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Comment by ben0x539 | Hacker News Reader

> The main concern here is pure politics: the conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, gender, class, and religion

I feel like trying to ban discussion of these conflicts will lead to the same outcome that reddit's weird "free speech" policy had, if more subtly. If Hacker News is the place where racist, misogynist, fascist hackers can feel particularly safe, that's going to be the kind of people you attract, at the expense of marginalized hackers.

There is no neutral option around this kind of politics and I'll be sad to see HN throw marginalized people under the bus to ensure the comfort of the privileged.

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If Hacker News is the place where racist, misogynist, fascist hackers can feel particularly safe, that's going to be the kind of people you attract, at the expense of marginalized hackers.

I appear to be the top ranked openly female member here and my experience of HN dramatically improved when Dan Gackle (aka dang) took over the role as lead moderator of the site. I have faith in his judgment, plus I have substantial soft skills myself. I do not believe he is going to do anything to shape HN into the sort of thing you are positing here.

I am also openly a woman. And I'm probably one of the lowest-ranked members on here, precisely because this community is already so fucking much a "place where racist, misogynist, fascist hackers can feel perfectly safe". So i only come over here when something is really interesting or really appalling, because it is a toxic awful cesspit of a community and Mr. Gackle doesn't seem to have done any better than any of the other mods in that regard. IDK why you have any more faith in him than in any of the rest of them.

I have recently noticed multiple women with longstanding accounts that were (mostly or entirely) inactive for apparently a very long time but which have recently started being active again. I also have exchanged emails with Dan Gackle on a number of occasions and he has banned accounts for making ugly personal attacks at me that were completely out of line (and gender based) and he has also engaged in more limited, but useful interventions.

There are other things that I am not willing to comment on publicly, but which inform my opinion.

I am sorry your experience has been so negative. I certainly had a pretty difficult time at one time, but I have always had a pretty good opinion of HN and I felt I had reason to work on the problem from my end, since I am good at certain things. I believe it is generally getting better and women are generally being received differently here than what happened at one time.

I feel certain that after gawking in horror at the trainwreck on this thread i will just go back to quietly pretending HN doesn't exist for another few months, because i cannot even. And i'll continue to warn literally every marginalized, subaltern, or otherwise vulnerable person in tech i know to stay the fuck away from here.

Looking through your last couple comments you seem like you're constantly looking to get into political arguments by writing inflammatory comments mostly regarding gender. I'm not surprised that when you fish for a political argument, you end up attracting the worst that the site has to offer.

It would be super nice if you did not do this. I assure you, women who have been here a long time have good reason to have baggage. Her approach isn't productive at the moment, but your comment will read to quite a lot of women as victim blaming and drive them away.

This undermines the progress that some people here have work incredibly hard for.

RIGHT OVER HERE there are HN users spouting the usual disproven gender-essentialist bullshit about women in STEM fields: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13101949

I have no idea why you feel so much more comfortable at this place than MeFi - MeFi isn't good, by any stretch of the imagination, but at least when people get banned for horrific misogyny or anti-Semitism people don't come along later and say "but they had great technical contributions!"

I understand your anger. But I do not understand why you feel some need to take it out on me.

I do not need to justify to you why I think mefi is far worse than hn. Feel free to go hang there and stop adding your toxic comments to hn, like you said you would prior to deciding to come back and dump on me some more.

a) I wasn't taking it out on you; b) I don't generally comment at MeFi either, and for most of the same reasons?

It sure comes across like you are taking it out on me.

The comments you claim would not happen on mefi would likely get deleted. They don't here. That does not make mefi better. It just makes it easier to pretend it is or to be fooled by appearances.

dang doing moderation has definitely improved the place and I sure don't want to ascribe sinister motivations to him. I hope it'll work out okay! But I'm worried.

The concern of well intentioned individuals is a potential force for good. I wouldn't want you to simply let your guard down and I have certainly argued with dang myself.

Best.

The thing is, the people who are being racist, misogynist, fascist, etc. are also being political. And so their posts will get flagged too.

I think the idea is, basically, that rather than "calling out" these things and getting into a big argument about them each and every time they happen, you just (indicate to the mods that you want to) blow them out of the sky.

> The thing is, the people who are being racist, misogynist, fascist, etc. are also being political. And so their posts will get flagged too.

No offense to the HN moderation team, but I have very low confidence that this is going to be how it works out. :/

How does one contact the moderators to let them know that a comment is racist/sexist/whatever? I don't see any "flag" UI at the comment level, and I don't know who the mods are by name.

If you click on the timestamp of a comment, you should see a 'flag' link. I don't recall, though it might be karma gated. You can also reach the mods via email to hn [at] ycombinator.com.

