7 ms·

I'm not sure these sorts of articles provide much value on HN. By "these sorts of articles", I mean the ones that have claimed that "diversity efforts have gon

by badRNG 5y ago

I'm not sure these sorts of articles provide much value on HN. By "these sorts of articles", I mean the ones that have claimed that "diversity efforts have gone too far this time." Regardless of your support or opposition to diversity, I think one would agree that these rapidly turn into unproductive, highly divisive comment sections that are out of place with the rest of HN.

ineptech 5y ago
They very reliably rise to the front page (because people like arguing about this stuff) and then sink off again (because, I believe, the HN algorithm penalizes a low upvote-to-comment-count ratio). I predict this'll be gone in two hours...
- hammock 5y ago
  >the HN algorithm More accurately, it's people flagging it and also manual nerfing by @dang
  - coldtea 5y ago
  - badRNG 5y ago
    To be fair, every comment that didn't agree with the conclusion of the article was nerfed. The top comment on this post for most of its existence immediately left the top and within seconds jumped to being the very last comment at the bottom with all the other even vaguely pro-diversity comments.
    - dang 5y ago
      Your and others' comments criticizing the article have been heavily upvoted, so this is clearly not the case.
      - badRNG 5y ago
        I think maybe my comment wasn't really clear. I know the pro-diversity comments had a lot of upvotes, what I was pointing out was that they were nerfed by a moderation tool or algorithm, not by downvotes, as evidenced from going from the top comment to the very last comment in the thread within a few seconds.
        dang 5y ago
        Ah, ok—I was probably reading your comment through the filter of "comments supporting my view are constantly getting downvoted/flagged/suppressed on this site", which is a more common complaint (which was also making appearances in this thread). Software can indeed affect subthread ranking, and moderators do that too—but certainly not for pro- or anti-diversity (or any other $divisive-topic) reasons. We downweight top subthreads for reasons like this: (1) they're too generic rather than engaging with something specific in the article; (2) they're high-indignation/low-information; (3) they're meta; (4) they're offtopic in a predictable way*. What all 4 of those categories (and there are probably others) have in common is that they tend to both get heavily upvoted and to not be interesting in HN's sense of the word. Once they get heavily upvoted, they tend to hang out at the top of the page, accruing mass and choking out more curious conversation. We try to use moderation and (to some extent) software as countervailing mechanisms to these default tendencies, because we've learned over the years that this is one of the highest-leverage things we can do to make threads more interesting. But this has nothing whatever to do with agreeing or disagreeing with the points being made. Edit: I'm guessing you were talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29785012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29785012, which indeed got downweighted in exactly this way, because it falls into categories #1, #3, and #4 above. But not into #2, at least, which is unusual and to your credit. * Unpredictable whimsical offtopicness, by contrast, is often interesting and we try to give it a pass. Otherwise moderation would get too predictable in its own right. I often have to remind people about that.
        hammock 5y ago
        Have you considered transparency for when you down-weight a specific post or thread?
- abernard1 5y ago
  > They very reliably rise to the front page They very reliably rise to the front page because this issue is endemic in the tech industry and yet people are afraid to speak out in public. This has always been the problem with HN's stance on "this isn't a forum for political debate" or whatever. It's a way of status-quo enforcement by selectively ignoring how political tech has become these days. It's also diminishing the role HN (used to?) play in conversations within the tech industry. If everyone should go to Reddit to discuss fundamental concerns with working in tech, then why wouldn't people just replace HN with an RSS feed.
- ineptech 5y ago
  Update: it's off the main page, actual elapsed time was about 90 minutes.
EamonnMR 5y ago
The title + substack domain are a good indication that this is going to be yet another culture war article.
philipkglass 5y ago
You can use the flag button if you think that an article will attract low-quality discussion. I used to use it a lot. Be forewarned that your flags will stop influencing results if you use them too frequently, as I apparently did.
mistermann 5y ago
That even the well above average intellects here can't manage a dialogue much above what you'll find on other platforms seems like a situation that has great potential for providing value.
finite_jest 5y ago
From HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
- badRNG 5y ago
