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> Still, as an occasional reader, I have noticed certain trends. When stories that focus on structural barriers faced by women in the workplace, or on diversity

> Still, as an occasional reader, I have noticed certain trends. When stories that focus on structural barriers faced by women in the workplace, or on diversity in tech, or on race or masculinity—stories, admittedly, that are more intriguing to me, a person interested in the humanities, than stories on technical topics—hit the front page, users often flag them, presumably for being off topic, so fast that hardly any comments accrue. I have noticed this trend for a long time also, and well before this article was first written. It seems to go in waves though I'll cautiously say that it seems to have gotten somewhat better in recent years. I remember a time in the mid-2010s when these kinds of stories would disappear almost instantaneously. Now some of these articles and topics get a good number of upvotes and occasionally even substantive dialogue. That said, the comments sections on these articles do tend to devolve pretty quickly.

nitwit005 3y ago
A lot of articles do match the very first thing in the guideline's list of what's off topic: > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. Specifically, there is this tendency to briefly discuss some new social issue, but then filling the rest of the article with discussion of the current political situation.
- leononame 3y ago
  Just cause they are related to humanities or discuss masculinity, minorities or race in tech doesn't make them political by default. A topic being discussed a lot in politics doesn't necessarily mean that that topic is political imo
  - nitwit005 3y ago
    You don't appear to have read what I wrote very carefully. The problem is that they fill most of the article with a general discussion of politics, making the article mostly about general politics. People are naturally going to flag such an article.
    - leononame 3y ago
      Right, I'm sorry. I misread that
    - dang 3y ago
      That's true. And there's the additional factor that the more familiar a topic is, the more likely the thread is to fill up with generic comments about it. That's what the HN guidelines call generic tangents: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Those are probably the most repetitive kinds of thread, and therefore the least valuable. This phenomenon shows up in most political threads but also in threads that aren't particularly political. The more generic topics have so much mass that they act like black holes that suck in all the interesting discussion (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20black%20hole&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
  - woooooo 3y ago
    Sturgeon's Law, though. The average article on all of those topics is a pile of political flamebait.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  The devil is in the details, though: >unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. And that's where we will never truly agree until the topic runs super sour. Which can take months. > there is this tendency to briefly discuss some new social issue, but then filling the rest of the article with discussion of the current political situation. it makes sense for multiple reasons, no? You never want to assume the general audience is caught up on every little piece of an evolving story, be it a simple celebrity drama or some complex political issue. It's news, not a research paper.
leononame 3y ago
I agree that the comment sections on those articles devolves really quickly. To me, those comment sections are the worst part of HN. The normally very civil discourse found in here tends to be more "reddity". Of course, I don't have a concrete example right now. But I do tend to stay off those topics in here cuase it feels like a shit show. Really makes me sad because the comment sections on other non-tech topics like music or literature are always interesting to read.
- mxkopy 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - arp242 3y ago
    That is a spectacular bad faith reading of what was actually said. They just tried to explain why birth rated dropped, with no judgements being made one way or the other. They absolutely did not claim that "women’s purpose is to keep them high". They even clarified that in a follow-up: "I think you misinterpreted my words: it's fantastic that humans (both men and women) have more options, if they choose to have less kids that's noone's business but their own."
    - mxkopy 3y ago
      Read: > Empowerment of women made "get married and out of your parents house" a less interesting option…Having children is just another bucket list item these days. It’s a slimy comment blaming women’s opportunities for declining birth rates. How you expect anyone to read that in good faith, I have no clue.
      - arp242 3y ago
        Trying to explain something ("A led to B") is not blaming. And again, the poster followed up clarifying that. Constantly taking the worst possible interpretation of everything and divining the worst possible malicious motivations at the drop of a hat is one of the main reasons these debates turn in to such drek all the time.
Pannoniae 3y ago
It's understandable that they get flagged because people can't talk about these topics without emotions and it almost always derails into a flamewar.
- vector_spaces 3y ago
