Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

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From what I've seen people post here, I can totally get that they don't like HN people. It's sad, because HN is how I found out about these people and their amazing skills, but I would've done the same thing in their place.

Many people, especially in the LGBTQ+ community, hate being featured on here. Some have asked the admin not to be linked but the HN doesn't blacklist websites.

There's a flood of negativity from the tech bros every time something makes it to the HN front page, both here but also on HN link aggregators. This is especially true for the people whose talents bring them to the HN front page every month or so, receiving the same flack and abuse every time.

Last time someone tried to block HN abuse by checking the referer header and redirecting visitors away, HN altered the link HTML to not send the referer header rather than listen to their wishes. First for a specific post, then for all posts. That's a pretty clear sign to me that the HN admins care more about their links and the fake internet points generated by discussions than about the people and projects being discussed.

If the admins are actively working against your wishes, why would you want to tolerate that platform?

Granted, I'm just massively struggling with the idea of excluding a whole radically diverse community (with some of the most civilized and self-moderating discourse on the internet) in the name of inclusiveness. To me, it's as ironic as it gets.

On that end, I can't find any fault on HN's end enabling their 99.99% of their interested readers who didn't do any wrong to be included in the discourse around these ideas, on the free and open web.

> the idea of excluding a whole radically diverse community (with some of the most civilized and self-moderating discourse on the internet) in the name of inclusiveness. To me, it's as ironic as it gets.

Not really more ironic than almost every non-trivial societal discussion, à la "if you want peace prepare for war". Anything non-trivial is multifaceted, and anybody who has an absolute opinion is probably missing most of the argument.

Very quickly for this specific case: one can easily argue that excluding people is hardly inclusive, but one can also easily argue that a niche community with its own subculture _needs_ some sheltering from the rest of the world, or the subculture gets lost very quickly (so the sheltering is good for diversity in that it preserves the existence of the subculture).

(I'm not pretending to present a fully-fledged argument here, just a taster to challenge absolute opinions, entire books could be written on this and probably have)

Re your specific argument, see also under “Cultural appropriation” (IV.6) in Scott Alexander’s essay “The ideology is not the movement”[1]. On the other hand, the argument that is actually, literally written down in Asahi discussions usually paints the whole HN readership as a group with specific coherent opinions that are specifically bad, so I’m not sure to which degree I ought to judge them by the strongest argument they could be making as opposed to the one they actually are.

(OK, there’s also the argument that HN will engage with people whose opinions the usual Asahi folks consider reprehensible—even if not necessarily often—and should thereby be treated as equally reprehensible unless they kick them out[2]. But, I don’t know. I’m a couple decades too young to have seen organized ostracism at the meetings of the Komsomol, but still, the only reaction I have when these kinds of social-isolation penalties are proposed is base animalistic terror. This includes people a decade younger in my own social circles proposing it, which is not even rare.)

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-th...

[2] “Parable of the Nazi bar“, etc.

And they are also free to (try to) restrict who has access to their site, so everyone is happy?

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