Question for the mods: Why? It doesn't appear to be a bias towards either side. Is the perception just that people are tied of hearing about it? Why not let the users decide that?
I strongly suspect that many users flag based on the title, without reading further. Most of the sexism focused pieces are pretty bad. I'm a woman and I tend to hate most of them.
Once or twice, I emailed the mods when I felt a post on the subject was poorly titled, but had worthwhile content. On at least one occasion, they changed the title and, I think, turned off flags for the piece so it could be seen.
I am careful to have a light hand. I seem to be the most prominent female member here and I can get accused of having an agenda for saying anything at all on the topic of sexism. *
I have tried to write more evenhanded pieces on one of my blogs. Some of those have gone okay, but they never really get all that much traffic or response on HN. But, as I see it, some of the problems with this topic include:
1) It has a long track record of ugliness on both sides, so some people kneejerk flag anything that sounds like it touches on the topic because they are tired of these toxic, pointless discussions.
2) Most pieces are pretty man-bashing. The audience here is predominantly male. They get tired of being hated on for having been born male. (I am also tired of the misandry, so I don't think that is unreasonable.)
3) Most pieces on the topic aren't really all that good. They are typically histrionic and blamey.
4) If you don't use the usual catch phrases in the title, people won't recognize that it is pertinent to a topic they are interested in. If you do, you can't sidestep all the baggage it involves. So trying to do something better faces a huge uphill battle in terms of even being recognized as both relevant and not guilty of the usual issues.
Even on a hot-button topic, there are quality comments made, by both sides. Those are worth reading, no matter which side you take on the issue. And then there are the "You're so stupid, how could you think something so idiotic, I hope you die in a fire" comments. Those comments don't add much except noise. If you want the quality comments to be visible among the noise, you need to weed out the noise comments. You need this more on hot-button topics, because they attract more noise comments.
It's possible to moderate a discussion forum to avoid this, but it requires a high level of involvement from the moderators and a willingness to aggressively recognize and prune divisive commentary regardless of the specific tone or content.
Sez you. The unspoken premise is that nothing is so important that it's worth stopping to have an argument over. Perhaps I'm misreading your views, but when they're tossed out as an aphorism they come off as smug rather than substantive.
For example when parents have a disagreement about how to deal with catching their child sneaking in drunk after a party.
This can go many ways but for the purpose of highlighting the difference take Chris and Pat.
(argument)
Chris: Pat, I can understand how you'd feel that way, but considering the family history of alcoholism, maybe we should take a more conservative approach with this.
vs
(flame war)
Chris: Well, Pat... Maybe if your mother had cared half as much about you and your brother growing up as I'm trying to care about our kids and cracked down on you guys a little bit, maybe your brother would have stopped at that red light, and maybe your kids would have an Uncle.
After all, for some of these topics it's exactly the people that won't go looking for them at other places on the internet where they may still make a difference.
To use an example that's slightly less controversial: I think it's important for people working with lots of other people's data to have some fundamental sense of privacy rights. And HN is probably one of the best places to reach those actually in the trenches that are in the position to say 'no' when, for example, the CEO of Yahoo tells them to allow the NSA full access to their users' emails.
Yet that's a topic that quickly turns to politics, so you'd probably have good reasons to wish those discussions happened elsewhere.
Just to be clear: I think the mix of topics overall is mostly fine right now. But just like Facebook or Twitter, I think HN may be in a position where your "editorial responsibility" should be somewhere on your radar. Not because HN is the size of those, but because it caters to a readership that has certain powers far outstripping its size.
edit: not sure why this is getting downvotes when it's a direct counterargument/response to the parent
Outside of flagging, behavior within the post itself (lots of comments?) probably penalize them. Really, really good stuff makes the frontpage, though. The issues at Uber, for example, were widely discussed.
What I mean is if you read the comments on an article about James Damore the day it broke and read the comments were the article to be posted today, they haven't really evolved. It's the same canards over and over. Damore being an example of a story that users were indignant about getting knocked off the frontpage.
Moreover, there's evidence that repeating such generalizations—even though you intend them critically—makes the environment less welcoming and poisons it further for the equality you'd presumably like to see.
