The dark side of HackerNews: negativity at best, suppression at worst
keen.io
keen.io
Although I am sympathetic to the subject of sexism in our industry, this doesn't mean every article about it deserves to be on top of Hacker News. Michelle's piece was perfectly fine as blog posts go, and I'm glad she shared her thoughts, but it didn't really offer any new insights in the way that a Hacker News submission should.
The purpose of Hacker News is not, as this follow-up post seems to believe, to "draw attention to justice-oriented problems." I personally feel Hacker News has too much content based on politics and outrage these days, and it crowds out interesting technical content. I am sympathetic to many of the causes espoused, but just because I agree with you doesn't mean I'll upvote something that doesn't substantially contribute. Stories like that that don't introduce something new tend to just reignite old arguments, which isn't interesting or productive.
If Michelle had actually been calling attention to a novel problem in need of a solution, that would be a different story. But as far as I can tell, she was just kind of summarizing something that happened that made her upset. Again, I'm sympathetic and find the same things upsetting, but that still doesn't make it relevant.
None of this is a judgment of Michelle's post, and it doesn't mean what she was writing about is unimportant. It just means that, like 90% of things that interest me, it's not a good fit for this particular forum.
I fear that Hacker News flaggers are now over-generalizing "complaining about sexism" and lumping anything near that into the category of "nothing left to say".
My post was about what companies can do when they are faced with a gender PR problem. I'm glad it got some reads from the community, but I'm sad it got dismissed so quickly due to flaming in the comments. This leads me to question the algorithm for flamewar detection, since it seemed like a valuable conversation.
I also fear Hacker News readers are mistaking "complaining about sexism" as an attack or complaint about males in general. I think that's why we get so many defensive, flaming comments in threads discussing gender bias. This behavior only proves how much being male is engrained into the identity and culture of the tech community. When a woman says something about the tech community, males feel their gender is being attacked and very emotional posts result.
I consider myself a member of the tech community working on building it, not a person attacking it, so this response was unexpected. This is a good lesson to consider when writing about gender in the future.
There is a lot of good work we can do together to get more women into tech, and to give women here more confidence (did you know there has been a flight of women from the industry?). As tech becomes such a vital part of every company, I feel women are missing a huge opportunity if we don't become more involved here. Women need more encouragement than men do to make a go in this industry. I think that's worth writing about.
So many bay area companies are doing great things to help with this cause. That's part of why I was so shocked that the online community was so dismissive of this post.
I have another post planned to try to inspire the tech community to get more engaged. The reason these posts keep coming up is that there is still a lot we can do to make working in this industry better (if we can agree that having more technically skilled women is something worth working toward).
I believe discussions about how to attract, maintain, and train developers are important to this community. I also believe there is a lot of opportunity in encouraging women to build skills and join us.
I ask the Hacker News admins and flaggers of my post today to please consider the value of this discussion.
PS: I think I will make it a point not to use "Sexism" in the title for future posts. Hopefully that will help.
It's obviously something that impacts many people in this line of work, otherwise this community would not have such strong opinions about it.
Does Hacker News suppress other topics or just gender bias?
This is so hurtful.
Hacker News does not suppress this topic. But this topic has been very well covered, so the bar for what constitutes a novel contribution is fairly high.
There are also a lot of "Your rights online" stories on Hacker News. A lot of these get flagged into oblivion as well. This isn't because we don't care about our rights, but that the topic is sufficiently well-covered that it takes an exceptional story to actually bring something new to the conversation instead of just flaring up old arguments.
It isn't that we don't think the topic your blog post is important. It is. But just because a topic is important doesn't mean every article on that topic will be widely upvoted. In general, it's actually harder to rank with an "important" topic because you have a lot of competition and there is only so much space for stories.
So, please don't take it personally or interpret this as people suppressing the topic. It's just Hacker News trying to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. We don't have very good organizational tools here, so we kind of have to resort to blunt weapons that can look overly harsh when you're on the receiving end.
(Also, HN meta-discussions or any articles about Bitcoin tend to get flagged into oblivion as well. I guess people are just tired of reading that stuff.)
Which story currently on the front page should be replaced by your article?
As I write this it has 41 pts and 121 comments - that seems like an article that got some attention.
That is, if the topic is important and valuable to HN it will be valuable even if you didn't necessarily care so much about the topic.
That's sad, because there was good discussion going about objectification in marketing, and if the tech industry should be held to a higher standard as compared to other industries.
"Either:
"The post is being flagged en masse by our fellow HackerNews community members."
That is the most likely reason the submission dropped rapidly from the main page to a lower page. People who participate here regularly use flagging power to keep the submissions with thoughtful, interesting comment threads that are essentially on-topic higher than submissions with arguing, repetitive comment threads that aren't as close to the core topics of Hacker News. That, and luck of the draw as to which time of the day the blog post was submitted (meaning which HN participants happened to see it) is explanation enough for why the submission sank.
The moral of the story? Submit something next time that is closer to the core topics of HN, and write it very carefully to maximize the probability of thoughtful, interesting comments. Especially make sure that you have a new take on one of the recurrent issues, or are bringing up an issue that is fresh and rarely discussed here. Good luck.
In other words, Larry Summers was probably right. Then again, he was fired shortly afterwards for daring to express disagreement with one of the popular ideologies of our era.
I like justice and all, but ironic humor trumps even that ;)
Remember, the goal is to create the illusion of community in order to market.
I don't think anyone hit the "instaban" button nor did I see anyone advocate you go away. You put yourself out there and this is how the community reacted -- don't take it personally.
Take your passion and keep fighting for what you believe in. So long as your actions align with your values, it doesn't really matter what anyone else thinks, says, or does.
:)
So, be welcome and don't hesitate to contribute.