Comment by zach43 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zach43 | Hacker News Reader

This is definitely a nice sentiment, and i have encountered push-back at work for wanting to provide users with good exit experiences. The analogy to shipping labels is apt, and i also like to think that keeping users hostage / locked-in to your ecosystem will lead to worse consequences in the future for your product.

I wanted to provide one bit of close critique on a small part of the post:

> And look, I’m no social justice warrior (or so I hope) to go and bash people on the internet for whatever they’ve done wrongfully.

yikes. General suggestion for technical bloggers: please don't make vague references to internet culture wars (even in passing) in your posts unless they are central to your thesis.

This kind of stuff is at best distracting, and at worst can cause major misunderstandings. For me it engenders a certain kind of distrust: is the author trying to purposefully rile me or anyone else in their audience? It feels quite unprofessional as a whole.

It stuck out to me too as something which didn’t really add anything to the content, and certainly seemed to entail some culture war signalling. Maybe something like keyboard warrior would have been more suitable.

Hi Zach,

Thx for the comment. Maybe we have to go through an unpleasant experience once to understand what you’ve resonated with from the article and what I wrote. Or maybe multiple times. Who knows

Regarding the quote, what I meant was that I’m no social justice warrior to go on and leave 1-star reviews to that company because they didn’t cancel my subscription.

It’s just that I’d rather build more, instead of spending time to destroy what someone else did. Or, I’ve heard stories of people buying thousands of negative reviews, thus destroying reputations

I write as I’d be speaking and I use a lot of relaxed language. Sometimes it sets people off because it’s not professional and I understand, but the core of value is there (or at least I’m trying to make it so).

Thx for your comment! Any parts that stood out for you besides this one?

That's not really what "social justice warrior" means - generally speaking, it's a term used by people on the political right to describe (and generally disparage) people on the political left who talk a lot about identity politics, etc.

It's a politically loaded term that, regardless of your position on the subject, looks a little bit odd in an article about user offboarding.

Leaving aside what we know for a moment — wouldn't I be addressing a social issue and looking for justice in a hostile (warrior) way because of something that happened to me?

Dude, just drop it. Rename it to Internet vigilante or whatnot but clearly this is the wrong combination of words + context.

Definitely, 'internet vigilante' is probably the correct drop-in replacement.

If the term didn't already de facto mean something else, sure.

But since it does, at least in American English, your readers are going to understand it a different way.

I think GP's point was that "social justice warrior" is a loaded term with a political agenda behind it, and that using it detracts from your overall point (both in the article, and in your explanation for using it in the above comment)

Leaving aside what we know for a moment — wouldn't I be addressing a social issue and looking for justice in a hostile (warrior) way because of something that happened to me?

If you want to break each word down individually then yeah, sure. But you can never divorce a phrase/words from their social meaning. What is implied between the lines carries just as much weight, if not more than the literal text.

You may feel that you are doing simply just that, without any political implications, but most people are not going to interpret it that way. The thought will not be successfully communicated, as the unnecessary politically charged language will overshadow your actual point. This can be easily fixed by removing that particular phrase.

The term “social justice warrior” doesn’t refer in modern parlance to people who leave bad reviews for SaaS products. It’s a term referring to a particular conflict in American culture/politics and just detracts from any point you’re trying to make.

Surely SJWs are not only in the US. And let's leave what we know aside for a moment — wouldn't I be addressing a social issue and looking for justice in a hostile (warrior) way because of something that happened to me?

I give the example in the blog post about a .wordpress.com website that was made to boycott the said service. That means people are after you

I think we're losing the point here

> wouldn't I be addressing a social issue and looking for justice in a hostile (warrior) way because of something that happened to me?

> I think we're losing the point here

The point of this thread is that in the real world, the actual use of the term "SJW" is overwhelmingly by conservatives using it to dismissively label liberals, and using the term suggests a blatant political alignment that detracts from the substance of the article.

Let's respect the guidelines and not go into politics. I didn't want to touch down on politics and I think using SJW can be non-political. I understand you don't. Discussing that would be political.

Isn't this entire thread evidence enough that the term is loaded and distracting from your main point?

> I think using SJW can be non-political

It is, by definition, a term that's inherently a political reference.

As in, that's literally in the dictionary definition: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/us/social_justi...

> derogatory, informal

> A person who expresses or promotes socially progressive views.

The oxford definition doesn't really capture the common usage of the term:

" calling someone a social justice warrior implies that the accuser thinks the other person is an unreasonable, hostile, and self-interested internet user with a progressive agenda. " -- https://fee.org/articles/how-the-term-social-justice-warrior...

True, but I think the dictionary definition is plenty to cover 'inherently political in some manner' on its own.

You're creating a political discussion by refusing to drop a VERY politically loaded term from your discourse and claiming you're using it non-politically.