When you do this, you (i.e. we—we nearly all do it) are valuing the rush of morally posturing above our peers more than the cause we care about. If we're going to actually make HN be the welcoming place we want it to be, we'll have to do something about this.
I have my doubts about how welcoming HN is for different demographics, and while the grandparent poster is handwaving things with a mental mockup as you say, absent transparency on moderation policies many people inevitably feel the same way about the moderation.
I mean, at present you have a bunch of secret rules to make everything run better. That works OK as a practical strategy, but it also reduces buy-in - which is why I get heavily downvoted any time I suggest that government intelligence services are inevitably going to adopt utility-maximizing strategies at the expense of liberty, no matter how many times I qualify this by saying I'm trying to be descriptive rather than prescriptive.
I think there's merit to the suggestion that snarking about how unwelcoming HN is to industry minorities is counterproductive. But I don't think HN's institutional commitment to being more welcoming to industry minorities is exactly pellucid.
Personally, I don't feel any need to know how many women are on the moderating staff. That question has not ever crossed my mind as an issue for me, personally, as a woman posting here.
My impression is that the forum is fairly multicultural. It is not a monolith of white American males/white American male culture.
I am much more concerned with feeling heard than with whether or not they have firsthand experiences like mine. I once wrote the mods and made my case for why something should be deleted as I felt it was actively putting a young woman in real danger. They didn't initially see it, but they did listen and ultimately redacted the information that concerned me.
I think if I have a real problem, they will listen. This is better in my mind than having been born with the same bits between their legs that I happen to have been born with.
I don't pretend to speak for all minorities. But my understanding is that both you and anigbrowl are white males. So I thought I would chime in just so the topic isn't being addressed solely by the demographic that you two express concerns about dominating the mod staff.
This is an insidious pattern that I see a lot. White men virtue signal about their concerns about sexism, racism, etc, then fail to give real weight to the voices of the very people they claim to be concerned about. The concerns of white males matter and should be heard. The voices of oppressed minorities still are irrelevant, even when the topic is the concern of fair treatment for them.
This makes an excellent point, and the same could be said of the junior moderation team - the HN readers who up/downvote comments.
A practical solution: The mods might ask people in underrepresented minorities for some honest, frank perceptive and feedback. Stop guessing and trying, and get some real knowledge. Look at particular threads (on sexism, etc.) and talk about how welcoming HN is to them and why. IME, there is no substitute for a lifetime of personal experience with these issues; most people without that experience - including myself - are surprised when they hear the realities and details.
You can identify who is underrepresented and who might feel unwelcome by what groups are referred to as "they". For example, in discussions of sexism women are often discussed in the third person - a good sign of who is the excluded group. If you think about it, those discussions should be led by the people who have experience with the issue, just like Java devs (hopefully) lead the Java discussion. This discussion, right here and right now, should have those voices - it's right in front of our eyes.
I'll add that religious prejudice against Muslims is particularly overlooked. If I were Muslim, I would not feel welcome here at all. As a practical test, substitute in 'Jews/Jewish/Judiasm' for 'Muslims/Islamic/Islam' (to pick a religious minority against which prejudice is rejected, as it should be for all) and evaluate the statement. I've seen many that unambiguously fail.
What makes you think we don't?
Gimme a break; I'm writing Internet comments not dissertations. Some things slip through the cracks. :)
EDIT: Also, re-reading my comment, I see it's all pretty critical. HN is the best forum on the Internet, IMHO, in large part thanks to the guidelines and moderation; but at the same time the competition is pretty bad and I think HN can be even better. My hope is that by developing and demonstrating effective practices, and then by sharing them, HN could improve discourse throughout the web. It sounds fantastical, but why not - the practices cost nothing, websites and online services everywhere are starving for a solution, and HN is in a very visible position and has a technically sophisticated team, a backing organization that loves innovation (YC), and an audience that can appreciate it.
The situation is definitely complex, which is why it must be discussed at every opportunity and in every venue, especially by intelligent people who deal with complexity as a living (HN's core demographic). Downvoting and flagging stuff just because you personally don't want to talk about it is selfish. It is in fact the very definition of selfishness.
If someone does not want to discuss a particular topic, they can refrain from upvoting it and posting comments on its discussion thread. FLAGGING however prevents others from being exposed to it as well because it pushes the submission off the front page (where it rightfully belongs, based on votes) and sometimes even kills it if enough selfish people pile on. That only makes the issue worse because it is akin to mopping it under the carpet.