  Maybe I didn't word it well enough, but I intend to comment on a broad category of discussion that I don't think is necessarily inappropriate according to the guidelines, but tends to produce unproductive, hostile conversations. I understand that anti-diversity blogs often gain a lot of traction with a particular subset of HN readers, but it consistently winds up producing flame wars and can make HN a less friendly place.
  - commandlinefan 5y ago
    It seems to me that HN is the last place you can discuss this topic - it's just preemptively deleted on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
    - bartread 5y ago
      Tend to agree. And, yes, there are people who get really hostile with these kinds of conversations (HN is a decent-sized community, so not surprising, and it's not always the same people in every discussion so I'd like to avoid any broad brush interpretation of this remark), but I think HN is one of the last places where it is possible, online, to have difficult discussions about challenging issues. That's an incredibly important, although possibly (originally) unintended, role. On a personal note, I value hearing different perspectives, and often come away from HN discussions feeling like I've learned something, so I am against squelching it.
    - philipkglass 5y ago
      The author of this substack has a Twitter account too, where this same article is promoted and discussed: https://twitter.com/TaraRHenley https://twitter.com/TaraRHenley This same article is also under active discussion on two subreddits: https://old.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/rv9kvx/tara_henley_why_i_quit_the_cbc/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/rv9kvx/tara... https://old.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/rv9l8v/tara_henley_why_i_quit_the_cbc/ https://old.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/rv9l8v/tara_henley_...
john_moscow 5y ago
I would argue that the article highlights the biggest problem of the West. It used to be a society of strong independent and happy individuals, capitalizing on their strengths and trading with each other in search of prosperity. We traded it in for a steady paycheck in exchange for mindlessly fulfilling standardized corporate jobs, and are now surprised that the human ambition got redirected from finding ways to create new value to bashing someone who seemingly got a patch of greener grass. I think, the way out is understanding that the current divisive ways the society is going are doomed, and that we all have a common problem to solve, and sweeping such discussions under the rug will only delay this outcome.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Division isn't stable but it often precedes change. The status quo hasn't served everyone, and the first part of improving a status quo is to make the case it cannot stand. When one does, division occurs.
- ketzo 5y ago
  So, to be clear: "end of barter system" -> "steady paychecks" -> "death of innovation in the West" -> "bitter people seek to create division" That is an absolutely wild series of logical leaps and generalizations, each sorely needing any kind of evidence or even intuitive explanation.
  - john_moscow 5y ago
    Nope, "low interest rate policies + lack of antitrust enforcement" -> "mergers, buyouts, fewer small businesses" -> "fewer economic roles involving decision making" -> "fewer social ladders through hard work" -> "fewer push for education + general unhappiness" -> "bitter people looking for scapegoats"
- foobarian 5y ago
  In North America at least, I think this century will be the first time it has really run out of "unoccupied" land to grow into. Other parts of the world have been in this steady state for many centuries; it remains to be seen how the equilibrium will manifest here and where it will lead.
CoastalCoder 5y ago
I 99% agree with you. One small counterpoint: Employers enjoy a bully pulpit on these issues. Employees with legitimate concerns about their employers' stances / policies sometimes can't even discuss them without the risk of losing their livelihood. This can create a situation where individuals perceive that "the whole world" is telling them they're wrong, and are bad people for being wrong in this way. HN's anonymous-yet-respectful forum can somewhat help with this. If nothing else, it's encouraging to know that they're not alone, but rather in an environment where other dissenters are also silenced.
- badRNG 5y ago
  >One small counterpoint: Employers enjoy a bully pulpit on these issues. Employees with legitimate concerns about their employers' stances / policies sometimes can't even discuss them without the risk of losing their livelihood. There are endless platforms that are better suited for these discussions: Gab, 4chan, and Ruqqus to name a few. "HN's anonymous-yet-respectful forum" is best preserved by not hosting these types of deeply hostile, alienating discussions.
  - CoastalCoder 5y ago
