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Comment by kfajdsl | Hacker News Reader

I'm much much younger than John23832, but I definitely recognized a lot of the same in some of the gaming communities I was a part of in the mid to late 2010s. There wasn't quite as much racism (at least in the places I hung out), but there was plenty of sexism and homophobia. It wouldn't necessarily be explicit, but there were lots of offhand comments and jokes. That's how racism (and sexism, homophobia, ...) tends to present itself; it's a lot more subtle than people straight up going "I hate ${group}".

However, I will say that I first got properly exposed to tech/computing by doing FIRST robotics in high school (2017), and those competitions were very diverse. Everyone I met through FIRST (students and mentors) was very accepting of everyone, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, etc. My college experience (classes, competition team, internships, etc) has thankfully been more of the same.

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> It wouldn't necessarily be explicit, but there were lots of offhand comments and jokes. That's how racism (and sexism, homophobia, ...) tends to present itself; it's a lot more subtle than people straight up going "I hate ${group}".

Don't conflate those jokes and offhand comments with hate. You're erasing all sorts of meaningful differences between basically harmless husbands joking about their wives or differences between men and women, and Andrew Tate.

It's also a poor tactic to effect change. If you immediately group basically harmless in-group type behaviours like these with actual devastating harm, you make yourself and your objections look silly causing people to dismiss you, and it's far harder to change behaviour after calling someone a hateful bigot, than it is to ask they tone it down because a joke made someone a little uncomfortable. I think you can easily imagine the difference in defensiveness each response might elicit.

Similarly, don't assume that all racism is expressed as hate. You're erasing all sorts of meaningful difficulties experienced by minorities if you assume that only overtly hateful comments can be disparaging.

> Similarly, don't assume that all racism is expressed as hate.

Who really claims that though? Saying "black people are always late" is racist because it's a racial prejudice, but that's not an expression of hatred towards black people. I think everyone gets that.

I also agree non-hateful comments can be insulting. So we're in agreement: erasing nuance is dumb. My point is that this nuance dictates that we shouldn't group these distinct behaviours all together and respond to them the same way.

Sure, some racism is expressed as DEI initiatives.

> If you immediately group basically harmless in-group type behaviours like these with actual devastating harm, you make yourself and your objections look silly causing people to dismiss you, and it's far harder to change behaviour after calling someone a hateful bigot, than it is to ask they tone it down because a joke made someone a little uncomfortable.

Sure, some of those things can be harmless. I agree that when calling out bad behavior you shouldn't necessarily go all the way to 100 (ofc depending on severity). The main way to gauge malice is people's reactions to a reasonable request to tone it down. Apologizing and not repeating it? Cool, that's how basically any friend group figures out where the line is drawn. Doubling down and basically saying "grow a pair"? Not ok.

There's also a difference between something like "hah, guess they were on IST" vs "typical street shitter" (using my own ethnicity as an example).

The problem is that if you don't personally know the views of the people involved, racist jokes are often indistinguishable from hate.

Outside of a context where the humor is understood by all like a stand-up comedy act, you aren't entitled to how other people perceive your behavior.

If you walk like a racist and talk like a racist, people are just gonna assume you're a racist.

If that's a problem for you, there's a really fucking simple solution.

The point is you don't know how this person walks or talks, you only see a fragment of a conversation typically taken out of context. I hope you see the problem here, to say nothing of the problem with assuming someone is intrinsically evil unless they toe your specific line.

Furthermore I'm entitled to argue for what I think are good practices for communicating online, just like everyone else.

words are actions in a forum where you cant see anything about a person but their words

If people making jokes is a problem for you, there is a really fucking simple solution: don't get offended. You aren't entitled to people going out of their way to accomodate you. If you don't know if someone is doing something out of hate, assume they are not.

Angsty teens trying to push the boundaries of what is socially acceptable are unfortunately heavily overrepresented in Internet culture, from what I've found.

A bit of pushback and people are usually super apologetic. Usually they're just aping someone else who said something counter-culture because they thought it sounded badass, and don't really believe it.

I did FIRST (about 10 years before you, ha). FIRST is a very inclusive space by design. I think it's great.

Ha, that's awesome; I loved meeting the mentors who also did FIRST way back. It's a great program, I credit it for putting me where I am now!

I feel that with gaming communities the main problem is simply having too many teenagers without supervision. It's pretty much like school really, immature people picking on others because of their own insecurity / problems. Eventually most people even in very toxic communities grow up and stop hating people for no logical reason, at least the smart ones.

It was exactly this; I was one of those teenagers for a little bit

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