Hacker News Reader

Comment by ur-whale | Hacker News Reader

Any article that uses the sentence "mostly men" in the first paragraph is highly likely not worth reading.

These says, if you write "men" instead of "mostly men", you get attacked my SJWs. My favorite form is when they write "men (and they are almost entirely men)."

But as is becoming clear to many, you cant please everyone all of the time, and, especially these days, there are some people you cant please any of the time.

What phrasing would you prefer? "Humans" or just "men"?

If someone cannot think about a topic without classifying the genitals of the discussed people irrespective of what they are talking about, you'd probably not be wrong to take notice of that.

Not that it matters, but, expecting the whole world to share the same perversion is a bit too much..

I think "people" would be the typical language to use in such a situation.

“People”. You shouldn’t use gender, race, religion or nationality to describe a group of people unless it is somehow important to the story.

Otherwise you end up propagating stereotypes.

"This type of cancer affects mostly men."

"Women make the majority of the school's Computer Science enrollment which used to be mostly men."

That must mean cancer is sexist. No wonder people hate it so much.

Yeah, testicular cancer is real sexist

According to Financial Times it's a good thing crypto is mostly men, since it's such an obvious scam:

> Most women aren’t as into crypto as men and that’s OK. It’s actually good! Cryptocurrencies consume huge amounts of energy, enable criminality, often lack security, and generally just don't work very well.

> But let's not encourage other women to throw their money away on nonsense. And let's not think that just because a lot of men are doing something, we should do be doing it too.

https://www.ft.com/content/77f34d67-b797-3359-a89d-f9447ca40...

It's factual, noteworthy and reasonable in the context.

Why? Would you feel differently about coinbase if it's leadership were evenly divided between men and women, or largely women?

No. Your attempt to project hyperbole into what I 'feel' is not rhetoric.

If it's a small group of heretofore unknown people with a major stake in a new, exotic and opaque, 1 Trillion dollar asset pool, then describing them as 'all men' is perfectly reasonable if they are. Just as if they were all American. It's relevant because they are obvious characteristics of the group and not a random outcome.

If there was some women in the group then it wouldn't have been notable.

This is not SJW journalism it's just journalism.

Oh how the turn tables

It seems to me that if a fact is informative then the opposite of that fact would be too. For example, the article says that verified users jumped 34%. That fact tells us coinbase is growing and at what pace. If the opposite were true, and users were declining, that would tell us coinbase and maybe bitcoin were in trouble.

I don't see what the most common gender among the leadership team tells us. What does it matter if they are mostly, partly, or entirely men or women? This article is written in Bloomberg, the four founders of Bloomberg plus their chairmen are all men[1] - does that matter? If I were to put on my "just journalism" hat, maybe I'd think it says something when organizations led entirely by men criticize organizations partly led by women for their social justice bona fides... Or, maybe I'd think that most executives are men, most people in tech are men, most people in crypto are men, so it's really not that surprising or informative that most of coinbase's leadership are men. Or, maybe it does matter for some reason, but the journalist should explain that reason rather than just drop the fact and imply it means something without explanation.

1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_L.P.

I agree. It goes without saying that most of the capital is owned by men. In which industry is that not the case?

The social commentary angle can't justify that line either: Bitcoin is a pseudonynous digital currency, that started trading at $0.10, and required nothing more than having a basic windows machine, and downloading the node software, to hold from the start. Very early on, downloading the standard wallet software was also all it took to mine bitcoin. If mostly men own it, it's because mostly men were interested in the concept early on.

In any case, despite containing that line, this was a good article and worth reading.

I think the point is that the article feels a need to highly this, as though it is relevant. Primarily because they are trying to narrativize it in a certain way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com