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Comment by bezier-curve | Hacker News Reader

There's a local developer meetup group in my hometown, a town which doesn't have a lot of local developers, ban me for essentially disagreeing with them in a private Discord DM. My crime? Telling them I don't like my hometown (and possibly for being the only known gay person). Meanwhile, their group's amenities are tax payer funded and allows their publicly funded power trips because they found someone to "grease the wheels" (aka cronyism).

If special interest groups are entitled to access to public resources, then I think their "board of directors" should also waive their right to filter out people from their group without some intervening third party auditing.

It's nice to use public infrastructure, but what you're suggesting already exists in some parts of the US, and it's abused. These "non-profits" are not necessarily philanthropic, or in the public's interest.

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I'm sorry to hear about your experiences, but I don't think some huge bureaucratic red tape will be any better. What will happen is that all the toxic assholes who will rant, make creepy remarks, etc. won't be told to buzz off, because doing the whole third party auditing will be too much effort and costly.

And I also think it's fine to exclude people for subjective reasons, even if it's (marginally) "tax-funded". If you go to the JS meetup and keep complaining about how bad JS is then maybe it's best that you stop coming. Generally very contrarian and combative? Maybe it's best those people also stop coming.

People that go to Sunday mass to proselytize that God doesn't exist (or to an atheist meetup to proselytize that God does exist) are also not welcome. Saying "it's tax-funded, and therefore it should be open to all" would lead to absurdity.

In the end we have to accept that not everything is perfect, and that trying to achieve 100% fairness typically makes things worse.

Well, I live in the bible belt, and I'm pretty certain it was discrimination in my case because one of their "board of directors" posted a homophobic tweet the same day I was banned. It's an example of how we shouldn't mandate hosting any "special interest" groups using tax dollars, which was the GP's point.

I was not challenging the sole purpose of the group as in your example, they simply retaliated for personal reasons irrelevant to the group's purpose, which is unprofessional. The group is about software development, not my hometown. The only reason I was even talking to their admins in DM is because they were harassing me with confrontational dialogue over a tasteful joke that went over their heads. It's a toxic group, and our public university shouldn't be hosting their events.

> I'm pretty certain it was discrimination in my case

Well, maybe, and that sucks, but it also doesn't really matter. You're still burdening thousands if not tens of thousands of groups with a significant legislation and cumbersome procedure just because there's this one group in the bible belt that might be a bunch of jerks. You can't really legislate jerks away.

And regardless, I don't think public resources should only be available to "nice people", or "non-toxic groups" (whatever subjective meaning you can give to that). It really doesn't cost a lot of money to provide and manage some venue for public use, and "funded by tax dollars" is more of a hang-up than anything else. Tons of public resources are funded by tax dollars, from pavements to social services to the fire brigade. Jerks and groups that are a bunch of jerks have just as much right to use these resources as anyone else. This line of reasoning becomes pretty absurd fairly quickly.

Well, I get the point you're trying to make but it seems a bit reductionist to compare discrimination against a legally protected status to whether or not "nice" people are using public resources. One instance is actually illegal, the other is not.

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