6 ms·

Game Over

105 points by slig 14y ago

tomasien 14y ago
While I agree that vitriol isn't the best response to someone displaying a lack of understanding, as you did, I hope you don't get defensive and instead try to learn something from the people who made reasonable critiques of your thoughts. Because they need some adjusting.
- antirez 14y ago
  Hint: you are saying that my thoughts need to be "adjusted".
  - tomrod 14y ago
    I don't think he stuttered--he laid his point out his succinctly. What exactly were people taking issue with? I couldn't tell from the post.
  - tomasien 14y ago
    (edited because it was in the wrong place in the conversation) Your thoughts about sexism, at least how to express them? Absolutely. I don't want to diminish you or your ability to assess a complex system, but it seemed to me (and a lot of other people) that you expressed a great deal of ignorance and a lot of classic misguided assumptions based on limited and biased personal anecdotal experience. But if you don't agree after considering that, then that is just that. I only urge you to take this opportunity to do some thinking. Isn't that why you put your thoughts out publicly in the first place?
    - iamdave 14y ago
      based on limited and biased personal anecdotal experience. It's not as he presented his case as stone-cold fact and call me crazy, but aren't personal anecdotal experiences exactly the things that give birth to opinion? Since when did sharing a belief/stance/daring to opine on something demand anything other than anecdote? I don't like that thought pattern at all.
      - tomasien 14y ago
        I'm not saying they're not valid because they're based on anecdotal experience, but that anecdotal experience is much weaker than say, serious study. Saying his opinions were based on anecdotal observations isn't why I'm saying they're off, it's why I'm saying perhaps there are deeper resources to be examined. That's all, I'm really not trying to demonize his experience in any way, just hoping for further reflection rather than simply being defensive against the extreme reactions from some
      - arrrg 14y ago
        It doesn’t demand anything other – but don’t be surprised when other people then tell you that you are wrong, misguided, ignorant or biased. It’s a quite unsurprising consequence of only relying on your gut-feeling when you opine. Convincing opinions are supported by facts and theories, by knowledge of past thinking on the topic at hand. All opinions are not created equal. I’m sorry, but if you write a stunningly ignorant post on sexism that takes so many wrong turns, you shouldn’t be surprised when other people are offended by your displayed lack of knowledge and care. I don’t want to apologize bullying or harassment – that simply isn’t something you can ever apologize – but anything below that line is perfectly ok.
      - king_jester 14y ago
        > It's not as he presented his case as stone-cold fact and call me crazy, but aren't personal anecdotal experiences exactly the things that give birth to opinion? We are talking about the experiences/opinions of a man about sexist treatment of women. This is a classic example of someone speaking over the voices of people actually suffering from sexism and then making opinions that dismiss key issues about sexism. While the author is totally entitled to that opinion and speech, why would anyone be surprised that people got angry about the post?
  - _pius 14y ago
    Hint: you are saying that my thoughts need to be "adjusted". Yes, he did ... so what? That's his opinion. Didn't you just write an entire blog post about how everyone should be entitled to their own views? This whole thing is little more than hypocritical whining on your part. You wrote an offensively naïve opinion piece about problems you've never faced and now you're shocked — shocked! — that those whom you've offended have responded in-kind with their own opinions that now offend you? Embracing free speech also means recognizing the right of others to respond to you.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - Tichy 14y ago
    Being critical about yourself is probably not your greatest asset. Just my impression from your two comments here...
    - tomasien 14y ago
      Certainly noted
silentmars 14y ago
Is there a link to the thing that happened to set off this post? I read the previous post and its comments and saw nothing out of the ordinary.
- antirez 14y ago
  long story short, a blog post about sexism I wrote generated a reply that remembered me that I was probably not in a communication environment I was happy to be in... so I'm finding new ways to communicate that don't involve tweets.
  - mst 14y ago
    I tend to treat twitter as a broadcast platform and largely ignore the replies anyway - but I certainly won't discuss sexism on there. It's ... far too easy for topics like that to generate a flash mob; if you don't find "ignore it" to be an acceptable response then leaving seems fair enough - but I'd recommend to anybody on twitter to ignore any replies to controversial statements in any case.
  - tomelders 14y ago
    You were right though. It seems wrong to me that you should be silenced by the tyrannical ramblings of the brain dead mob.
  - leephillips 14y ago
    "I'm finding new ways to communicate that don't involve tweets." They are likely to be old ways (compared with Twitter). You've hinted already on your website, if I understood correctly, about the ideal form of communication on the web. If people want to comment on one of your articles they should write one of their own, giving themselves the time and space to construct something worth reading.
