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Comment by ghostpepper | Hacker News Reader

Why is the second sentence of this article about how the CEO of Gab used a Transphobic slur? It kind of seems like the author threw that in there to make sure the reader agrees with their political views, but the article doesn't say what the slur was, and I don't think the author would defend the idea that being transphobic makes it okay to hack a person's website, but it kind of feels like that's the point implicitly being proposed.

It feels like yet another injection of politics into what was previously a tech-focused website.

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The CEO of Gab used a transphobic slur while describing the hack in question.

To be clear, the words were: "Mentally ill tr**ny demon hackers (I’m very serious) are attacking Gab right now."

The article then quotes the rest of the tweet.

How is it irrelevant to briefly talk about the introduction paragraph of the tweet before discussing its more technical content?

> It feels like yet another injection of politics into what was previously a tech-focused website.

So, I've had an an account here since 2012, and was a reader before; this kind of comment is older than my presence here, and, if it ever existed, so is the time that HN was a politics-free tech-focussed website. [0]

Political issues, especially tech-adjacent ones or ones that aren't inherently so but which are raised directly in the context of tech issues, have been a major subject here for a very long time.

You are free, of course, to start your own tech discussion site with a firm no-politics (by whatever standard you want to delineate “politics”) rule, if you like.

[0] EDIT: except for a planned-as-brief-and-still-abandoned-early experiment.

The CEO literally used a trans-phobic slur when describing the hack. Plus, it speaks to the purpose of Gab, to allow the voicing of the types of bigoted views held by the far right. It's the reason for its creation. Communities that were removed from reddit, Twitter, etc for expressing such views.

So what he used a transphobic slur?

> I don't think the author would defend the idea that being transphobic makes it okay to hack a person's website

I wouldn't be so sure of that.

> It feels like yet another injection of politics into what was previously a tech-focused website.

Technology itself may be politically neutral but its use and creation is inherently political.

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