Would you care to elaborate? I am genuinely interested, in part because of curiosity and also because I haven’t experienced this personally.
Everyone feels like they are targeted and disenfranchised, as a side effect of the nature of social media.
All my left-wing woke friends are CONVINCED that the social media platforms uphold the white supremacist misogynistic patriarchy, and they have plenty of screenshots and evidence ...
All my alt/center-right/libertarian friends are CONVINCED the social media platforms uphold the woke BLM/Marxist/LGBTQ agenda and they ALSO have plenty of screenshots and evidence of times when...I do not believe or claim that dang is personally biased against "my side". I think he tries incredibly hard and is rigorously driven to avoid bias because of the grand social experiment he's shepherding. It's our privilege to participate in that experiment.
What I claim is that the policy of "assume good faith" has an inevitable, unavoidable side effect of driving away outgroups. On reflection it wouldn't be just left-affiliated outgroups either — the mechanism is that leniency in moderation means that low-grade hostility is tolerated — BUT that hostility could be directed against the outgroups of any forum, and who the outgroups are is variable and forum-specific.
You can see that the people that control moderation on most social networks are political left, and aren't shy about discussing it. You can see that the political support from the social media workers leans to the left (I think over 99% of all political donations from twitter goes to the left). You see that these people routinely proclaim support for leftist political causes in their personal social media. Do you think there's a chance this influences their decisions?
Now, we've been told a lot about implicit biases and how people that think they are even handed may be still prejudiced even if they don't realize it, and need to take deliberate actions to ensure this bias does not influence their work. Do you think this also relates to people controlling social media, or they are unique caste of saints untainted by biases the rest of humanity suffers from? Or, more likely, they don't think they need to any take such actions, because they live in 99% agreement bubble? Do you think the existence of 99% agreement bubbles hinders their ability to evaluate their biases and enact measures to reduce their impact on their work?
https://melissamcewen.medium.com/a-guide-to-hacker-news-for-...
That author advocates that HN stay how it is — or rather, she advocates changing it from within. But I don't think it's possible — I believe that the "assume good faith" proposition leads to toleration of unlimited low-grade hostility that does not rise above the threshold of flagging. The result is that outgroups flee the platform. Have you not noticed the gender imbalance around here?
From what I can see it's pick your poison:
* "Assume good faith" — outgroups don't participate. Exclusion may not be the intent, but it is the de facto result.
* Siloed: outgroups can and will meaningfully participate, but debate is more constrained.
The disagreement may be unsurprising, but I'd rather be persuasive. I'm not chasing "heretic" cred.
> I think it looks more like people interested in gender and identity based activism leave, and people interested in signal-to-noise ratio stay.
That's not true, as there are plenty of people discussing male-focused gender issues and male identity based activism, in addition to those discussing women, transgender, and universal gender issues.
> This is easily discovered by looking through the profiles of the top 100 posters and following the breadcrumbs.
Why would I want to do that? I mean, unless I am specifically interested either in gender activism (I am not), or in dating a top-100 HN poster (I am happily married) - why would I bother to research what kind of bits each of top-100 HN posters carry between their legs?
> That's not true, as there are plenty of people discussing male-focused gender issues
I would like to see some data supporting the assumption that male-focused gender issues and male-focused activism are discussed significantly more frequently on HN than female-focused gender issues and female-focused activism. This does not match my anecdotal impression - but of course I could be wrong. Could I see the source of your claims?
I only mention it to support the assertion that the gender imbalance exists. You wouldn't do it ordinarily.
> I would like to see some data supporting the assumption that male-focused gender issues and male-focused activism are discussed significantly more frequently on HN than female-focused gender issues and female-focused activism.
I didn't make such an assertion, as I was only rebutting the idea that "people interested in gender and identity based activism leave" per se. There are plenty of such discussions — a 700-comment thread on limb lengthening surgery just went by within the last day. The thread is filled with testimonials as to the discrimination faced by short men and the harms caused, including stories of heinous, callous bigotry.
(To which I say: yes let's please work together to be better to each other. Let's start from the assumption that it is human nature to be prejudiced and we all need to work to overcome our biases, rather than dividing ourselves into "x-ist"/"not-x-ist".)
I actually suspect that there may in fact be more male-focused gender identity discussion on HN than female-focused, but I haven't done the research. The misperception about that arises because men may not classify their own identity discussions as identity discussions.