Y Combinator and the Negative Externalities of Hackernews
danilocampos.com
danilocampos.com
1. bobcostas55: member for 146 days, 42 karma
2. gph: member for 997 days, 634 karma
3. lulzwat1111: member for 32 days, -8 karma, comment downvoted into oblivion
4. aianus: member for 588 days, 369 karma
5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8372411 I honestly don't see the problem here?
6. nickthemagicman: member for 690 days, 241 karma, comment downvoted into oblivion
The vast majority of the time, ignorant comments are met with multiple replies setting the person straight, or with downvotes (as I do, for anything that is insulting or offensive).
Hacker News intends to attract a technical audience. The community includes a wide variety of people, some of which are 16-to-25-year-old men who have poor socialization skills. Some of them (and some others, certainly) have naive, twisted beliefs, or they are just unaware of their privileged position in society. Others are from different countries that have old-fashioned gender norms.
I don't think this is a problem unique to HN or even to tech. I claim that you could just as easily write an article like this about fraternity or country club communities, if their communications were indexed for the entire world to see. At least in the case of HN, you have a large number of dissenting viewpoints.
I actually think it's good that short-sighted individuals express their bigoted views. It gives others a chance to provide them with some perspective. Even more, though, prudent individuals who think the same thing have the opportunity to have their viewpoints changed as well. Also, seeing the extreme version of one of your views can cause you to pause and reconsider it.
Personally, I was quite libertarian and lacking in perspective on several issues (e.g., end user empathy, social welfare, the importance of tact) when I joined Hacker News 7-1/2 years ago. Of course I can't give all the credit to HN, but it has definitely had some positive effect in improving my personality and broadening my perspective.
https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=%23hnwatch&src=typd
> I actually think it's good that short-sighted individuals express their bigoted views.
There's a word for this kind of viewpoint.
> It gives others a chance to provide them with some perspective.
While alienating entire groups of underrepresented backgrounds.
Sam Altman says tech needs to fix its exclusionary nature. So he actually agrees with me on this.
I say change begins at home.
What would that be?
For the record (and I hope this is clear in the context of the rest of that paragraph), I think getting bigoted views out in the open can be better than the alternative. Open views can be criticized and corrected. Subversive hate or discrimination is much harder to address.
"I say change begins at home," is meaningless. If you want change, go downvote (and possibly reply to) *ist comments in order to set them straight. Form a group of others to help you. Don't get on a soapbox and demand for everyone else to make the world the way you want it without being part of the solution. Taking public figures to task for what you perceive to be their shortcomings (as opposed to their wrongdoing) is not a solution.
Before that, though, try to give people the benefit of the doubt before you respond with venom to them. Mischaracterizing people's positions and attacking out-of-context quotes (as I feel you did with me) are not going to change minds or win over anyone.
It's not the job of seagulls to organize oil spill cleanup.
I've provided a case and actionable suggestions here, at a length of 745 words. I'm not going to give you 745 more.
http://danilocampos.com/2014/09/y-combinator-and-the-negativ...
I'm not here to convince you. Your education is your job.
But I am thrilled to continue documenting how, say, software engineering leaders at startups contribute to a culture of exclusion and alienation by making it the jobs of marginalized people to "educate" their more privileged counterparts.
Here are a few actionable suggestions from OP's article:
* "[Create] a Code of Conduct for Hacker News." This helps all community members share clear expectations of appropriate & inappropriate behavior.
* "After providing clear guidance for what kinds of comments are acceptable to its values, YC must fund a means of consistent enforcement when content is posted outside those bounds."
* "[YC] must publicly accept its complicity in building and maintaining a business asset with these negative externalities."
* "YC must submit to accountability for improvement."@_danilo: The sad thing is that I actually agree with your goals and the first two suggestions. I disagree with your tactics. I apologize if my viewpoint sounded like, "There is no problem." That was not my intent. I only intended to offer a counterpoint to what I felt was a misrepresentation of the overall character of Hacker News. I definitely agree with you that there are issues.
But in the process of responding to me, you attacked me. I literally feel like a victim at this point. You took the conversation to Twitter, where I don't even have an account, and aired your grievances about me at my employer.
Please consider your actions in the future. You are not helping your cause when you alienate others and make them feel helpless. You could have tried a little bit harder to convince me instead of attacking me (cf. this post).
Hacker News has a set of guidelines that provide clear expectation of appropriate and inappropriate behavior as it regards submissions, comments, and flagging.
