Comment by cdogl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cdogl | Hacker News Reader

> The Berlin-founded company has maintained its relevance by embracing a simple ethos: come as you are. That’s made SoundCloud the for-everybody platform—one that embraces all genres, sexualities, religions, and definitions of music and art. By setting itself up as a hub for community-oriented music streaming, it’s become a kind of incubator for avant-garde sounds. SoundCloud is everybody’s underground.

I find this kind of politicised editorialising from publications like Wired quite tiring. I have many acquaintances who produce EDM and I was on Soundcloud from 2012 or so. They never saw it in these terms. Of _course_ a platform for hosting your music tracks isn’t exclusive to a particular race, religion or ethnicity. Can anyone name a counter-example in music for whom that’s not the case, outside of obscurity? Or indeed any comparable tech platform?

Some seem to have decided that being neither sexist, racist nor homophobic in your banal business offerings is a revolutionary development from the past decade or two.

> I find this kind of politicised editorialising from publications like Wired quite tiring.

You're making it political, but it's just positioning. A PR firm pitched Wired this story as part of a campaign to remind everyone that SoundCloud once mattered¹ in preparation for their forthcoming fire sale.

¹ Probably not as much as this story suggests, though. Artists who started on SoundCloud weren't using it exclusively. For example, TikTok (not SoundCloud) broke "Old Town Road".

Well, the quote you mentioned said nothing about sexism or racism, you added that. So I think you should wonder why the references in that paragraph made you bring a whole gamut of "political" considerations you then deemed irrelevant in one swoop.

The only one they said is "sexualities", and here again I would challenge your re-framing. "Embracing all sexualities" doesn't just mean "not being homophobic". Not actively discriminating against differences between people is the first step. The next step is being welcoming of differences.

Now, is Soundcloud doing that? I'm not sure. I don't know, I'm not a soundcloud user, nor am I queer. But there are absolutely spaces and websites that attract queer creators/users, and ones that don't. There are some that are neutral bland neutered corporate spaces. And some that are unapologetically vibrant and attract a greater percentage of people from - well "all genres, sexualities, religions, and definitions of music and art".

Perhaps Wired hasn't proven to you that Soundcloud isn't one of those sites, but it doesn't sound like you want them to.

Trying not to put words in OP's mouth, but I definitely know people in real life with this attitude, who also get weirdly bristled by innocent mentioning of things like "sexualities" in businesses' PR/positioning pieces. If I were to open a cafe and mentioned somewhere in my Grand Opening PR that the cafe is "inclusive to all genders and races," I know real acquaintances who would absolutely complain to me that my business was "too political". It's weird that the mere act of affirming that your business is welcome to people has become politicized but, hey, welcome to 2024.

It’s almost as if mentioning it, you’re implying that the majority of businesses close to you are not inclusive. If this is the case, go ahead and mention it to stand out.

Otherwise you’re just trying to get brownie points in how cool and progressive you are while solving your imagined problem.

I don't get how it's any different than hanging a big sign outside that says "We love to serve truckers and bikers!" It's just marketing/positioning. What makes one "brownie points" and the other not?

Do we apply the same standard to brands that position themselves as patriotic? If not, it seems that the positioning is less of an issue to certain people than the position.

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