  The implications here are interesting -- that discussing with emotion is something to avoid or that it's even possible to avoid at all. We're human -- as much as doing so has been a cultural aspiration for millenia in the West, it is simply not possible to decouple ourselves from our physical and emotional experiences. In my mind, it's far less important that we try to address these topics "without emotion" (whatever that means) and instead focus on cultivating respect and curiosity and assuming good faith. This is a bit more congruous with the spirit of the site. There's another Western cultural aspiration involving an impossible decoupling, probably more common in American culture than European, which is to depersonalize politics. But politics is about people, and some people are much less immediately affected by political and social issues than others -- there's usually a great many layers of indirection between the articulation of a regressive point of view or support for a particular law or politician, and e.g. a minority being squished out of tech or a parent who was a victim of a hate crime or a queer person's suicide. There are probably especially many layers of indirection when it comes to a lot of tech workers, given the demographics. In any case, when discussing politics and issues of class and race it's important to recognize that you're not talking about something abstract, but people, and their loved ones and families. Given that, it's hardly a level playing field if we start with the expectation that folks will leave emotion at the door
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    "Discussing with emotion" is an euphemism for "saying things that you would not normally say unless you were thrown off kilter by your reaction to what you had just read."
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      I'd assume that "good faith" would cover that aspect too. And I feel that's a comment issue more than a topic issue, so it's odd that HN punishes a post topic for a commenting issue.
carabiner 3y ago
Yep this happened with my last 3 flagged submissions. All on social issues. Really sad because especially first one listed below I thought would elicit good discussions, somewhat tied other issues like affirmative action. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35867458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35867458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36065735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36065735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36627969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36627969
- dang 3y ago
  I'd say https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35867458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35867458 was an interesting submission that probably shouldn't have been flagged, although it's doubtful whether a thoughtful, curious discussion is possible. Usually we end up with people charging in and wielding their priors as a stick, and from that point of view I can understand the flags. The other two were too sensational and, in the case of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36627969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36627969, already a heavily discussed theme, so I'd say they were flagged correctly.
  - eduction 3y ago
    Your thinking on these and other posts is narrow minded and totally subservient to the richest people in Silicon Valley, starting with the people who own this site. You also have the temerity to go outside HN and tell people to rewrite posts on other sites - a corrosive form of censorship. Your reply here is a great example of why you are a poor moderator. I wish you would quit.
    - dang 3y ago
      > You also have the temerity to go outside HN and tell people to rewrite posts on other sites - a corrosive form of censorship I don't understand what you're referring to. Can you explain further? Edit: oh, I see - you're talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35719273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35719273. Yes, sometimes when startups ask me for help, I make suggestions about how they can change their articles to better appeal to HN readers, or to avoid pitfalls. For example, mentioning one's startup only at the end of an otherwise interesting article (which I guess people do because marketers told them it was a "call to action", or something?) makes many HN readers feel like the whole article was a bait-and-switch, and then they rush into comments to complain that the article is "just an ad" or whatnot. That's what happened in that thread - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35718172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35718172 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35718321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35718321. In such cases I advise authors to mention their startup right at the beginning - an easy fix. I don't think most people would call that censorship! - certainly the authors who take the advice do so freely and say they're grateful for it. I can't help but wonder if there's something else to your complaint because it's hard for me to understand why that would be objectionable. If you want to explain more I'd be interested... Btw re "the richest people in SV" - the startup in that case wasn't SV related as far as I know, and certainly not YC related; I believe it's a spinoff from Andy Pavlo's research group at CMU. I wasn't helping them for any reason other than to make the HN thread more interesting and because they emailed to ask.
neilv 3y ago
> That said, the comments sections on these articles do tend to devolve pretty quickly. I might be getting desensitized, but (being pretty socially progressive, myself) the comment threads painful to me seem much less frequent today than a few years ago. (Up until a couple years ago, when a comment thread seemed to bring out comment threads that were very concerning, sometimes I'd go read a little n-gate.com, as an antidote. I'd let that person rant about HN, much more over-the-top than I would. Unfortunately, during their last installment or two, before disappearing, the writer sounded more genuinely upset about something. I hope they're OK, and that they didn't absorb too much stress, while saving me from blowing a gasket.)
- kergonath 3y ago
