The amount of frothing vitriol in this thread makes it clear that Armstrong made the correct choice. Public discourse in the Bay Area has become completely toxic.
Maybe it’s the font, we just don’t now. Maybe one more character can totally kill Twitter.
Better keep the changes to a minimum until you figure out what to do.
He was correct, so was Shopify, so was Basecamp and all these businesses that told their employees to leave their partisan politics and social justice concerns at the door.
I'm not sure what HN has turned into but the litany of disingenuous comments from people claiming a tech company has the duty to mend society the way they believe is the best makes me believe that a lot of people here don't understand what running a business is about and It is not being a PAC.
I'm also amused with the people claiming that all these companies "are bleeding talent". No, a lot of us here just want to write programs or manage teams or products, nothing more. Certainly not be involved in any social justice activity.
I would absolutely love to work at Coinbase given these work conditions.
It's not even only about politics. I like being able to go to a place, work, chat a bit about superficial things with my collegues and go back home. I don't need to expose my whole self and soul when I go to work, and in fact I prefer not to. Some people are not like me, and feel the opposite. Great! I just want places to exist for both of us.
The political activism gets so ridiculous that we have to cheer for looting because it is tied to BLM... for whatever strange reason.
And this is looting shops in Seattle, which overwhelmingly supports BLM. You can bet those shop owners probably won't support BLM anymore...
Even when they set that construction site on fire, the stark difference between the front of the march which went peacefully by and the trail of destruction from the end of the march; it's no wonder the people at the front were confused when the police confronted them. unless they were staring at their phones the entire time, they'd have no idea what the "pacific youth liberation front" was doing behind them.
Unless you went actively searching for both sides, the passive social media and MSM would just show you whatever half of the story aligned with your political views; any conversation was just 2 sides completely talking past each other because they only saw their echo-chamber and refused to acknowledge the other side's echo-chamber.
The best/dumbest example was video of a (dismounted) cop who rolled his bike over some guy's head. And then the time-lapse video of that guy spending 15+ mins following the cops around and laying down in front of them; only getting his head rolled over on the 5th time. The immaturity of all parties in that video is just mind-boggling to me.
Noah Trevor went on a long monologue how looting was justified because police broke social contracts first.
A lot of people applauded him for saying this.
And I would consider Noah Trevor to be an highly influential BLM leader.
It still makes absolutely no sense to me to loot random shop owners (who support BLM) because police breaks social contract.
Even completely political organizations will have to control political discussions at workplace. US Government is moving into that direction and we are seeing a far less political Senate and Congress that is rarely focussed in any discussion as a joint entity. The two teams in legislative bodies rarely 'talk' to each other on political topics. Most discussions are now procedural and political debate in almost all public forums is completely dead.