  - mindslight 14y ago
    Welcome back to the same sycophantic groupthink that had cast computing as such a breath of fresh air back when you first learned to program. While the legacy middleman economy went to shit, tech matured into the hot new thing - surprise surprise, the ignorant mob has arrived (and no, they care not for Internet philosophy). We came looking for intellectual independence, they come looking for 'social'. Much easier said than done, but don't let the bastards grind you down.
blackhole 14y ago
Some people are going to say that he was in the right, and some will argue this is a consequence of being wrong, but this doesn't matter. What this illustrates is the dangerous precipice that the world of blogging is hanging on to, where the violent hatred that spews forth when anyone writes a remotely controversial opinion threatens to silence any opinion that sways too far from mainstream consciousness. The fact that the first comment that was posted here was just more critique about the original blog post and how supposedly "wrong" it was illustrates how much of a problem this has become. Whether or not his opinion is wrong doesn't matter. What matters is that he expresses it as an alternative perspective to mainstream conciousness. Problems are solved and society is moved forward by a multitude of various opinions, all right and wrong in their own ways, interacting with each other. Each perspective provides a unique method of solving a problem which may not yet exist. The more perspectives we have, the more ideas we have to work from when we try to solve a problem. By violently critiquing such controversial stances, we are indirectly silencing those voices, and ultimately destroying our own ability to find progressively better solutions to problems, because we get stuck inside a single point of view and refuse to move outside of it. It is not simply a matter of ignoring trolls either, because many of the most hurtful comments, at least in my experience, are otherwise highly intelligent people who completely missed the point of what you were trying to say, and have spent 10 minutes writing a scathing critique against a nonexistent problem. If we continue to censor ourselves, it will destroy us. "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire
- ahelwer 14y ago
  I see this from a different perspective. We are finally getting to the point where a critical mass of people are not going to tolerate sexist misinformed crap as they encounter it, and will instead speak out en masse. The blog post on sexism wasn't a "controversial opinion." The author wasn't bravely standing up to the mainstream. It was just his crappy opinion that tech needs to continue to try very hard to move past. Most importantly, his opinion was NOT silenced. Why do people in this arena of conversation seem to consistently misinterpret the meaning of free speech? He espoused his opinion, and then a whole bunch of other people espoused theirs. Nobody was silenced. Quite the opposite, actually.
eykanal 14y ago
I have no idea who you are or what you do, so this comment includes a certain naïveté. That being said, turning off comments doesn't accomplish anything. As you see here, your article was posted, and there are comments, and you're reading them, and you have no control over them. People will have opinions and that has nothing to do with you. The article itself-—as with any article that discusses sexism--was guaranteed to be controversial from the get-go, given its topic. Given that you seem to be somewhat popular, a controversial post from a popular person will elicit all types of discussion, including lots of flaming. I'm not sure why this surprises you, or why you are responding so strongly, but I would definitely encourage you to reconsider; I love interacting with people whose articles I read frequently, and I imagine the same is true in your case with your audience.
- chewxy 14y ago
  He wrote Redis.
recuter 14y ago
The medium is not the message. With that being said, antirez, it seems that your experience got too noisy and counterproductive and it makes a lot of sense to disengage a bit. You're missing out on very little. Also, thank you for your work.
waratuman 14y ago
It is a shame to see such hate against people. @antirez was attacked for openly sharing his thoughts about sexism. The sad part is that those who attacked him seek respect for their points of view yet do not give it to others.
eliasmacpherson 14y ago
I don't know if anyone has suggested this, but if I were you, I'd take your original article off to the nearest Women's Studies department at a University. You're far more likely to get a reasoned response than here or on Twitter.
volta1 14y ago
if you are apt to stop blogging/tweeting because someone(s) leaves a comment that hurts your feelings, then you shouldn't be sharing your opinion in public, anyways.
unoti 14y ago
Leaving the flamewar world and focusing more on the work seems like a real healthy thing to me.
atomical 14y ago
HN is starting to become drama central.
- mattdeboard 14y ago
  Yeah gets like that every September or so. I've taken to calling it, "It's always September or so"
powera 14y ago
