OkCupid Deletes Post “Your Looks and Your Inbox” | Hacker News Reader

OkCupid Deletes Post “Your Looks and Your Inbox”

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In case anyone didn't catch it... the 4 photos of "random" dudes that follow the line:

> "here are just a few of the many, many guys we here in the office think are totally decent-looking, but that women have rated, in their occult way, as significantly less attractive than so-called “medium”"

are the 4 cofounders of OkCupid... ;)

What's wrong with the article and how is it related to incels?

Is destroying unpleasant data the new version of book burning?

It is a little more 1984 than Fahrenheit 451.

That post never existed. We have never been at war Eastasia. [Your] Ignorance is [our] strength.

I think it has more to do with Zuckergate than Incelgate.

In case you didn't know OkCupid and Facebook's data research teams are in strong competition regarding which team is most borderline unethical, as evidenced for example here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/29/okcupid-e....

>Incelgate

can someone explain what this is?

Seemly after the canadian guy killed people with a van, a witchunt for Involuntary Celibates started...

For example: https://twitter.com/ekp/status/991817194987114496

I wouldn't use "witch hunt" for a community that toxic, though wow using -gate is obnoxious.

Agh, that's scary. What is she expecting them to do about it?

Is she asking them to fire people for being sexually unattractive?

I think there's a distinction to be made between "people who are unable to find sexual partners" and "people who self-identify with and participate in communities that spew hatred and encourage violence over the fact that they can't find sexual partners".

Sort of like the difference between "white people" and "white supremacists". Except that currently we don't have separate (reasonably brief) terms for the above categories.

There's nothing wrong with having employees who are unattractive / can't find sexual partners, and I agree that that would be just as ridiculous a criterion to fire someone over as being caucasian. However, if you have people in your company who are filled with vitriol or considering violence (be it because they hate women who won't sleep with them or because they hate people with a different skin color), that's a problem waiting to happen.

I think this "intolerance of intolerance" is becoming terrifying.

I personally find "people who hate people with a different skin colour" and "people who hate women" to be repulsive. I'd prefer not to work with those people, if possible. But I accept that in a free society, I might have to. I have no special right to be protected from opinions I don't like, and nor should I.

Nobody should be excluded from employment because of an opinion. And in a free society, it should never be illegal to state an opinion.

We are crossing the line into thought crime here, and it's frightening to see powerful people like Ellen Pao being ok with that.

I also prefer not to work with people with such bad views but I think I could. However, I also want to work with women and PoC and as the object of someone's hatred, it would presumably be harder for them; their absence would be worse for the organization, themselves, and me personally.

My starting point is I don't think what you say or do outside the workplace should have bearing on your employment. Lots of people have bad, crazy ideas that don't significantly affect their performance.

It is the rare person who can prevent their hate from leaking out into their day to day interactions and making their coworkers uncomfortable - thus interfering with morale and the company's viability.

If we remove the ideological aspect of this argument entirely, what we're left with is the notion that employment is supposed to be 100% comfortable. But...

In any given employment environment: chairs may be less than form-fitting; different people will have different tolerances for the thermostat setting; some employees may heat fish and durian fruit in the microwave; one may be asked to load or unload 40 foot shipping containers; being under pressure to meet a deadline is fairly normal; a boss or coworker may have an unpleasant personality, possibly even a personality disorder.

In general, we expect that in many ways, employment will be uncomfortable. In general, we accept this as a nominal cost of earning a living.

But once various ideologies are introduced, there is a sudden expectation that a small and specific subset of workplace interactions ought to be 100% pleasant and comfortable. Why is this?

If I have the choice between working somewhere where my colleague thinks he has the right to rape me if I don't sleep with him vs a place where my colleagues are respectful and have my back, where do you think I'll choose to work? And if I don't have a choice of where to work, do you think I'll be able to do my best work with that sort of threat present?

It's not just about comfort (though personally I do think people have a right to a workplace where there coworkers would defend them against bodily harm rather than claim a right to inflict it). It's also about what's best for the business.

> There's nothing wrong with having employees who are unattractive / can't find sexual partners, and I agree that that would be just as ridiculous a criterion to fire someone over as being caucasian.

On an unrelated note: the "firing" time hasn't arrived yet, but not being hired just because you're Caucasian isn't that uncommon nowadays.

Incel doesn't mean "someone who is unable to have sex". We need to have some esympathy and empathy for that group, and many places are trying to fix lonliness. This group may benefit from legalisation of sex work. Pao is not talking about this group.

Incel means "someone who is a member of a group who have a pathological hatred of women and men who have sex with women, who think that they have a right to demand sex, and that if it's not provided they have a right to take it by force by rape". Pao is talking about this group.