  > I might be getting desensitized, but (being pretty socially progressive, myself) the comment threads painful to me seem much less frequent today than a few years ago. I think so as well. But I also think I’ve become better at spotting the emergence of sterile discussions where people just want to push each other’s buttons. I see them coming before they completely devolve, at which point a tap on the [-] button makes reading HN much less draining emotionally. I had to be at peace with the knowledge that I would not read any good post there, though, as I have a kind of completionist mindset and it is unnatural not to read everything.
- igleria 3y ago
  > n-gate.com first time I saw this website. Lot's of laughs but yeah, the owner probably went to therapy or is no longer among us.
Mistletoe 3y ago
Hacker News would be immeasurably improved by removing the flag button entirely. That’s what the downvote button is for. Flag should be a message to a mod if there is something heinous like gore on the front page. It’s used as a censorship button here and that isn’t cool, especially in a place that is supposed to support well rounded discussion.
- mdp2021 3y ago
  The snipers that hit you prove you wrong: you may have looked for discussion, you received passing sneers: flagging is probably not the critical issue.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  I disagree, the flag button is very valuable, especially whenever any other social media goes through some exodus and we get a bunch of new transient users who don't really care about the culture here. For example, since the reddit exodus, I feel like we've had an uptick in "drive-by" comments (characteristic of reddit) where people just throw in some sort of unproductive, sometimes provocative comment with no intent of engaging. Flagging is a nice way to clean up trash like that without having to pull in a moderator.
- tptacek 3y ago
  That supposes that the only criteria for what should or shouldn't be promoted to HN users is the vote count. But HN has never worked that way, and never could; if it did, the front page would be all cat pictures.
  - idlewords 3y ago
    Where do I go to upvote that happening?
- grecy 3y ago
  I agree 100%. Given that some of the most influential tech people on the planet frequent HN (see Matt Cutts, etc.), I think it's critically important to discuss topics that are related simply to making the world a better place. Tech and tech people can help , but not if we can't even have the conversations. If the richest and most influential people in tech are not even permitted to have these conversations, the chances of them getting fixed drops dramatically. It feels like YCombinator wants to just keep shoving heads into sand on many, many topics because they're making money, and making money is the goal.
version_five 3y ago
That kind of stuff has infected so much of modern discourse, if people want to talk about it there are plenty of forums for it. Why should we all stop what we're doing and prioritize discussing a niche political cause who's proponents have been blackmailing people everywhere into paying attention to them and have now come to dominate all sorts of forums and secure power, ironically with no benefit to the people they feign support for. And when people say they want it discussed, they don't mean they want to read diverse opinions, they just mean they want to see orthodoxy regurgitated.
- dang 3y ago
  Political threads often do go that way, and I understand the frustration. We don't want regurgitation—that follows from what we're trying to optimize for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... But the question of how to handle politics on HN is not simple. By the same principle of trying to optimize for curiosity, some content with political overlap is interesting and belongs here. The questions are which forms of it, how much, which particular links, etc.. I feel like after 10 years we arrived at a pretty coherent and stable general answer to that. Not that we get every specific call right—we don't. But the general principle has held up. For anyone wondering what I'm talking about, here are some past explanations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 (April 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 (Nov 2019) and some related points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959679 (July 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 (May 2018) and there are lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... covering this.
  - SkyMarshal 3y ago
    @dang I hope you write a book someday on everything you've learned as the main mod of HN for the past decade or however long you've been doing it. It would be an absolute treasure trove of how to manage public forums and social media, especially as it evolves from a small niche community to a larger one, maintaining as much of its original character as possible, and in a highly politicized, adversarial, and mis/dis-info saturated information environment. Would be a fascinating read.
lackinnermind 3y ago
Opinions and views likely follow statical patterns like everything else. Systemic reasons are why it's common to see the collective responsible for the systemic patterns in society be so fervent to deny systemic issues exist. I myself like the idea of my success being attributed to my hard work. I would like to think that I bootstrapped my way to success. It's not an easy feeling to accept that in many ways by virtue of just being part of the main majority collective I by default have an advantage in my community over those that aren't a member in that majority collective group. i.e. if the majority % of users in a forum are belonging to a certain category then it's reasonable to believe that most of that majority would be against anything perceived as a criticism of their group (and by extension themselves).
- dmix 3y ago
  There's not a lack of these sorts of discussions on the internet by males or tech people or white people or whatever. Just go on Reddit or Twitter it's everywhere. American's love talking about those issues. It's probably the biggest thing they love talking about compared to most other countries.
