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I love what they're doing, but last time I clicked a link for asahilinux on hacker news I was taken to a pop up that specifically said that readers from Hacker

• ohgodplsno 3y ago
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  • justin66 3y ago
    Half of the average HN users spends their their either trying to dox Asahi Lina, or to be violently transphobic towards Rosenzweig. The other half is horribly pedantic assholes. Also, if you donate before 6PM you'll receive a free NPR mug and a t-shirt. (I predict this year's funding drive will be less successful than last year!)
  • kossTKR 3y ago
    Isn't that a weird thing to say when this thread is filled with people absolutely praising them and this achievement? I doubt HN is more or less toxic than traffic from any other mainstream site, but maybe i'm wrong.
    • MBCook 3y ago
      There a reason a number of sites have taken similar positions about HN. It’s more toxic on a few axis.
      • masfuerte 3y ago
        > toxic on a few axes. (Sorry, you did tee it up)
        • psd1 3y ago
          Ugh, HN users with axes to grind...
    • camgunz 3y ago
      I imagine since they're on the receiving end, they'd know. Also if even one HNer tried to dox me I'd ban the lot of you, and I'm a relatively cantankerous straight white guy.
      • kossTKR 3y ago
        I get it. I guess i find it so exceedingly bizarre to dox someone, especially when known for being brilliant people - it probably doesn't register properly.
        • slily 3y ago
          Doxing is an exaggeration of what it is. They have a very public online presence in the first place and made it pretty obvious, and they self-promote. It's just putting 2 and 2 together. The "block" on HN seems to have more to do with their gripes about inaccurate or negative comments than about attacks, unless I missed something.
          • 0x6c6f6c 3y ago
            Most of the harm of "doxing" isn't revealing information, which in many cases can be found online for people like software engineers who have public CVs, but rather targeting of those individuals in communities that are predisposed against them and willing to take action be it through emails, comments, etc. There's a lot to be said about any number of people privately or publicly spamming you, intimidating you, or threatening you on a _personal_ level.
            • camgunz 3y ago
              100% It's about proving to the victim that they don't have control.
            • slily 3y ago
              I agree, but I don't think there's any harm in being honest about in this case, since it's pretty on-brand for their public persona. It just seems like a weird hang-up, which ironically fuels the rumor mill. "Hey, isn't this Twitter account run by the same person as that Twitter account?" is pretty harmless as far as "doxing" goes, and when you've let it slip a number of times, what's the point? It's naive to expect total anonymity and zero negative attention with a flamboyant public persona (not meant to be derogatory), especially when you're making money from it, and if you add fuel on the fire on top of that...
    • LordDragonfang 3y ago
      "Half" is hyperbole, but it's a sizable minority that's obnoxious and persistent enough that nearly every trans hacker I follow has a gripe with HN. (Which is a greater number than you'd think; not that long ago I found out it's a meme in the transfemme community to refer to striped thigh-highs as "programmer socks")
  • brapbrap 3y ago
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  • memefrog 3y ago
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    • LexiMax 3y ago
      > Can you give us links to some examples? Sure! https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110507731403617388 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110507731403617388 These receipts foot with my own observations. Transphobia does tend to eventually get flagged, but often it only happens after the comments section has dropped off the front page, and all it takes is browsing with "showdead" to reveal things that range from obvious "groomer" and "mentally ill" dog-whistles to being downright scary. In the meantime, anti-transphobic comments or people complaining about the lack of moderation of transphobic comments are usually downvoted or flagged, and all you have to do is look at the root comment of this thread for evidence of that.
      • memefrog 3y ago
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        • LexiMax 3y ago
          > There is nothing wrong with any of the comments linked to by him in that thread, in my opinion. Then there is no meeting of the minds that can be had. > In my experience, this is always arrived at by some sort of absurd logic that goes "he denies that I am really a woman, and when you do that you make transgender people more like to kill themselves, therefore it is genocide" which is obviously nonsense. What is happening right now in America is much, much worse than your strawman. https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/this-is-what-transgender-eradication https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/this-is-what-transgender-... If you are trying to draw a distinction between murder and using rhetoric to encourage stochastic terrorism, criminalizing existing in public, destroying social support systems, blocking access to health care, and in some cases forcible detransition, IMHO you're drawing a distinction without a difference. Both the dog-whistle _and_ the fig leaf fallback positions are horrendous injustices.
  • ClassyJacket 3y ago
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• olddustytrail 3y ago
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  • AceJohnny2 3y ago
    That's because HN has since removed referral headers on links, to work around this specific kind of blockage.
    • kelnos 3y ago
      Hm, strange, HN seems to set referrer-policy to 'origin', which seems like it should send a referer header when going to external sites[0]? But clearly it does not. So I guess I'm just misunderstanding how that header works. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Referrer-Policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...
      • yencabulator 3y ago
        Look at the link itself: <a href="https://asahilinux.org/support/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://asahilinux.org/support/</a>
      • SushiHippie 3y ago
        Look at the 'a' HTML tag. <a href="https://rosenzweig.io/blog/first-conformant-m1-gpu-driver.html" rel="noreferrer">The first conformant M1 GPU driver<a>
      • paulmd 3y ago
        Asahi and a few other websites blocked HN traffic (because of the aforementioned problems) and then HN added special nofollow/noreferrer for only these domains to prevent this. and then the sites responded with more assertive measures.