    Part of my point was that HN is unusually good at keeping discussions civil, which I view as a requirement for productive discussion. If you know of another forum that has this quality, I'd be grateful for a link. There are large swathes of the Internet I'm ignorant about.
    - evv555 5y ago
      https://www.fairforall.org https://www.fairforall.org has a quality community. That said I think this a relevant topic for hn on many levels and I don't find the conversations repetitive. If OP doesn't think so maybe they're not the target demographic for hn.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - 5y ago
notreallyserio 5y ago
I'm just waiting to see a novel comment on the topic. It's only been discussed N times where N is the number of drops of water in the ocean.
- erichocean 5y ago
  Anything outside the Overton window is definitely not allowed by the HN guidelines, so why would you expect to read/see something new here?
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    Why do you say that? What specifically in the guidelines are you referring to?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
anton96 5y ago
I see that you complain about the quality of the debate on HN but at the same I time I still have interest for political debate here. I know it's not the main goal of this site but at the same time, the usual culture here makes it interesting to see how it unfolds. I wonder if the drop of quality from those subject is because they get flagged fast. Anyway, sometimes I wish there was a website of the same quality as HN but for politics.
snarf21 5y ago
One thing I learned in my many years in this life: you can't fix inequity by inching slowly in the "right" direction. However, the "right" stopping point is too often controlled by the same oppressors. You have to be like a pendulum and swing waaayyy too far past "equity". Then the pendulum will eventually energy out at a more reasonable equitable point. This is a lot of anchoring point bias built in. This overcomes it.
- ithkuil 5y ago
  What would be in your opinion the best historical example of a inequity that wasn't righted by moving slowly and one of an inequity that was righted by overshooting the target?
  - rectang 5y ago
    Not the OP, but I'd cite the US Civil Rights Act of 1964, whose enforcement provisions would not be necessary in an idealized democratic society which has come to terms with diversity. (Sadly, the consequences of the Roberts Court gutting the act demonstrate that those enforcement provisions are still very much needed today.)
- boppo1 5y ago
  I think 'equity' is such an unfortunate choice of term. This usage popped up in the mainstream and then exploded all over in the last couple of years. I'm sure it was chosen for its phonetic adjacency to 'equality'. I haven't seen and concrete definitions for the usage, just borderline-meme webcomic illustrations of people looking over a fence at a baseball game. I believe understand the meaning, that being that equality before the law does not account for material quality of life imbalances arising from unquestionable historical wrongdoing. It seems to be most frequently used in describing the relationship of Black and Indigenous Americans to Americans of European "white" descent. My big issue with it is that the word 'equity' has an extremely important financial meaning that many of the people wielding the new usage are unfamiliar with or don't know at all. There are lots of young people who don't have 'nu-equity' and are woefully ignorant of the overwhelming influence the accounting equation and cash flow valuation has on their lives. Teaching this new vague definition of 'equity' is going to divorce so many people from ever having productive conversations about wealth. Already, lots of people I follow in finance (white and nonwhite, male and female, immigrants and natural born) are dismissing this kind of language out-of-hand. Or, perhaps I am wrong. Maybe this new usage of equity points, in fact, to exactly the same thing as the legacy financial definition. The activists want shares and they demand them now. I have not seen anything to support this identity, but maybe the meaning isn't too far off.
tgv 5y ago
It's the hacker culture that has enabled this. The potential of internet has awoken an abhorrent greed that leeches off anger and polarization, and can only sustain itself by creating more: from facebook and twitter to reddit and tumblr, they're all guilty. The main-stream media has lost their cash cow, and now simply follows the money. Denying responsibility for this is like saying "guns don't kill people." Well, if that doesn't get your blood boiling...
citilife 5y ago
I think part of the challenge is that the "hacker" ethic has always been very libertarian. Open dialog about issues within corporations and industry has always been a thing here, until relatively recently. I actually don't think it is that out of place on HN, many the top posts on Hacker News are related to politics (Joe Biden vowing different direction, Brexit, even youtube-dl facing a DMCA are all politics) https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I personally think it's rather one sided, but it's clearly important to many here.

