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1. sussma+(OP)[view] [source] 2023-06-07 15:39:53
there is constant transphobia against Asahi contributors on display on this site. Every single article that gets to the frontpage will have dozens of vile posts in the deads and a couple sprinkled inbetween. I’m not sure if HN staff doesn’t care about it, agrees with them or simply isn’t aware.

It’s not limited to the Asahi project, either. The site isn’t safe for queer folks.

replies(7): >>judge2+nf >>troad+Rj >>Wowfun+dk >>kotaKa+a71 >>ipytho+UH1 >>gjm11+eK1 >>arp242+EL2
2. judge2+nf[view] [source] 2023-06-07 16:34:13
>>sussma+(OP)
It seems HN's philosophy is like that of (early) Reddit, where the commenters self-govern and down/flag comments like that - and it seems to be working if they're all dead, right? They're hidden unless you have an account and specifically enable showdead.
3. troad+Rj[view] [source] 2023-06-07 16:51:19
>>sussma+(OP)
> there is constant transphobia against Asahi contributors on display on this site

Could you be so kind as to link me to an example?

People have discussed Marcan's anime alter ego, certainly, but I've never seen anything transphobic in the slightest. Maybe it's all flagged before I get to see it, but I honestly can't figure out what you might even be referring to. I enjoy reading Asahi updates when they come up, so I am unsure how I could be missing something so 'constant'.

> It’s not limited to the Asahi project, either. The site isn’t safe for queer folks.

As a 'queer person' myself, I find that statement utterly ludicrous and I reject it completely.

replies(1): >>asmor+vw
4. Wowfun+dk[view] [source] 2023-06-07 16:52:59
>>sussma+(OP)
> Every single article that gets to the frontpage will have dozens of vile posts in the deads and a couple sprinkled inbetween.

But that's why they're dead. Turn off "showdead" if you don't want to see them.

The ones that aren't dead, I would assume the moderators haven't seen yet and/or haven't received enough flags yet. Moderation is hard.

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5. asmor+vw[view] [source] [discussion] 2023-06-07 17:39:18
>>troad+Rj
> People have discussed Marcan's anime alter ego

This is pure and poor conjecture, just like the rumor (originating on chan boards and KF) that a person close to marcan had faked suicide. Exactly this sort of rumor mill is what is wrong with HN linking to Asahi developers.

> As a 'queer person' myself, I find that statement utterly ludicrous and I reject it completely.

Are you a cis gay? I remember a few cases where people reached out to have information redacted to dang and it took weeks. While the people mentioned above were digging into private lives. This site absolutely requires you to shut the fuck up about your own life if you are at risk of being turned into a "lolcow" or pedojacked or whatever else these people will come up with. I understand that's not a consideration yet for 'queer people' currently not conscripted to the front of the culture war.

replies(1): >>troad+8R
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6. troad+8R[view] [source] [discussion] 2023-06-07 18:48:47
>>asmor+vw
I can honestly say I've never, ever, heard anyone call anyone else these terms on Hacker News. I don't think I've ever even heard those terms before. It sounds like you might be very online, in a way that seems to be making you unhappy.

Some of my most upvoted comments on here have been from a 'queer' perspective. It helps to assume good intentions and engage with others constructively and in good faith.

I must admit, I feel saddened by your dismissiveness of certain 'queer people'. You have no idea who I am, what my identity is, and yet you so casually dismiss members of the marginalised group you purport to be defending. How callous of you.

Perhaps the reason I can so easily dismiss your hysterical claim that HN is unsafe is that - in my day - 'unsafe for queer people' meant 'reasonable likelihood of getting a brick to the face', and not 'seeing words online you don't agree with'.

replies(1): >>asmor+NX
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7. asmor+NX[view] [source] [discussion] 2023-06-07 19:14:33
>>troad+8R
this is very dismissive for how much you're projecting i'm dismissing you. it's okay if you can't relate to me, just don't assume you understand.

hn is unsafe in the way that it provides zero control over what you have submitted and a perfect history of your posts, mostly set in stone unless you email an administrator. at least reddit lets you self-service delete posts.

those are perfect conditions for a certain kind of group that spend way too much time digging up and correlating info to then start harassment campaigns that exceed 'seeing words online you don't agree with' quite often.

