Hacker News Reader

Comment by ritchiea | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News is an unfair place for people to speak up about about the lack of racial and gender diversity in tech. I have been downvoted for comments where I felt like I was making uncontroversial critiques of the status quo. I have seen HN users say that black neighborhoods need more policing than other neighborhoods. It's not an easy place to be non-white or non-male.

I believe banning politics is a bad idea even for a week.

View on HN

Some users will down vote comments not because they disagree but because from experience they know that any resulting discussion will be unproductive. Rehashing the same discussion again and again is actively destructive to the community as a whole. It decreases the signal-to-noise ratio, tacitly approves of the negative contributions, and increases the likelihood that those that contribute positively will leave, and the community as a whole will be all the worse for it.

I don't understand how your conclusion follows from the rest. The fact that your "uncontroversial critiques of the status quo" get down voted is evidence that we can't have unbiased and productive political discussions on HN.

This ban gives the status quo implicit support by stoping the discussion in its tracks. Our reality includes political discussion and I don't think we can cleanly make a divide between it and other things that spark interest in hackers.

That's why this is a good time to experiment with a ban. The USA is in a transition between two presidents of different parties and the UK has an unelected supremeo with two chaotically contradictory mandates.

The status quo is fuzzily defined at this moment so bias towards it is not as harmful as usual.

uncontroversial critiques of the status quo

Hmm...

Let me try to understand your reasoning. If everyone agreed with your critique of the "status quo", why would it be the status quo to begin with?

There are myriad ways the status quo can be at odds with people's values and desires. Sometimes the status quo remains so because we can't decide on the proper remedy or disagree on the proper remedy. Just because something is status quo does not mean critique is inherently controversial.

I would suggest, if your critique proposes a particular remedy, you should expect people to question whether your proposed remedy is a good idea. If it does not propose a remedy, you should expect people to question whether your critique is even useful.

A critique of the status quo that doesn't generate controversy is probably irrelevant.

How is that unfair? It's actually quite fair. We all have opinions and we can upvote, downvote, and comment equally.

The parent to my comment complains about HN being unfair to his political viewpoint and has a history of posting somewhat sympathetically about Trump. He seemed to assume that sympathizing with Trump or conservatives is the only way one could disagree with mainstream HN political views. "Unfair" is his term, I was making a point.

Saying "you were downvoted" doesn't mean all of HN is unfair. I've been here a couple years and overall the topic of inclusion and diversity is handled very well. I dont mean "well" in that every progressive claim is unilaterally accepted, either. I mean that we take the subject seriously and most of us are champions of diversity and inclusion.

This may be the most laughably wrong statement I've seen in this entire thread, and that's saying something.

Something that all discussions could benefit from, especially politics, is a clear distinction between descriptive and normative comments. For example, describing a bias in the status quo should not be equated with endorsing that bias.

We should probably try to stay on the descriptive side as much as possible. Whenever making normative statements, we should probably make sure they are based on an unbiased collection of facts (and not ignoring inconvenient facts), with solid and clearly explained reasoning, and assumptions made explicit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com