>I feel like trying to ban discussion of these conflicts will lead to the same outcome that reddit's weird "free speech" policy had, if more subtly. If Hacker News is the place where racist, misogynist, fascist hackers can feel particularly safe, that's going to be the kind of people you attract, at the expense of marginalized hackers.

How are marginalized people "thrown under a bus" here? Not allowing discussions about race and gender is not equivalent to that at all.

I can barely tell the gender or race of anyone here.

I know a lot of people here. I know their genders, I know their races, in some cases I know their sexual orientations. Because they have talked about personal experiences here. But the world is fundamentally and inescapably political and this policy will, full-stop, be used as a bat to silence those people and prevent them from sharing their personal experiences when those experiences threaten the white-empowering, male-empowering status quo. There is no world in which it won't be.

Consider an article about discrimination in the hiring practices of startups. Is that "political" under this policy? My guess it is. And so out come the flags and the status quo is reinforced by the thunderous claim that it's Just Not A Problem--because, whether or not flags mean "this is bad and obviously unimportant" to 'dang, that's what they mean to the audience. And so, incrementally, the culture here gets worse. And worse. And worse.

Hacker news does not have the responsibility to improve or stop discrimination that happens outside the website. There is barely any discrimination that occurs on this website. Again, the majority of people cannot tell the race or gender of others unless it is explicitly stated.

And those issues are not just a one sided affair. It is politics after all. HN is impartial in that it silences both sides of that story (the other side being affirmative action or racial discrimination in favor of those who are supposedly oppressed).

With an assumption of good faith, let me try another way to express this to you: silence is, functionally even if not intentionally, support of the status quo. As such, the experiences of white men are implicitly apolitical under this policy and will be allowed. The experiences of women and minorities are implicitly political under this policy and will be flagged as such.

Is the incipient problem, for those not so fortunate as to be born white and male, perhaps a little clearer now? (And, to be clear, I am a white male. I'm just not blind to the concerns of others.)

Most of Hacker News contains shared experiences where identity level experiences are irrelevant. That appears to be the point of Hacker News becoming apolitical to me, to avoid bringing in experiences that can differ between people and cause arguments.

I'm not a white male and I never think to bring up issues affecting my group to the discussion. It doesn't brother me that those issues are barely brought up.

> Most of Hacker News contains shared experiences where identity level experiences are irrelevant.

I would suggest that maybe this isn't true for people who aren't you. And who aren't me. Many things, like getting a job as a software developer or talking to my boss--things I think you and I can probably agree are likely shared experiences?--feel very apolitical for me. And it is understandable that they feel that way: because I am the beneficiary of the biases extant in society. I get the breaks. It's "normal" for me to look around and see nobody having it easier than I do and when I fuck up (god, do I fuck up!), I am not othered so that my actions reflect on my race or gender, but on me specifically.

Such an "apolitical" world, such an "unbiased" world, may not exist for, say, women or African-Americans or trans folks. And sweeping that realization under the rug is, by itself, a political act in favor of the continuation of the incentives and the policies that create that situation that lets me be comfortable and "apolitical" and ensures that other folks cannot be either.

Nothing is apolitical: it just may work to your benefit. And it usually works to mine--I am fortunate to have the grace to understand just how lucky a dice roll I got, and that's why I can't be on-board with policies that want to prevent discussion of whether the dice are loaded or not.

> Many things, like getting a job as a software developer or talking to my boss ....

Note the "most". Pointing out one counter example where discussion barely shows up isn't a counterpoint. I would also argue that those experiences are shared but that is its own political discussion.

> Such an "apolitical" world, such an "unbiased" world, may not exist for, say, women or African-Americans or trans folks. And sweeping that realization under the rug is, by itself, a political act in favor of the continuation of the incentives and the policies that create that situation that lets me be comfortable and "apolitical" and ensures that other folks cannot be either.

I don't think it is reasonable to feel uncomfortable about not being able to discuss two sided issues on one board out of millions on the internet.

Political discussion is inherently caustic and damaging to discussion boards. Only small, heavily moderated boards can produce productive discussions. It is in the nature of simple user registration and no posting restrictions.

> Note the "most". Pointing out one counter example where discussion barely shows up isn't a counterpoint. I would also argue that those experiences are shared but that is its own political discussion.

Virtually any interaction between two people could be put into this bucket. If you want to just talk about adjust-your-pince-nez tech stuff, Lambda the Ultimate exists. Pretty much everything with more of a human element than that is intractably political--you just may not have a dog in the fight.

Hiring is political. Firing is political. Performance reviews are political. Getting funded is political. SOPA is political. Hate speech is political. Wikipedia NPOV is political. The surveillance state is political. Facebook's content filtering to show you what you want to see is...political.

This isn't stuff that "barely shows up". It's the core of the culture. Computers, ultimately, barely matter to tech--people do. And people are intractably political.

