I am trying to find the unethical part of this, care to enlighten us?
I took a whack at articulating _why_ it's wrong while not quite fitting a clear definition of malfeasance here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27632365
I don't have my beliefs on the topic clearly articulated, but I'll give it a crack. There's the argument that public information is public, and that there's no issue in aggregating it or otherwise making it more accessible, as long as the access is through legitimate means. I'm sympathetic to this and understand why people believe it, but I think it contradicts other consensus moral intuitions about privacy rights. A salient example that other HNers may be familiar with is the doxxing of Scott Alexander; any intellectually honest person familiar with the internet can tell the difference between "you can find out who he is if you do some digging" and "real name published by the NYT", despite the pathetic attempts at dismissing the possibility that doxxing him was bad (amusingly, including by people who I am 100% sure would find the bikini example to be a horrible violation). Hell, I was a reader of Scott's for years before I first came across his real name. The entire social Internet is built on security through obscurity, because opsec is hard and many people aren't constantly vigilant.
There's even precedent for these intuitions outside of the social media context. It's uncontroversially okay for someone's face to show up in your photo taken in public; once you've taken it, nobody cares if you study the guy in the background. However, aggregate and operationalize this, and it changes not just in degree, but in character: It's practically a trope in thrillers for universal CC cameras + alphabet-agency elbow grease to stitch together comprehensive tracking of an individual, and the public is rightfully a little creeped out by the thought.
The main difference here is that technology, as always, is democratizing the ability to do this, pushing the threat model from the unrealistic "NSA spends huge resources to track you" to the prosaic "facial recognition can just track and store everyone's movements at low cost" (or "some under-the-radar shop is aggregating your bikini shots") and a million other mundane violations of our moral intuitions. To my mind, we're in the uncomfortable period before a new norm equilibrium is reached that matches the technological context. This has already happened locally: I'm sure this group knows people who have good opsec since the early 2010s, and "treat everything you post as if it's public" is at this point an age-worn piece of wisdom.
I mean, I guess that's the reason why it was downvoted, don't you think?
That said, I didn't actually downvote it, I just gave some argument for why I think the downvote was justified.
IMO, this distinction is usually illusory, and only taken seriously in the kinds of conversational spaces that aren't worth being part of. "Most reasonable people think it's immoral" can be applied to any number of horrific things over the course of human history. If you want to hide[1] a potentially sincere groupthink simply because it doesn't comport with groupthink, there a million and one fora full of dumb, narrow-minded people you can do that on. HN isn't all the way there yet, and I think it's worth pushing back against the tide.
This doesn't suggest that it's impossible to post something so alien that there's likely little of value to discuss, but this is demonstrably untrue of the parent comment, as evidenced by my response to it and the half dozen people who found it interesting enough to upvote it.
[1] Again, we're talking about flagging, not just downvoting, though it applies weakly to the latter too.
> IMO, this distinction is usually illusory, and only taken seriously in the kinds of conversational spaces that aren't worth being part of. "Most reasonable people think it's immoral" can be applied to any number of horrific things over the course of human history.
Your solution to the fallibility of human judgment, especially when it comes to ethics, is to assume that there can be no moral judgement anymore, because one might be wrong. I don't think this is productive. I'm quite sure there are a number of things you would consider deeply immoral that you would be shocked to read here. People are allowed to have a sense of ethics and to use that to guide downvotes. If you disagree, just upvote instead, or discuss why you disagree. But you yourself admitted that most people would find the behaviour in question immoral.
> HN isn't all the way there yet, and I think it's worth pushing back against the tide.
Your mistake is to assume that HN is somehow above basic human nature. But HN is also full of explicit and implicit biases and those can often hide behind a veneer of supposed rationality.
> This doesn't suggest that it's impossible to post something so alien that there's likely little of value to discuss
I found your contribution to the debate to be actually sort of interesting, but more as an answer to a question such as "how can we explain why we find that sort of behaviour to be immoral" and not to the OP's implicit "I fail to see what's immoral here".
Also, it was just in a sense a low-effort comment. I'm sure that poster can perfectly well understand why someone would find the behaviour in question immoral given that that person presumably has spent time around other people, including women who might object to this kind of objectification. So if they still disagree that it is immoral, they could at least try to argue why.
(Also, the sole reason why I'm engaging you, as opposed to OP, here is because I find these sorts of meta-ethics / meta-rationality discussions to be quite interesting and important in a world where "reasonable people" seem to be less and less able to agree on how to ascertain both what is true and what is moral. This is, I think, a discussion worth having, I just happen to disagree with your conclusions.)
