet to make sure it got the real point across in a way that wasn't inflammatory, and that had a good chance of being persuasive. With 5k followers, I think her most popular tweets might get a few hundred likes. The one time she got drunk and angry, she got thousands of supportive reactions, and her followers increased by a large % overnight. And that scared her. She saw the way "the crowd" was pushing her. Rewarding her for the smell of blood in the water.
Audience capture is real. Chronically online people with polarised followers will play to their crowd. Inch by inch, day by day, as social creatures, we automatically and subliminally seek approval from our social group. I've seen this type of dynamic push people into the extremes.
My wife got out. First she asked me to block twitter on all of her devices. A month of cold turkey later, she quit for good ,and she's far happier for it.
I know that was the case for me. I spent hundreds of hours of reading blog posts by intelligent, optimistic, philosophically transgressive at times but not actually rude or crass folks, all trying to grapple with how to live best in this world. I think this reshaped me to be a much better person in a whole bunch of ways. Very happy for it.
Natural responses to this would be "I don't like drama" and I would say the same, unfortunately this isn't the case for most of humans.
Should Gary Tan quit over this? Of course not. I think the fact that people put others on a pedestal is a mistake in the first place.
Vile and disgusting? Yes. Shocking? Absolutely not. Sorry that your buddy lacks empathy.
"State subjective perspective as objective fact. Cast shame upon the OP for not pre-aligning with said belief. Put the responsibility on the OP to prove that they are not deserving of shame."
I grew up in an environment where this kind communication was sort of the default, hence why I was curious and wanted to drill down a bit and give it some thought. Of course, many people agree that Twitter is more unhealthy than healthy. But that's not entirely the point here, I think.
This is the kind of shitpost most people would be able to get away with, but Tan is now too important -- and will have to curate his communications more. Especially if he's going to take such a strong position against incumbent politicians cautious of their own images.
It also feels like a smart political play by his targets to discredit him. They were probably waiting for him to slip up and say something like this.
Anyways, his position is a sympathetic one - the city is not well managed. I say this as someone who frequently disagrees with Tan.
The fact it’s a Tupac lyric is not like common knowledge. I doubt a random poll of Twitter users would show most people would know the reference immediately.
It’s an election year. People will use the tweet as they see fit. Voters will ultimately decide whether it matters or not concerning candidates who have received money from Tan. But I don’t think this is the last we’ll hear about it.
This is a touch paranoid.
it was misinterpreted, he thought people would get a reference that they clearly did not
As a general matter, people should spend more time saying what they mean instead of engaging in meta-discourse of quoting cool references to each other for vibes. It's an unhealthy way to communicate; online discourse is totally irony-poisoned and (imho) this is partly why there's such a breakdown of social trust.
And really, don't you think throwing out lines like 'die slow motherfuckers' in public for cool points is a little...juvenile?
I'm vaguely aware of him, and his name and how he died are fairly well known, but I couldn't name a single track if my life dependent on it.
But even with artists "everyone" listens to, most people's listening is limited enough that assuming people know their lyrics would be stupid.
How is he important? Would a person on the street know who he is?
I guess this goes with the idea that he can wish death on people and be an asshole but that’s ok, as long as it’s hidden.
Assuming he is so critical or important should the public then know better what his thoughts or attitudes are?
“Gosh, wish someone handed him a twitter account earlier so we knew before signing a contract or something…”
On the other hand one can take a more compassionate view and say maybe he had a mental breakdown or some trauma. Not knowing or caring about his importance, I’d default to that, as I would most strangers in that situation.
The only kind of person who’d ever go that far is someone with a very fragile ego
It’s a bit rich
They wouldn’t rant like that in real life on a bus with a captive audience.
If anything this is healthy.
Having not used twitter, is this easy one-click thing that takes no time nor thought, or is he having to switch screens and spend time on doing this?
(Technically I became a twit yesterday because nitter stopped working and there is just one person's posts that I like to check up on, so I ended up giving in and logging in... :( But I still don't know the UI well enough to answer my own question :) )
In literally the next sentence:
> the level of avoidable human misery caused by the dysfunction of politics [...] sickening [...] utterly enraged [...] there's a piece of your soul missing
So you'll deploy extreme emotional hyperbole, but not "violent rhetoric"? Seems like those are two rather nearby points on the same spectrum, no? Tan just slipped a bit off the edge. If you're going to deny someone's soul, it's not that big a leap to wish them dead.