ggm 3y ago
There's substantial levels of denialism of there being any problem. It's odd to see both deflection, and abuse, where both systematically point to the underlying experiences validating the problems exist, and both attempting to "deny" it. As an old hand in ICT it wasn't always like this. Something happened (in my opinion) between about 84 and 94 which systematically eroded and undermined women's experience in ICT. I'd say it was gamer/pc culture but it's beyond that, although it's tied up in it. The conference cycles and tradeshows also played a role. Booth babes played a part, trivialising women's roles in public. Several dozen highly significant design, analysis and operational roles in the internet vested in women back "then". People sometimes forget that. Women have always been a part of systems, networks, code. Always.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  It's that the profession acquired status and $$. Mid-90s into the .com boom transformed it from a nerdy but niche profession/obsession into one with status. Anytime that happens, the gatekeepers start to dominate. That's my guess, anyways. I got into this work for pay in the mid-90s, not earlier, so I'll take your word for it that there was a time when women were more prominent.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  In the latter half of the '80s, MIT changed their admission criteria to get a larger percentage of women undergraduates in incoming classes. This cohort did not have the same level of "STEM advanced placement" prep classes as before and the grind/pace/atmosphere of the freshman filter classes changed; many faculty were not happy about it, as I was told by female students from that time period. I don't doubt that similar changes took place elsewhere. I'm not saying this was not an improvement, simply that it meshes with your timeline and sheds a different specturm of light on what you are pointing out. (to put it another way, there were traditionally many fewer women who wore pocket protectors and carried sliderules, but yes they were very much a part of the community)
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >Something happened (in my opinion) between about 84 and 94 which systematically eroded and undermined women's experience in ICT. you're pretty much on the money: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when... The reasons speculated are much more boring, though. The personal computer was treated no differently than a Nintendo console, AKA a toy. So they (big coporate) simply decided boys were easier to market the home PC to (remember, this was decades before the general public took games seriously. People legitmately thought video games were a fad to die out of) And that stuck. Snowballs into a time where the "nerd" stereotype more or less became the perogative term in the 80's/90's as a quick framing for some undesirable male. Every single piece of media had some stereotype of it, well into the 00's. It's not surprising women were put off. Men were put off too. No particular mastermind here. Just corporate wanting to make a quick buck off of kids. Those kids just happened to pioneer an entire industry while Hollywood laughed at them.
lvncelot 3y ago
I just stend to stay clear of certain topics on HN. It's not that I'm not open to different viewpoints on the internet, it's that these comment sections are filled with bad-faith arguing and are just bound to make me angry. If I wanted that, I could just go to Reddit or Twitter.
- uoaei 3y ago
  I know it's a complete impossibility, but some kind of "bad faith filter" would go a long way to making the comments much more pleasant. I'm not sure what I should expect from a community that prides itself on its rationalist roots, but discussions are often disappointing nonetheless.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    You'd be surprise how much of this noise can disappear from blocking maybe, a dozen frequently "passionate" commenters in a community like this. But block features aren't on the table last I checked.
    - JNRowe 3y ago
      There was an extension¹ posted a few years ago² which implements blocking on the client side. The possible issue is there may be some users who you wish to block in the general case that do add value in other threads, so you would have to weigh up those decisions. However, it feels like a bad idea to me, if only because it reduces community building and curation a little. Without a mass of users taking action via flagging or reporting on community problems the end result will surely just tend towards submissions and comment threads that are simply garbage, as that is what new users would see as the social norms. All that said, I wouldn't blame people for using it. There do seem to be a few members of this community that I'd not want to know in real life, and given their comments in some threads they'd not want to know me either ;) Edit: I see you mentioned an extension in another thread, and this may be the same one. Still, I'll leave this here in case others want to see the links. ¹ https://github.com/morgante/hn_blocklist https://github.com/morgante/hn_blocklist ² https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10005699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10005699
matheusmoreira 3y ago
I started submitting articles about brazilian politics to HN after I read a really nice thread about hiring in South America. Some of them have been flagged and still generated discussion somehow. I've learned to accept it. If they get deleted, I won't force the issue. It's true that political discussion tends to devolve quickly. This is especially true for a fifty-fifty polarized country like Brazil. I'm still glad this community has been relatively tolerant. I almost always enjoy the conversations I have here, even when I do not agree.