by badRNG 5y ago

ineptech 5y ago

They very reliably rise to the front page (because people like arguing about this stuff) and then sink off again (because, I believe, the HN algorithm penalizes a low upvote-to-comment-count ratio). I predict this'll be gone in two hours...

hammock 5y ago
>the HN algorithm More accurately, it's people flagging it and also manual nerfing by @dang
- coldtea 5y ago
- badRNG 5y ago
  To be fair, every comment that didn't agree with the conclusion of the article was nerfed. The top comment on this post for most of its existence immediately left the top and within seconds jumped to being the very last comment at the bottom with all the other even vaguely pro-diversity comments.
  - dang 5y ago
    Your and others' comments criticizing the article have been heavily upvoted, so this is clearly not the case.
    - badRNG 5y ago
      I think maybe my comment wasn't really clear. I know the pro-diversity comments had a lot of upvotes, what I was pointing out was that they were nerfed by a moderation tool or algorithm, not by downvotes, as evidenced from going from the top comment to the very last comment in the thread within a few seconds.
      - dang 5y ago
        Ah, ok—I was probably reading your comment through the filter of "comments supporting my view are constantly getting downvoted/flagged/suppressed on this site", which is a more common complaint (which was also making appearances in this thread). Software can indeed affect subthread ranking, and moderators do that too—but certainly not for pro- or anti-diversity (or any other $divisive-topic) reasons. We downweight top subthreads for reasons like this: (1) they're too generic rather than engaging with something specific in the article; (2) they're high-indignation/low-information; (3) they're meta; (4) they're offtopic in a predictable way*. What all 4 of those categories (and there are probably others) have in common is that they tend to both get heavily upvoted and to not be interesting in HN's sense of the word. Once they get heavily upvoted, they tend to hang out at the top of the page, accruing mass and choking out more curious conversation. We try to use moderation and (to some extent) software as countervailing mechanisms to these default tendencies, because we've learned over the years that this is one of the highest-leverage things we can do to make threads more interesting. But this has nothing whatever to do with agreeing or disagreeing with the points being made. Edit: I'm guessing you were talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29785012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29785012, which indeed got downweighted in exactly this way, because it falls into categories #1, #3, and #4 above. But not into #2, at least, which is unusual and to your credit. * Unpredictable whimsical offtopicness, by contrast, is often interesting and we try to give it a pass. Otherwise moderation would get too predictable in its own right. I often have to remind people about that.
        hammock 5y ago
        Have you considered transparency for when you down-weight a specific post or thread?
abernard1 5y ago
> They very reliably rise to the front page They very reliably rise to the front page because this issue is endemic in the tech industry and yet people are afraid to speak out in public. This has always been the problem with HN's stance on "this isn't a forum for political debate" or whatever. It's a way of status-quo enforcement by selectively ignoring how political tech has become these days. It's also diminishing the role HN (used to?) play in conversations within the tech industry. If everyone should go to Reddit to discuss fundamental concerns with working in tech, then why wouldn't people just replace HN with an RSS feed.
ineptech 5y ago
Update: it's off the main page, actual elapsed time was about 90 minutes.