This is a weird hill to die on.

The fact that you’re talking about this instead of what you wanted to talk about should maybe be a clue that you should be more careful next time.

With all due respect...

Given that you have come here, one would assume, for the feedback, and that you self proclaim to run an experiences design agency that specialises on helping tech CEOs reduce user churn, it might pay to closely consider the feedback you're getting here rather than repeatedly dismissing it with your comment leaving aside what we know for a moment.

It seems unlikely the middle 90% of readers are going to approach everything they read with all of their existing presumptions completely suspended.

Your HN bio then goes on to state:

We believe experiences are not only the reason why users choose not to leave but also what generates word of mouth. We’re building a credo around this belief — https://chagency.co.uk/blog* (emphasis mine).

From my perspective, it hurts your credibility to appear to be acting disingenuously.

Opinion: your reference to social justice warrior is fairly well unnecessary.

To put it in perspective for you, the term SJW or Social Justice Warrior is a derogatory term designed to insult it's target applicant. You are essentially using a slang term incorrectly and trying to defend it by using it's literal translation. It has no place in technical writing and makes you look at best a bit silly, and at worst, a willing participant in a silly internet subculture that has its bedrock in juvenile hate and antagonistic behavior from both sides.

I wanted to add that I otherwise really enjoyed the article and agree with the sentiment. The outgoing experience can be the difference between me recommending a service or not. It's about maintaining respect for the user, and not burning the bridge at the very last opportunity.

I suggest being careful about using the "social justice warrior" label, it does not seem to have settled on a solid definition yet.

So far I have almost exclusively seen it used to attack women in computer games. This is the first time I have seen it used to refer to people 1-staring reviews.

But not having a solid definition shouldn't stop us from thinking for ourselves, right?

Words and phrases have meanings. You’re not being a freethinker by taking a popular idiom and redefining it. The fact that you’re receiveing the same response from all commenters should be a hint.

Seriously. It really makes me suspicious of this person's use of the term, especially given the general stance of people who label others as "social justice warriors".

It might not be solid, but at least two sources have formalised a definition at this point in time:

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/social-justice-warrior

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/us/social_justi...

Since other commenters are not getting through to you, let me put it differently: by using this particular term, you've just taken a side in an ongoing sociopolitical conflict. This conflict is kind of huge on the Internet these days, so a good chunk of your audience knows about it, whether through participating or hiding from collateral damage. Unless you want to participate in this turmoil, you should never do that.

Real-world analogy: imagine you're a a businessman in a real-world place that has suddenly gone to war for some reason. Even though the shootouts and shellings are happening elsewhere, you probably don't want to wear what happens to be insignia or flag or the holy symbol of one of the sides. Not only would that risk one side shooting you for misappropriation, and the other for being an enemy symphatizer, your customers would probably not want to be anywhere near to you, lest they get shot by association. Doesn't matter that the symbol is just a cross, or just a bird. What matters is that there are two sides willing to beat other people up over it.

--

Or, put yet another way: you're poking a dragon. Don't. Especially if you're not getting anything out if it.

And yet another slight different angle, in case it helps :-) Sometimes you feel strongly about a topic and so when you write about something that tangentially refers to it, it is very tempting to express that reference. Unfortunately, if you feel strongly about it there's a good chance that others also feel strongly in the opposite direction. The result is that you distract those people from the main reason you wrote the text.

Or in other words, you get on the front page of HN and the first 20 or 30 posts are talking about social justice warriors and not how to provide good exit experiences for users :-)

In a different, but similar way it's easy to miss your readers when talking about technical subjects. For example, if you have a very deep insight into a technical matter, it's often difficult to understand why your readers don't understand what you are talking about. The trick to good writing is to approach your reader on their terms and invite them in. If you can explain something in terms that they relate to, then suddenly they can understand it, whereas before they couldn't. It's easy to think that the reader is uneducated and that's why they didn't understand. However, it is the purpose of the writing to educate the reader.

In the same way, you might think that the reader should not get distracted by an offhand comment. It might be easy to fault the reader for not being able to see it in the context that you see it. However, just like the uneducated reader that can't understand a technical topic, you can't expect your reader to understand your context without a considerable amount of effort to set the stage. As it is not the main topic of your thesis, it becomes a bridge too far for the reader and they miss your point entirely.

Look you are definitely responding to keyboard warriors who have nothing but finding negativity wherever they can.

Don't worry about them. Your statement was fine- you seem annoyed by a certain class of people and its fair for you to name them in your own blog.

they've got their right to do so and I understand there's a huge pain body associated with the SJW term.

However, it was a shame that we got into a bit of warfare around the semantics of a word when both I and these people who were analyzing my use of the word are most probably against people creating hate-blogs against someone's product :(

thx for taking time to write the comment, I appreciate it

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