Just from reading the blog posts, it seems like this is a bit of an overreaction to some mild criticism of a mediocre blog post. Then I looked at Twitter. If there are multiple people tweeting basically "you're stupid" dozens of times ( https://twitter.com/kendall https://twitter.com/kendall seems particularly egregious) it's not being in any way productive, it's a bunch of people being assholes and claiming "you're sexist" as a shield against anything they might do. I don't know if it's something specific to Twitter, or just making people "celebrities" who aren't ready to handle the stupid comments that come with it.
- rntz 14y ago
  It's twitter-endemic, if not twitter-specific, for the simple reason that it's hard to express a coherent, well-justified argument in 140 characters, but easy to express anger. The anger might even be justified; just don't go to twitter expecting to read the justification.
- mcantelon 14y ago
  The thing to do is just tweet that you're going to be taking a vacation from Twitter for a few days. By then the tweets will have died down.
- bsg75 14y ago
  > https://twitter.com/kendall https://twitter.com/kendall seems particularly egregious Who just coincidentally works on a product which may (or not) be in commercial competition, and could just possibly be attempting to gain some measure of the internet fame his target has earned in actually producing something of value to many developers. I can't help but notice in all of the vitriol, the loudest are those who appear to do little more that talk (on the internet). (A completely unscientific analysis)
stefantalpalaru 14y ago
Yes, sometimes being rational and having common sense will get you flamed but what's that got to do with twitter? Antirez is a well known programmer and the amount of reaction he gets is above average. Was anybody expecting anything else?
Evbn 14y ago
Less cyclical arguing, more redis. Win-win.
rdtsc 14y ago
One thing to keep in mind is that unless people strongly agree _but_ even mildly disagree the will post something in reply. In rest, most people who kind of agree or the ones that are sort of neutral will not feel the need to click reply or post. So anything controversial is bound to receive more negative feedback. Any positive or supportive comments might come as a second wave, in response to a slew of negative comments but those are sort of a second order effect. Trolls will just detect this is a sensitive topic, and regardless if they personally care or not about the issue, will see a potential for flame war and will not resist the urge to dump a can of gasoline in the fire and then watch the show.
dacilselig 14y ago
Perhaps it's just me (and the irony of me saying this will be obvious after reading this post) but if you are writing blogs, isn't it obvious that eventually you will get negative feedback and in some cases verbal harassment? My perspective on such things is that say you have 1000 followers of your blog and you write on a topic. Odds are that out of the 1000, 75% of them will likely not give any feedback, 10% will give positive, 8% will give negative and then there's the 2% that may verbally harass you because they are offended. Does this mean that they are bad people for doing something like that? Well I guess it's up to you to decide whether they are. However, try to remember that there are people out there who were not taught or never picked up on the idea that you should be courteous when talking to over individuals. Maybe they were never taught it, taught the opposite, or have difficulty in controlling their anger. They can also believe so strongly in something to the point of doing something unethical. The point is not to take things personally when people attack you directly versus your ideas. Instead why not ask them why they felt it was necessary to talk in that fashion? Apologizing for offending them can also help in alleviating any direct attacks as it makes them aware of how they are acting. A little social engineering is a good thing to know. Don't just run away from it. There are so many better ways of going about it.
Aldebaran 14y ago
The gist is basically "People should be treated the same way regardless of gender/race/...", which I agree to entirely, people who are trolling are probably incompetent women or sexually frustrated nerds afraid of losing the few female interactions they are exposed to in the workplace.
- mdonahoe 14y ago
  "people who are trolling are probably incompetent women or sexually frustrated nerds" You sound like you are trolling
- EugeneOZ 14y ago
  absolutely agree.
venus 14y ago
There seems to be a very specific pattern where someone says a problem is not as bad as it's made out to be, and they are immediately jumped on as an enemy who is not "serious" about the issue by those wishing to position themselves as being "tough on X" for whatever reason. It doesn't seem to happen in the other direction much, ie there seems to be little negative consequence about getting too excited about a particular problem. One sees this all the time: - outrage about someone saying that, all things considered, paedophiles are not a particularly large risk to children - outrage about someone saying that terrorists are not the huge threat they are made out to be - outrage about someone saying we should consider a more nuanced, pragmatic approach to drug strategy - outrage about someone saying that maybe the IT industry is not solely comprised of misogynistic psychopaths out to crush every woman under their boot at every chance I really hate this pattern. Needless to say there is little nuance to any of the smears, it's all just claims of "terrorist sympathiser" or "he's just sexist too". Is there a name for it?
