edit: I would like to thank all the misogynists in this thread voting this down. Thanks for keeping tech a welcoming place for women and victims of assault!
Complaining about downvotes is against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), so please don't do this either. Assuming that downvotes signify misogyny and then responding with outrage was a particularly huge and unhelpful leap.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295658 and marked it off-topic.
I don't think anything about cock.li is meant to imbue professionalism.
I think one of the points is that it almost immunizes them from psychological operations. [1]
I know it sounds conspiratorial, but social justice movements in online communities can be easily leveraged by orgs like the NSA to disrupt an organization. Combined with anti-meritocracy ideals, it's easy to get someone "at the top" who doesn't have any credentials (and who isn't really trying to get there for any other reason than disruption).
It might not be his actual strategy, but the offensive things serve as a deterrent against lowest common denominator character assassinations. He has no reputation to destroy.
You're not supposed to trust it or take it seriously, at all.
It's just a host for fun, for people from *chan websites.
I'm really not sure what you're expecting.
Come on, as a tech community we deserve and can do better.
(also, I don't appreciate you strawmanning my comment.)
If it's not your sense of humor, you're welcome to not visit the site. In fact, for the conversation at hand, you didn't at all need to do that because the quote made sense without doing so.
You're taking this comment thread greatly off topic. That's the reason for the downvotes. Not misogyny or something. Claiming otherwise makes your remark sound almost stereotypical.
Rape is not a joke, by no definition is it humor.
Except a joke itself, nothing is a joke, nothing is by definition humor except itself.
It is sort of like saying that an engine is not a plane, by no definition can an engine fly.
Which is true because an engine doesn't fly, planes do. (Or Apache Attack Helicopters)
Humor is something you build using other parts, it's more than the sum of it's parts, no single part in of itself is humor.
Secondly, there are no rules what humor is and what it is not except that it provides laughter and amusement. If somebody laughs about a rape joke, it's by definition humor, albeit (depending on joke) not a good one by most people's standards.
Lastly, there is something called "Gallows Humor" in which (to quote Freud) "the ego refuses to be distressed by [...] reality. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world."
As Wylie Sypher puts it, Gallows Humor is "to be able to laugh at evil and error means we have surmounted them".
It's a natural human instinct. (I'm shamelessly copying of Wikipedia here, I'm no expert in all topics)
So while, yes, rape is not a joke and it's a very horrible thing to those it happens to and we as a society should make efforts to not allow it to happen, it can only be healthy to make humor and jokes about it. Not to diminish the victims but to diminish the perpetrators. The perpetrator is worth nothing more than a joke to us, they have no further value or meaning in society and ought to be locked away forever after we thoroughly laughed, helping the victim to recover in the next step.
That is what I want from a strong and healthy society.
Obviously, this is why South Park crashed and burned, and isn't now in its 20th season.
Complaining that 4chan is offensive is a bit like complaining that knives cut things, and it won't get you much more sympathy. When I explicitly mentioned /g/, you should have known what you were in for. And if you didn't, the context might have tipped you off.
OTOH, the guy does genuinely go to great lengths to protect the security of his site (and of the mail of his users), and seems to know what he's doing. So I'm not to down on him for the unprofessionalism.
It's not a sustainable atmosphere to maintain
By the same logic there should be no dark humor involving murder since it makes things hostile for everyone (everyone can be murdered).
Infact, there should be no text talking about violence since that would makes things hostile for everyone.