Yay, 2 downvotes from racist and sexist trash so far! Let’s keep it coming!
Please don't post like this comment here, though. It only hurts and makes things even worse.
The thing that helps is to share some of what you know and some of your experience, so others can learn. A small minority of commenters is going to react badly, repeat stock objections, downvote etc., and respond with flamebait. But most of those comments will eventually get downvoted, flagged, and/or moderated. That's the best we can hope for on a public forum where anyone can easily create an account.
More importantly, the rest of us are genuinely interested. If you would please follow the site guidelines by ignoring the flamebait (other than to flag or downvote it, and email us at hn@ycombinator.com in egregious cases), and by sharing information with curious readers when you're so inclined, we'd be grateful.
However, I don’t agree with you that it’s a small minority doing these things. I’ve been reading (and commenting) on HN daily since 2010 (under different accounts), so it’s very difficult for me to accept what you’re saying as fact.
Also, did you see my other comment about how I feel about the guidelines lol? (It might have been on a different article.) No offense, but I’ve seen your replies on other articles where you ask people to follow the guidelines and my immediate response is always something like “But why? What this person said makes sense.” For example, the whole “don’t tell people they didn’t read the article” rule...
I don’t mind being flamed by the “small minority” of racist and sexist commenters here. I’m used to it. I’m also used to people expecting me to “behave” myself.
Anyway, based on facts, Timnit Gebru is right. Jeff Dean lied (possibly unintentionally) through omission. Megan Kochalia should be fired.
I'm not asking you to "behave yourself". I don't look at your comments that way at all. I'm asking you to treat HN as a community that you're part of.
I think you're underestimating the good faith in readers here. It is an unfortunate consequence of HN's non-siloed structure (i.e. there's no filtering or selection of who one's subscribed to—just one big room) that bad actors, even when they are a small minority, create an overwhelming and shocking experience of the community being that way. It is not objectively true. Actually the opposite is true: this community is, for a place that includes millions of people, actually relatively functional. (Note that word 'relatively'. Obviously it's still dysfunctional. The question is how do we nudge it into less dysfunction.) I've written about this here if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
Re making things worse: there are, unfortunately, many ways to make HN worse. I'm not saying you're doing all of them, just one of them. You posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25565642 5 times—that's obviously not cool, regardless of how badly you were provoked. When I say that, it is in no way a defense of bad actors. I'm just trying to prevent this place from degenerating deeper into hell, or at least to slow hell down a bit.
So like I said, I don’t mind calling out racist and sexist people on HN. You should try it some time. I already told you what you could do to nudge this community in the right direction. But again, I already said PG wouldn’t allow this.
Is there any data to back up your claim about this “small minority”? If I run a sentiment analysis on the most “charged” posts, will the analysis indicate that there’s a “small minority” of racist and sexist people on HN?
Sure, no one’s going to be racist or sexist on the millionth hate post about Electron or AMP. I understand that. Is that all you’re saying?
Have you seen how toxic the Blind app community is? There’s an overlap between that community and this one. Maybe it’s just the exact same “small minority” everywhere... (Sarcasm)
FWIW, to be clear, it’s not that I lack faith in only HN readers. My ideas/truths about the world extend past this community. HN comments are just a symptom of something much larger: a diseased system being upheld by people who just want to see the good in everyone and vomit rainbows.
You're completely welcome here as long as you want to participate as a community member and use the site in the intended spirit—which, by the way, has nothing to do with "behaving oneself", "just seeing the good in everyone", or "vomiting rainbows". It has to do simply with wanting an online discussion forum that's actually interesting, that has some value for curiosity, as opposed to melting down into a circle of hell. Comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25565642 are not interesting and encourage worse from others. This is the way that internet communities poison themselves. We're trying to stave that off, at least for a while (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). The internet call-out culture where people shame and abuse each other is not sustainable here.
I haven't seen Blind, only a few mentions here and there. When you say "there's an overlap between that community and this one", you're assuming your conclusion. I don't see any reason to believe there's much overlap.
If you want your ideas about how to "nudge this community in the right direction" to be taken seriously, one thing you shouldn't be doing is posting in a way that is utterly destructive of the community. That can't possibly be the right direction. Places like this are fragile and we need to work together to prevent this one from becoming hell. Scorched earth is not interesting, and if HN turns into that, what good does it do anyone, or the world? It's bad enough that racism, sexism, and other bad things appear here—indeed it's awful, and it's also inevitable, because anything that exists in society is going to show up in a large, open internet forum like HN. If you think we don't care about that, you couldn't be more wrong. But that doesn't make it good to burn the commons to the ground, which is unfortunately what most of your recent posts point towards.
I'm not sure why you bring up PG, but he hasn't had anything to do with operating HN for many years.
You’re also disregarding the fact that I left several non-trollish comments on that post. It’s ok to call people out.
You’re just like the rest of them.