Incel was a label that these people gave to themselves, simply meaning "involuntarily celibate".

Sure these communities are incredibly toxic, but I don't think it's fair to say that every member of them has all of the beliefs you describe. Most of these people are probably mentally ill, they need compassion and empathy, not to be purged from society.

How much more bitter and angry are they going to be if they start to feel like they're also excluded from having a job?

There is a subculture of men who refer to themselves as 'incels' – urban dictionary has a good explanation: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=incel

Some new scandal, I guess, that has "gate" slapped to it, even though it has nothing to do with watergate.

Woman haters are not getting laid.

More precisely, "women haters are not getting laid and start killing people over it".

A bunch of truly awful people nobody wants to be around blaming women for their lives instead of taking some personal responsibility.

And a witchhunt of those people is somehow going to help?! When has that ever helped. People like that are to some extent mentally ill and need professional help instead.

There are always going to be more people that need professional assistance than there are resources to give them said assistance. A normative solution is better than no solution.

> A normative solution is better than no solution.

Please explain how. I think it's literally the worst idea to go poking people already on the edge with their hate and misery.

No solution means not telling these people at all that their ideas aren't going to get them anywhere and letting them fester in their hatred. I agree that it could be done without the vitriol. Not entirely sure how, but I agree in theory that it's possible.

But objectively speaking, the incel viewpoint is more caustic than the common reaction to it. I'm not saying that people who identify as incels deserve it, but they really oughta know better.

This is essentially modern heresy in action. Social cohesion is far more important than both your obstinacy and your problems, and if you persist, we will burn your ass at the stake. It's ugly, it's sad, we wish we didn't have to do it, but it reflects the reality of society.

> This is essentially modern heresy in action. Social cohesion is far more important than both your obstinacy and your problems, and if you persist, we will burn your ass at the stake. It's ugly, it's sad, we wish we didn't have to do it, but it reflects the reality of society.

The "social cohesion" argument is too wide. It could have been applied in the past for example to suppress the women suffrage movement. What was more important the women suffrage or the social cohesion of the 1900 society? I like the women suffrage and I dislike the incel viewpoint, but I don't understand how can you apply the self censorship or get burn argument only to the things that you dislike.

There's no ultimate morality here, only people fighting to make their views the orthodox ones. Heretics fight against a force much bigger than them. If they want to be taken seriously, they need to take the next step and form a rebellion, get other people on their side.

This is even more serious than heresy, this is called apostasy. Apostates don't get stoned by their peers, they get crucified by the army. But sometimes civil war is necessary to improve the morality of society. Suffrage was one of those times.

It's the common people that adhere to the orthodoxy that does the burning. Not the censors or the inquisition, who had bigger fish to fry. You won't find me out there tarring and feathering incels.

I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to their viewpoint. What I'm not sympathetic at all to is their stubborn obstinacy. Feminism is more important than your sexual satisfaction.

The answer to the incel situation is sex positivism. There is no holy war needed here. Sex positivism is an orthodox solution. The heretics just need to come back to Jesus.

>Social cohesion is far more important than both your obstinacy and your problems, and if you persist, we will burn your ass at the stake. It's ugly, it's sad, we wish we didn't have to do it, but it reflects the reality of society.

Wow, How do I make sure I never interact with your "society"? To me this attitude is strait out of Orwell and Huxley?

You realize I didn't invent society, right? And never need interact with it if you don't preach heresy.

I don't think this has anything to do with the incel movement. It was a risky post to begin with. This tweet is making a lot of assumptions. Flagging as no good discussion can come from this post on HN.

> Flagging as no good discussion can come from this

..in your opinion. Why do you feel the need to silence that discussion?

I get that HN is a forum with its own rules and as such there is no automatic "right" to free speech, but is this really what flagging is for?

Flagging should be used for spam and other content which simply doesn't belong on a tech-related forum. Not for just removing stuff that you personally don't want to discuss.

Why don't you just ignore it and upvote the stuff you do want to participate in?

EDIT: this comment now appears as 'folded' when I refresh the page. Does this mean that it too has been flagged? That's pretty funny.

On HN flagging is used not just for spam, but often for content you don't agree with; especially if you strongly don't agree with it. In this case you think this content shouldn't be on HN and click "flag". If enough people do that, the post disappears. There's nothing you can do about it.

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

Flagging is supposed to be used for spam or off-topic content. People who flag stuff they don't agree with are not following the guidelines of this community.

'whalesalad' is apparently breaking the guidelines twice, first by flagging something simply because they don't agree with the discussion that might ensue, and secondly by commenting to say that they flagged.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is theory. What I describe is how this works in practice: commenters on HN use flag as a tool to silence opposing views. It happens every day, hard to overlook it.

