> Publicly espousing an unpopular opinion now can be career suicide
Let's not pretend this is new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist
The difference now is that visibility is more uniformly distributed across the population.
Let's not pretend this is new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist
The difference now is that visibility is more uniformly distributed across the population.
And that you don't necessarily have to chase said visibility. Before, visibility was a goal very few people could attain. Now it's a bomb that can be thrown at you without warning.
I am not sure if humans can exist without blacklists. Some people definitely have the instinct to create them.
But nowadays it is fairly easy for every employer out there to check out whether there is a 'controversy' in your past or not, even if you are not a traditional celebrity.
Being less employable in Miami is one thing. Being less employable in the entire Anglosphere is another.
Let's not pretend the scale of the phenomenon today and mass surveillance capacity of today plus mass exposure and permanent public record of social media, web forums, even public spaces and events (e.g. with someone recording a video) is in any way comparable to the McCarthy era.
Or the the "offenses" people get social-mob-attacked, pilloried, and fired are in any way comparable to the offenses (even if BS) people were prosecuted for in that day: being considered an enemy of the state working to overthrow the government.
I'm also seeing a lot of base-rate fallacy and availability bias issues (surprisingly, from many of the same people who complain about other people falling prey to the base rate fallacy w.r.t. Covid). That you can think of a few instances where people were loudly pilloried for, say, weaponizing the state use of force to racist ends, doesn't mean that it happens that often.
Sort of a “join us or die” accept killing is not usually needed to shut someone down. Shunning is usually enough these days.
What's going on now is being blacklisted by multiple industries. People who get marked as such never work in "normal" companies again and have to move continents to find work.
You are comparing being blacklisted by a group of people to being blacklisted by society at large.
Who?
Maybe I'm just not paying attention to the news, but I somewhere missed the great wave of American software developers migrating to Europe for a better life for their families.
Hollywood is not at the scale of the internet. Some privileged people got cancelled in Hollywood, who cares. When a hard working person gets cancelled by saying something stupid, the consequences are back breaking.
Whereas today it's a new phenomenon, that gets progressively worse even though the problems you've mentioned (regarding blacks, women, gays, etc) are at their historical lower point.
So while America was progressing then, this is a regression now.
And it also affects blacks, women, gays, lesbians, republicans, demoracts, old-style lefties, and so on -- all of those categories have had members cancelled or mob-attacked for wrong opinions... (even someone like Dave Chappelle, who is a comedian of all things, has been attacked on such grounds).
Dave Chappelle, with his recent $8-figure deal with a prominent pop-culture/FAANG company, who keep publishing and promoting his specials, seems like he's actually a counter-argument to your point.
Sure, we've all heard of donglegate, or about that guy whose hand did an "OK" gesture on his car door and was accused of "far-right" symbolism, or about that teenaged girl who once said the И-word in a video celebrating her driver's licence which resulted in her rejection from university, and many many more. Yes, these things are injustices and they should not happen, and they should be stopped. But on the large scale of things, does saying something stupid really pose a significant risk of disproportionate public shaming to a normal person?
The online hatemob only has so much attention span to dedicate to its latest victim(s), and there is only so much airtime and tweets to be dedicated to the latest outrage. And, in the meantime, hundreds of millions of people live their lives as normal, with more-or-less online presence, saying, doing and posting things which may well be "cancellable" according to this or that neopuritanical value — and yet, nothing happens to them. And this is good.
Don't get me wrong, I do think that fear of "cancellation" inhibiting people's openness to express themselves and their mental well-being is itself problematic, however statistically irrational this fear may be. However, focusing attention on these rare events, even if it is to criticise the phenomenon, may only make the problem worse.
If you'll forgive the somewhat melodramatic analogy, it's a bit like terrorism. Just like disproportionately instilling fear of terrorism only serves to help the terrorists' objective to instil fear, so does disproportionately insisting on the unfairness and disproportionate consequences of "cancel culture" only serve to help the cancellers themselves in their desire to influence society.
[0] For a given meaning of "cancelled" and "saying something stupid", that is.*
To your second question, where am I "saying that like it's some innocuous thing that anyone would do"? And what does it matter?
Take a loan shark, for example. You don't need to take a leg every time a loan is late. You just need to do it to enough of them, visibly enough, that everyone gets the message -- you can miss a payment, and maybe get away with it... but you also might get seriously fucked up.
And suddenly, no one's missing payments. Because the % chance of failure might be low, but the damage done is dramatically high (potentially infinite, if you escalate from taking legs to taking heads) -- giving you a very a high expected-value.
You only need to expel a few people from society for espousing wrong-think, to get most people to fear speaking wrong (accidentally, or intentionally). And it's perfectly rational.
Regarding terrorism, it's the same thing. You don't need to have that many terrorist events for it to be rational to defend heavily against them -- if they do enough damage (e.g. 9/11), they've made up for their rarity. The problem with defense-against-terrorism is that it's used to justify things that have nothing to do with it, or very weakly related (eg invasion of countries, elimination of security protocols, invasions of privacy, etc) and is used as a scapegoat for all sorts of nefarious activity.
The part that's irrational is not the fear of terrorists, but rather the mindless interpretation of anything that claims to help resolve that fear.
Not sure what will land you there, but I know they have it and use it.
If you mean YC has a strong community of founders who share war stories of how people and companies were difficult to work with, and the other YC founders pay attention to those stories though, well, that's not a blacklist.
About the blacklist, I don’t know exactly how it works, who specifically has access to it or who can add entries to it, but I know it exists, I know people who have been affected by it, know people who have been told explicitly about it and know that at least some partners have access to it.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew
* https://news.ycombinator.com/show
YC competitors go straight to shownew to minimize visibility and they have no hope of landing on the front-page. Whereas YC companies go straight to the front-page.