EamonnMR 5y ago

The title + substack domain are a good indication that this is going to be yet another culture war article.

philipkglass 5y ago

You can use the flag button if you think that an article will attract low-quality discussion. I used to use it a lot. Be forewarned that your flags will stop influencing results if you use them too frequently, as I apparently did.

mistermann 5y ago

That even the well above average intellects here can't manage a dialogue much above what you'll find on other platforms seems like a situation that has great potential for providing value.

finite_jest 5y ago

From HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.

badRNG 5y ago
Maybe I didn't word it well enough, but I intend to comment on a broad category of discussion that I don't think is necessarily inappropriate according to the guidelines, but tends to produce unproductive, hostile conversations. I understand that anti-diversity blogs often gain a lot of traction with a particular subset of HN readers, but it consistently winds up producing flame wars and can make HN a less friendly place.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  It seems to me that HN is the last place you can discuss this topic - it's just preemptively deleted on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
  - bartread 5y ago
    Tend to agree. And, yes, there are people who get really hostile with these kinds of conversations (HN is a decent-sized community, so not surprising, and it's not always the same people in every discussion so I'd like to avoid any broad brush interpretation of this remark), but I think HN is one of the last places where it is possible, online, to have difficult discussions about challenging issues. That's an incredibly important, although possibly (originally) unintended, role. On a personal note, I value hearing different perspectives, and often come away from HN discussions feeling like I've learned something, so I am against squelching it.
  - philipkglass 5y ago
    The author of this substack has a Twitter account too, where this same article is promoted and discussed: https://twitter.com/TaraRHenley https://twitter.com/TaraRHenley This same article is also under active discussion on two subreddits: https://old.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/rv9kvx/tara_henley_why_i_quit_the_cbc/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/rv9kvx/tara... https://old.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/rv9l8v/tara_henley_why_i_quit_the_cbc/ https://old.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/rv9l8v/tara_henley_...

john_moscow 5y ago

I would argue that the article highlights the biggest problem of the West. It used to be a society of strong independent and happy individuals, capitalizing on their strengths and trading with each other in search of prosperity. We traded it in for a steady paycheck in exchange for mindlessly fulfilling standardized corporate jobs, and are now surprised that the human ambition got redirected from finding ways to create new value to bashing someone who seemingly got a patch of greener grass. I think, the way out is understanding that the current divisive ways the society is going are doomed, and that we all have a common problem to solve, and sweeping such discussions under the rug will only delay this outcome.

shadowgovt 5y ago
Division isn't stable but it often precedes change. The status quo hasn't served everyone, and the first part of improving a status quo is to make the case it cannot stand. When one does, division occurs.
ketzo 5y ago
So, to be clear: "end of barter system" -> "steady paychecks" -> "death of innovation in the West" -> "bitter people seek to create division" That is an absolutely wild series of logical leaps and generalizations, each sorely needing any kind of evidence or even intuitive explanation.
- john_moscow 5y ago
  Nope, "low interest rate policies + lack of antitrust enforcement" -> "mergers, buyouts, fewer small businesses" -> "fewer economic roles involving decision making" -> "fewer social ladders through hard work" -> "fewer push for education + general unhappiness" -> "bitter people looking for scapegoats"
foobarian 5y ago
In North America at least, I think this century will be the first time it has really run out of "unoccupied" land to grow into. Other parts of the world have been in this steady state for many centuries; it remains to be seen how the equilibrium will manifest here and where it will lead.

CoastalCoder 5y ago

I 99% agree with you. One small counterpoint: Employers enjoy a bully pulpit on these issues. Employees with legitimate concerns about their employers' stances / policies sometimes can't even discuss them without the risk of losing their livelihood. This can create a situation where individuals perceive that "the whole world" is telling them they're wrong, and are bad people for being wrong in this way. HN's anonymous-yet-respectful forum can somewhat help with this. If nothing else, it's encouraging to know that they're not alone, but rather in an environment where other dissenters are also silenced.

badRNG 5y ago
>One small counterpoint: Employers enjoy a bully pulpit on these issues. Employees with legitimate concerns about their employers' stances / policies sometimes can't even discuss them without the risk of losing their livelihood. There are endless platforms that are better suited for these discussions: Gab, 4chan, and Ruqqus to name a few. "HN's anonymous-yet-respectful forum" is best preserved by not hosting these types of deeply hostile, alienating discussions.
- CoastalCoder 5y ago
  Part of my point was that HN is unusually good at keeping discussions civil, which I view as a requirement for productive discussion. If you know of another forum that has this quality, I'd be grateful for a link. There are large swathes of the Internet I'm ignorant about.
  - evv555 5y ago
    https://www.fairforall.org https://www.fairforall.org has a quality community. That said I think this a relevant topic for hn on many levels and I don't find the conversations repetitive. If OP doesn't think so maybe they're not the target demographic for hn.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 5y ago

notreallyserio 5y ago

I'm just waiting to see a novel comment on the topic. It's only been discussed N times where N is the number of drops of water in the ocean.