I don't think so, no. Those two things are miles apart.
It's just that Tan forgot the rules in the heat of the moment. And so would the grandparent poster after a few drinks, I suspect.
To wit: cool the fuck down, everyone. Shitposting on the internet is a slippery slope to an accidental death threat.
Or they can just agree with Gary that correlation is never causation.
A lot of people say they never thought their neighbor could hurt someone, after the fact.
An earlier report from the same news site describes the candidates that he is supporting as 'moderate': https://missionlocal.org/2024/01/y-combinator-ceo-garry-tans...
I'm a little surprised though that a tech person of Asian ethnicity would be interested in boxing, good for him for going against all the ingrained stereotypes.
I always judged people based on how they act when drunk. Always stick with people who are happy drunk never angry/violent drunk
All of those things tend to reveal truths about ourselves that we normally don't expose.
Everybody has a bad day though so I did gave him the benefit of the doubt, but I'm really not surprised by this tweet "scandal" at all and the way he's dealing with it.
OR
like you said, maybe he is on some behavioral or cognitive decline. Another Lee Holloway situation [1]
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline...
We can disagree on politics, but calling for the death of politicians publicly — especially as an influential member of an already regionally important company — is disgusting.
This behavior cannot be tolerated. I don’t care how inebriated someone is.
I say this as someone who worked for a YC company (that is still in business) for almost a decade.
Ah, so if it's a quote, it doesn't matter, because even though you've decided when to use them, they're not "your words"
Thanks, going to publish press releases with Cannibal Corpse lyrics going forward.
Whatever, it's not intended to mean killing someone. But you have to be a colossal dumbfuck to say it like that to a bunch of people wise in the ways of the street political machine.
The problem isn't referencing something or someone, but doing so expecting those on the receiving end to know the reference and not take it at face value.
One, without context, is just a face. The other, without context, promotes murder. Context matters of course, but so does the actual quote itself without the context.
What a load of bullshit. He put names of specific people in his tweet who have subsequently received threatening letters in paper mail.
The intended audience heard the message loud and clear.
I wonder if you took that message the same way if Tran said "Die slow, Rene Wiltord" and you received personal paper mail afterwards that said "Tran was right. Die, Rene."
Pretty much the only part left intact was "die slowly".
This isn't a quote, this is an allusion.
SF politics is a clown show on all sides - Garry has lost serious credibility that he could play some part in cleaning it up. I think he knows that.
Whether people in the US are extremely oversenstive to tweets and words, or that the tweets and words have the power to suddenly make regular people hateful and violent - neither of those states are normal.
Either that, or the country really is a few Twitter sparks away from civil war, which again would... not be a normal state of things.
If the other side said it, oh dear. We'd best remove them from their job, their payroll, shun them forever, and make sure they never have power again.
I think the correct approach is to have a conversation, to seek an apology, and to hold the party to being better. Strike one; it's water under the bridge.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
Some of us have enough principles to complain even when "our" side does horrible stuff. When a friend does it, I might be more inclined to talk to them in private rather than blast them in public, but that's a mix of "I am more likely to change their mind if I don't antagonize them by making this public" and "I have absolutely no social media presence, so me calling someone out doesn't really make a difference."
> If the other side said it, oh dear. We'd best remove them from their job, their payroll, shun them forever, and make sure they never have power again.
Care to share some examples?
Go ahead and post it yourself, it seems reasonable, yes?
Are we sure about that? There are politicians who have coordinated/enabled things with consequences that would justify capital punishment if someone believes in that as an option. For example, from a raw moral perspective a reasonable person could support executing the entire congressional Aye vote for the US sending the army into Afghanistan.
That would be a terrible mistake, because the incentives don't check out, politics would become a bloodbath when people make honest mistakes, bloody vengeance helps no-one and there is a plausible question around whether the person voting is making a personal decision or just trying to channel their voters. But since it is a superficially reasonable position I assume people would say that sort of thing regularly. To argue it out and learn why it is a bad idea, if nothing else.
While I'd argue for a normal person that posting something like that would just fly under the radar and disappear into the aether of the internet, the same does not apply to someone who heads a large publicly visible company, and who posts publicly on an account associated (implicitly) with that company.
1. Votes come at the end of a process starting with someone calling for action. Has to be a first person to bring the idea up; and Twitter is as good a place for public debate as we have. (If only people could master the longform paragraph, or even essay-length debate and move to somewhere a bit more nuanced.)
