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Comment by CoastalCoder | Hacker News Reader

I 99% agree with you.

One small counterpoint: Employers enjoy a bully pulpit on these issues. Employees with legitimate concerns about their employers' stances / policies sometimes can't even discuss them without the risk of losing their livelihood.

This can create a situation where individuals perceive that "the whole world" is telling them they're wrong, and are bad people for being wrong in this way. HN's anonymous-yet-respectful forum can somewhat help with this.

If nothing else, it's encouraging to know that they're not alone, but rather in an environment where other dissenters are also silenced.

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Wow, you'd almost think wage slavery might be a problem along with racism.

Oh - you mean the problem is white wage slaves might have less power to exclude and discriminate against non-white wage slaves.

I think you've just added additional support for badRNG's point above in that even when agreeing with someone it generates divisive comments.

There was no reference to wage slavery or even race in the comment you responded to.

>One small counterpoint: Employers enjoy a bully pulpit on these issues. Employees with legitimate concerns about their employers' stances / policies sometimes can't even discuss them without the risk of losing their livelihood.

There are endless platforms that are better suited for these discussions: Gab, 4chan, and Ruqqus to name a few. "HN's anonymous-yet-respectful forum" is best preserved by not hosting these types of deeply hostile, alienating discussions.

Part of my point was that HN is unusually good at keeping discussions civil, which I view as a requirement for productive discussion.

If you know of another forum that has this quality, I'd be grateful for a link. There are large swathes of the Internet I'm ignorant about.

https://www.fairforall.org has a quality community. That said I think this a relevant topic for hn on many levels and I don't find the conversations repetitive. If OP doesn't think so maybe they're not the target demographic for hn.

Right. To be frank, it really seems you are suggesting people who disagree with you should be marginalized to a few corners of the internet suffering from "the coven of the witches" problem.

And for the record, Ruqqus was shut down [1], so it really doesn't even exist.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799199

There's a chicken or egg problem with the "coven of witches" conjecture. I also don't think Gab is all that marginal. It seems to exist largely to facilitate conversations around perceived excesses with diversity efforts.

My greater point is that communities that facilitate these types of conversations typically have less inviting, more hostile cultures. There's a spectrum of course, but you can see glimmers of the type of discourse found on sites like Gab in the comment sections of anti-diversity blogs on HN. I think that an HN which plays host to more discussions about perceived issues with diversity will alienate a lot of folks who aren't entrenched in those sorts of debates and self-select for the type of discourse associated with these so-called "covens of witches." It seems to me that there's no value in sliding down that side of the spectrum for a site that's largely meant not to play host to ideological battles.

Cf. Scott Alexander’s “three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches” quip[1]. This bootstrap problem has very little to do with current affairs anywhere, I’d say, and I don’t think it has ever been solved except where the more liberal (in the original sense) means of communication additionally had some sort of technical superiority as well.

Except maybe the founding story of the US—I’m not an expert—but that was literally several waves of “witches” (many of them profoundly illiberal) taking their ball and going elsewhere, and their genetic memory of the necessity of free discourse seems to have died out by the middle of the 20th century (and was arguably missing the point as to which discourse needs to be free for decades before that). Not a bad record overall, but we’ve run out of unsettled land to go elsewhere to.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...

>To be frank, it really seems you are suggesting people who disagree with you should be marginalized

Seems that way. Parent explicitly wrote that it's only the articles that say "they've gone too far this time" that they find at fault. This means articles with the opposite view ("yay, more of those diversity efforts"), that touch on the same subject (and thus one would assume to be equaly divisive), are ok. I'd find it impartial and ok if they didn't wish either kind on HN, but only targeting one side is icky.

But even this framing (of articles like TFA as being anti-diversity) is wrong, if not disingenuous, to begin with.

As if TFA author is a seggregationist or wants less diversity (so agreeing makes you like that too), when diversity is not what the author complains about, but rather the inverse: lamenting the litany of the same facile rage-bait identity articles to the detriment of substantial reporting.

Actual reporting which would include substantial reporting on matters of opressed identity and lack of diversity, as opposed to e.g. gaslighting readers that Dave Chappele's special was met with uniform hostility when it was a huge success, or letting huge social issues be ignored, while covering inconsequential complains...

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