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Hacker news is a really good site for tech discussion. But when it comes to anything about diversity / harassment in the workplace, it seems like a group of pe

• ZeroGravitas 6y ago
  When you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
  • textgel 6y ago
    Ironically applicable to those demanding this due to their claims of being oppressed.
• dang 6y ago
  The community reflects the larger society, which is divided on social issues. Remember also that users come from many countries and regions. That's a hidden source of conflict, because people frequently misinterpret a conventional comment coming from a different region for an extreme comment coming from nearby. The biggest factor, though, is that HN is a non-siloed site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=silo%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), meaning that everyone is in everyone's presence. This is uncommon in internet communities and it leads to a lot of misunderstanding. (Edit: in what follows, when I talk about the internet I mean internet communities of HN's size and scope, or larger. The problems are different at smaller size or narrower scope, but those aren't the problems we have.) People on opposite sides of political/ideological/cultural divides tend to self-segregate on the internet, exchanging support with like-minded peers. When they get into conflicts with opponents, it's usually in a context where conflict is expected, e.g. a disagreeable tweet that one of their friends has already responded to. The HN community isn't like that—here we're all in the same boat, whether we like it or not. People frequently experience unwelcome shocks when they realize that other HN users—probably a lot of other users, if the topic is divisive—hold views hostile to their own. Suddenly a person whose views on (say) C++ you might enjoy reading and find knowledgeable, turns out to be a foe about something else—often something more important. This shock is in a way traumatic, if one can speak of trauma on the internet. Many readers bond with HN, come here every day and feel like it's 'their' community—their home, almost—and suddenly it turns out that their home has been invaded by enemies, spewing rhetoric that they're mostly insulated from in other places in their life. If they try to reply and defend the home front, they get nasty, forceful pushback that can be just as intelligent as the technical discussions, but now that intelligence is being used for evil. I know that sounds dramatic, but this is how it feels, and it's a shock. We get emails from users who have been wounded by this and basically want to cry out: why is HN not what I thought it was? Different internet communities grow out of different initial conditions. Each is a fractal that replicates in self-similar ways as it grows—Reddit factored into subreddits, Twitter and Facebook have their social graphs, and so on. HN's initial-condition set includes that it's a single community that is the same for everybody. That has its wonderful side and its horrible side. The horrible side is that there's no escaping each other: when it comes to divisive topics, we're a bunch of scorpions trapped in one bottle. This non-siloed nature of HN causes a deep misunderstanding. Because of the shock I mentioned—the shock of discovering that your neighbor is a monster, someone whose views are hostile when you thought you were surrounded by peers—it can feel like HN is a worse community than the others. When I read what people write about HN on other sites, I frequently encounter narration of this shock experience. It isn't always framed that way, but if you understand the dynamic you will recognize it unmistakeably, and this is one key to understanding what people say about HN. If you read the profile the New Yorker published about HN last year, you'll find the author's own shock experience of HN encoded into that article (and it's something of a miracle of openness and intelligence that she was able to get past that—the shock experience really is that bad). This is a misunderstanding because it misses a more important truth. The remarkable thing about HN, when it comes to social issues, is not that ugly and offensive comments appear here, though certainly they do. It's that we're all able to stay in one room without destroying it. Because no other site is even trying to do this, HN seems unusually conflictual, when in reality it's unusually coexistent. Every other place went into fragments long ago and would never dream of putting everyone together [1]. It's easy to miss because of these conflicts, but the important thing about HN is that it remains a single community—one which somehow has managed to withstand the forces that blow the rest of the internet apart. I think that is a genuine social achievement. The conflicts are inevitable—they govern the internet. Just look at how people talk about, and to, each other on Twitter: it's vicious and emotionally violent. I spend my days on HN, and when I look into arguments on Twitter I feel sucker-punched and have to remember to breathe. What's not inevitable is people staying in the same room and somehow still managing to relate to each other, at least partially. That actually happens on HN—probably because the site is focused on having other interesting things to talk about. Unfortunately this social achievement of the HN community, that we manage to coexist in one room and still function despite vehemently disagreeing, ends up feeling like the opposite. Internet