- Karunamon 14y ago
  I've ended up defining it as a kind of poisoning the well. I posted on both Reddit and HN about this and got some interesting responses: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/r5zrf/is_there_a_word_for_this_debate_phenomenon_and_is/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/r5zrf/is_there_a_... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3732508 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3732508
jhickner 14y ago
Anyone smart enough to have an interesting opinion on this topic is probably also smart enough to see that there's absolutely no upside to expressing that opinion. It either parallels the mainstream (in which case it's redundant) or it differs in some way, in which case it invites a retaliatory shitstorm. In a nutshell Salvatore said that he prefers to raise the level of abstraction (as programmers are wont to do) from focusing on how _female_ humans are treated unequally to focusing on how _all_ humans are treated unequally. At worst isn't this a disagreement on methodology rather than a disagreement on values? What purpose has been served by turning this topic into a third rail?
- abraxasz 14y ago
  >Anyone smart enough to have an interesting opinion on this topic is probably also smart enough to see that there's absolutely no upside to expressing that opinion. That's my exact conclusion for pretty much every interesting/controversial topic. There's a very small circle of people (not necessarily friends by the way) with whom I exchange ideas on politics/religion/philosophy or anything potentially controversial. I know these people are smart and enjoy an educating conversation. To the rest of the world I just spew the usual boring conventional opinion when I'm forced to, or change the subject altogether when I'm allowed to..
  - jhickner 14y ago
    Agreed. Any relationship where you can freely "entertain ideas without accepting them" (- Aristotle) is something to be cherished. pg wrote an essay on this topic, for anyone interested: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
- _delirium 14y ago
  I think it's fairly natural for some topics to become third rails, if they attack views people hold strongly, or are seen to be outside the acceptable range of debated opinion. You even occasionally see it at HN: I recall a thread some months ago where someone expressed a leftist, vaguely anarcho-communist viewpoint on something, and got a flurry of replies that weren't really engaging the comment's content in debate on an intellectual level (if you don't like capitalism you shouldn't be typing this on a computer, accusing him of ignoring gulags, etc.). Certain opinions are just outside various communities' "ok to debate" range, which varies by community, and will get you piled on if you cross a particular community's line (trickier these days because web communities are very fluid and stuff criss-crosses between them).
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tlear 14y ago
Following antirez on twitter was one of the few really worthwhile sources of real signal there for me. Honestly it is really sad to see him leave, I learned a ton from just reading his feed over time.
hakunin 14y ago
This discussion has little meaning. Everyone makes a call. Author made a call to express his controversial view, and there is no point in saying that his free expression was thwarted by others' free expressions. Others made a call to respond by teaching the author how wrong he is in many constructive and destructive ways. All of this is meaningless, because controversial opinions are appreciated when they are the right call, and hated when they are the wrong call. It's a coin flip for the most part. Author complains that people are acting badly, but these people are everything that the world consists of. There is nothing else on the receiving end of his message except these (and other) people. Who else to express your opinion to? I'd assume author knows that. When you add salt into your tea, you don't blame your tastebuds for disliking it. Occasionally, however, you dip bacon into chocolate and your tastebuds go "whoa, awesome". This is the risk of controversial opinion. If you make it, just prepare yourself for the inevitable. There is a reason experiments require goggles. As a community, we should strive to be calmer and more thoughtful about the way we express ourselves, and try harder to make the right calls. If everyone could do that, however, we probably wouldn't have the sexism problem in the first place.
roguecoder 14y ago
Free speech goes both ways; it is not freedom to consequence-free speech. Want to express the opinion that women (and presumably men) who are highlighting and combating sexism are just demanding special treatment and wasting everyone's time? That's fine, but everyone else has the freedom of speech to criticize your speech and form an opinion of you based on what you've said. That's how this works. Hypocrisy is unbecoming. Self-censorship because other people will point out how wrong you are isn't censorship; it's doing your homework. If you don't want to be called ignorant and wrong, don't be ignorant and wrong. Imagine some journalist coming in and saying the problem with software development was that programmers didn't document enough. It isn't censorship for their opinion to be laughed out of the room.

