Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for this. I didn't see your other comment about the guidelines. If you have a link to it, I'd be interested to read it.

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.

I wasn’t provoked though. I literally asked to be downvoted in the GP and then when I was (as expected because of course HN is full of more racist and sexist people than you’re willing to admit) I copied/pasted the same comment and changed numbers while waiting for my builds to finish. It’s not as serious as you keep alluding to (i.e. “I understand Internet posts can be activating.”)

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.

Ok. I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, but if you were just casually trolling the thread rather than feeling hurt by something that came up, that's worse, and the kind of thing we will ban an account for if it happens again.

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.

Dude, like I said I’ve been commenting on HN under different accounts for years. Don’t judge me by this one interaction... Keep defending the racists and sexists.

You’re also disregarding the fact that I left several non-trollish comments on that post. It’s ok to call people out.

I also feel like your own reply to me shows that not even you can rise above it. I’ve never seen you leave comments like this before. I’ve definitely seen quite a few people who deserve it. I’m disappointed.

You’re just like the rest of them.

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