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Comment by aphyr | Hacker News Reader

For cishet folks on HN: this writing isn't about or for you. I've seen a lot of this community's homophobia, misogyny, transphobia, and generally reactionary political drift over the last 12 years--including replies to my technical writing. I know exactly how this conversation is going to go if it happens here. I'm asking y'all not to have it.

I'm returning a 403 on HN referrals to aphyr.com as a mild discouragement. I hope you'll respect this.

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submitter, cishet dude, and long-time admirer of your work here.

I posted the link because i was impressed with your usual style and level of detail and thoughtful work.

it wasn’t my intention to feed the trolls; perhaps i haven’t spent enough time on Svalbard? :)

As a queer HN'er - thank you for writing and compiling this! It's quite some amount of work. Like you say, it's so important for a community to know its own history.

That’s a very aggressive posture. I would say HN is one of the best moderated places online where people of opposing beliefs can debate in good faith. I think casting the entire community as -phobic is very unfair.

Here's the thing though. When it's a predictable outcome that somebody in the crowd will post x-phobic responses to a given story, then it's completely unreasonable for an x-person to expect a lack of x-phobia. If you were more concerned about the frequency of x-phobia in this community, rather than taking offense at people speaking about the negative experiences at the hands of this community, perhaps the community wouldn't have the reputation that it does.

Blocking on referers is a defensive move, not at all aggressive.

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