I think this is emblematic of how tyrannical some of the people subscribing to the prevailing Silicon Valley viewpoint are.
I once would have thought that this would have been somewhat obvious.
I don't think either were particularly strong positions or poorly spoken.
It probably doesn't help that the automated rulesets here aren't kind to downvoted first posts by new users.
Note that this is different from people being flagged or down voted by members because of content. I can imagine it's very frustrating, but they are different behaviors. In one, specific action has been taken by members; in another, one has been caught by automated anti-abuse measures.
Why invoke the "tyrannical" rhetoric in respect to clicking a "flag" link on a website? It's not that big of a deal. Not everything is an attack by the Silicon Valley elite, all sorts of interesting topics get booted off the front page and there is always someone with a particularly strong opinion in the comments who has to exclaim why their personal issue is the bane of the HN hivemind (a hivemind that underpins a decentralized conspiracy to destroy free speech in order to avoid confronting the unavoidable conclusions of your air-tight argument). Sometimes stuff just gets flagged, it happens on both sides of every controversial topic ranging from blockchains to booth babes.
It is also disingenuous to say this happens to articles on the prevailing viewpoint to the same degree. Articles on Damore and Fowler was plentiful, and they were not voted off the frontpage. The sin of oppressing critical viewpoints in the valley falls squarely on the social justice warriors.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14946450
Something along these lines is often-cited, but isn't supported by the guidelines or by comments by the moderators.
From the guidelines:
> "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Discussions on contentious issues very quickly devolve on HN: it's not built to support them well, and many members recognize that. You're right, these are important issues and they should be discussed, but HN empirically has not been proven to be a good place to do so. And rehashing the same arguments time and again is almost the definition of not interesting.
Your posting via a throwaway account is anecdotal evidence of this. That's not a judgment, that's just a reflection of how it is. Likewise your assumption that curation on HN is due to "an ideologically possessed social justice minority": that's not a assumption that engenders the foundation of good faith that discussion on contentious topics desperately needs. Regardless of other factors at play that make discussions like this difficult (and I agree they're myriad), this is one that is destructive, rather than constructive.
And please don't confuse this stance as normative. Hopefully we'll figure out better ways to use things like online forums for working through issues, but we haven't done that yet. Want to have better, deeper discussions on difficult topics? One thing you can do yourself is conduct yourself in a manner that makes that possible. Build a reputation with a regular account so people can trust that you're engaging in good faith, and assume that people are behaving reasonably for reasons that may not be clear to you or you may disagree with before deciding that they're unreasonable.
To associate viewpoints with your real identity that regularly involve a spectrum of mob justice and workplace dismissals seems foolish in the current climate. If you doubt such a climate, I'd ask you to examine the post which you un-deaded, observe that it is now re-flagged and re-dead, and I'd ask you honestly if you as a moderator think that is justified.
Even on my primary account wherein I substantial reputation, I would not touch threads like this with a ten foot pole, let alone express my honest opinions. My livelihood is far too important to risk even over a topic which I consider as worthy of discussion as this.
I'd also address your statement that this is "the same argument time and again". This (OP) is material evidence coming out that adds critical depth to an issue that thus far has been painted as very uni-directional, and is, in my opinion, going to influence the next N years of tech workplace culture in dramatic ways. If HackerNews can't handle this well, why can't we take this as impetus to think deeply about that? (With the additional datapoint that discussions "on this topic" that support the status quo seem to be maintained, whereas those that oppose it vanish, so I might suggest the topic itself spawning unproductive discussions isn't the problem)
To be clear, I'm not a moderator. My comments are a reflection of what I've seen on HN with respect to what works and what doesn't.
I think there needs to be a punishment function for ideologically motivated flagging and maybe even other actions done by such a minority, so that it cause the articles to stay on the frontpage longer when brought back in order to dissuade the behavior.
That said, bringing up again "ideologically motivated flagging" ignores other reasons people may be flagging, such as the belief that such discussions aren't constructive on HN, independent of one's ideological or political position. And the mods do punish those that abuse flags and votes and submissions and comments. (And many who are so penalized think it's applied unfairly to them, from every ideological persuasion. Or that it's done ideologically rather than for incivility or other abuse.)
Here's how I'd break down my position in a nutshell:
- These are important topics.
- These are topics I think need to be discussed.
- HN empirically has not been a place where such topics have been interestingly and constructvely discussed.
∴ Such topics are for the most part best discussed elsewhere (i.e., not HN).
What I read from your comment is that you think these topics should be discussed (which I agree with) and should be discussed on HN, which I don't because I don't think that HN is structurally fit to handle such discussions.
So, with that, I think there are two questions that I would like you to address:
- Do you think HN as it is now is the place to constructively have these discussions?
If you answer yes to this question, then you and I disagree, and as I noted upstream, I think the evidence is on my side. If you answer no, the next question is
- Do you think HN should be a place to constructively have these discussions?
If you answer yes, what would make HN a place where such discussions could take place? There are certain things I think are criticial to being able to discuss contentious topics constructivelly. Those include being able to identify over time the people you're engaged in discussion with. This doens't mean know absolutely: pseodonyms are fine. However, you can't get very deep into a discussion on contentious issues if you aren't able to take others on good faith, and you can't do that without establishing some kind of reputation. Repeatedly using throwaways works against this.