        • throw10920 3y ago
          > assertive measures This is incorrect. These sites (or at least the Asahi one) are not being "assertive" - they are being hypocritical and toxic. Additionally, nobody has the right to selectively block links to their website. You get two options: you either let your site be publicly-viewable, with all the benefits and drawbacks, or you make it members-only and require a login. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
• slikrick 3y ago
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  • mellosouls 3y ago
    Harmful by what standard? The moderation here is among the best on the web, what on earth are you talking about? Even if there are a tiny minority of toxic users, blocking access to all seems like the issue may not be with HN... Edit: ok I missed some previous discussions, eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971867#37000629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971867#37000629 for earlier similarly dubious generalisations and complaints providing context.
    • theptip 3y ago
      I think what you're missing is that a tiny minority of toxic users (as perceived from your viewpoint) can easily be perceived as a high concentration of harassment from those that are on the receiving end of abuse. This asymmetry of harassment is a dynamic worth thinking about more broadly; for example, if only one in a thousand men cat-calls women, you might not even have any male friends that have ever cat-called, and yet that might mean a particularly attractive woman might pass a cat-caller many times per day. Small differences in the rate of cat-calling (1:1000 vs 1:2000) won't be detectable to you, but can represent a huge difference (once a day vs twice a day, say) to those sampling far more frequently from the distribution than you are. More specifically to the thread here, the question is not whether HN is well moderated, or whether toxicity is quite low-frequency from your perspective. The relevant question is whether the base-rate of anti-trans harassment is higher than in the general population. It's entirely possible (I think it's true) that people in this community are in general more civil to each other than on most of the internet, and I think the thoughtful moderation is a big part of that. But it's also possible (and I don't have any direct experience to claim whether it is or not, so this is just numbers to illustrate what's possible, not a claim of how things are) that at the tails of the distribution there's 10x more anti-trans harassment in the community too, and we'd simply not be in a good position to observe or measure it unless we were on the receiving end of it or auditing lots of comments very closely. Honestly, based on the tenor of responses when this specific topic comes up (quite different to the normal HN vibe IMO), that wouldn't surprise me either.
• TheDong 3y ago
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  • brinyflap 3y ago
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  • tristan957 3y ago
    > Hacker news users are, on the whole, asshole sexist tech-bros who can't wait to post "but actually" and harass trans women. Do you have any research to backup your claim?
• jeroenhd 3y ago
  From what I've seen people post here, I can totally get that they don't like HN people. It's sad, because HN is how I found out about these people and their amazing skills, but I would've done the same thing in their place. Many people, especially in the LGBTQ+ community, hate being featured on here. Some have asked the admin not to be linked but the HN doesn't blacklist websites. There's a flood of negativity from the tech bros every time something makes it to the HN front page, both here but also on HN link aggregators. This is especially true for the people whose talents bring them to the HN front page every month or so, receiving the same flack and abuse every time. Last time someone tried to block HN abuse by checking the referer header and redirecting visitors away, HN altered the link HTML to not send the referer header rather than listen to their wishes. First for a specific post, then for all posts. That's a pretty clear sign to me that the HN admins care more about their links and the fake internet points generated by discussions than about the people and projects being discussed. If the admins are actively working against your wishes, why would you want to tolerate that platform?
  • endymi0n 3y ago
    Granted, I'm just massively struggling with the idea of excluding a whole radically diverse community (with some of the most civilized and self-moderating discourse on the internet) in the name of inclusiveness. To me, it's as ironic as it gets. On that end, I can't find any fault on HN's end enabling their 99.99% of their interested readers who didn't do any wrong to be included in the discourse around these ideas, on the free and open web.
    • kaba0 3y ago
      And they are also free to (try to) restrict who has access to their site, so everyone is happy?
    • williamdclt 3y ago
      > the idea of excluding a whole radically diverse community (with some of the most civilized and self-moderating discourse on the internet) in the name of inclusiveness. To me, it's as ironic as it gets. Not really more ironic than almost every non-trivial societal discussion, à la "if you want peace prepare for war". Anything non-trivial is multifaceted, and anybody who has an absolute opinion is probably missing most of the argument. Very quickly for this specific case: one can easily argue that excluding people is hardly inclusive, but one can also easily argue that a niche community with its own subculture _needs_ some sheltering from the rest of the world, or the subculture gets lost very quickly (so the sheltering is good for diversity in that it preserves the existence of the subculture). (I'm not pretending to present a fully-fledged argument here, just a taster to challenge absolute opinions, entire books could be written on this and probably have)
• smcl 3y ago
  A few commenters on HN were giving Hector Martin shit and trying to dox Asahi pseudonymous contributors (who clearly did not want to be ID'd). Maybe the popup should have included a bit of detail on that so people such as yourself who aren't aware or involved aren't put off the project. But the animosity they have is understandable.
• throw10920 3y ago
  Right - the Asahi Linux project specifically does not want attention from HN. I flag every Asahi-related submission here, and I encourage you to do so, too.