Presumably, the author of this piece isn't just complaining that the "Guidelines" aren't titled "Code of Conduct", and actually prefers different specific expectations than those that are currently specified. But, to make an actual actionable suggestion, concrete changes need to be identified.
> "After providing clear guidance for what kinds of comments are acceptable to its values, YC must fund a means of consistent enforcement when content is posted outside those bounds."
Heavy handed centralized moderation rather than relying primarily on community moderation is an actionable suggestion, but there is no concrete evidence presented that (1) community moderation isn't working, or (2) heavy-handed centralized moderation would work better.
> "[YC] must publicly accept its complicity in building and maintaining a business asset with these negative externalities."
Except for handwaving at vague anecdotes and stating the authors personal opinion, there's no support for the existence of the asserted "negative externalities". But, yes, while it lacks justification for action, this is certainly an actionable suggestion.
> "YC must submit to accountability for improvement."
This is a vague statement, not a specific, actionable suggestion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6165385
> Rape has meanings other than non-consensual sex. GP: Please use the word rape to the full extent provided by the english language, and let those who don't like the word deal with it.
Hat tip:
So I agree that the comment you linked to is insensitive. Does that justify attacking me (https://twitter.com/_danilo/status/517371895747194880)?
Can you tell me where you feel that I was defending bad behavior, or bad culture? My claim was that you misrepresented it. You turned that into a very personal attack. Is that OK?
I don't think it's the part of marginalized people to educate bigots. Sorry if I wrongly assumed that you aren't marginalized.
My view is that the moral non-marginalized should speak out loudly against bigots. I was trying to encourage you to attack the bigots instead of attacking everyone else.
Edit: BTW, Everlaw has a blog. Anyone is welcome to read it and form their own opinions about our culture.
BrandonM, I'd encourage you to keep educating yourself. I'd suggest reading resources like http://juliepagano.com/blog/2013/11/02/101-off-limits/ and following some "social justice warriors" via your platform of choice.
I, personally, am still very much in the process of learning about how my own privileges (white, middle-class, male, cis, het) affect me and others, which is why I find article's like Danilo especially useful.
That's the main reason why Danilo's actions bothered me so much today. My initial post basically boiled down to, "The article misrepresented Hacker News: it's no worse than other communities with similar demographics. And when bigots make themselves visible, it gives us a chance to change minds." Even I can come around to the idea that those are shitty points.
But we didn't have that discussion. Instead, Danilo used his Twitter privilege (where I have none) to level an attack at me, threatening my livelihood. To me, that seems like a different version of the exact problem he is purporting to solve.
If the "warrior" in "social justice warrior" is literal, then I suppose that tactic makes sense. But I think there's a better way. I read this today:
The biggest crime of fear is getting my mind so wrapped up in itself, I forget that that I’m not the only one who is afraid. We’ve all got things that haunt us.
Did I really deserve what Danilo threw at me today?
> Twitter privilege
Goodness. If anything, you got off easy, bub. Even now, oblivious, invoking concepts like "privilege" you clearly don't understand.
You don't get to run your mouth about things you don't understand and then escape accountability. You don't get to excuse a terrible status quo as being acceptable because it serves to educate people at the expense of the marginalized.
You are exactly the problem. Not the bigots. Not the overt sexists. Not the children posing as grownups, too young to know their indecency. The problem is mealy-mouthed folks who mistake differences of power for differences opinion. And who forgive the unacceptable on that basis.
And feel so righteous doing so.
Sorry if that's not the sort of coddling you're used to. But I'm not here for you. I'm not here to make you comfortable and I'm certainly not here to persuade you. I'm here because what you said was wrong and dangerous.
I'm a lot more concerned with the feelings of people who are being driven out of this industry because of exactly the sort of chicanery you're excusing.
Working for you sounds damn crummy. If you don't want that sort of observation leveled in public in the future, I have one suggestion:
read some books
Do the right thing because it's the right thing. Not because someone was nice to you or not on Hacker News.
> threatening my livelihood
And where is the threat to your livelihood, exactly?
If what you said was as acceptable as you claim, you face no danger.
If what you said was problematic, then why did you say it? Publicly? Flying under the banner of "Lead Software Engineer for Everlaw."
And why would you expect a public wrong to pass with impunity?
You're arguing both that you were perfectly reasonable—and that I was unreasonable to call you out for saying something crummy.
