zlacker

I'm overwhelmed by the quantity of comments here. I don't have a chance of even seeing them all, let alone read them all, let alone patiently and painstakingly moderate them all. One reason for that (today) is that I've been writing long, careful replies to you in the hope of explaining the kind of comments we're looking for here and why we need you to eschew gratutitous provocation.

In response, you made a bunch of quotes in which you replaced the word "women" with "Jews". I just spent several minutes trying to track down those comments before I realized that you were pulling that trick. I'm really shocked that you would stoop to that.

The flamewar trope "I'm going to replace $group1 with $group2 just to show how $xist your comment is" is one of the most common. Usually it's people on the other ideological side who do that, and often garden-variety trolls. It is a strong marker of cheap flamewar and a good example of how the ideological enemies who perpetuate these flamewars actually resemble each other more than they do anyone else.

>>dang+(OP)
Maybe, but right now I can't think of another way of showing how illegitimate it is to have a discussion over how best to treat a discriminated group of people, especially when when that group is so underrepresented on this forum. There is just no right way to have this discussion at all. If discussions on a tech forum look like they're minutes from a men's rights group meeting, then that's a huge problem.

>>pron+F1
If you can't think of another way than altering quotes for shock value, that may be because your view of the thread and the community is not actually accurate. I've looked again, and I don't think your description is fair. The OP seems to me legitimate; painful, but not gratuitous. As for the thread, many of the comments are thoughtful. I don't agree with or like all of them—or most of them, actually—but I think you're misassessing the amount of bad faith in the community. That's a big deal because, as I tried to explain above, it takes people to a why-bother/fuck-it place, from which they end up creating the very thing they were deploring.

It's unfortunately all too easy and common for people to mistake a divided community for a "putrid horror show", dominated by demons [1] or, as the internet likes to call them, "terrible persons", when in reality most people here just have different backgrounds and experiences from one another [2]. I'm not saying that's the only factor—anyone can scan my moderation comments in this thread to find examples to the contrary (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26613942). But I still think the HN guidelines are right to say "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." ...and I think that if you took that guideline more to heart, you might see the bulk of the thread differently. (I don't mean the long tail of trolls and flames—those are always with us.)

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098

>>dang+P2
Hang on, do you mean the comment that started this is 'painful but not gratuitous'? Because:

This is kind of the end result we're heading for, where you can only talk candidly with people who are equal or lower than you on the oppression hierarchy.

Seems pretty clearly gratuitous flamebait. Oppression hierarchy? We're heading to where nobody can frankly speak to anyone? This is 'first they came', in different words and is equally cheap and dumb.

>>pvg+m4
No, by OP I meant the original submission.

>>dang+(OP)
Thank you so much for everything you do dang!

>>dang+P2
The people aren't monsters; it's the dynamics of such discussions -- an emergent property -- that breeds such results. My problem isn't bad faith of the participants; I'm sure people are authentic. It is that HN finds it appropriate to host and publicise a discussion in an overwhelmingly male forum on how to best treat women in the workplace (and not from the professional HR perspective). The very thing I was deploring in the first place is the thought that such a discussion in such a forum is ethically legitimate.

BTW, I am not talking about the actual article. It's fine. I'm merely talking about the ensuing "debate."

>>dang+(OP)
> Usually it's people on the other ideological side who do that, and often garden-variety trolls.

Huh, and here I was under the impression that you moderated both sides equally.

>>pron+q5
You need exactly 0 women in a discussion about how to treat women in the workplace to reach the right conclusion, it's ridiculous that you attribute having right perspective on things to sex.

You threat women exactly as everybody else. See? Wasn't that hard.

>>hiofew+Lc
We've banned this account for trolling. Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with. Doing that will eventually get your main account banned as well.

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

>>unansw+xc
There isn't enough information in your comment for me to understand, but it sounds like some sort of gotcha? If so, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. HN moderation practice has been thoroughly covered by the tens of thousands of posts we've made about it. There aren't any surprise revelations or factors that haven't been explained a zillion times.

>>dang+fj
Why the need to search for deeper underlying meaning in my response? Why not take it at face value?

>>unansw+lr
Because I didn't understand it?