Couldn't get past the furry art. Maybe separate interests.
I find this statement hard to believe, for reasons that might become more clear as I explain the history that makes your remarks controversial. For the time being, I'm going to assume good faith, and I'll revisit this [suspended] disbelief at the end.
In another comment, you said:
> On a personal note, it's not my cup of tea, but that's cool, there's a million tech blogs without sexualized mascot drawings.
There's a long history of people on technical forums (HN, Reddit, Lobsters, Slashdot, etc.) assuming that furry art is inherently sexual. I blogged about this topic before. https://soatok.blog/2021/04/02/the-furry-sexuality-blog-post...
The history of the "furry is sexual" premise can be traced back to imageboard culture (i.e. 4chan), which got its start from Something Awful, which was the origin of a lot of anti-furry sentiment. This hatred of furries was rooted in queerphobia. See: https://archive.ph/fX8Jo
> A huge, huge motivation for early furry hate was homophobia. That remained the one axis on which we (non-furry dweebs) could punch down, no matter the stated justification. Furries helped mainstream majority-queer online spaces. That made them easy to mock, because they were unashamed enough to be public with their weird art and their dragon wings and their rejection of all the suffocating norms that still make mainstream geek culture an unrelenting hell.
> That invited scorn. It hurt to see others free of the shames that wracked us so. Disgust was the immediate response, a kind of unbodying rejection which would seek to purge any otherness from ourselves. Some of us knew it to be queerphobia, and I'm sure that was the motivation for a lot of the early trolling. Others just wanted to be part of the in-group, and there was no easier way to do that than take a swing at a designated punching bag.
> Something Awful had a particular response to furries. After creating a subforum specifically for furries to post in, everyone who used it was marked with a custom yellow star avatar, then banned.
This meme of hating furries has far-reaching echoes today, with dumb rumors being whipped up all over the country in order to fan the flames against LGBTQIA+ people: https://dogpatch.press/2022/05/23/furries-schools-hoax-map/
You might be wondering, "What's the link between furry and LGBTQIA+ people?"
Well, the best statistical estimates I can find for queer people in America put us at about 5% to 10% of the population. Conversely, about 80% of the furry fandom is LGBTQIA+. https://furscience.com/research-findings/sex-relationships-p...
The "most furries are gay" thing was the premise of how SomethingAwful treated us in the early 2000's: https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/728349066178998274
There is also a common sentiment that LGBT people merely existing is "going too far". e.g. https://twitter.com/XydexxUnicorn/status/1528420587001065474
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So, given that historical context, when someone comments on a technical blog post that they couldn't get past the art (followed by "Maybe separate interests." as a standalone sentence, which comes across as snarky and condescending), and offer up a defense that boils down to "your fursona is too sexualized", it's certainly a red flag.
With multiple data points and doubling down, it becomes very challenging to not read that as an unstated "teehee I'm going to dog-whistle my way around overtly breaking the rules while still signaling anti-furry hate and there's nothing you can do about it, because I'll just play stupid if you call me on it". I deal with this a lot from tech people. To wit: https://soatok.blog/2021/03/04/no-gates-no-keepers/
I'm not saying that's what you're doing or how you feel. This is simply how it comes across to my peers and myself. Only you know what you feel in your heart and believe in your mind.
But that's why dismissing technical articles because of cartoon animal characters and calling them "too sexualized" is likely to be controversial on Hacker News comments.
I hope you find this information helpful for future interactions with furries on Hacker News, because we're not going away.
It was my professional suggestion to separate the content to avoid that misinterpretation.
You can't control how you are perceived by others. You have to grow thicker skin. You can simply say "No I don't care about that, it's my passion and I will stand behind it.", instead of getting offended. As some on the right I have to constantly be interpreted as a racist or sexist, or any other ist. That's fine as I know those claims are false and I believe in my views.
More power to whatever you want to do, I'm a libertarian and I think people should be able to do whatever they want as long as they aren't infringing on other people's rights. But you don't get to control other's speech or how they think. You can certainly try to convince them though, which you've certainly made an effort to, I applaud that. I don't think the victim mentality or linking it to "phobias" is helpful though.
The problem is the misinterpretations, not the juxtaposition. Correct yourself, not me.
I'm never going to stop being gay, or a furry, or a cryptography nerd.
I'm not going to respond to the rest of your comment, because doing so would likely violate the HN guidelines. So that's how far free speech goes.
I just advised that you should learn to not get so offended because it's pointless, people will think what they think.
Of course do what you want though, as will I.
Good day.
Here's the thing: I'm not offended.
If I believe you're acting in good faith, I'm absolutely going to explain to you why you're getting a negative reaction. That's what I did above, which you seemed to have parsed as "taking offense".
If you're not acting in good faith, just tell me what you really are so I can file your opinions where they belong and move on with my day.
One day you're going to be confronted with your "I don't care about the consequences of my actions" attitude in a very personal way, and you're going to think, "Of course I'm not ___ist/______phobic!"
When that finally happens, remember our conversation today, where you took a minority describing how you come across to their peers as them taking offense, and introspect. Maybe you'll learn the lesson I was trying to impart today.
If not, all of this is moot. I don't need your advice, and it's not welcome.
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."