nitwit005 3y ago

A lot of articles do match the very first thing in the guideline's list of what's off topic: > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. Specifically, there is this tendency to briefly discuss some new social issue, but then filling the rest of the article with discussion of the current political situation.

leononame 3y ago
Just cause they are related to humanities or discuss masculinity, minorities or race in tech doesn't make them political by default. A topic being discussed a lot in politics doesn't necessarily mean that that topic is political imo
- nitwit005 3y ago
  You don't appear to have read what I wrote very carefully. The problem is that they fill most of the article with a general discussion of politics, making the article mostly about general politics. People are naturally going to flag such an article.
  - leononame 3y ago
    Right, I'm sorry. I misread that
  - dang 3y ago
    That's true. And there's the additional factor that the more familiar a topic is, the more likely the thread is to fill up with generic comments about it. That's what the HN guidelines call generic tangents: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Those are probably the most repetitive kinds of thread, and therefore the least valuable. This phenomenon shows up in most political threads but also in threads that aren't particularly political. The more generic topics have so much mass that they act like black holes that suck in all the interesting discussion (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20black%20hole&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
- woooooo 3y ago
  Sturgeon's Law, though. The average article on all of those topics is a pile of political flamebait.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
The devil is in the details, though: >unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. And that's where we will never truly agree until the topic runs super sour. Which can take months. > there is this tendency to briefly discuss some new social issue, but then filling the rest of the article with discussion of the current political situation. it makes sense for multiple reasons, no? You never want to assume the general audience is caught up on every little piece of an evolving story, be it a simple celebrity drama or some complex political issue. It's news, not a research paper.

leononame 3y ago

I agree that the comment sections on those articles devolves really quickly. To me, those comment sections are the worst part of HN. The normally very civil discourse found in here tends to be more "reddity". Of course, I don't have a concrete example right now. But I do tend to stay off those topics in here cuase it feels like a shit show. Really makes me sad because the comment sections on other non-tech topics like music or literature are always interesting to read.

mxkopy 3y ago
[flagged]
- arp242 3y ago
  That is a spectacular bad faith reading of what was actually said. They just tried to explain why birth rated dropped, with no judgements being made one way or the other. They absolutely did not claim that "women’s purpose is to keep them high". They even clarified that in a follow-up: "I think you misinterpreted my words: it's fantastic that humans (both men and women) have more options, if they choose to have less kids that's noone's business but their own."
  - mxkopy 3y ago
    Read: > Empowerment of women made "get married and out of your parents house" a less interesting option…Having children is just another bucket list item these days. It’s a slimy comment blaming women’s opportunities for declining birth rates. How you expect anyone to read that in good faith, I have no clue.
    - arp242 3y ago
      Trying to explain something ("A led to B") is not blaming. And again, the poster followed up clarifying that. Constantly taking the worst possible interpretation of everything and divining the worst possible malicious motivations at the drop of a hat is one of the main reasons these debates turn in to such drek all the time.

Pannoniae 3y ago

It's understandable that they get flagged because people can't talk about these topics without emotions and it almost always derails into a flamewar.