Likewise, there needs to be a common understanding of civility. The definition of civility isn't universal, and changes from forum to forum (both online and in real life). There's quite a bit of disagreement on HN of what constitutes civil behavior, which again makes it difficult to dig into contentious discussions constructively: a shared understanding of civility allows people to engage on equal footing. This isn't a failure of any one group or perspective. It's just a reflection of human nature. This isn't different from real life: there are some topics you discuss with your family, others with your friends (and different groups of friends), others at work. Each has their own norms that allows those different topics to be discussed constructively.
It also means that that each point shouldn't be relitigated again and again. That sucks all the air out of the room and gets in the way of people having interesting discussions on a whole host of other interesting, non-contentious topics which HN explicitly has as a goal. This is really no different than if every discussion boiled down to a language flamewar or similar repetition. It's not healthy for the forum.
This isn't an exhaustive list, but I think it captures some of the important characteristics that make constructive discussion on contentious topics possible. You may disagree.
HN, for better or worse, isn't built like that. It wouldn't be HN if it were substantially different. I'd love to see a forum that makes such discussions possible. I don't expect (nor necessarily want) HN to be that place.
Each of these is getting longer than the last, so I'll try to refrain from commenting more on this, at least until I find a publisher. ;)
I see your point about the fitness of a platform for challenging the prevailing viewpoints in Silicon Valley, and for making sure that people can develop rapport and reputation that makes them accountable. Those are all great points.
We would agree fully if HN banned all articles on contentious topics or unapologetically allowed all viewpoints with all the mess that brings.
Where I think we differ is what the right action is when highlighting a viewpoint that cause social dissonance. My opinion is that giving the stage only to people that shout the loudest when opposing viewpoints speak is a terrible choice, as in general the most extreme people are the loudest and I doubt those represent the majority. We gave the stage to the extremes in communism and fascism, and it didn't end so well. We do not need to repeat that experiment again.
I think we need to do everything we can to highlight injustices in the power applied to force only one viewpoint to be heard. In addition to this social justice warriors need to receive negative social and life repercussions for their tyrannical actions.
You realize this is exactly a description of 'social justice' and it is exactly this that is the problem
- blacklists of workers that have the wrong viewpoint
- explicit race and gender discrimination
- using power to enforce that no one can express an opposing viewpoint
All actions that hurt those that are affected in material way.
Screenshots, without evidence of provenance, of anyone saying anything are trivial to create; they aren't evidence just part of the accusations.
The consequences of my doing this are so mild, I just don't accept that this is worthy of serious condemnation. If you want to think the worse of me for doing it, be my guest - but nobody's going to get packed off to the Gulag, nobody's going to get sacked, nobody's going to get sent to Coventry. In fact, even once flagged, the discussion is still there. It's just not on the front page any more. Even once flagged, there are numerous other venues where this discussion could continue! And indeed, part of the reason I click Flag is to encourage this discussion to take place in those other venues rather than here.
Meanwhile, you advocate real-life consequences with material repercussions for those whose ideology you oppose.
After watching how aggressively my comments were marked dead, I turned on "Showdead" and came to the realization that the dead comments were far often more substantial than those allowed to persist; at the very least it may be worth others doing the same if they want to keep trying to utilize this platform.
First story, at least in my feed. It has made most of the news sites, since the story keeps getting flagged off the front page, expect more submissions of the same topic because people aren't aware of existing discussions.
Marking a submission as a dupe of a previous post that was flagged away is just wrong.
You can discuss things that aren't on the front page. You aren't entitled to have what you want to discuss features on the front page, OTOH.
I don't know if you're aware but articles can move off the front page because people (like me) flag them (as I did). If enough people flag it, off it goes.
Sometimes the article sticks around, and obviously mine was a minority voice. Sometimes it disappears, probably because, I expect, most people are like me: we've seen this stuff discussed before, and the discussions are, on average, poison - or, worse, repetitive and dull.
So, flag. Flag, flag, flag. (That's what I think to myself, anyway. Actually, I only get the option of flagging it the once.) I make no bones about this, and I won't apologize for my actions, because I have nothing to apologize for. I vote according to my principles and mine alone. If these principles happen to be shared by others, great. If not, that's fine too. Democracy in action.
(Well... I do admit that I give the discussions a quick skim, just on the off-chance I might see tptacek in action. My guilty pleasure! There's also the chance that somebody might actually, you know, make a good point, but I don't worry too much about that because my experience is that the risk is very low...)
I am sure this feels pleasant as long as your viewpoint is in power. Tyrannies rarely stay that way though, so good luck.
In this case the article was marked as a dupe, but this specific article was not posted twice and previous articles on the subject was quickly voted off the frontpage by people like you despite high interest. This didn't happen to articles critical of Damore, so this seems to be exclusively a social justice tactic.
Edit: explained better why talking about voting is relevant as an analogy
Sometimes multiple articles relating to a particular issue are posted. When these links don't attract much discussion, this isn't much of a problem. But when they do, it's probably best to try to centralize the discussion, lest the entire front page get filled up multiple copies of the same stuff.
This has happened before in the past and it's a bit dull if it's something in which you have zero interest.
Marking a submission as a dupe serves a different purpose: it provides a pointer to the "canonical" submission for a given discussion, and not just for those that have spent some threshold of time on the front page.
You may very well disagree with the effects of HN curation in general or for this submission in particular; however, I think it's valuable to recognize that marking submissions as dupes and flagging/downweighting are independent.
It's pretty rich to go on about censorship and then pull a move like this. If we don't ban you, then comments like yours destroy the site, but if we do, you can do the "help help did you see he just repressed me" bit from Monty Python.