2. Reflecting on the "Die slow motherfuckers" for a little while - Tan didn't actually make a call for action. Exactly what that means is ambiguous, and it is without a doubt poor form.
> someone who heads a large publicly visible company
If the board wants to sack him I could certainly see that happening. Although as a practical matter, I don't think this is a sustainable standard. A good CEO is worth their weight in gold, sacking them over being a Twitter troll from time to time seems like a bad call. Musk is an example; both a troll and also a pretty amazing CEO. The right thing to do might be to tolerate the situation unless the pressure gets overwhelming.
On that point we've been tolerating outward displays of political speech from corporations for a while. I'm against it both on principle and because it is typically left-wing-aligned but since it happens I don't see why this sort of political diatribe is needs to be stepped on. Dude has political opinions. We all do.
One benefit I see of it is normalizing the presence of historical out-groups (racial minorities, gender minorities, etc.) that have always existed in society.
But, in practice, the "support" can be paper-thin and the chasing of support from out-groups simply as a means to push profit margins is sometimes obvious and thinly-veiled enough to the point of growing discontent towards the groups that they're ostensibly supporting.
This sort of critique (even if I can't guarantee its accuracy) is a bit more nuanced and feels a little bit less cargo-culty than just left/right.
There exist people who see benefits of any political stances. That is why the stance is taken. Arguing about whether it is a benefit is at the core of politics. For example, Mr Tan probably sees benefit from certain SF supervisors resigning immediately and is frustrated that they don't.
But it is better to keep businesses out of that, I believe we're better off if they are relatively neutral and thoughtless engines to achieve highly specific goals.
> But, in practice, the "support" can be paper-thin ...
1) This situation is also paper thin. I'd bet money that Tan doesn't do anything that would cause the supervisors to die a slow death. Most attack on politicians are.
2) I've had it made quite clear to me in companies I've worked at that if there was a candidate with different skin colour or gender to me they'd be before me in the line for hiring and promotions. That is paper thin support, but it is due to political ideology and I still don't like it. I would like companies to promote equal treatment and be scrupulously neutral on politics.
It's literally illegal to give death threats (not that I think this qualifies as a particularly serious one). But that's the difference between this and your argument with politicians rattling sabres. (Just to make it clear, I don't feel so strongly about the whole situation, but I do think making false equivalences is misleading)
Can we all just like I dunno chill out a bit? Who cares, and how does this affect me?
https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/trump-pinata-school/
https://am870theanswer.com/all/la-antifa-group-hangs-trump-i...
https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/donald-trump-effigy-hangs...
https://www.coloradoan.com/picture-gallery/news/2021/01/01/f...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3500960/I-hate-Trum...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/fibonacciblue/31620818443
https://www.newsweek.com/protest-trump-doll-guillotine-outsi...
And that's just the last president. If you search, you'll find plenty of similar examples for Obama and Bush too. Going further back than that will probably be harder to find records for, but yeah we have a long tradition of wishing death on our politicians and expressing that quite loudly. And almost all the time, it's certainly legal, whether or not the local community is keen on it varies.
Funny. That makes it sound like USA is the USSR from the childhood jokes about the difference between USA and the USSR.
Your comment would be just fine without that bit.
A while back somebody put up some stickers with his face on an octopus and the tentacles holding his various assets. The Twitter mafia went all out saying this was clearly racist and totally unacceptable in civil society, because of some prior art where an asian individual was offensively caricaturized atop an octopus. I tired to point out that the octopus has been used as a symbol of a many faceted organization since forever, and the racist aspect of the prior art wasn’t the octopus but rather the ridiculous caricaturization. The picture of Gary used in his octopus was a totally normal photo, so the racist prior art was of no consequence. Gary somehow saw my comment and decided to launch a tweet thread telling his hundreds of thousands of followers what a terrible racist horrible idiotic person I am, which resulted in a huge hacking campaign being launched against various little personal projects I had posted on my Twitter.
Ugh.
I don’t use Twitter anymore.
Garry Tan should know better. As an earlier article mentioned [1], he was previously quoted as saying "this kind of stuff should have zero place in San Francisco politics," referring to an activist's taunt that millionaires and landlords should be guillotined.
[1] https://missionlocal.org/2024/01/garry-tan-death-wish-sf-sup...
But him saying <specific, named people> should "die slow" shuold be taken as just a joke, bro.