vector_spaces 3y ago
The implications here are interesting -- that discussing with emotion is something to avoid or that it's even possible to avoid at all. We're human -- as much as doing so has been a cultural aspiration for millenia in the West, it is simply not possible to decouple ourselves from our physical and emotional experiences. In my mind, it's far less important that we try to address these topics "without emotion" (whatever that means) and instead focus on cultivating respect and curiosity and assuming good faith. This is a bit more congruous with the spirit of the site. There's another Western cultural aspiration involving an impossible decoupling, probably more common in American culture than European, which is to depersonalize politics. But politics is about people, and some people are much less immediately affected by political and social issues than others -- there's usually a great many layers of indirection between the articulation of a regressive point of view or support for a particular law or politician, and e.g. a minority being squished out of tech or a parent who was a victim of a hate crime or a queer person's suicide. There are probably especially many layers of indirection when it comes to a lot of tech workers, given the demographics. In any case, when discussing politics and issues of class and race it's important to recognize that you're not talking about something abstract, but people, and their loved ones and families. Given that, it's hardly a level playing field if we start with the expectation that folks will leave emotion at the door
- whatshisface 3y ago
  "Discussing with emotion" is an euphemism for "saying things that you would not normally say unless you were thrown off kilter by your reaction to what you had just read."
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I'd assume that "good faith" would cover that aspect too. And I feel that's a comment issue more than a topic issue, so it's odd that HN punishes a post topic for a commenting issue.

carabiner 3y ago

Yep this happened with my last 3 flagged submissions. All on social issues. Really sad because especially first one listed below I thought would elicit good discussions, somewhat tied other issues like affirmative action. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35867458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35867458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36065735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36065735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36627969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36627969

dang 3y ago
I'd say https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35867458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35867458 was an interesting submission that probably shouldn't have been flagged, although it's doubtful whether a thoughtful, curious discussion is possible. Usually we end up with people charging in and wielding their priors as a stick, and from that point of view I can understand the flags. The other two were too sensational and, in the case of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36627969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36627969, already a heavily discussed theme, so I'd say they were flagged correctly.
- eduction 3y ago
  Your thinking on these and other posts is narrow minded and totally subservient to the richest people in Silicon Valley, starting with the people who own this site. You also have the temerity to go outside HN and tell people to rewrite posts on other sites - a corrosive form of censorship. Your reply here is a great example of why you are a poor moderator. I wish you would quit.
  - dang 3y ago
    > You also have the temerity to go outside HN and tell people to rewrite posts on other sites - a corrosive form of censorship I don't understand what you're referring to. Can you explain further? Edit: oh, I see - you're talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35719273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35719273. Yes, sometimes when startups ask me for help, I make suggestions about how they can change their articles to better appeal to HN readers, or to avoid pitfalls. For example, mentioning one's startup only at the end of an otherwise interesting article (which I guess people do because marketers told them it was a "call to action", or something?) makes many HN readers feel like the whole article was a bait-and-switch, and then they rush into comments to complain that the article is "just an ad" or whatnot. That's what happened in that thread - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35718172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35718172 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35718321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35718321. In such cases I advise authors to mention their startup right at the beginning - an easy fix. I don't think most people would call that censorship! - certainly the authors who take the advice do so freely and say they're grateful for it. I can't help but wonder if there's something else to your complaint because it's hard for me to understand why that would be objectionable. If you want to explain more I'd be interested... Btw re "the richest people in SV" - the startup in that case wasn't SV related as far as I know, and certainly not YC related; I believe it's a spinoff from Andy Pavlo's research group at CMU. I wasn't helping them for any reason other than to make the HN thread more interesting and because they emailed to ask.

neilv 3y ago

> That said, the comments sections on these articles do tend to devolve pretty quickly. I might be getting desensitized, but (being pretty socially progressive, myself) the comment threads painful to me seem much less frequent today than a few years ago. (Up until a couple years ago, when a comment thread seemed to bring out comment threads that were very concerning, sometimes I'd go read a little n-gate.com, as an antidote. I'd let that person rant about HN, much more over-the-top than I would. Unfortunately, during their last installment or two, before disappearing, the writer sounded more genuinely upset about something. I hope they're OK, and that they didn't absorb too much stress, while saving me from blowing a gasket.)

kergonath 3y ago
> I might be getting desensitized, but (being pretty socially progressive, myself) the comment threads painful to me seem much less frequent today than a few years ago. I think so as well. But I also think I’ve become better at spotting the emergence of sterile discussions where people just want to push each other’s buttons. I see them coming before they completely devolve, at which point a tap on the [-] button makes reading HN much less draining emotionally. I had to be at peace with the knowledge that I would not read any good post there, though, as I have a kind of completionist mindset and it is unnatural not to read everything.
igleria 3y ago
> n-gate.com first time I saw this website. Lot's of laughs but yeah, the owner probably went to therapy or is no longer among us.

