Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Please don't take HN threads on this sort of ideological tangent. The original point was at least partly on topic; this is way off in the flames.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14530866 and marked it off-topic.

View on HN

Could you explain how gender stereotyping and gender equality is on topic with the text in the article?

Or to phrase it in an other way: if there was a bot farming karma by commenting with "Why is there no male named virtual assistants" in every article posted on HN with "virtual assistant" in the title, would the bot be on topic just because of the title?

I'm not sure I understand this question, but these things come in gradations, so it's often a bit arbitrary where to prune the thread. In this case I left the original comment intact because it was at least about the specific product, and there were substantive replies about the voices of other personal assistant products. On the other hand, any comment that begins "How many times have you complained about 99% of soldiers being male?" is just going straight into flamewar boilerplate of the most tedious sort.

In order for a comment to be even slightly on topic, do we not need at least some minor connection with the article? In this case the article has nothing to do with gender politics and nothing to do with the choice of male or female naming of virtual assistants. The connection the commenter made and the article is purely be based on the title alone.

Political comments based on article titles (in contrast to article text) is inherently contagious and tedious. All it does is spreading itself and anti-agents of itself. You attacked the anti-agent but left the infection alone, which is why people have a problem with it. The resulting thread of the original post is taking up 2/3 of the comments in here and only a single comment (by nathanasmith) has any connection with the article. That is out of 44 comments one is about the article. Had you moderated a bit more inclusive then 40 of those comments would likely never existed, and maybe a portion of them would instead have made comments about the article.

I don't approve of this decision. If discussion about how AI assistants have female names are on-topic, then so is the rebuttal that "AI assistants having female names is a non-issue". I like you, dang, but I think you added your own ideological bias in making this decision.

Yeah, that's exactly what came to mind as well.

I know you guys often see ideological bias in these things, but there's a strong if not irresistible tendency to see that whether it's happening or not [1,2], and people of opposite ideological persuasions accuse us of the same thing. So I dunno. I can't judge my own bias, obviously. What I can tell you is that after dealing with thousands of these, the only thing I consciously care about is what makes the threads tedious and predictable vs. not. That's pretty much the only thing that HN is ultimately about, and I probably have a more fine-tuned sense of it (i.e. of what's predictable) than most people do, just because of the effects of brute quantity on the brain.

1. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...

2. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...

You know best, of course. Note that I'm not claiming that HN is too left-/right-wing for me. I think HN is pretty well balanced and centrist. What I'm saying is you might have erred on the side of avoiding controversy. HN could use more controversial comments, whether it comes from the left or the right, especially when the comment is not trolling and is informative.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com