Hmmm.
Elsewhere in the world, only retroactively - in retellings, in legends, in K12 history lessons. The nice, patriotic fiction of good person saying something, galvanizing the population, and then large changes happening.
> It's actually a cultural and historical norm.
It's not. Broadcast media are barely 100 years old. The ability for any rando to broadcast thoughts outside their direct social circles exist for less than two decades.
Randos telling other randos within their social circles that they want bad things to happen to public personas - that is a cultural and historical norm. Nothing ever coming out of it, except maybe said randos landing in shit if the word reaches the public personas - that too is the cultural and historical norm. For such talk to be an actual danger to anyone else, and especially the subject of discussion? That is a very recent historical and geographical aberration (or rather, I suspect believing such talk to be dangerous is the aberration).
It should absolutely be unacceptable behavior for any CEO to do something like this. If I can get fired for it, they damn well should too.
We're pretty much there, yup.
But stochastic terrosism[1] isn't a new or unique thing.
Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated after similar remarks were said by Netanyahu[2], which was arguably a pivoting point towards the war in Gaza we have today.
Public figures talking about specific people dying should always be treated seriously. It's not disturbing that we do.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Yitzhak_Rabin...
If you can't tell the difference, you don't belong in public spaces or forums.
If "XXX of party YYY is a disgusting piece of human garbage" than I don't think that should be called terrorism.
Specific example that I linked:
>Rallies organized by Likud and other right-wing groups featured depictions of Rabin in the crosshairs of a gun. In July 1995, Netanyahu led a mock funeral procession featuring a coffin and hangman's noose at an anti-Rabin rally where protesters chanted, "Death to Rabin".
>Netanyahu denied any intention to incite violence
Rabin was subsequently shot dead.
The definition in Wikipedia says:
>Stochastic terrorism refers to political or media figures publicly demonizing a person or group in such a way that it inspires supporters of the figures to commit a violent act against the target of the speech.
Of course, direct "kill this person" language is not a requirement for that. "Won't someone rid me of this meddlesome priest?"[1] is a famous example from the 12th century.
>If "XXX of party YYY is a disgusting piece of human garbage" than I don't think that should be called terrorism.
By itself, it wouldn't be. However, if XXX of party YYY subsequently starts getting death threats or other harrassment as a result of this statement being made, there is a problem.
Which language a public person uses to indicate a target to their followers highly depends on the context and history of the particular public person and the group they are addressing.
Hopefully, you understand why doxxing[2] is problematic. There are real-life consequences for the person being doxxed. However, the language is perfectly benign; after all, there is no explicit call to action in an address, a phone number, a name.
Stochastic terrorism similarly leverages context and publicity to highlight targets. It's not about how you would interpret the message; it's about how the target audience interprets it.
In Tran's case, both the message (die slowly) and the target audience's interpretation (a call to harrasment) indicate that there was no miscommunicaiton.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing
How can you control that, though? Are people responsible for the mental state of all their followers? Or do they have to ensure that every utterance is so milquetoast that no action would ever come of it?
I'd have less of an issue if these rules were to be applied in a politically neutral fashion, but we know they never will be.
No. There is an extent, however, to which leaders are responsible for the actions of their followers.
They know what audience they're speaking to.
>Or do they have to ensure that every utterance is so milquetoast that no action would ever come of it?
False dichotomy.
They have to not encourage their followers to commit violence against others.
The entire point of someone engaging in this would be plausible deniability; the ambiguity is a part of it.
>I'd have less of an issue if these rules
Which rules? It's not like we're discussing legislation here.
We're discussing a concept.
>a politically neutral fashion
Oh, how curious. Do you seem to imply that certain political groups are more likely to be accused of inciting violence against individuals or groups?
Perhaps with a documented track record of spikes in violence following public statements?
Hmmm.
Yes, like Maxine Waters committing "stochastic terrorism" against the Supreme Court.
Or maybe you're talking about BLM?
At the very least, tweeting bat shit crazy stuff while drunk is nothing a CEO should be excused for, at the very least it is a sign of aerious self-control and judgement issues. Regardless of what politicak side said CEO, or anyone else really, is on.
Also, the name of a great song by Wang Chung. I had never heard it until asking Google to play To Live And Die in LA and it played the Wang Chung song instead of Tupac.
Reflects poorly on YC as well. Aparently their president didn't read the PG essay on keeping a low profile, especially online.
