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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

There is a wide range of people on HN. This community is not defined by its worst actors—who inevitably appear in any place on the internet where the doors are left open, as ours are.

Rather, it's defined by an overwhelmingly decent majority of participants, whom you're not welcome to slander here.

I notice that of all of you complaining about how racist that comment was, not one of you bothered to flag it. If you won't even do that much to help the community, in my view you forfeit the right to complain about it.

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No, that is not what I said. When people say overtly awful things, they are downvoted. No one defines HN by those.

The problem is the well intentioned but naive opinions that are upvoted and popular. Do you remember the popular comments from the GitHub diversity posts? Any diversity post for that matter.

The demographic here is mostly male. In a homogenous environment, regardless of which combination of race, gender or anything else, people have blindspots. This remains true when the majority of participants are decent. For example, a group of polite dudes can create an environment full of casual sexism.

Lastly, I flag insults and one line jokes. Maybe you can help us understand what gets flags and what gets downvotes.

However, I am happy the comment is removed. You are right, maybe I don't give the moderation enough credit.

If you believe, as I do, that subtle (and sometimes over) racism and sexism are real problems for the HN community, it's especially important:

(a) not to dismiss HN as a bastion of racism and sexism, as doing so concedes the whole site to those ideas

(b) to challenge racist and sexist arguments on the site both reliably and civilly.

Most of the people putting those arguments forward are trolls, and are seen as such by the site (watch what gets flagged). One of the most effective strategies race and gender trolls have is to rile up thoughtful people so that they make dumb, angry arguments. It creates a kind of autoimmune disorder on the site. Don't enable them.

I don't think they are trolls. The comments are similar to what I hear in real life and I assume they get ample upvotes from HNers because they are near the top.

If you always have the patience for a and b then god bless you!

It's a thousand strangers. My life doesn't get a scintilla better if I can accurately characterize the people who write misogynistic comments on HN as 68% troll or 49% troll.

But the task of reliably and civilly challenging prejudice here gets a lot easier the higher that percentage gets, so for my own benefit, I prefer to dial it up as high as it can go, and I'm happier for it.

You can relax on challenging racism on HN sometimes. It gets tiresome! You can even walk away entirely. But please don't trash the site on the way out --- that makes the job harder for everyone else taking the time to call out toxic bullshit here.

You can't relax on being calm and civil, even in response to comments that don't deserve it. Think about it this way, because this is probably true: every time we fuck up and write a nasty, shrill response to a racist comment, we generate a light-grey negative-rated rebuttal to racism. If we're particularly bad about responding, we'll park that comment next to a racist comment that keeps a neutral score just out of sympathy.

Please don't do that.

You can't relax on being calm and civil, even in response to comments that don't deserve it. Think about it this way, because this is probably true: every time we fuck up and write a nasty, shrill response to a racist comment, we generate a light-grey negative-rated rebuttal to racism. If we're particularly bad about responding, we'll park that comment next to a racist comment that keeps a neutral score just out of sympathy.

Hacker News! Where reacting to racism is worse than actual racism.

You can call it whatever you want, but if you make uncivil arguments, it's a fact that:

(a) your posts are going to get flagged, and people are going to see that they got flagged, and your "anti-racist" comments are going be penalized, often farther than the racist ones, and

(b) you're eventually going to get banned from the site

You can huff off to Twitter like the rest of the cool kids when that happens, but I'll observe that there's already a sizable contingent of cool kids claiming that HN is a bastion of misogyny and racism, and Lobsters is no closer to taking over the world for their efforts --- would that it were otherwise!

I guess I would sum this up as follows:

This is a real problem, and it doesn't have to be about you.

This is the sort of comment that violates the Principle of Charity (which we're about to add to the HN guidelines). You can construct that provocative an interpretation of tptacek's comment if you choose to—you can construct any interpretation of anything—but it doesn't come close to being the strongest plausible reading of what he said, and that's the only one you should be responding to here.

http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html

If you don't want to comment in that spirit, please don't comment. It diminishes mutual respect.

Are tp and you applying the principle of charity?

Here are two comments in this very thread that are downvoted. This is not unique to HN, this is a symptom in society that many women and PoCs have written about. I'd be happy to share some links if you are interested.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12013600

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12013616

ps oriental? I would have chosen a different link. :) In all seriousness, this is the cultural sensitivity and empathy HN lacks. Having been to South Carolina, I'm not surprised by outdated language, but I hope HN mods know better.

You can't seem to see the difference between bad comment and bad argument. In a thread that could be fairly characterized as "Hacker News tearing to bits a racist comment", you found two bad comments on the thread whose authors happen to agree with you --- and, from what it looks like, the whole rest of the site --- and tried to spin that into a narrative. Why would you do that?

My posts reinforces your previous point. Instead of disagreeing with what I write, why not take a second to find common ground? Applying the principle of charity helps all of us. It is a better way.

Add another example from this thread. This is why tech forums are not inclusive.

https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/12016262.json

Thanks for this well-put summary. I've been working on an enhancement of the HN guidelines and may plunder some of your wording.

Daniel, have you considered the other point of view? These comments affect members of HN differently?

http://www.robot-hugs.com/tone-policing/

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Tone_police

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/More_flies_with_honey

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