105 points by slig 14y ago

While I agree that vitriol isn't the best response to someone displaying a lack of understanding, as you did, I hope you don't get defensive and instead try to learn something from the people who made reasonable critiques of your thoughts. Because they need some adjusting.

antirez 14y ago
Hint: you are saying that my thoughts need to be "adjusted".
- tomrod 14y ago
  I don't think he stuttered--he laid his point out his succinctly. What exactly were people taking issue with? I couldn't tell from the post.
- tomasien 14y ago
  (edited because it was in the wrong place in the conversation) Your thoughts about sexism, at least how to express them? Absolutely. I don't want to diminish you or your ability to assess a complex system, but it seemed to me (and a lot of other people) that you expressed a great deal of ignorance and a lot of classic misguided assumptions based on limited and biased personal anecdotal experience. But if you don't agree after considering that, then that is just that. I only urge you to take this opportunity to do some thinking. Isn't that why you put your thoughts out publicly in the first place?
  - iamdave 14y ago
    based on limited and biased personal anecdotal experience. It's not as he presented his case as stone-cold fact and call me crazy, but aren't personal anecdotal experiences exactly the things that give birth to opinion? Since when did sharing a belief/stance/daring to opine on something demand anything other than anecdote? I don't like that thought pattern at all.
    - tomasien 14y ago
      I'm not saying they're not valid because they're based on anecdotal experience, but that anecdotal experience is much weaker than say, serious study. Saying his opinions were based on anecdotal observations isn't why I'm saying they're off, it's why I'm saying perhaps there are deeper resources to be examined. That's all, I'm really not trying to demonize his experience in any way, just hoping for further reflection rather than simply being defensive against the extreme reactions from some
    - arrrg 14y ago
      It doesn’t demand anything other – but don’t be surprised when other people then tell you that you are wrong, misguided, ignorant or biased. It’s a quite unsurprising consequence of only relying on your gut-feeling when you opine. Convincing opinions are supported by facts and theories, by knowledge of past thinking on the topic at hand. All opinions are not created equal. I’m sorry, but if you write a stunningly ignorant post on sexism that takes so many wrong turns, you shouldn’t be surprised when other people are offended by your displayed lack of knowledge and care. I don’t want to apologize bullying or harassment – that simply isn’t something you can ever apologize – but anything below that line is perfectly ok.
    - king_jester 14y ago
      > It's not as he presented his case as stone-cold fact and call me crazy, but aren't personal anecdotal experiences exactly the things that give birth to opinion? We are talking about the experiences/opinions of a man about sexist treatment of women. This is a classic example of someone speaking over the voices of people actually suffering from sexism and then making opinions that dismiss key issues about sexism. While the author is totally entitled to that opinion and speech, why would anyone be surprised that people got angry about the post?
- _pius 14y ago
  Hint: you are saying that my thoughts need to be "adjusted". Yes, he did ... so what? That's his opinion. Didn't you just write an entire blog post about how everyone should be entitled to their own views? This whole thing is little more than hypocritical whining on your part. You wrote an offensively naïve opinion piece about problems you've never faced and now you're shocked — shocked! — that those whom you've offended have responded in-kind with their own opinions that now offend you? Embracing free speech also means recognizing the right of others to respond to you.
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- Tichy 14y ago
  Being critical about yourself is probably not your greatest asset. Just my impression from your two comments here...
  - tomasien 14y ago
    Certainly noted

silentmars 14y ago

Is there a link to the thing that happened to set off this post? I read the previous post and its comments and saw nothing out of the ordinary.

antirez 14y ago
long story short, a blog post about sexism I wrote generated a reply that remembered me that I was probably not in a communication environment I was happy to be in... so I'm finding new ways to communicate that don't involve tweets.
- mst 14y ago
  I tend to treat twitter as a broadcast platform and largely ignore the replies anyway - but I certainly won't discuss sexism on there. It's ... far too easy for topics like that to generate a flash mob; if you don't find "ignore it" to be an acceptable response then leaving seems fair enough - but I'd recommend to anybody on twitter to ignore any replies to controversial statements in any case.
- tomelders 14y ago
  You were right though. It seems wrong to me that you should be silenced by the tyrannical ramblings of the brain dead mob.
- leephillips 14y ago
  "I'm finding new ways to communicate that don't involve tweets." They are likely to be old ways (compared with Twitter). You've hinted already on your website, if I understood correctly, about the ideal form of communication on the web. If people want to comment on one of your articles they should write one of their own, giving themselves the time and space to construct something worth reading.
- mindslight 14y ago
  Welcome back to the same sycophantic groupthink that had cast computing as such a breath of fresh air back when you first learned to program. While the legacy middleman economy went to shit, tech matured into the hot new thing - surprise surprise, the ignorant mob has arrived (and no, they care not for Internet philosophy). We came looking for intellectual independence, they come looking for 'social'. Much easier said than done, but don't let the bastards grind you down.