You may feel that discussions on certain topics don't add anything original. Did it ever occur to you that that's simply your perspective, shared perhaps only (or mostly) by other old-timers? Many people, especially those new to the industry, are unaware of these issues and they should be exposed to them within the relatively civil and intelligent medium of HN.
See, for example, this very article calling out the moderation of a submission on anti-white racism in the restaurant industry, while there are probably dozens of stories buried each week exploring racism or sexism on the tech sector. Yes, some of those do make it to the front page. But in terms of <front page time>/<magnitude of problem> you need about a thousand female Uber employees invited to a strip club for every alt-right Googler that gets fired for writing the wrong memo.
It's also interesting to watch the insistence on "engaging with others' arguments" when it comes to literal mobs with torches calling for the next holocaust, yet the overall treatment of these hot-button issues on HN is far to the right compared even to conservative outlets like the WSJ.
Pretty sure that's not true. IMO you're falling into the cognitive bias we all seem to have, of seeing the community as dominated by your ideological opposite. The other side sees it just the other way. Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15388778, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307915, and lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=....
> But in terms of <front page time>/<magnitude of problem>
We can't use such a metric. The magnitude of those problems is so large that there would be nothing else on the front page if we did.
HN is trying to be a specific kind of site—one that gratifies intellectual curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I think it's ok for such a place to exist on the web, don't you? If so, many things follow. The site can't primarily be about litigating disputes or fighting for causes, even (especially) good causes. In fact it can't 'primarily' be about anything, because curiosity shrivels under repetition. Therefore HN's system (community + mods + software) is organized not to have too much, i.e. very much, of anything on the front page.
The issue isn't that HN suppresses discussion of e.g. sexism/gender in tech; it doesn't—there have been tons of threads, often large, often on the front page. The issue is that <front page time>/<how much I care about X> is always, for any X, less than you would like. For most casual observers, "less than I would like" feels like "censored completely". Meanwhile the readers who don't like X have the mirror-image view and say "HN is overrun with X". It's all an undergraduate psych experiment basically.
For an article a about work and unrelated to sexism, gender or racism, a commenter wrote out of the blue that all white men live privileged and easy lives. A second person replied and disagreed, arguing that some men don't have everything perfect and easy from the point of birth to death. The reply got moderated for causing a flame war, with third-party people asking dang why he targeted the dissenting view and not the original comment.
Even if you're right, I'm not sure what evidence it's supposed to count as; everybody knows we make bad calls, and I know it better than anyone. But I searched for your incident and could only find https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14530877, which is close to what you describe and (I think) would strike most HN readers as pretty defensible.
The point is that if there is a bias, it would be that moderation seems to target those that disagree when people bring up sexism and racism in unrelated article discussions. It seems very safe, even profitable in terms of votes to bring up sexism and racism, which would be contrary to the views of matt4077.
I predict that if moderation was a bit more consistent in keeping out discussion about sexism and racism in unrelated articles (unless exceptional new insight), we would actually see less reader fatigue and lower amount of flagging for explicit articles about sexism and racism.
(Just to be extra clear, I don't disagree with the moderation itself on the two above examples if they had been the ones bringing in the topic of sexism into those threads).
These calls are somewhat arbitrary because when a thread degenerates, you can always trace the root of the degeneration further upthread. But moderation is more like pruning a tree than excising a tumor. The goal isn't to get rid of all malignancy—that would be too draconian and is impossible anyway. It's to detach the bulk of unwanted growth.
People can reasonably differ about individual cases, but the principle here ought to be pretty solid for anyone who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and wants to use the site as intended.
I just think that's breaking-expectations-bias: "Man bites dog" stories get more attention than "Dog bites man", because the community expects the latter and doesn't see it as newsworthy.
> yet the overall treatment of these hot-button issues on HN is far to the right compared even to conservative outlets like the WSJ.
No, its not. (Its true that it contains content that is to the right of what you'd usually see in the WSJ, but it also contains content very far to the left of what you'd find in the WSJ; on balance, it is very much not to the right of the WSJ, though it might well be to the libertarian side of the WSJ.)