4 ms·

I don't think you understand the seriousness of what's unfolding here, and the level of virulent dehumanisation expressed. There is no right way to discuss "The

by pron 6y ago

I don't think you understand the seriousness of what's unfolding here, and the level of virulent dehumanisation expressed. There is no right way to discuss "The Woman Question" any more than there is a right way to discuss "The Jewish Question." The tone of discussion is insignificant in comparison to conducting it in the first place.

dang 6y ago
Where you get these thoughts that you imagine moderators think, I don't know, but I don't recognize any of them. I don't give a shit about tone. I'm simply trying to support an internet forum in not going to hell and asking you not to make that job harder. What I hear you saying is that it's already gone to hell, so it doesn't matter what you do. Actually it matters a lot what you do. Every user here needs to abide by the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Bringing up "Jewish Question" is singularly unhelpful and more gratuitous provocation. It seems to me that you're the main person framing this thread as "Woman Question" to begin with, then using that to justify pouring kerosene of your own. That's not cool. What I've noticed is that users with strong ideological passions tend to describe as "putrid" and "cesspool" and so on, any discussion in which their own ideology isn't imposed as the dominant one. That's understandable, but it's not a realistic demand. HN is a large forum which is as divided on ideological topics as any other large population sample—moreover this population sample is all over the world, which unfortunately makes people far more prone to interpret others' statements as "putrid" without it even dawning on anyone that that's a factor. Much as I might wish it, we don't have the power to change how divided this community is. All we can do is look for ways to nudge users into having thoughtful discussion despite divisions. Everyone has a different sense of what that might look like, and we can talk about how to do that, but we don't have the power to make people agree.
- pron 6y ago
  There is a great moderation tool for such a discussion: not to have it. I think my framing is helpful, because clearly you're not seeing what I'm seeing. Here are three comments I picked from the top five at the moment (so, almost at random); there are far worse ones: > As an investor, of course I clam up. I spend my days looking at the world in terms of risk-adjusted returns and cost benefit analyses, so why would I take a human capital risk? My entire business is based on my reputation and I've seen what happens to the people who get comments like "not the best with Jews at conferences" ... I can count on two hands the number of Jews I would feel comfortable giving the exact same feedback to as I would a non-Jew. > I appreciate the effort to think of a better word than antisemitism. My question is, is this even antisemitism at all? How many people can get publicly denounced as “antisemites” and have their life ruined because they didn’t speak carefully enough, before it is simply just “smart” rather than “antisemitic” to be extra careful with how you speak to Jews. > Imagine what it's like being the intended target and not just "collateral damage". It's not a problem that non-Jews are nervous to be candid but it's a problem that Jews are feeling the secondary effects of that?
  - dang 6y ago
    I'm overwhelmed by the quantity of comments here. I don't have a chance of even seeing them all, let alone read them all, let alone patiently and painstakingly moderate them all. One reason for that (today) is that I've been writing long, careful replies to you in the hope of explaining the kind of comments we're looking for here and why we need you to eschew gratutitous provocation. In response, you made a bunch of quotes in which you replaced the word "women" with "Jews". I just spent several minutes trying to track down those comments before I realized that you were pulling that trick. I'm really shocked that you would stoop to that. The flamewar trope "I'm going to replace $group1 with $group2 just to show how $xist your comment is" is one of the most common. Usually it's people on the other ideological side who do that, and often garden-variety trolls. It is a strong marker of cheap flamewar and a good example of how the ideological enemies who perpetuate these flamewars actually resemble each other more than they do anyone else.
    - pron 6y ago
      Maybe, but right now I can't think of another way of showing how illegitimate it is to have a discussion over how best to treat a discriminated group of people, especially when when that group is so underrepresented on this forum. There is just no right way to have this discussion at all. If discussions on a tech forum look like they're minutes from a men's rights group meeting, then that's a huge problem.
      - dang 6y ago
        If you can't think of another way than altering quotes for shock value, that may be because your view of the thread and the community is not actually accurate. I've looked again, and I don't think your description is fair. The OP seems to me legitimate; painful, but not gratuitous. As for the thread, many of the comments are thoughtful. I don't agree with or like all of them—or most of them, actually—but I think you're misassessing the amount of bad faith in the community. That's a big deal because, as I tried to explain above, it takes people to a why-bother/fuck-it place, from which they end up creating the very thing they were deploring. It's unfortunately all too easy and common for people to mistake a divided community for a "putrid horror show", dominated by demons [1] or, as the internet likes to call them, "terrible persons", when in reality most people here just have different backgrounds and experiences from one another [2]. I'm not saying that's the only factor—anyone can scan my moderation comments in this thread to find examples to the contrary (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26613942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26613942). But I still think the HN guidelines are right to say "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." ...and I think that if you took that guideline more to heart, you might see the bulk of the thread differently. (I don't mean the long tail of trolls and flames—those are always with us.) [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=demons%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098