blackhole 14y ago

Some people are going to say that he was in the right, and some will argue this is a consequence of being wrong, but this doesn't matter. What this illustrates is the dangerous precipice that the world of blogging is hanging on to, where the violent hatred that spews forth when anyone writes a remotely controversial opinion threatens to silence any opinion that sways too far from mainstream consciousness. The fact that the first comment that was posted here was just more critique about the original blog post and how supposedly "wrong" it was illustrates how much of a problem this has become. Whether or not his opinion is wrong doesn't matter. What matters is that he expresses it as an alternative perspective to mainstream conciousness. Problems are solved and society is moved forward by a multitude of various opinions, all right and wrong in their own ways, interacting with each other. Each perspective provides a unique method of solving a problem which may not yet exist. The more perspectives we have, the more ideas we have to work from when we try to solve a problem. By violently critiquing such controversial stances, we are indirectly silencing those voices, and ultimately destroying our own ability to find progressively better solutions to problems, because we get stuck inside a single point of view and refuse to move outside of it. It is not simply a matter of ignoring trolls either, because many of the most hurtful comments, at least in my experience, are otherwise highly intelligent people who completely missed the point of what you were trying to say, and have spent 10 minutes writing a scathing critique against a nonexistent problem. If we continue to censor ourselves, it will destroy us. "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire

ahelwer 14y ago
I see this from a different perspective. We are finally getting to the point where a critical mass of people are not going to tolerate sexist misinformed crap as they encounter it, and will instead speak out en masse. The blog post on sexism wasn't a "controversial opinion." The author wasn't bravely standing up to the mainstream. It was just his crappy opinion that tech needs to continue to try very hard to move past. Most importantly, his opinion was NOT silenced. Why do people in this arena of conversation seem to consistently misinterpret the meaning of free speech? He espoused his opinion, and then a whole bunch of other people espoused theirs. Nobody was silenced. Quite the opposite, actually.

eykanal 14y ago

I have no idea who you are or what you do, so this comment includes a certain naïveté. That being said, turning off comments doesn't accomplish anything. As you see here, your article was posted, and there are comments, and you're reading them, and you have no control over them. People will have opinions and that has nothing to do with you. The article itself-—as with any article that discusses sexism--was guaranteed to be controversial from the get-go, given its topic. Given that you seem to be somewhat popular, a controversial post from a popular person will elicit all types of discussion, including lots of flaming. I'm not sure why this surprises you, or why you are responding so strongly, but I would definitely encourage you to reconsider; I love interacting with people whose articles I read frequently, and I imagine the same is true in your case with your audience.

chewxy 14y ago
He wrote Redis.

recuter 14y ago

The medium is not the message. With that being said, antirez, it seems that your experience got too noisy and counterproductive and it makes a lot of sense to disengage a bit. You're missing out on very little. Also, thank you for your work.

waratuman 14y ago

It is a shame to see such hate against people. @antirez was attacked for openly sharing his thoughts about sexism. The sad part is that those who attacked him seek respect for their points of view yet do not give it to others.

eliasmacpherson 14y ago

I don't know if anyone has suggested this, but if I were you, I'd take your original article off to the nearest Women's Studies department at a University. You're far more likely to get a reasoned response than here or on Twitter.

volta1 14y ago

if you are apt to stop blogging/tweeting because someone(s) leaves a comment that hurts your feelings, then you shouldn't be sharing your opinion in public, anyways.

unoti 14y ago

Leaving the flamewar world and focusing more on the work seems like a real healthy thing to me.

atomical 14y ago

HN is starting to become drama central.

