zlacker

>>tech-h+(OP)
>Whittaker also publicly denounced some Google decisions, including the appointment of Kay Coles James, a conservative think tank leader, to an AI ethics board. Google soon nixed the board.

I wonder how much that contributed. No matter the personal political leanings of the employees, most companies try to stay on the good side of both sides of the political aisle. When the president of Heritage Foundation (which is about as close to establishment conservatism as possible) was opposed so vehemently, it really created a rift with conservatives and now there are Republican Senators who now are calling for Google to get reigned in. The business leadership can’t be too happy about that.

>>RcouF1+sf
The fundamental problem of tech companies is that they need to keep two groups of people happy: whoever is in power, which is the bigoted right at the moment, and employees, who are generally not bigoted so on the American political spectrum are overwhelmingly left-wing.

This is an impossible task. My opinion is that Google should support its employees and deliberately position itself against the right. No matter how much ground you concede to them, they're going to act in bad faith anyway, so why listen to them at all?

>>damnyo+7g
We just asked you yesterday to stop taking HN threads further into flamewar. We ban accounts that do that. We have to, because doing that destroys the curiosity this site exists for. Would you please review the site guidelines and take the spirit of this site more to heart when posting here?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>>dang+eW
I want to understand this fully. You care more about me pointing out the obvious political context we live in than about the person downthread literally comparing being gay to pedophilia.

Will you, in your capacity as a moderator for one of the most influential forums on the internet, actively care about justice, or will you just protect the status quo? Pick a side.

(Keep in mind that Scott Alexander made the exact same mistake of trying to be neutral rather than choosing to be on the side of justice. Now his blog is overrun by fascist trolls. Hacker News is not far behind.)

>>damnyo+8X
Other people's violations of the site guidelines don't justify your breaking them as well. That's not only a non sequitur, it's a fatal one. If you see someplace we didn't intervene where we should have, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or by emailing hn@ycombinator.com in egregious cases.

We're not trying to be neutral in the sense you describe. I agree that it's impossible, that everything is ultimately political or at least connected to politics by one or two hops, and so on. But this is a hard problem with no easy answers—actually with no answers. I certainly don't have one. The answer you're offering is not an answer, because picking a side and banning the other side would explode this community. It isn't just people on the banned side who would oppose such an approach; most HN users on all sides would. The rift would kill the community. What good would that do?

Another reason is that political issues are more important than most of what appears on HN. Justice is more important than Rust. Does it follow that no website dedicated to less important things has a right to exist? I don't think so. I think it's ok to have a forum dedicated to intellectual curiosity, even though justice is more important than Rust. It's fine if you disagree, but then it would be good to make clear that that is what you disagree with. So far I don't think I've ever heard anyone come out and say so. But if you do agree that it's ok to have a forum dedicated to intellectual curiosity, I think I can argue confidently that the approach we take as moderators follows from that.