zlacker

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+(OP)
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+x1
No, by OP I meant the original submission.

>>dang+(OP)
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."

>>pron+B2
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+W9
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