Comment by squeaky-clean | Hacker News Reader

Comment by squeaky-clean | Hacker News Reader

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> . The most critical things against Pao and her husband I have seen are posts about there phony extortion sexism and racism law suits.

What about the subreddit comparing Ellen Pao to Pyongyang [0].

Jokes about Pao with over a +4000 positive score [1] [2] Jokes comparing Ellen Pao to Hitler. [3] I remember a post to /r/pics or /r/funny of Hitler's Wikipedia page, with Pao's photo instead of Hitler.

I ran into some old coworkers (who take Reddit WAAAY too seriously) at a bar during the weekend this whole thing was first blowing up. They were literally talking about how Pao needs to die. Then they got drunk, forgot they had ranted about her, and told me again how she needed to die.

This whole thing was really disgusting and made me hate the average Reddit user. I'll still browse some of the smaller subs, but I won't be touching the frontpage ever again.

[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/paoyongyang

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/3c03y8/ellen_paos_car...

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/3c05wq/what_sound_doe...

[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/3c0b5p/whats_the_diff...

Frankly every public figure is compared to Hitler at some point or the other on the internet. There have been pretty personal attacks on Ellen Pao on reddit, but every link you posted here is relatively mild. Similar posts and subreddits were made about Yishan Wong[1] when he was CEO. Hell, reddit also makes fun of little kids[2]. You can not police what people make fun of.

The personal attacks and name calling, which haven't been linked in your comments, were a bit much. However they were few and far in between.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/yishansucks

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcoop

> However they were few and far in between.

No they were not. https://www.reddit.com/r/all was dominated by them for days following the banning of /r/FatPeopleHate.

Thanks to bots, yes. You did notice that those 4k+ upvotes posts had somewhere between 0-20 comments in them, right?

The way you make the unfavorable comparisons worse is by taking them seriously. I wouldn't suggest taking those co-workers too seriously either - it probably won't help.

Ellen Pao wasn't awful, but all-in-all, it's probably a good thing she stepped down. Hopefully, next time there's a huge community changeover or staff change in reddit, everyone will talk through it and about it reasonably, and everyone will be able to bat away the easily-led and the gleeful and/or bored shit-stirrers.

What takeaway should we have about those drunken coworkers? I see roughly three possibilities:

* Their comments were funny / reasonable / etc.; there was nothing wrong with them. GP was wrong to find it disgusting.

* Their comments were bad, but there's nothing we can do about them. Our society involves it being socially acceptable to tell jokes about how people should die because of their inability to articulate clear moderation policies on a popular website, and that's unfortunate, but there's no way that we'll be able to change that social norm. (Or, alternatively, changing that social norm carries unavoidable downsides.)

* Their comments were bad, it's possible to make it no longer socially acceptable to make those jokes, and it should happen.

This doesn't really have anything to do with how seriously we take them.

The 4th option would be to just not assign a moral value to their comments, and chose for yourself as an individual to not let yourself be offended by them. It doesn't mean the co-workers were right, but it doesn't penalize them if the didn't intend to be bad (because doing so would be a slippery slope to thought policing). Unless OP thinks his/her co-workers would face Pao in person and tell her those things, or worse, act on them, then is there any reason to let their silly actions cause you any distress?

OP did not say he was offended, just disgusted. Like "haha gross, look at these shitty guys". Just like if someone starts making racist remarks, even if I don't personally believe they would murder a black person in the street, I will feel embarrassed for associating with them, and recognize that they are shitty people at the moment, and that is not a slippery slope to thought policing. That is how culture slowly fixes itself.

I don't know, where I'm from "disgusted" is a much stronger term than "offended". It's like a visceral repulsion that triggers something bordering on mild rage. I don't know how the OP intended it, but if it's as you describe, then yes, it's not too bad, but I haven't seen that term used so lightly usually.

To me disgusted and offended are unrelated. I'd personally agree that in magnitude of responses, disgusted is probably stronger, but, to me, being disgusted is about finding something to be awful, whereas being offended is like being hurt yourself. As a white guy, I am not offended if a racist guy talks about killing black people. I am disgusted, and hush the room and tell everyone to point and laugh at him.

So here's something that's always struck me as odd about these sorts of defenses of free speech. (This is something I've been thinking about for a bit, so I'm not picking on you specifically, you just reminded me of it.)

I believe in the power of speech. I believe that there is utility in being able to convey my thoughts, without someone else filtering or censoring them, to others. I believe that my words mean things, that they reflect what I believe. I believe that being a person "of your word" is an important thing: that when you say you will do something, you intend to do it. I believe that lies are, of themselves, clearly of negative moral value. (Which is not to express an opinion on whether lies can serve some greater moral good, just to say that they have inherent demerit.) I believe that if I care about my friends, I care about what they say; if I value my friends, I value what they say; if I respect my friends, I respect what they say.

It is out of that conviction that I think that restrictions on one's ability to speak, whether from a government or a private party, carry great power, which, like all power, can be abused.

If I don't assign a moral value to these coworkers' comments, if I don't care what they say, if I don't care to have opinions on their speech lest I risk "thought policing" them, if I believe that people may say bad things while intending to be good (or vice versa) and that's just okay... it seems that I have completely devalued the power of speech, and I have destroyed the very reason we care about free speech, without censoring a single word. If anyone can say anything and it could mean anything or nothing, and nobody cares, what is the point of speech?

The point of drunk, hyperbolic speech is to vent frustration. Just because some kinds of speech can raise armies doesn't mean that all kinds of speech should be treated as if they will.

What exactly is sexist about comparing someone to Hilter? Would the sexism change if the person being attacked fit under another demographic? Is it OK to criticize say Christopher Columbus because he is a white male. Please enlighten me.

It's not sexist, it's just plain offensive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bwGsOBTlhE

> This whole thing was really disgusting and made me hate the average Reddit user

They are not the average Reddit user.

Probably a huge majority of Reddit users have no idea who Ellen Pao is.

Sorry you're getting downvoted. Even Ellen Pao claims the racist and misogynist are a small minority.

Even if that's the case, they're a very visible component of Reddit's userbase, to the point that an outsider definitely might see them as representative.

If the default home page and /r/all can all be flooded with posts about her, it's not exactly a small group of extremists.

   If the default home page and /r/all can all 
   be flooded with posts about her, it's not 
   exactly a small group of extremists.

I don't think the numbers support that statement at all.

Reddit has roughly 1.5 million daily users. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic

It only takes about a thousand (net) upvotes to get something to the front page.

So a very small (less than 1%) portion of the visitors can very much get things like "fire Ellen" posts onto the front page, especially when there's no opposing block of voters.

(In other words, there were no passionate defenders of Pao who were eagerly downvoting the posts that trashed her. There were only anti-Pao zealots, and a much larger userbase that simply didn't care much at all. Count me in the latter, FWIW.)

What about it? If you are a public figure these are pretty common. On the same ground, would you go an extra mile like this post when somebody comparing donald trump to hitler? Your political bias goes both ways...

What's wrong with the jokes? Ellen is a grownup and a public figure. Jokes come with the territory. No one is seriously comparing her to Hitler.

Just because no-one is literally drawing a moral equivalence between her and Hitler doesn't mean it's not a shitty thing to say, or that you're not a dick for saying it.

I think you would be a dick to send that joke to /u/ekjp, and it's a bit crass for a dinner party, but it's well within bounds on a pseudonymous forum called "Jokes".

Now, I think one could make the argument that /r/Jokes should be more heavily moderated because it's a default sub, and should cater to a more vanilla, easily offended audience.

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