Pick one.
And yet you're comfortable saying that I'm "exactly the problem", that I'm "desperately" defending Hacker News, that I'm crummy to work with. You don't know me.
When I say that I feel victimized by you, you call me more names, say that I'm running my mouth, that I'm used to being coddled, that you can't possibly have more privilege than me. Sound familiar?
Please try to have a bit of perspective on your own behavior. There are much more effective, humane ways to win the hearts and minds of others and achieve your goals.
I know you made the top comment on my article say you're glad when people say bigoted things so that the folks most impacted by them have to donate time to educating them. 'Bout all I really need.
> There are much more effective, humane ways to win the hearts and minds of others and achieve your goals.
Did you miss the part where I said that wasn't anything close to my goal?
Again: I expect people to demand the right things because they're the right things. Not because people are "nice" or not.
> you call me more names
Citation needed.
> When I say that I feel victimized by you
Whew. The privilege to call being disagreed with "victimization." Incredible. Tech in a nutshell, right here.
What I actually said:
> It gives others a chance to provide them with some perspective.
When I said "others" I didn't intend that to mean the victims of their bigotry. I was referring to myself and the many other Hacker News members that disagree with those views. I can certainly see how my comment was unclear on that front, and I regret making such a contentious statement without making my intended message as clear as possible. ("Open views can be criticized and corrected. Subversive hate or discrimination is much harder to address," as I later clarified.)
There's a difference between a disagreement and a personal attack. We both disagreed with each other's messages, certainly. But I did not attack you or your character.
Take anything he says, interpret it in the most uncharitable way possible, and then get him mobbed online. His company cuts off the limb to save the body by firing him. This is a tactical way of shutting somebody up, not a sign of their moral deficiency. Anybody with some numbers behind them can do it. I also got a sorta "I know where you live" vibe from how you repeated back his job to him, so I think you know this.
So, for me, as a person who's got a couple layers of outsider-ness from the typical tech workforce, I would be extremely uncomfortable working with this person. This is a person who made clear they supported public forums being open for bigots to say what they like.
So they can be educated.
Dang. That's awful. It suggests a terrifying lack of empathy. It's something I would want to know about. And certainly not something I'd want in a colleague.
Freedom to speak is not freedom from accountability.
I'm here to fight marginalization. That's my fight, too. In quite a big way.
I respect that your approach may be different from my own—as marginalized individuals, we do have common cause.
You can and should view HN however you'd like. But there's a lot to be angry about on the merits. And a lot to be angry about when those problems are excused or dismissed. I can't apologize for that. And I must maintain my original position: I would loathe to work with someone who is this unaware.
Where I do apologize is if my tone carried a righteousness you found alienating, and if my frustrated words denied you the sense of solidarity I would aspire to offer. That's crummy and worth examination.
Thank you for your candor and clarity.
The story I got from your public persona was that you came up from nothing to be a web programmer who calls the Bay Area home. That story could describe me.
I hope you will forgive me for my incorrect assumptions.
The community doesn't have to be 100% racist or sexist for there to be a problem. These are all from the same threads as the original article:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8342366 [7227 karma, 1269 days old]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8342896 [7401 karma, 2780 days old]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8338055 [32302 karma, 2432 days old]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8392928 [5003 karma, 1249 days old]
1. HN culture is (generally) sexist & racist, a "bro-fest" if you will.
2. ycomb profits from HN
3. ycomb says they're against sexism etc.: “We—the tech industry as a whole—need to fix this. Most importantly, it’s an ethical issue.” ...
4. ...but there seems to be no legitimate effort by YC to alter the culture & signal what's acceptable behavior (i.e. don't be racist) on hackernews.
How on earth is 4. going to happen especially with an international crowd? Is any organization doing 4. adequately? Is YC supposed to educate the whole world on how "bro-fest" is PC but [something else]-fest is not?
A technical solution to a social problem rarely works but in this case I think it'd help. If what the OP implies is true, and it surely is to some degree, most of the people who have the ability to control visibility (downvote) would have achieved that ability through participation in the echo chamber. Achieving enough karma to downvote seems rather hard, if not impossible, if you're not subscribed to the prevailing groupthink.
But maybe this is me, as always, trying to find an engineering solution to the problem.