Mistletoe 3y ago

Hacker News would be immeasurably improved by removing the flag button entirely. That’s what the downvote button is for. Flag should be a message to a mod if there is something heinous like gore on the front page. It’s used as a censorship button here and that isn’t cool, especially in a place that is supposed to support well rounded discussion.

mdp2021 3y ago
The snipers that hit you prove you wrong: you may have looked for discussion, you received passing sneers: flagging is probably not the critical issue.
dotnet00 3y ago
I disagree, the flag button is very valuable, especially whenever any other social media goes through some exodus and we get a bunch of new transient users who don't really care about the culture here. For example, since the reddit exodus, I feel like we've had an uptick in "drive-by" comments (characteristic of reddit) where people just throw in some sort of unproductive, sometimes provocative comment with no intent of engaging. Flagging is a nice way to clean up trash like that without having to pull in a moderator.
tptacek 3y ago
That supposes that the only criteria for what should or shouldn't be promoted to HN users is the vote count. But HN has never worked that way, and never could; if it did, the front page would be all cat pictures.
- idlewords 3y ago
  Where do I go to upvote that happening?
grecy 3y ago
I agree 100%. Given that some of the most influential tech people on the planet frequent HN (see Matt Cutts, etc.), I think it's critically important to discuss topics that are related simply to making the world a better place. Tech and tech people can help , but not if we can't even have the conversations. If the richest and most influential people in tech are not even permitted to have these conversations, the chances of them getting fixed drops dramatically. It feels like YCombinator wants to just keep shoving heads into sand on many, many topics because they're making money, and making money is the goal.

version_five 3y ago

That kind of stuff has infected so much of modern discourse, if people want to talk about it there are plenty of forums for it. Why should we all stop what we're doing and prioritize discussing a niche political cause who's proponents have been blackmailing people everywhere into paying attention to them and have now come to dominate all sorts of forums and secure power, ironically with no benefit to the people they feign support for. And when people say they want it discussed, they don't mean they want to read diverse opinions, they just mean they want to see orthodoxy regurgitated.

dang 3y ago
Political threads often do go that way, and I understand the frustration. We don't want regurgitation—that follows from what we're trying to optimize for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... But the question of how to handle politics on HN is not simple. By the same principle of trying to optimize for curiosity, some content with political overlap is interesting and belongs here. The questions are which forms of it, how much, which particular links, etc.. I feel like after 10 years we arrived at a pretty coherent and stable general answer to that. Not that we get every specific call right—we don't. But the general principle has held up. For anyone wondering what I'm talking about, here are some past explanations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 (April 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 (Nov 2019) and some related points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959679 (July 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 (May 2018) and there are lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... covering this.
- SkyMarshal 3y ago
  @dang I hope you write a book someday on everything you've learned as the main mod of HN for the past decade or however long you've been doing it. It would be an absolute treasure trove of how to manage public forums and social media, especially as it evolves from a small niche community to a larger one, maintaining as much of its original character as possible, and in a highly politicized, adversarial, and mis/dis-info saturated information environment. Would be a fascinating read.

lackinnermind 3y ago

Opinions and views likely follow statical patterns like everything else. Systemic reasons are why it's common to see the collective responsible for the systemic patterns in society be so fervent to deny systemic issues exist. I myself like the idea of my success being attributed to my hard work. I would like to think that I bootstrapped my way to success. It's not an easy feeling to accept that in many ways by virtue of just being part of the main majority collective I by default have an advantage in my community over those that aren't a member in that majority collective group. i.e. if the majority % of users in a forum are belonging to a certain category then it's reasonable to believe that most of that majority would be against anything perceived as a criticism of their group (and by extension themselves).

dmix 3y ago
There's not a lack of these sorts of discussions on the internet by males or tech people or white people or whatever. Just go on Reddit or Twitter it's everywhere. American's love talking about those issues. It's probably the biggest thing they love talking about compared to most other countries.