Right, I mentioned that the case against downvoting is weaker, since at this point it's basically describing my opinion about what makes a forum a worse place to hang out. No real disagreement here.
> Your solution to the fallibility of human judgment, especially when it comes to ethics, is to assume that there can be no moral judgement anymore, because one might be wrong.
I don't think this is what I expressed; the intent of my second paragraph is to explicitly clarify that I'm not defining away the ability to signal (via downvote/flag) that certain content isn't welcome in a forum. My point was that moral judgment without care and thoughtfulness is extremely unproductive for a forum of this sort. (I actually hold the stronger opinion that it's evil, but this is so much stronger a claim that it would derail this conversation significantly to go into it).
> Your mistake is to assume that HN is somehow above basic human nature.
I don't follow how this applies to what I've said. Differen communities are suited to different types of discussion, and HN is better-suited to thoughtful consideration of non-consensus views than others. It's not perfect at this goal; I'm certainly pretty hard on HN in my meta-comments, but that's largely because I was lucky enough to have found a couple other fora that are even more highly-selected for intelligence, intellectual honesty, compassion, and open-mindedness. The default state of an Internet (or non-Internet) forum is to allow people to perform "thinking" while basking in the warm fuzzies of guaranteed social approval and never having to challenge their beliefs. If the behavior you're defending isn't pushed back against where possible, every forum in the world will become the same formless sludge (and inability to empathize with those outside of your bubble). As I mentioned, "suppress this without discussion because I think it's immoral" has a horrific track record; were this 50 years ago, I'd be saying "seriously, why _is_ being gay so worthy of persecution" and you'd be saying "it's immoral to even think that, no need to engage, just downvote".
I know I was pretty hard on the concept of mutual-approval societies, but I actually think there is value to this approach. The term "safe space" is often used derogatorily, but it has significant value. If there's a forum dedicated to discussing the minutiae of Christian theology, I think it's completely reasonable to keep it a "safe space" from those who want to argue the basics of, say, God's existence. There are many types of productive discussion that require holding constant certain assumptions (rendering questioning of those assumptions unproductive).
HN is fairly high-percentile when it comes to acceptance of non-consensus ideas, expressed in good faith. That is (historically) the culture of this forum, and its value. As I mention in my previous comment, there are non-consensus ideas which one can judge do not come anywhere near interesting topics, but as evidenced by my response to him/her, this comment was not one of them. Note also that this doesn't even preclude downvoting, though it's not ideal; my comment specifically mentions "downvoting without replying".
Particularly without a reply, it seems much more likely that the downvotes come from the knee-jerk reflex to pattern-match that afflicts the especially-stupid ("this guy must be a misogynist! I must come to the rescue! I'm such a good person"). People like this are _everywhere_, and by definition are extremely unlikely to learn or be learned from. I get that there are hordes of these people even on HN, but their comments and their anti-thought impulses are precisely what I would like to push back against to preserve the distinct value this place still retains.
> more as an answer to a question such as "how can we explain why we find that sort of behaviour to be immoral" and not to the OP's implicit "I fail to see what's immoral here".
What's the difference? If there is a difference, why does the comment fall in the latter bucket instead of the former, given that his comment is _literally_ a question?
> Also, it was just in a sense a low-effort comment
If there is a difference in intent, why should that matter? I'd happily lose a million reflexive downvoters from HN to retain a single poster of "low-effort" questions that probe a Sacred Tenet of Groupthink, even if I disagree with the assumed implicit conclusion of the prober. Downvoting-without-response is both lower-effort _and_ more harmful than asking these questions: If the comment is so obviously wrong, surely a low-effort response should suffice, right? If you've spent much time on HN, you'd know that easily-rebutted comments are rebutted thoroughly and repeatedly.
I think perhaps where our views here diverge is that I couldn't care less about "punishing" the commenter, and am certainly not willing to damage the quality of discussion here to do so. It's not even a good idea from the pragmatic perspective of stigmatizing these views: when I see a downvoted and unanswered question, I don't think "he's definitely wrong", I think "1) I can't think of a rebuttal and nobody else seems to have either, so they just suppress it and 2) boy, HNers have gotten even fucking stupider".
Sorry for the length, and I likewise appreciate the conversation!
This is not sarcasm, or me trying to be mean.
If you have to say "I'm not trying to be mean" before anyone accuses you of it, then you're clearly aware that what you're saying sounds mean, but you don't care to try and avoid it, but you want to pretend you are still nice. Which, ironically, is something that would cause some intensive pencil scritching during a psych eval.