If people flag civil, substantive comments just because they don't like them, that's an abuse of flagging, and we eventually take away their flagging rights.

Flagging is for posts that break the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Thanks for this.

So was my comment flagged? And does this count as an abuse of flagging?

No, we collapsed the subthread because it's off topic.

Yeah, it doesn't really offer any good advice, just offers up questionable conclusions. Personally, I think it's an indictment of online dating in general as encouraging our shallowest selves to go front and center, but we seem to not want to give it up yet.

I don't think a service tailored at dating is ever going to be decent at what it's ostensibly doing. Instead what's going to work is someone doing a local community app right.

Yup. It’s completely shallow and unnatural. The only hope of it working is to shift attractiveness matching to AI, elimimate profile pics seen by humans and start real conversations with people whom you’d likely be attracted to, but don’t get to judge before meeting them. Eliminate the overwhelming messages deluge that people can’t deal with because they wrote / took pics that too many people like. This way, realistic potential couples are persuaded to talk to each other rather than just hounding the few attractive people.

Personally, I have found that you best make mental connections over digital media, while you best make physical connections in person. So services need to be tailored towards those mental connections. I have found Quora and other discussion platforms to be unbelievably good for finding people that I really wish lived in Atlanta.

But a discussion platform almost certainly cannot also be a dating service. I wish someone would give me a few hundred thousand to explore why.

The timing of the deletion is what seems suspicious. On the other hand, it could be related to Christian Rudder's somewhat disastrous keynote at CHI (the largest academic human-computer interaction conference) last week:

https://www.reddit.com/r/chideviance/comments/8eenaj/people_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/sciences/comments/8edxm3/controvers...

But anyway I agree that this topic is gasoline-soaked and unlikely to produce much of value.

Why do posts like this get flagged so often?

This relates directly to a tech company, and is about the intersection of tech & societal trends which many people here are interested in. It seems like perfectly valid HN content.

Do flagged posts get reviewed by moderators, or does HN allow a minority of users to flag whatever they want out of existence?

I don't know the details, but the [flagged] mark is added automatically when enough users flag the post, probably it consider the fags to upvotes ratio, but I'm guessing here. With even more flags the story may be killed.

The mods usually take a look at the stream of post, specialy the flagged ones, but there are too many posts and in case you find something classified too badly you can email them hn@ycombinator.com , they usually reply soon, but it's manual process so use it wisely.

My guess here is that some users flagged it because the incel angle. It looks like a exaggeration, but I'm still not sure. So I'm not hitting any buttons here [no upvote, no flag, no email to the mods].

[My interpretation is that a log time ago OkCupid posted some silly story with some data and dubious analysis as a marketing strategy. Now they have been acquired and they must pose as a serious business, so they delete the old posts that are too polemic or politically incorrect, so ... I'm not sure that there is a connection or not.]

There is unfortunately a small but non-trivial fraction of HN readers who think it’s important to say “I know what other people should not be allowed to read and I will use my privileges to enforce my opinion.” In other contexts those same people would loudly decry others engaging in that practice as evil censors, but they’ve wrapped themselves in a belief that because they are the ones seeking to deny others the right to read something that they are virtuous in their actions.

The stat that they don't show are how many simultaneous sexual partners people have on the site. They could have made it an interactive data exploration site to compare this to attractiveness!

Just get off of these awful sites and programs. They profit off the worst traits of humanity and it seems their blog as well. There is nothing scientific or useful that can come from their data or supposed insights. The first step in the right direction was to delete the post.

Why would anyone with integrity and self-respect subject themselves to flawed, unnatural and zero investment world that are dating apps? Can you imagine how lazy, distracted and confused are the users of these apps are in real life? Just stick to the real-world, screen the square root of as many people as you could ever meet in your remaining life-expectancy and pick the best one that comes along next. No Paradox of Choice. No “The One.” No waiting for Godot. Just action.

> and pick the best one that comes along next

The point is that for a set of people there's no-one coming along next. Hence they turn to dating sites to try to make connections.

I grew up in the 1980s and 90s. There were no dating apps, just classified 'want to meets' in the newspaper and they were expensive and fruitless. I didn't have a first date until I was 30, it took that long to find someone who was interested.

I wouldn't lecture anyone today about anything they can ethically & legally do to avoid that long sentence of loneliness. Even if they don't find a life partner, just getting one or two dates can be a huge boost to esteem.

1. Because one is desirable and receives validation on dating apps.

2. Because one is a young digital native nerd with a lack of social skills.

Or both. I met 95% of my (sexual) partners online, including my boyfriend.

Met my wife on OKCupid. Admittedly, it was quite a stroke of luck, but you only need one.

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