mattdeboard 14y ago
Yeah gets like that every September or so. I've taken to calling it, "It's always September or so"

powera 14y ago

Just from reading the blog posts, it seems like this is a bit of an overreaction to some mild criticism of a mediocre blog post. Then I looked at Twitter. If there are multiple people tweeting basically "you're stupid" dozens of times ( https://twitter.com/kendall https://twitter.com/kendall seems particularly egregious) it's not being in any way productive, it's a bunch of people being assholes and claiming "you're sexist" as a shield against anything they might do. I don't know if it's something specific to Twitter, or just making people "celebrities" who aren't ready to handle the stupid comments that come with it.

rntz 14y ago
It's twitter-endemic, if not twitter-specific, for the simple reason that it's hard to express a coherent, well-justified argument in 140 characters, but easy to express anger. The anger might even be justified; just don't go to twitter expecting to read the justification.
mcantelon 14y ago
The thing to do is just tweet that you're going to be taking a vacation from Twitter for a few days. By then the tweets will have died down.
bsg75 14y ago
> https://twitter.com/kendall https://twitter.com/kendall seems particularly egregious Who just coincidentally works on a product which may (or not) be in commercial competition, and could just possibly be attempting to gain some measure of the internet fame his target has earned in actually producing something of value to many developers. I can't help but notice in all of the vitriol, the loudest are those who appear to do little more that talk (on the internet). (A completely unscientific analysis)

stefantalpalaru 14y ago

Yes, sometimes being rational and having common sense will get you flamed but what's that got to do with twitter? Antirez is a well known programmer and the amount of reaction he gets is above average. Was anybody expecting anything else?

Evbn 14y ago

Less cyclical arguing, more redis. Win-win.

rdtsc 14y ago

One thing to keep in mind is that unless people strongly agree _but_ even mildly disagree the will post something in reply. In rest, most people who kind of agree or the ones that are sort of neutral will not feel the need to click reply or post. So anything controversial is bound to receive more negative feedback. Any positive or supportive comments might come as a second wave, in response to a slew of negative comments but those are sort of a second order effect. Trolls will just detect this is a sensitive topic, and regardless if they personally care or not about the issue, will see a potential for flame war and will not resist the urge to dump a can of gasoline in the fire and then watch the show.

dacilselig 14y ago

Perhaps it's just me (and the irony of me saying this will be obvious after reading this post) but if you are writing blogs, isn't it obvious that eventually you will get negative feedback and in some cases verbal harassment? My perspective on such things is that say you have 1000 followers of your blog and you write on a topic. Odds are that out of the 1000, 75% of them will likely not give any feedback, 10% will give positive, 8% will give negative and then there's the 2% that may verbally harass you because they are offended. Does this mean that they are bad people for doing something like that? Well I guess it's up to you to decide whether they are. However, try to remember that there are people out there who were not taught or never picked up on the idea that you should be courteous when talking to over individuals. Maybe they were never taught it, taught the opposite, or have difficulty in controlling their anger. They can also believe so strongly in something to the point of doing something unethical. The point is not to take things personally when people attack you directly versus your ideas. Instead why not ask them why they felt it was necessary to talk in that fashion? Apologizing for offending them can also help in alleviating any direct attacks as it makes them aware of how they are acting. A little social engineering is a good thing to know. Don't just run away from it. There are so many better ways of going about it.

Aldebaran 14y ago

The gist is basically "People should be treated the same way regardless of gender/race/...", which I agree to entirely, people who are trolling are probably incompetent women or sexually frustrated nerds afraid of losing the few female interactions they are exposed to in the workplace.

mdonahoe 14y ago
"people who are trolling are probably incompetent women or sexually frustrated nerds" You sound like you are trolling
EugeneOZ 14y ago
absolutely agree.

venus 14y ago

There seems to be a very specific pattern where someone says a problem is not as bad as it's made out to be, and they are immediately jumped on as an enemy who is not "serious" about the issue by those wishing to position themselves as being "tough on X" for whatever reason. It doesn't seem to happen in the other direction much, ie there seems to be little negative consequence about getting too excited about a particular problem. One sees this all the time: - outrage about someone saying that, all things considered, paedophiles are not a particularly large risk to children - outrage about someone saying that terrorists are not the huge threat they are made out to be - outrage about someone saying we should consider a more nuanced, pragmatic approach to drug strategy - outrage about someone saying that maybe the IT industry is not solely comprised of misogynistic psychopaths out to crush every woman under their boot at every chance I really hate this pattern. Needless to say there is little nuance to any of the smears, it's all just claims of "terrorist sympathiser" or "he's just sexist too". Is there a name for it?