by pron 6y ago

dang 6y ago

Where you get these thoughts that you imagine moderators think, I don't know, but I don't recognize any of them. I don't give a shit about tone. I'm simply trying to support an internet forum in not going to hell and asking you not to make that job harder. What I hear you saying is that it's already gone to hell, so it doesn't matter what you do. Actually it matters a lot what you do. Every user here needs to abide by the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Bringing up "Jewish Question" is singularly unhelpful and more gratuitous provocation. It seems to me that you're the main person framing this thread as "Woman Question" to begin with, then using that to justify pouring kerosene of your own. That's not cool. What I've noticed is that users with strong ideological passions tend to describe as "putrid" and "cesspool" and so on, any discussion in which their own ideology isn't imposed as the dominant one. That's understandable, but it's not a realistic demand. HN is a large forum which is as divided on ideological topics as any other large population sample—moreover this population sample is all over the world, which unfortunately makes people far more prone to interpret others' statements as "putrid" without it even dawning on anyone that that's a factor. Much as I might wish it, we don't have the power to change how divided this community is. All we can do is look for ways to nudge users into having thoughtful discussion despite divisions. Everyone has a different sense of what that might look like, and we can talk about how to do that, but we don't have the power to make people agree.

pron 6y ago
There is a great moderation tool for such a discussion: not to have it. I think my framing is helpful, because clearly you're not seeing what I'm seeing. Here are three comments I picked from the top five at the moment (so, almost at random); there are far worse ones: > As an investor, of course I clam up. I spend my days looking at the world in terms of risk-adjusted returns and cost benefit analyses, so why would I take a human capital risk? My entire business is based on my reputation and I've seen what happens to the people who get comments like "not the best with Jews at conferences" ... I can count on two hands the number of Jews I would feel comfortable giving the exact same feedback to as I would a non-Jew. > I appreciate the effort to think of a better word than antisemitism. My question is, is this even antisemitism at all? How many people can get publicly denounced as “antisemites” and have their life ruined because they didn’t speak carefully enough, before it is simply just “smart” rather than “antisemitic” to be extra careful with how you speak to Jews. > Imagine what it's like being the intended target and not just "collateral damage". It's not a problem that non-Jews are nervous to be candid but it's a problem that Jews are feeling the secondary effects of that?
- dang 6y ago
  I'm overwhelmed by the quantity of comments here. I don't have a chance of even seeing them all, let alone read them all, let alone patiently and painstakingly moderate them all. One reason for that (today) is that I've been writing long, careful replies to you in the hope of explaining the kind of comments we're looking for here and why we need you to eschew gratutitous provocation. In response, you made a bunch of quotes in which you replaced the word "women" with "Jews". I just spent several minutes trying to track down those comments before I realized that you were pulling that trick. I'm really shocked that you would stoop to that. The flamewar trope "I'm going to replace $group1 with $group2 just to show how $xist your comment is" is one of the most common. Usually it's people on the other ideological side who do that, and often garden-variety trolls. It is a strong marker of cheap flamewar and a good example of how the ideological enemies who perpetuate these flamewars actually resemble each other more than they do anyone else.
  - pron 6y ago
    Maybe, but right now I can't think of another way of showing how illegitimate it is to have a discussion over how best to treat a discriminated group of people, especially when when that group is so underrepresented on this forum. There is just no right way to have this discussion at all. If discussions on a tech forum look like they're minutes from a men's rights group meeting, then that's a huge problem.
    - dang 6y ago
      If you can't think of another way than altering quotes for shock value, that may be because your view of the thread and the community is not actually accurate. I've looked again, and I don't think your description is fair. The OP seems to me legitimate; painful, but not gratuitous. As for the thread, many of the comments are thoughtful. I don't agree with or like all of them—or most of them, actually—but I think you're misassessing the amount of bad faith in the community. That's a big deal because, as I tried to explain above, it takes people to a why-bother/fuck-it place, from which they end up creating the very thing they were deploring. It's unfortunately all too easy and common for people to mistake a divided community for a "putrid horror show", dominated by demons [1] or, as the internet likes to call them, "terrible persons", when in reality most people here just have different backgrounds and experiences from one another [2]. I'm not saying that's the only factor—anyone can scan my moderation comments in this thread to find examples to the contrary (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26613942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26613942). But I still think the HN guidelines are right to say "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." ...and I think that if you took that guideline more to heart, you might see the bulk of the thread differently. (I don't mean the long tail of trolls and flames—those are always with us.) [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=demons%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098