> I don't think it is reasonable to feel uncomfortable about not being able to discuss two sided issues on one board out of millions on the internet.

I'm being careful not to frame your arguments poorly; I would appreciate the same charity. I feel uncomfortable with tacit support for a white, male status quo on one of the more read, more important culture sites that are in the tech community of which I am a part.

The point I was trying to make is that there's people who exist outside those shared experiences, and yet have valuable contributions to make to discussion on HN, but they probably aren't gonna because banning politics will create an atmosphere where they don't feel safe or welcome.

The fact that you think that this set of statements is framed in a neutral or apolitical way is proving the point, you know?

You caught that, didn't you? I've been careful to offer my responses in good faith, but I couldn't help but notice that, yes, his defense is coming from a pretty regressive starting point.

The words people pick tell you a lot about them, don't they? ;) Almost like they mean things...

> the world is fundamentally and inescapably political

Thank you for saying this.

It feels like what we're seeing here from HN leadership is denial - or abdication – of moral responsibility. That's a choice you can make, and it's known to be an argument going on within Facebook right now. It doesn't impress me much, but in all honesty, HN doesn't; this place has real problems with sexism and racism.

Speaking personally, I guess it means I'm unlikely to ever apply to YC, because I weigh these moral – call it social justice, that's fine with me – considerations pretty highly in choosing who I work with. Other people will find different personal calculuses here. Many YC founders are my friends and they speak highly of the people involved; this just happens to be over my personal line.

Nevertheless, I'm still just... disappointed.

Hey, didn't I just run into you over in the other thread...?

But, yeah, you're welcome. I've been here long enough that not saying anything was untenable. Email's in my profile if you'd like to talk further.

In some contexts, not discussing an issue is equivalent to claiming that there is no issue.

For example, a story about a new data analysis tool or technique used by police would presumably still be on topic. Would a comment discussing how this tool might disproportionately affect minorities be considered off-topic politics? If that story is allowed but the discussion about race is not, the marginalized people might feel like they need to go elsewhere.

The problem with many political topics is that we already know the conversation and the outcome.

1. Present a new data analysis tool used by police

2. Comment about disproportionately affect minorities

3. Response with FBI data explaining it's because certain minorities commit more crime

4. (devolves into flame fest)

... n. Complains marginalized people might not read the site

n+1. That's their personal choice

n+m. (more flame fest)

And hence why suggesting the content here stay technical instead of political is the best of several non-perfect choices.

I understand that, and I like this experiment because of that, but think about it from the other perspective. If you felt like your life was in danger, and the entire community was like "mmm, this conversation isn't intellectually stimulating enough for me, please don't bring it up here", what would you think? It's one thing to go to some narrowly defined conference and find that politics are avoided, but it's another to go to a sort of general hangout for like-minded people and find that they won't acknowledge people like you.

It's sort of like saying "oh, I don't see race". Well, everyone else does, and not acknowledging racism is just about as bad as actually being racist. Ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away.

And another analogy, telling people there are more appropriate places to discuss politics is sort of like people telling Black Lives Matter/Colin Kaepernick/etc. to please protest in a more appropriate manner. There's no point in "appropriate" protests and appropriate forums, they are ignored. You have to bring this stuff up in places where people want to ignore it, otherwise nothing will ever change.

If my life was in danger, I'd have higher priorities than HN. The dictionary has a word for people who "feel" their life is in danger when it's really not: delusional.

HN will get really messy if the comment board becomes a place to protest.

IMO bringing your political grievance de jour to a tech site like HN is a sign of immaturity. Telling these people to grow up or leave isn't a bad thing. Conservatives lived through Obama and liberals will do fine under President Trump.

Maybe, I'm just trying to explain the other perspective. Saying "Conservatives lived through Obama and liberals will do fine under President Trump" is a political position, and adopting a politics ban supports that position.

All I'm trying to say is that it's important to recognize that you are adopting a political position here, even though it doesn't feel like it. I'm not trying to say you're wrong, just that you have to acknowledge you have a position, and you can't escape by calling something a "political grievance de jour". That itself is a political statement.

I totally agree any statement within the spectrum is considered a political position.

Thank you for the good conversation.

I'm not sure I follow this logic, but I sense that my comment was more confusing than clarifying, since I'm pretty sure it doesn't lead to the consequence you're talking about and that's not what we intend (quite the opposite).

The intention here is simply to treat political stories as off-topic for a week. The question of what counts as a political story vs. not, is pretty much an impossible one to answer in the general case, so I probably shouldn't have tried.

The fear is mixing the x and y axis of opinions. Most people can probably see why something like party, ideology or nation can be damaging. Not talking about those things generally doesn't prevent people from having a certain opinion on another level. But then you mix that with things like race, gender and class where wanting to talk about it generally (but not always) constitute an opinion.

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