Karunamon 14y ago
I've ended up defining it as a kind of poisoning the well. I posted on both Reddit and HN about this and got some interesting responses: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/r5zrf/is_there_a_word_for_this_debate_phenomenon_and_is/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/r5zrf/is_there_a_... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3732508 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3732508

jhickner 14y ago

Anyone smart enough to have an interesting opinion on this topic is probably also smart enough to see that there's absolutely no upside to expressing that opinion. It either parallels the mainstream (in which case it's redundant) or it differs in some way, in which case it invites a retaliatory shitstorm. In a nutshell Salvatore said that he prefers to raise the level of abstraction (as programmers are wont to do) from focusing on how _female_ humans are treated unequally to focusing on how _all_ humans are treated unequally. At worst isn't this a disagreement on methodology rather than a disagreement on values? What purpose has been served by turning this topic into a third rail?

abraxasz 14y ago
>Anyone smart enough to have an interesting opinion on this topic is probably also smart enough to see that there's absolutely no upside to expressing that opinion. That's my exact conclusion for pretty much every interesting/controversial topic. There's a very small circle of people (not necessarily friends by the way) with whom I exchange ideas on politics/religion/philosophy or anything potentially controversial. I know these people are smart and enjoy an educating conversation. To the rest of the world I just spew the usual boring conventional opinion when I'm forced to, or change the subject altogether when I'm allowed to..
- jhickner 14y ago
  Agreed. Any relationship where you can freely "entertain ideas without accepting them" (- Aristotle) is something to be cherished. pg wrote an essay on this topic, for anyone interested: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
_delirium 14y ago
I think it's fairly natural for some topics to become third rails, if they attack views people hold strongly, or are seen to be outside the acceptable range of debated opinion. You even occasionally see it at HN: I recall a thread some months ago where someone expressed a leftist, vaguely anarcho-communist viewpoint on something, and got a flurry of replies that weren't really engaging the comment's content in debate on an intellectual level (if you don't like capitalism you shouldn't be typing this on a computer, accusing him of ignoring gulags, etc.). Certain opinions are just outside various communities' "ok to debate" range, which varies by community, and will get you piled on if you cross a particular community's line (trickier these days because web communities are very fluid and stuff criss-crosses between them).

deleted 14y ago

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tlear 14y ago

Following antirez on twitter was one of the few really worthwhile sources of real signal there for me. Honestly it is really sad to see him leave, I learned a ton from just reading his feed over time.

hakunin 14y ago

This discussion has little meaning. Everyone makes a call. Author made a call to express his controversial view, and there is no point in saying that his free expression was thwarted by others' free expressions. Others made a call to respond by teaching the author how wrong he is in many constructive and destructive ways. All of this is meaningless, because controversial opinions are appreciated when they are the right call, and hated when they are the wrong call. It's a coin flip for the most part. Author complains that people are acting badly, but these people are everything that the world consists of. There is nothing else on the receiving end of his message except these (and other) people. Who else to express your opinion to? I'd assume author knows that. When you add salt into your tea, you don't blame your tastebuds for disliking it. Occasionally, however, you dip bacon into chocolate and your tastebuds go "whoa, awesome". This is the risk of controversial opinion. If you make it, just prepare yourself for the inevitable. There is a reason experiments require goggles. As a community, we should strive to be calmer and more thoughtful about the way we express ourselves, and try harder to make the right calls. If everyone could do that, however, we probably wouldn't have the sexism problem in the first place.

roguecoder 14y ago

Free speech goes both ways; it is not freedom to consequence-free speech. Want to express the opinion that women (and presumably men) who are highlighting and combating sexism are just demanding special treatment and wasting everyone's time? That's fine, but everyone else has the freedom of speech to criticize your speech and form an opinion of you based on what you've said. That's how this works. Hypocrisy is unbecoming. Self-censorship because other people will point out how wrong you are isn't censorship; it's doing your homework. If you don't want to be called ignorant and wrong, don't be ignorant and wrong. Imagine some journalist coming in and saying the problem with software development was that programmers didn't document enough. It isn't censorship for their opinion to be laughed out of the room.