users are so unused to being in one big space together that we don't even notice when we are, and so it feels like the orange site sucks. I think it's time to reflect a more accurate picture of this community back to itself. What's actually happening on HN is the opposite of how it feels: what's happening is a rare opportunity to work out how to coexist despite divisions. Other places on the internet don't offer that opportunity because the silos prevent it. On HN we have no silos, so the only options are to modulate the pressure or explode. HN, fractious and frustrating as it is, turns out to be an experiment in the practice of peace. The word 'peace' may sound like John Lennon's 'Imagine', but in reality peace is extremely uncomfortable. It is managing to coexist despite provocation. It is the ability to bear the unpleasant manifestations of others, including on the internet. Peace is not so far from war. Because a non-siloed community brings warring parties together, it gives us an opportunity to become different. I know it sounds strange and is grandiose to say, but if the above is true, then HN is a step closer to real peace than elsewhere on the internet that I'm aware of—which is the very thing that can make it seem like the opposite. The task facing this community is to step further into coexistence. Becoming conscious of this dynamic is probably a key, which is why I say it's time to reflect a more accurate picture of the HN community back to itself. [1] Is there another internet community of HN's size (millions of users, 10-20k posts a day), where divisive topics routinely appear, that has managed to stay one whole community instead of ripping itself apart? If so, please point me to it so I can learn.
  • thrwaway69 6y ago
    I really love this moderation style where you self reference yourself but with added thoughts instead of only pointing at a previous comment or guideline. It shows how moderator (dang) has changed over time after reinforcement learning of hn comments and submissions.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • victorvation 6y ago
      It's much more reminiscent of BB-style forums where moderators were part of the community and would explain their actions at the time of enforcement. This is unfortunately un-scalable, and so larger communities turn to strictly enforced rules with zero flexibility a la Reddit or moderation via machine classification like FB, Twitter, and YouTube.
  • vepea2Ch 6y ago
    That's really insightful, thanks for taking the time of sharing it. That being said, without considering our own opinions on a given topic, you can easily reproduce the experience of visiting random HN threads and finding a well written dismissive post on top of the thread, no matter what the subject is, and almost systematically (and thus, when someone is interested in the topic, that's the first thing they see). This is hardly explained by the "monster neighbors shock" effect. If you agree with this observation, how would you explain it?
    • dang 6y ago
      I'll offer two explanations. First, there's a contrarian dynamic on the internet: people rush in to express whatever they disagree with or dislike about something (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22contrarian%20dynamic%22%20objecti&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and such comments tend to get upvoted because, for whatever reason, critical/indignant comments get upvoted. This is a weakness of the voting system (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22upvotes%20alone%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). Second, though, I think you might be describing your own shock experience here. Not every thread starts with a shallow dismissal—some do, but actually most don't. (Moderation is a factor, because we downweight petty and indignant comments whenever we see them at the top of a thread.) My bet is that you're seeing these sometimes, and because they're shocking and unpleasant, they somehow expand into your experience of HN overall. That's a shock experience, because the things that strike us unpleasantly end up dominating our sense of the whole. I've written about this a lot, but in slightly different terms: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20notice%20dislike&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Trying to figure these phenomena out is an ongoing process.
• seemslegit 6y ago
  > There's a significant subset of people that cry the loudest of censorship only when it comes to communities having a stance against racism, sexism and homophobia. That's your own bias speaking here, HN is pretty vocal against all censorship or community hijacking efforts. It's just that in nine cases out of ten "a stance against racism, sexism and homophobia" is used performatively and in bad faith and few people here buy it or bother to pretend that they do.
• Mirioron 6y ago
  The Wikipedia community is unwelcoming and initiatives like this are part of the reason. That's because these initiatives for "inclusion" are quite often used for something superficial or as a convenient cudgel to hit someone you disagree with. The way "inclusion" in the US/UK is done is what I would consider racist and sexist. I don't want to see more of it in online services that I use. Giving someone an advantage because of their race or sex and thus discriminating against others for the same reasons is racism/sexism. Edit: we know Wikipedia has been a battleground for US politics for a long time now. I think this is seen as a step towards one side.