That's not even touching on the dirty tricks the YC network plays with the VC community. They will work hard to ensure that no YC competitors get funded, including spreading false dirt on founders of competitive companies.
/shownew and /show are clearly explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html ("Every Show HN appears on shownew. Once it clears a small points threshold, it will appear on the show page in the top bar.") and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html ("All submissions appear on newest, and all Show HNs on shownew, but there is a small points threshold before a post appears on ask or show.")
The stuff you're saying about how YC works is not only made-up, it's the opposite of the truth. YC often funds competitors to existing YC startups—first because if you're funding 1000 startups a year, that's inevitable; and second because startups don't usually die because of competition, as PG and YC have been explaining to founders for many years. A startup that's building something people want will almost always find a way to differentiate itself.
We don't moderate Show HNs to favor YC startups or disfavor other startups. We do give YC startups the chance to post Launch HNs that get placed on HN's front page (as explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). But these don't go on the /show tab (they used to, but I disabled that so YC startups wouldn't get too much of an extra advantage). Plenty of Show HNs make the front page, and the overwhelming majority have no connection to YC—in fact, I can't fathom how you'd have thought otherwise, since this seems quite obvious.
When a non-YC startup is having a successful Show HN, I often help them and also encourage them to apply to YC. When a non-YC startup posts a Show HN that isn't successful, I often email them with suggestions about how to rework it so the community will like it better, and if they do that, I often put their Show HN in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it gets a random placement on HN's front page.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28810941 I gather that you're upset about something that happened to a specific Show HN. Rather than jumping to false conclusions about what happened, you should post the link so that (a) we can look into it and respond, and (b) readers can make up their minds for themselves. Since the comments you're posting contain no specific information, the more you post dramatic claims, the less likely readers are to believe you.
There could be a ton of reasons why your friend's Show HN got demoted, ranging from setting off the flamewar detector, the voting ring detector, getting flagged by users for some reason, getting downweighted because it broke the Show HN guidelines, getting downweighted because it broke the HN guidelines, various kinds of spam or abuse behavior (the worst of which is buying upvotes from spammers, which people unfortunately do but which typically causes their post to get buried immediately, and their account and site banned on HN). I'd need a link to say for sure which of those, if any, it was. Or maybe it just didn't get enough upvotes to clear the hurdle from /shownew to /show. That often happens. It happens to YC startups too.
If your friend(s) didn't do anything bad, you or they should email us so we can look at the post and possibly help. That's what people do when they assume good faith, and that approach has a much higher expected value than the approach you've been taking with these comments. You/they should do that out of simple self-interest if nothing else. Even when people did do something bad, we usually forgive and unban them if they take responsibility for it and promise not to do it again.
Not only do we not lie to the community, we try never to do anything that isn't clearly defensible to the community. To do otherwise would be not only wrong but stupid, since it would risk losing the good faith of HN users. Why would we do that? That's the only value HN has. It's precisely by not doing it that we can keep HN in the high esteem of this audience, and therefore keep YC in a kind of special relationship with users here. That's what makes HN valuable to YC (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
I've responded more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28817887.
"We have half a dozen opaque excuses" isn't the argument you think it is. The fact is this site shouldn't even exist due to the crystal clear conflict of interest between running a vc firm and a startup "news" site. That's not just journalism 101, it's common sense 101. It's not defensible.
> Not only do we not lie to the community, we try never to do anything that isn't clearly defensible to the community.
If you take one step outside the HN/YC echo chamber, you'll find that most people know that this site is a scam and heavily weighted toward promoting YC companies as that's the only reason it exists. Only a very, very foolish person would believe otherwise.
Also LOL that you hid this reply! It's because there is no defense for a vc firm pretending to run a "news" service and you know it.
This has become repetitive, though, so I'm going to stop doing that now unless you have some specific information to offer.
* because we moderate HN less, not more, on YC-related topics [1]. Less doesn't mean zero, though.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
But there is no comparison to a small population being affected (ironically in the USSR, lots of artists and authors got not only blacklisted but sent to the Gulags --gee, I wonder if they wrote to Stalin on behalf of their brethren) to potentially anyone and everyone being a potential subject at any moment for something otherwise innocuous.
What’s more this is much worse. It’s not about a singular subject (communist sympathizer) but just about anything at any moment. It's a shifting landscape so much so that there is internecine sniping among all groups.
Today you can’t even make a genuine faux pas without the risk of someone coming down on you and risking your livelihood. That’s quite different.
If Pelosi said off handedly, you know Trump did a couple of things right, or you know I don’t agree 100% with everything BLM she’ll be in trouble and she’s the top politician outside the president. Imagine a school teacher…
I think we don't respect the power we wield often enough. That's a terrible capability to provide via a system that also encourages you to blurt something out in 280 characters or less. Every single tweet is a shout from a mountaintop (and since it's time-stamped and on the timeline forever, that shout echoes perpetually).
Additionally, that infrastructure incentivizes gravitation towards some flat-mass-"centroid" of acceptable cultural practice, and there's no particular guarantee that such a thing across the bulk of humanity is either possible or desirable.
If I may paraphrase... there's no comparison between oppressing a minority I don't belong to, and the entire population being subjected to the same risk.
If you say "tax the rich 95%." That's bad. "Tax everyone 95%" That's really bad. I don't understand how you cannot see that. The fewer people affected by something, the less evil it is even if it's evil.
I mean, what are you saying, H-wood blacklisting was bad, therefore what we see in social media ostracizing is acceptable? That seems... strange.
Of course not all sympathizers of communism also agreed with death camps, re-education, stifling of progress, etc., etc., but they tacitly contributed to to those bad things. A young person, or someone who thinks they are being funny or whatever caught in a bad moment is different from someone who knowingly supports tyrannical forms of government.