ggm 3y ago

There's substantial levels of denialism of there being any problem. It's odd to see both deflection, and abuse, where both systematically point to the underlying experiences validating the problems exist, and both attempting to "deny" it. As an old hand in ICT it wasn't always like this. Something happened (in my opinion) between about 84 and 94 which systematically eroded and undermined women's experience in ICT. I'd say it was gamer/pc culture but it's beyond that, although it's tied up in it. The conference cycles and tradeshows also played a role. Booth babes played a part, trivialising women's roles in public. Several dozen highly significant design, analysis and operational roles in the internet vested in women back "then". People sometimes forget that. Women have always been a part of systems, networks, code. Always.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
It's that the profession acquired status and $$. Mid-90s into the .com boom transformed it from a nerdy but niche profession/obsession into one with status. Anytime that happens, the gatekeepers start to dominate. That's my guess, anyways. I got into this work for pay in the mid-90s, not earlier, so I'll take your word for it that there was a time when women were more prominent.
fsckboy 3y ago
In the latter half of the '80s, MIT changed their admission criteria to get a larger percentage of women undergraduates in incoming classes. This cohort did not have the same level of "STEM advanced placement" prep classes as before and the grind/pace/atmosphere of the freshman filter classes changed; many faculty were not happy about it, as I was told by female students from that time period. I don't doubt that similar changes took place elsewhere. I'm not saying this was not an improvement, simply that it meshes with your timeline and sheds a different specturm of light on what you are pointing out. (to put it another way, there were traditionally many fewer women who wore pocket protectors and carried sliderules, but yes they were very much a part of the community)
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>Something happened (in my opinion) between about 84 and 94 which systematically eroded and undermined women's experience in ICT. you're pretty much on the money: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when... The reasons speculated are much more boring, though. The personal computer was treated no differently than a Nintendo console, AKA a toy. So they (big coporate) simply decided boys were easier to market the home PC to (remember, this was decades before the general public took games seriously. People legitmately thought video games were a fad to die out of) And that stuck. Snowballs into a time where the "nerd" stereotype more or less became the perogative term in the 80's/90's as a quick framing for some undesirable male. Every single piece of media had some stereotype of it, well into the 00's. It's not surprising women were put off. Men were put off too. No particular mastermind here. Just corporate wanting to make a quick buck off of kids. Those kids just happened to pioneer an entire industry while Hollywood laughed at them.

lvncelot 3y ago

I just stend to stay clear of certain topics on HN. It's not that I'm not open to different viewpoints on the internet, it's that these comment sections are filled with bad-faith arguing and are just bound to make me angry. If I wanted that, I could just go to Reddit or Twitter.

uoaei 3y ago
I know it's a complete impossibility, but some kind of "bad faith filter" would go a long way to making the comments much more pleasant. I'm not sure what I should expect from a community that prides itself on its rationalist roots, but discussions are often disappointing nonetheless.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  You'd be surprise how much of this noise can disappear from blocking maybe, a dozen frequently "passionate" commenters in a community like this. But block features aren't on the table last I checked.
  - JNRowe 3y ago
    There was an extension¹ posted a few years ago² which implements blocking on the client side. The possible issue is there may be some users who you wish to block in the general case that do add value in other threads, so you would have to weigh up those decisions. However, it feels like a bad idea to me, if only because it reduces community building and curation a little. Without a mass of users taking action via flagging or reporting on community problems the end result will surely just tend towards submissions and comment threads that are simply garbage, as that is what new users would see as the social norms. All that said, I wouldn't blame people for using it. There do seem to be a few members of this community that I'd not want to know in real life, and given their comments in some threads they'd not want to know me either ;) Edit: I see you mentioned an extension in another thread, and this may be the same one. Still, I'll leave this here in case others want to see the links. ¹ https://github.com/morgante/hn_blocklist https://github.com/morgante/hn_blocklist ² https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10005699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10005699

matheusmoreira 3y ago

I started submitting articles about brazilian politics to HN after I read a really nice thread about hiring in South America. Some of them have been flagged and still generated discussion somehow. I've learned to accept it. If they get deleted, I won't force the issue. It's true that political discussion tends to devolve quickly. This is especially true for a fifty-fifty polarized country like Brazil. I'm still glad this community has been relatively tolerant. I almost always enjoy the conversations I have here, even when I do not agree.