  • aloisdg 6y ago
    You need artificial parity first to create models to have, on day, accidental parity.
  • kabacha 6y ago
    As much as I agree with you, is "inclusivity" ever used maliciously? I'm running some coding events and while I'm a firm believer in meritocracy often giving the space to outsiders or unusual folk end up in more interesting and new experiences for the event attendees. In my mind I see it as a meritocratic choice to diversify the floor and honestly I've never seen this "feature" being abused or cause any friction. To me it seems like this attack vector is only when rewards are high (prize, job position) but for pay less and unappreciated work like wikipedia editing, or in my case coding presentations, I don't really see how this could be abused. Maybe it's exclusively an American issue?
    • generalpass 6y ago
      I encourage you to watch a Joe Rogan episode from last year when he brought Jack Dorsey, a Twitter VP, and Tim Pool. [1] The reason this episode is relevant to your comment discussion is that Pool presents that there is this paradigm problem where certain policies intended to bring "inclusion" end up excluding something like half of the U.S. population. This paradigm Twitter management is stuck in prevents them from understanding how people outside their paradigm view their actions, and this results in effectively banning a enormous set of the population from popular discourse. It is hard to evaluate if this is exclusively an American issue because, really, there are so few other countries that speak English. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ
• thosakwe 6y ago
  Hit the nail on the head. This site is incapable of having nuanced conversations about this, because opinions that the loudest voices disagree with are downvoted + flagged into oblivion. This is significant when talking about diversity, because it means minority voices are silenced, and without those voices, such a conversation is meaningless. For example, look at the comments thread whenever "James Damore," "cancel culture," or "affirmative action" comes up. That should be proof alone that HN is never going to have an actual impactful conversation about this... Ever. I'd prefer if the mods just banned these discussions forever, because it's exhausting, and forever doomed to end up as a "diversity is bad" conversation.
  • microcolonel 6y ago
    > I'd prefer if the mods just banned these discussions forever, because it's exhausting, and forever doomed to end up as a "diversity is bad" conversation. Funny thing is, it looks the other way around from the other perspective. Maybe what you're seeing is not a bias against race- and sex-based DIE initiatives, but your first taste of balance in discussions about them. Maybe because you assume that your argument is correct, whenever you see the other side at all, you feel like there's an imbalance, when perhaps it's just that you have a warped view of the landscape of opinions on these matters.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • Fjolsvith 6y ago
      Frankly, the parent's point is more visible as the rare, generally dissenting discussion is almost always downvoted and show grey.
      • luckylion 6y ago
        In this submission at least, it seems to be primarily low-effort comments that are downvoted. By that I mean wild assumptions, no effort to provide any evidence to back them up or just some popular saying and a dash of moralization that suggests whoever isn't sharing the opinion of the commenter is a bad person, does not want to engage in an honest conversation, has a hidden agenda and wants to drive away the good people etc. When someone is offered a conversation and results to name-calling and straw-manning, isn't a downvote what you'd expect?
• einpoklum 6y ago
  Often, such initiatives are about virtue-signaling rather than actually doing something against racism, sexism and homophobia. Worse, and apparently also often, these initiatives are even worse: They introduce a mechanism legitimizing instant bans following a complaint against a user, with no detailed statement of the claims against them, no ability to respond to the accusations, no due process in handling the complaint, and no transparency vis-a-vis other users. This already poisons the community atmosphere - and of course, such mechanisms never fail to be misused, adding to the acrimony.
  • secretsatan 6y ago
    Using the term "virtue signaling" is itself an attempt to shut down any conversation, virtue signaling that the commenter is very impartial compared to everyone else and knows better
    • einpoklum 6y ago
      I can no longer edit the answer, but if you like: s/virtue signaling/conspicuous expression of moral values/