Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The guidelines specifically ask you not to do what you did with this Sarah Jeong and Quinn Jones thing: Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

View on HN

I think the totality of my comment makes clear the relevance. In the matter of interpreting historical internet posts and judging whether the speaker should be censored or punished for them, or not, the lines are quite blurred.

Is there not something worth discussing here — as we examine the reactions to Sarah Jeong, Quinn Jones, Alex Jones.... to me these are all part of the same movement. By which I don’t mean necessarily something explicitly planned and orchestrated, but rather shifting public consensus on public discourse, what consequences should be dealt, and how the visceral response in these cases may be weaponized and subverted.

Upon second thought though, perhaps the more apt comparison is Roseanne Barr. I certainly agree that bringing up Jeong did not result any useful dialog on the topic, so I’ll be more careful about that in the future.

lines are quite blurred.

They aren't. The lines between a professional conspiracy- and snake-oil-monger, a person whose friendship with Nazis made them lose a job offer and a person against whom a targeted smear campaign failed are not at all blurred. These things are not closely related and piling Roseanne Barr on to this blob of amorphous grievance-gunk just makes it more sealion-shaped and sealion-sized. It's not a good HN topic - polite flamebaiting is still flamebaiting.

Even more clearly, Apple choosing to be selective about who they'll retain in their podcast catalog is not at all the same discussion as The New York Times choosing who to hire. This is practically the textbook case of an unrelated controversy derailing a thread.

That's true, the distinction is greater than I made it out to be.

On the other hand, derailment was a serious concern during the industrial revolution and some thread-workers violently opposed new, disruptive technology. This is a technology site. Bears, beets, Battlestar Galactica, all this has happened before and will happen again and is totally not unrelated.

Conceded.

My comment was in relation to the waterfall effect which proceeded Apple’s decision to delist InfoWars, not to Apple exercising editorial control over its store, which IMO by itself would be entirely unnewsworthy.

If you don’t see any parallels to the NYT firing a new tech editor based on her offensive tweets and the NYT not firing a new tech editor for her offensive tweets, then I can certainly understand how you don’t see any relation to InfoWars being censored, and I won’t press the point.

It seems like you feel like this is all so cut and dry, however the public discussion on all sides would seem to discredit that notion. It’s what NYMag calls, “on the one hand, utterly obvious ... and at the same time muddled and thorny.” [1]

I had to Google the sealion reference, I think you’ve quite abused the term. [2]

[1] - http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/02/why-quinn-norton-and-the-...

[2] - https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sea-lioning

I think my reply [0] over there [1] also works here [2]. So say we all.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17702100

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17702100

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17702036

Pointing out that ToS violations aren't being handled consistently is entirely on topic.

The guidelines mention:

> Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle.

We should allow discussion of hate speech, regardless of ideology, on a thread about how hate speech is handled online.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com