erichocean 5y ago
Anything outside the Overton window is definitely not allowed by the HN guidelines, so why would you expect to read/see something new here?
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Why do you say that? What specifically in the guidelines are you referring to?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

anton96 5y ago

I see that you complain about the quality of the debate on HN but at the same I time I still have interest for political debate here. I know it's not the main goal of this site but at the same time, the usual culture here makes it interesting to see how it unfolds. I wonder if the drop of quality from those subject is because they get flagged fast. Anyway, sometimes I wish there was a website of the same quality as HN but for politics.

snarf21 5y ago

One thing I learned in my many years in this life: you can't fix inequity by inching slowly in the "right" direction. However, the "right" stopping point is too often controlled by the same oppressors. You have to be like a pendulum and swing waaayyy too far past "equity". Then the pendulum will eventually energy out at a more reasonable equitable point. This is a lot of anchoring point bias built in. This overcomes it.

ithkuil 5y ago
What would be in your opinion the best historical example of a inequity that wasn't righted by moving slowly and one of an inequity that was righted by overshooting the target?
- rectang 5y ago
  Not the OP, but I'd cite the US Civil Rights Act of 1964, whose enforcement provisions would not be necessary in an idealized democratic society which has come to terms with diversity. (Sadly, the consequences of the Roberts Court gutting the act demonstrate that those enforcement provisions are still very much needed today.)
boppo1 5y ago
I think 'equity' is such an unfortunate choice of term. This usage popped up in the mainstream and then exploded all over in the last couple of years. I'm sure it was chosen for its phonetic adjacency to 'equality'. I haven't seen and concrete definitions for the usage, just borderline-meme webcomic illustrations of people looking over a fence at a baseball game. I believe understand the meaning, that being that equality before the law does not account for material quality of life imbalances arising from unquestionable historical wrongdoing. It seems to be most frequently used in describing the relationship of Black and Indigenous Americans to Americans of European "white" descent. My big issue with it is that the word 'equity' has an extremely important financial meaning that many of the people wielding the new usage are unfamiliar with or don't know at all. There are lots of young people who don't have 'nu-equity' and are woefully ignorant of the overwhelming influence the accounting equation and cash flow valuation has on their lives. Teaching this new vague definition of 'equity' is going to divorce so many people from ever having productive conversations about wealth. Already, lots of people I follow in finance (white and nonwhite, male and female, immigrants and natural born) are dismissing this kind of language out-of-hand. Or, perhaps I am wrong. Maybe this new usage of equity points, in fact, to exactly the same thing as the legacy financial definition. The activists want shares and they demand them now. I have not seen anything to support this identity, but maybe the meaning isn't too far off.

tgv 5y ago

It's the hacker culture that has enabled this. The potential of internet has awoken an abhorrent greed that leeches off anger and polarization, and can only sustain itself by creating more: from facebook and twitter to reddit and tumblr, they're all guilty. The main-stream media has lost their cash cow, and now simply follows the money. Denying responsibility for this is like saying "guns don't kill people." Well, if that doesn't get your blood boiling...

citilife 5y ago

I think part of the challenge is that the "hacker" ethic has always been very libertarian. Open dialog about issues within corporations and industry has always been a thing here, until relatively recently. I actually don't think it is that out of place on HN, many the top posts on Hacker News are related to politics (Joe Biden vowing different direction, Brexit, even youtube-dl facing a DMCA are all politics) https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I personally think it's rather one sided, but it's clearly important to many here.