Good thing so, nowadays everybody openly shows you who they are and where they stand. Back the days, people hid their dark sides a lot better.
Can't wait to be blameless for the lyrics for Necropedophile showing up in an email to the CEO.
There might be a reason the Tupac reference didn't exactly come through.
Perhaps because he replaced all the people Tupac wished dead in his rap song with the names of SF politicians.
In the spirit of Tran's excuse, I only wish that his words were taken as seriously as Tupac's when it comes to consequences for saying them.
this song played an important part in the public exchange that concluded with both artists dead from fatal gunshot wounds.
the seemingly out of place "as a record label" portion of Tan's quote probably should have engendered some pause in the discerning reader.
A discerning reader would discern that the word record was missing from Tran's allusion to Tupac's song.
Here's the full quote, in its entirety:
>Fuck Chan Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a label and motherfucking crew
>And if you are down with Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a crew fuck you too
>Die slow motherfuckers
Compare and contrast with Tupac's lyrics:
>Fuck Mobb Deep, fuck Biggie
>Fuck Bad Boy as a staff, record label and as a motherfuckin' crew
>And if you want to be down with Bad Bo, then fuck you too*
>Chino XL, fuck you too
>All you motherfuckers, fuck you too (take money, take money)
>All of y'all motherfuckers, fuck you, die slow, motherfucker
The only part that was left intact is "die slow".
Which is hardly a quote. More of a violent, incoherent ramble.
> In 2022, Preston proposed a ballot measure to tax vacant housing in San Francisco.
I think I might just love the guy. Thanks for the awareness campaign Garry!
i’ve seen an unusual number of multifamily properties listed all over SF last few months.
This idea that rising property values is a God-given right needs to stop.
Capitalism is supposed to work BOTH directions--up and down.
market has demonstrated plenty it can lower rents as is
there’s plenty of half empty apartments all over soma and mission bay
If it’s set where it’s cheaper to hang onto the vacancy until rents rise again and finish the build then, it’s a problem.
i tend to favor vacancy tax, but this won't fix the problem with developers. SF needs to reform their review process. this is TLDR but there was a big study about this: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/us/san-francisco-housing....
it's already incredibly expensive for a developer to even go through the review process for a development, let alone build it. a vacancy tax would further deter developers from building in SF (as it's already happening due to the terrible review process)
Many landlords are bad at math from what I've found. If you're asking for $2400 and no one is biting, it makes more sense to drop to $2200 than hold out for a month to try and get $2400, because at $2400 it will take a year to catch up.
Rent control incentivizes empty housing during bear markets.
Eh? I mean, conversely, allowing the property industry to leave properties vacant unfairly punishes ~all other industries, along with the general public. What's special about the property industry here?
"We should leave people without anywhere to live, and harm the economy in general, to facilitate a small part of the economy" is a pretty weird argument.
(I do think that possibly some individual property investors believe that, rather than running a rather complex and highly regulated business, they are buying into a passive investment magical money machine. These people should probably consider just buying shares in a REIT, instead.)
It's not just that. It's the way property owners in renter-majority jurisdictions buy off just enough of the renters to keep other measures to raise housing costs on the books, which both erases the benefit of rent control even for the people who have it and screws over anyone without a rent controlled apartment twice.
Individuals and small landlords raise or lower rents in response to market conditions as they prioritize cash flow--it's very difficult to make up for lost rent. It's the private equity financed stuff that is artifically keeping rents too high as they have enough cash to ride across an empty property almost indefinitely.
Vacancy taxes stop the idiocy and force the private equity financed stuff to be market responsive as well.
Citation?
> They make for great tag lines to pull support in and NOTHING changes.
Two questions, independent
* Is that the fault of those advocating for change? Are they failing to introduce legislation or is their legislation not making out of committee or whatever due to opposition? Sincere question
* Is there a candidate which would walk the walk better on actually implementing the popular policies which Dan advocates for?
His office is accessible and he very clearly cares about the work he is doing. I often see him walking to work and talking to constituents along the way.
The demonization of the man is shocking…
You cannot remain CEO if you do.
This is not a controversial position to have.
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan's online rant spurs threats to supes, police reports
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39205676
The current thread, however, ended up spending 8 hours on the front page, far more than we'd ever normally allow for this class of story.
Here are the explanations I've posted about this so far:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231365
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39224560
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39210947
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39172045
If anyone reads those and still has a question which isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.