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Comment by awb | Hacker News Reader

Intent does matter but it’s only half the picture. The impact is the other half. If you don’t intend to run over someone with your car, but you do, you still get in trouble (assuming their intent want to get run over). You need to be more careful because your actions (even unintentional ones) impact others.

From the post, they say that they have a conversation with anyone that’s the subject of a complaint at which point if you express some interest and concern about the impact you’re having on the community, your intentions will probably be respected more than if you just want to focus 100% on your intent, impact be damned.

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But this case is interesting. Because when you run someone over, you can physically observe the damage done to them. But when you communicate in a manner that upsets someone, it’s impossible to objectively observe the impact. And worse: it is strongly personal.

And that is where a truly ridiculous but also entirely reasonable question comes in: how much of someone being impacted by speech online is really kind of their responsibility? It can’t be zero because zero would be completely incompatible with free society; protected speech can necessarily cause discomfort or pain, and realistically with increasingly many perspectives you’re bound to find someone hurt by something. It probably shouldn’t be 100% either, because there’s no amount of thick skin that can’t ever be broken. Somewhere down the middle is a spot where people have to conduct themselves reasonably, but there is some expectation for personal resilience in the face of adversity in communication.

I suspect that a whole lot of conflict regarding CoC’s, moderation, etc. comes from people who believe more or less responsibility belongs with the person who is impacted by given speech. And it is not culturally universal, either. People may scoff at the concept but if your vernacular differs in a way that is upsetting to someone due purely to cultural differences, there may never be a position to stand in that is truly “inclusive to all.”

Effective inclusivity in a community without some degree of compromise by its members is probably impossible, and I worry the group dynamics of modern communities does not mesh terribly well with this concept, on an internet where everything is constantly decontextualized.

Another thing that often gets missed with online speech is that, if you're Millenial or older, you went from an Internet where the stakes were virtually zero and almost everyone was anonymous, to the Internet today, where the stakes (real or perceived) are higher than ever.

Socializing and doing business over the Internet used to be a punchline or a fictional conceit in the 1990-2005 era, but now many things that previously only mattered in meatspace are only realized online. Personally, I haven't really gotten my head around the social implications of this change.

The "you didn't mean to hit someone with your car" thing is certainly a fun way to look at it, but what about people only get tapped by the bumper and then act like they flipped through the air 500 times before slamming their head into the concrete? And before anybody pretends like these people don't exist, let's think about the football(soccer) players that act like their leg is broken when someone sneezes near them. And if ppl will be that petty and insincere in a professional sporting event, it's fair to say that ppl will do it on the internet.

A better analogy is if you don't intend to run over someone with your car and they jump out in front of you, then you are not at fault, nor were you doing anything wrong.

Results do matter more than intentions, but sometimes results are out of your control or even disconnected from your actions. You may say something perfectly reasonable and yet someone takes unreasonable offense. Who is to define what is reasonable to say and what is reasonable to take offense to? In the past decades, the political left has taken us too far in the direction of giving a small minority tyrannical censorship power to silence by taking offense at whatever they dislike, and then cancelling the person who said it.

What? I can’t call someone a “f*** f*” anymore?

Every generation thinks the next generation’s rules are tyrannical. Speech and culture is messy and it’s not black and white. To say it’s all been bad is ignoring a lot of violent speech that is no longer acceptable and the benefit that has brought to the the same small minority groups you’re referencing, from being less subjected to verbal attacks.

>What? I can’t call someone a “f** f*” anymore?

If this is what you honestly think they're referring to then I feel like that says a LOT more about you then it does about them. They were very clear that they aren't talking about situations like this one you've just described.

Are you being disingenuous or do you honestly need someone to explain what they meant? They're talking about crybullies who will disingenuously misinterpret what someone says and take offense to it. Very much like you've just done.

Were you alive in the 80s? I literally heard this complaint multiple times from multiple people. The point is is that calling someone a “f_____ f__” would be considered a “micro aggression” by some in the 80s that only the “radical left” would get upset about.

The point is that if you’ve lived long enough you’ve seen people complain about culture changing enough times to know that it’s always changing and always uncomfortable for those that don’t like it.*

I'm pretty sure name calling with malicious intent has always been considered a macroaggression.

Even today, using that terminology in jest may be completely acceptable and benign with no malicious intent at all, depending on the social circle it's being used in. Cultural norms do not translate to universal cultural axioms.

Yes, and the 1970s. The expression "microagression" hadn't been invented, but nobody imagined it was anything but aggressive.

Things go too far in one direction, and the speech restrictions in the former Eastern Bloc were considered unacceptable for more than 20 years after its collapse.

Now some people are trying to reestablish the same control mechanisms.

P.S.: No one is asking to permit the slur you cited to make a point, it isn't a great example.

> if you don't intend to run over someone with your car and they jump out in front of you, then you are not at fault, nor were you doing anything wrong.

Not if you are in a pedestrian crossing (especially unsignalized one).

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