Brendan Eich resigns as CEO from Mozilla
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
People too often forget that rights don't mean that there will be no consequences to exercising those rights (within the bounds of the law, and other things).
Moderators don't, as a rule, kill any stories that have an active thread. That way those who are interested in the discussion can keep it going. The most we would do is demote an item in rank. There are exceptions to this, but they're so rare I can't remember any.
I'm unkilling the post, because I want to reply to some of the moderation questions downthread, and I figure if I'm allowed to keep commenting here then everybody should be.
Empirically, the HN community has proven to be incapable of discussing certain subjects without immediately turning noxious. Once that happens, it's more than just a technical question of how best to consolidate the threads. The values of the site—intellectual substance and personal civility—are being grossly violated. If we allow that, how can we claim they're the values of the site? And if they're not the values of the site, who on earth would want to stay here?
That is the harder problem. We don't know yet what the long term solution will be, but we're going to keep experimenting until we find one.
[1] As you may have noticed, I've been making a lot of those this week--but they don't work on threads that have completely lost it.
I'm all ears!
1) The easiest thing you can do is have a friendly reminder about what is and what is not acceptable to post right next to the comment textbox. When I was in grad school they used to remind students of the honor code before each and every test, and apparently it reduced problematic behavior.
2) Posters in heated conversations care more about advancing their view than keeping HN civil. You can't rely on the downvote system, because mean comments that advance the "right" view will be upvoted regardless. You can't call them out, because your thread will be one of many, and the damage is already done by the time the comment is read.
They simply need to be deleted, and I don't see much deletion on HN.
3) there is a 99.9% chance a post is spam if it broadly criticizes the behavior of HN as opposed to the person they are replying to. These posts should also be removed.
4) For every topic of political contention, there is a group of people that ONLY post about that topic. These people should be monitored closely. I don't consider these posters to be participating in good faith--this is (or should be) a community of tech people that occasionally talks politics. So if you only post about a particular political issue, and never about any technology-related topics, one wonders if you are there just to advance your political viewpoint. As an aside, these posters mostly come out of the woodwork for gender-related topics, which I think are consistently the worst category on HN in terms of comment quality.
5) we need a clearer idea of what is and what is not acceptable on HN. Honestly I want to flag most of the political stories. I hate them. But I don't, because I am afraid of losing the feature.
6) ignore people who whine about censorship. There are a ton of other forums they can post on.
7) a more radical idea that I am less sure about: remove all political stories, and make politics.ycombinator.com. The twist: make membership invite-only. If someone is uncivil then it reflects poorly on the person who invited them. This is, as far as I can tell, the only effective solution to stopping uncivil discourse. When tensions are high, any amount of incivility can trigger another user. The only way to stop this problem generally is to stop it completely, there is no half way.
EDIT: to be completely clear: this advice really only applies to topics where the posters on each side have what can only be described as religious devotion to their point of view. Civil discussion requires humility, and there is rarely humility in political discussions.
Remember how that worked out with deleting pages on programming languages from wikipedia ?
EDIT: My point was to say that the same might happen to dang, we all know his identity, his email address. So, "careful with the axe Eugene". Over enthusiastic deletion, whether be it in good faith or otherwise (frankly, faith is irrelevant as far as content moderation is concerned), is often not a solution. As you probably know from your own experience, it often exacerbates the problem, Streisand effect and all that. I was surprised that you suggested the exact same style of intervention knowing how it turned out for yourself. See, someone downvoted this comment within minutes and its greyed out. This works a lot better. BTW "were terrible.... and likely unvisited" is a personal opinion and not widely shared. So in the end what have we learned from the experience ? same old (Ha! Floyd again)
Politics posts are non-coercive opt-in hellbans. Everybody wins.
If we don't like your personal opinions we wont vote or back a proposition against them -- we'll make you lose your job.
An orthodontist even refused to take me on as a patient because of who my father was.
Hundrends of millions of people had similar opinions in the 50s -- they didn't know better. Do you propose they all got fired?
Even if you do. I don't recall that being the case historically, anyway. Instead, black and pro-civil rights people fought for their rights, with marches, public speeches, voting, and such. Not with campaigns targeted at individual people. The KKK used to do that.
Free speech cuts both ways.
Free speech cutting both ways should only mean both parties are allowed to say whatever they like -- and the majority/plurality of the people decide democratically which way to go about it and who they agree with.
If an unpopular speech means you get fired, then it's not free at all. It's "be careful what you say or bad things can happen to you" -speech.
All dictatorships and all opressive regimes have such mockery of "free speech". Heck, even burning Giordano Bruno can be considered an example of "free speech" that "cuts both ways" in this logic.
(Not to mention that he didn't publicly voice an opinion in the first place. He privately backed against a bill -which was his democratic right to do- and the name of the backers was leaked).
Yes. How about the guy who lost his job for making a dongle joke, personally to his friend at a conference that was overheard? (And, then the woman who outed him on the internet lost her job too, again for reasons of public reaction). And tons of other examples besides -- people calling for others to get fired etc, because of their personal, not work related, opinions.
>Or is it pretty much just Brendan Eich right now, reaping the consequences of expressing bigotry publicly?
He never expressed "bigotry publicly". He privately backed a cause he believed in (right or wrong) with a donation.
As for "reaping the consequences", for me this amounts to a lynching mentallity that I'm uncofortable with.
If you don't like someone's opinions on civil rights, fight them in the court of public opinion and/or voting.
Political donations (at least, of the size Eich made) are public, otherwise, this would never have been an issue.
How do you know it's purely personal?
He clearly doesn't agree that homosexual people should be afforded the same legal rights and societal status as heterosexual people in their personal lives.
It's safer to assume that he would have negativity towards homosexuals in the workplace, e.g. look down upon them due to 'lifestyle choice' or some other bigoted nonsense, than to assume that once he's at work all of his prejudices are put to one side.
Chauvinists and racists rarely, if ever, leave their prejudices at home, so why would homophobes?
> If you don't like someone's opinions on civil rights, fight them in the court of public opinion and/or voting.
That's almost exactly what has happened, yet you call it 'lynching'.
'Public opinion' has forced him to step down before people 'voted' by not using/contributing to Mozilla products.
Nobody has denied him the right to hold his opinion, he's free to carry on doing so, however people have questioned his ability to not discriminate against people in his role at Mozilla, due in large part to fact that he has actively supported discrimination against people in the past based upon their sexuality.
I find it sad, he definitely had views opposed to mines, but he definitely would have done a great job as CEO at Mozilla...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7527229
I'll wait for his post on the topic to form a final opinion on that, but my initial reaction is that it's wrong to bury a story of this magnitude in the tech industry.
Kinda fun to see routing around censorship in action. :)
Is he saying that because a thread exists for a topic, anyone who wants to discuss that topic needs to go and track down the buried thread? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
If the community still wants to discuss something, why not let them? Why force the discussion into a rarely-visited thread ghetto?
I know about Brendan Eich's views, but Mozilla is an organization devoted to open source, none of whose concerns, as far as I can tell, have anything to be with sexual minorities. Were he still the CEO, he really couldn't have used his office to act on his views; so why all the castigating ?
He has a view, and sure a lot of us (including me) don't agree with him, but this culture of outrage is disgusting.
Not to make this any more controversial ... this could easily be the story of a racist person in the who got caught in the same position after the tides shifted and being openly racist just wasn't acceptable any more ... for example Trent Lott.
edit: apparently downvotes are being used instead of "no, that's silly" which was really the point