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Comment by emptysongglass | Hacker News Reader

This looks like Eelco was forced into a corner by a base of progressive extremists who wield terms like "concern trolling" and "sealioning" as weapons to crush dissent.

There are a number of comments in the thread of this announcement that are gray-text reported as "off topic" despite their restrained and on-topic tone. One commenter, dedguy21, has all of his comments flagged asking what exactly they're protecting minorities from until they finally admit they're a black man.

This is all pretty bad news for discourse in open source projects. And no, I'm not "concern trolling". We see it in action in the announcement thread, where dissenting opinions are pushed out of sight.

That we've come to a point where people are simply washed out of view for "harmful" rhetoric that isn't some particularly dominant viewpoint is a regression of discourse.

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I'd be interested to hear what you think was happening here, and if anything that happened here or could possibly happen could be considered concern trolling or sealioning, of if those are just woke concepts to be disregarded in its entirety.

> concern trolling or sealioning, of if those are just woke concepts to be disregarded in its entirety.

Using terms like "concern trolling" or "sealioning" definitely marks cultural identity.

Considering the term "sealioning": https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/sealioning-internet... I recall the original comic was along the lines of a sea lion arguing to the point of following someone into their bedroom. -- I think the idea of taking an argument to places where it's not appropriate is universal.

Merriam Webster's definition is much more belligerent: 'something that appears civil, but actually the civility is disingenuous, and they're only arguing to be a jerk to you'. -- I think there's a good reason why e.g. HN guidelines suggest to try and see arguments in a good light.

Would you consider Jon's behavior in the thread that contributed to him being banned (https://discourse.nixos.org/t/objection-to-minority-represen... - this was not the sole reason) to be

"the disingenuous action by a commenter of making an ostensible effort to engage in sincere and serious civil debate, usually by asking persistent questions of the other commenter. These questions are phrased in a way that may come off as an effort to learn and engage with the subject at hand, but are really intended to erode the goodwill of the person to whom they are replying, to get them to appear impatient or to lash out, and therefore come off as unreasonable"

You don't have to reply with a yes or no. I'm just wondering if you see the traces, and then we can put the difference down to how much benefit of the doubt we each give to potentially bad actors based on how frequently we encounter them.

It doesn't come across that Jon's comments are "intended to erode the goodwill of the [people] to whom [he is] replying". -- The initial post does come across as raising a genuine concern. (Though I think often the main problem with non-progressives is a lack of articulateness and a lack of legibility).

It does come across that commenters are frustrated with Jon in the discussion (in that thread, and from various other threads).

> we can put the difference down to how much benefit of the doubt we each give to potentially bad actors based on how frequently we encounter them.

There's definitely a part of this frustration where some have been arguing with the same people for months & others haven't seen that. -- But I don't think that's the only thing.

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