I've seen more than a couple of threads where an entire side of what I find to be an interesting (or at least worthwile) discussion is blotted out. It's annoying if you actually want to consider an entire thread and not just get spoon-fed the parts which correlate to consensus opinion. This is supposed to be a forum for intellectually thought-provoking or at least civil discussion, but the implementation of downvoting amounts to sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting down someone you don't agree with.
I don't see much evidence that this is particularly true; sure, I see people that complain that it is, and a roughly equal number who complain that HN is overly swamped with politically correct "social justice warriors" and biased against white, upper-class men.
Personally I think its rather balanced and mostly civil, with a few extremes on every conceivable side, with effective moderation (central and community-based) which both keeps a lid on the problems all-around and keeps the level of bias to a lower level than you'd expect given the rather extreme imbalance in the community to which HN is directed.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/02/06/272646...
[1]. https://developers.google.com/women-techmakers/ [2]. http://www.google.com/diversity/for-the-future.html#research...
You keep saying this like it is a fact or that anyone is arguing for this. It is a complete fallacy.
That's nice.
The guy in charge of Y Combinator disagrees with you. Which is the whole point of the post.
Edit: allegedly being internally inconsistent
Let's assume that HN is a terrible place where sexism and racism are easily found--consider that the ability to review people's posting histories is a really good datapoint of figuring out whether or not they're somebody you want to work with. If an applicant applies with a posting history rife with sexism and racism, then maybe they're not going to be asked back. It's a chance to let people show their true colors, and many people are bigoted shitbags.
So, even looking past that, the author raises the point that YC has a portfolio north of 30B USD. So, erm, maybe whatever they're doing is working? Maybe, just maybe, sexism and racism and everything else is not really that relevant to running a successful business. I don't want to go full libertariloon on this and go claim that the free market thus proves those are non-issues, but from a business standpoint they don't seem to be mattering. A criticism of "but but but imagine how much better things could be if they stomped it out!" is a non-starter, because it's playing in what-ifs.
If HN does have a problem, it's that the downvote system is bullshit and broken and enables people to hivemind more easily. PG screwed up, in my opinion, when he gave a blessing on giving downvotes based on disagreement instead of civility or relevance. The moderation system is opaque and broken, though much less broken thanks to people like dang.
Mostly, I think, the single systemic issue of HN is that people are not self-selecting for good technical content, and are so closed-minded that useful discussion of non-technical content becomes boring, tedious, and prone to flaming.
EDIT: Thank you whoever gave that downvote without explanation for helping to demonstrate my point!
I think the author (and I agree with him here) sees the racism & sexism itself as being a problem. Nowhere does he argue that the problem is that racism/sexism are bad for profits.
Personally I don't need the market to tell me if racism & sexism are bad and I doubt that you do either.
I agree that making policy decisions based on racism and sexism, especially when the affected population has no alternative but to be subject to those decisions (say, no other place to look for work, no other police force to seek protection from, etc.), is wrong. That said, I find it just as wrong to brand other people as bad or evil because they've got some silly view.
To put it quite crudely: The primary job of YC is not the policing of ideas and thoughts of people posting on HN beyond keeping things relatively civil.
One can have these viewpoints and maintain civil discourse. One can even have viewpoints that are less pragmatic; e.g., violent crimes clearly committed more frequently by one race over others. In such a case, somebody can civilly point out numbers and studies that refute that viewpoint, and at the point one can either accede or agree to disagree.
Being civil doesn't have anything to do with agreeing with people, or even being right.
I get that you could have an objective discussion on religion that might be offensive, but does the fact that someone can find it offensive make it "offensive" in general, or does it make the person who isn't offended "privileged"? I'm just not sure exactly how to apply your statement to such scenarios -- could you explain a little more about what you mean?
Would (could?), for example, objective data (e.g. CSV file, scientific study, statistics) have these qualities or just people's opinions on the objective data?
If you don't notice it it's because you're privileged. If you're not, it's like you're swimming in it.
However, I was specifically asking if you thought it was possible to have discussions on sensitive topics in a civil way or if having a discussion, e.g., "the pros and cons of slavery in America" or "was the prophet of Islam a fraud?" itself is some kind of expression of privilege over the person who would be offended by said discussion.
I'm not too worried about censorship in general, but sometimes the whole "don't be offensive" seems like an open problem and at odds with "have and discuss an opinion that disagrees with others". Just wanted your thoughts on that...
I could do without the civility, to be honest. I'd rather be compassionate and thoughtful and inclusive but irreverent and disrespectful.