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Comment by vandot | Hacker News Reader

Wow, maybe YC and HN are coming around to pervasive inclusion issues in tech. Until I see some action though, I'm left with the memory of that time I posted survey results about women in Seattle tech scene and it was flagged. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13558116

I see that a thankful comment on this article is already flagged, so... seems like much has not changed.

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> I see that a thankful comment on this article is already flagged, so... seems like much has not changed.

I don't see a flagged comment like that. Could you link to it?

The whole submission was flagged.

I think your submission would have fared better if you had used a less incendiary title, like maybe "Seattle Startup Diversity Survey" and linked to the report at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57b77304b3db2bfb203fb...

But maybe I'm fooling myself and it would've been flagged anyway.

I’m also excited to see this progression. I remember being showered with downvotes only 5 years ago when I took the unpopular stance that the SV monoculture was poinsonous.

But don’t forget — it’s about making a better world, not winning at Hacker News. It sucks that your post got flagged, but you live to fight another day :-).

I've noticed that any sort of progressive/inclusive comments get aggressively downvoted on HN. It's sad and frustrating.

It's analogous to pointing out that the #1 trait that successful founders have in common is family wealth - it causes people to have to look into their own privilege, and it ain't pretty.

I find the opposite - I've been on HN around a decade, a few months ago, during a discussion on living in SV I mentioned that the valley is a cultural wasteland. dang said this was a 'slur' and not acceptable on HN.

The idea that it's unacceptable to criticise the culture of an area, and that people need to be protected from this idea, would be unthinkable on Startup News.

Can't both be true? Are these actually opposites?

The whole point here is to have more signal than noise, and it's usually successful. I made a similar comment a few years ago about another geography and got a similar response. It gave me pause.

Reflecting on it, the way dang and others handle these things is right, if you have a point, you can make it without making an insulting generalization and characterization.

If you don't, at the end of the day, whatever point you try to make is wiped by the visceral response.

I'd be surprised if dang or others took offense to saying "Ohio is a cultural wasteland".

Removing all color from speech makes the world a very boring place.

Criticising bay area culture is not a 'slur' and saying that is more inflammatory than the original statement.

I've noticed this as well, and on a few occasions it's caused me to cut down on my participation here.

It's because HN prides itself on "civility". So you can "innocently", "just to be fair", "playing the devil's advocate", "but what about" say any offensive thing you like, and when someone who's sick of hearing that bullshit uses a naughty word they get downvoted for being "uncivil".

The rest of the internet figured out long ago that such behavior is actually pretty toxic, and is called "sealioning" [0][1]

[0] http://wondermark.com/1k62/

[1] footnotes. It's all civil if you have footnotes.

Looking at the comments on this story, at least, I'm not seeing it. Most downvoted comments are from those disputing the study, or "what about men?" etc.

YC and HN are linked but are definitely not the same. The HN community is pretty well known for being toxic when it comes to these topics.

And it stinks that the HN moderators' reaction to this issue generally seems to be to brush it under the rug. Almost all meaningful discussions on this topic are quickly flagged off the front page.

You don't solve a problem by pretending it doesn't exist.

Mods don't do flagging; users do.

Moderators don't flag stories off the front page, users do. The most common moderator reaction to threads on this topic is to turn off the flags, ask people in the thread who are violating the guidelines to please stop violating the guidelines (or ban them), and sometimes post a preemptive top comment asking potential commenters to please not violate the guidelines.

This is a community site and the members of this community are responsible for their own behavior, including how they relate to the community. This is why there are user moderation tools like voting and flagging.

I realize the mods don't control the flags. They do however know that flagging is an issue when it comes to these topics. They could do more to facilitate the discussion of these issues. They already do dictate behavior in a number of other ways (e.g. personal insults are one thing that results in heavy moderation).

EDIT: A prime example is that this post is currently 5th on the HN front page and has roughly triple the points of the 3rd and 4th items on the front page in roughly half the time. That means this post is almost certainly being suppressed with flagging. Will the mods do anything to protect this post?

Could you please email us at hn@ycombinator.com with suggestions? We're always trying to improve quality and it's helpful when users let us know what their ideas are.

Edit in response to edit: Yes, moderators (me) turned off the flags on this post. Points can't be compared directly between stories because that's not how it works.

I don't have access to your ranking algorithm, so I can't tell you how to fix the issue with this post being ranked lower than the 3 posts directly above this on the front page that are all older, have less votes, and one has more comments. I also don't have access to the data you have on flagging and what type of posts get flagged. I imagine there are ways to identify controversial topics like this that receive a high amount of both votes and flags. Do those posts deserve special protection? Maybe you look at how a user uses their flag permissions. Should a flag from an infrequent flagger have more weight than a frequent flagger? Can you identify a flagger who uses the flag inappropriately? Should there be some type of shadow banning on the flagging functionality? These are all things I would want to explore if you are legitimately looking to allow these type of important conversations the flourish on HN.

Stop penalising stories based on the behaviour of users in the comments. If users can't be trusted to discuss something, disable comments on the story instead. This site isn't purely a mechanism for enabling discussion - it's also one of the primary ways that members of the tech community can become aware of issues, and algorithms that prevent sensitive topics from being visible because they always trigger pointless arguments in the comments don't provide benefit.

The existing mechanisms y'all have been using (suppressing posts with many flags or with many comments) seem like they just don't work at the current scale of hacker news even if they did when it was smaller. In particular, the fact that the system(s) were exploited to push a YC survey down on the front page is a bummer - I have no idea where else I'd find out about a YC survey other than YC's website unless I rely on some site like techcrunch to publish a writeup about it days later. (Where will they see it if it gets pushed off hacker news?)

Once a story hits a certain vote threshold it probably needs a reprieve from some of the automated filtering mechanisms, at the very least. Disabling comments in response to flame wars would be much better than suppressing the story itself. Flagging seems good for fighting link spam, but a flagged story with many comments would suggest an intense (and not necessarily heated/flamey) discussion that has value and would naturally attract flags from people with an axe to grind.

Intense discussion is what https://news.ycombinator.com/active is for. There's also https://news.ycombinator.com/best which (I assume) puts more weight on votes and has less churn. Both still show this submission, although it has dropped off the default frontpage.

Those alternatives should probably be advertised better than just that tiny link in the footer.

If you're only interested in YC news specifically, you can also subscribe to https://blog.ycombinator.com/feed/ . Most of the articles there don't ever make the front page, I think.

Here's one of many possible improvements: keep track of stories that had to be "rescued" from being flagged to death, and anyone who flags more than one of them loses both flagging and voting privileges.

Here's another: if you had to turn off flagging on a story, turn off the comment-based heuristics at the same time.

Here's a third: rethink the comment-based heuristics, and consider what kinds of discussion you're trying to curtail.

Why do you say the HN community is toxic with respect to these topics? For example, all of the top comments on this article are in favor of YC's announcement and supportive of what they're doing.

Really? HN is probably the most feminised tech forum that's ever existed.

Indeed it is. And yet I wouldn't describe it as remotely feminized, only slightly less hostile to women than, say, Slashdot.

IMO, that says more about tech forums and the tech community than it does about HN.

What actually would HN be like if it were perfect in your eyes? What would tech be like?

decent.

Right. You have absolutely no idea.

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