you can of course now go on to scold me and others with this problem about how we need to up our opsec or shouldn't post in the first place. i find such arguments, if you were to make them, entirely unconvincing. being aware of your risk profile is one thing, shifting all the blame for making it harder to retroactively rectify little pieces of information (these people found a place from a blurry 500x500 picture of a parking lot out a window) on the user is just a bad excuse for shitty UX.

replies(1): >>troad+k91
8. kotaKa+a71[view] [source] 2023-06-07 19:53:19
>>sussma+(OP)
I mean, every time Foone asked to be respected and not posted here HN staff didn't seem to care...
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9. troad+k91[view] [source] [discussion] 2023-06-07 20:01:37
>>asmor+NX
> you can of course now go on to scold me and others with this problem about how we need to up our opsec or shouldn't post in the first place

Not at all. I neither think you should up your opsec nor avoid posting. I think you should be unabashed of what you have to say. I also think you should hear out others doing the same, generously and in good faith.

That tiny minority who harass and abuse queer people today? That used to be virtually everybody, all the time, everywhere you'd go.

The only reason queer rights are where they are today is because people weren't afraid to speak up, even when they had every right to be. When coming out meant admitting to criminal acts - proclaiming them in public, no less. Had they not put themselves out there - had they refused to speak to those that didn't already agree with them - this would be a much darker world, and your definition of 'unsafe' would be a lot more visceral.

People used to march, faces out in the open, in their small towns, for their rights, past neighbours who hated them. That's what 'unsafe for queer people' means. I'm just never going to be able to see 'people disagree with me online sometimes' as being in any way comparable.

10. ipytho+UH1[view] [source] 2023-06-07 22:57:51
>>sussma+(OP)
I’m confused by this comment. I follow the asahi Linux developments here on hn and read the comments. In this thread alone there are several high rated posts to the effect of “this project rocks!!”

The only reference I can find to trans- anything is basically this comment. Quite honestly, I recommend a thicker skin. Some people will be assholes, whether you’re trans, straight, bi, whatever. Pretending that assholes don’t exist will just make you angry… you can’t just wish away the assholes but you can ignore them and prove them wrong by being awesome (which in this case the asahi linux developers work speaks for itself!)

11. gjm11+eK1[view] [source] 2023-06-07 23:13:00
>>sussma+(OP)
I had a look at the comments on this post. I don't see any saying anything at all about gender, pronouns, trans-ness, etc. (Other than in this little discussion right here about what is allegedly wrong with HN.) I have showdead on, incidentally; I'm not seeing any dead comments on those topics either.

Maybe for whatever reason this particular post is better than others? I put <<asahi site:news.ycombinator.com>> into DuckDuckGo. (Not because there's anything magic about DuckDuckGo search results, but to get a sample of Asahi-related HN posts without cherrypicking.) The first hit is to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35394297; no trans-related things there that I can see either. (It does have some discussion of why the Asahi Linux site was turning away people coming from HN, and the reason given there was nothing to do with "Lina", nor with transphobia, but was that marcan feels that HN discussions of Asahi are full of mistakes.)

Second hit is to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35928000. Again, nothing trans-related.

(To look for trans-related things I (1) skim-read the comments by eye and then (2) searched for "trans", "gender", "pronoun" and "man", the last because people being obnoxious about trans issues often can't resist going out of their way to call someone a "man" or a "woman" if they think they might be upset by being called that. I specifically kept an eye out for dead comments. It's very possible that I missed things, but it seems to me that a minimum threshold for saying that there's "constant transphobia on display" is that someone explicitly and somewhat carefully looking for it should be able to find at least one example.)

Next few links aren't obviously strongly-Asahi-related articles. Next one that is is to a comment about "Lina" somewhere in the middle of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35233479, so I took a look at the comments there. There was indeed a "Lina" subthread, some of which was pretty rude but none of it in a visibly-trans-related way.

My general impression of the HN comments on Asahi-related threads, from this, is that they are on the whole very positive, that some people think marcan is weird for Lina-related reasons (which may or may not actually make sense; I have no knowledge of that business), and that if anyone is being obnoxious at or about trans people in those threads then either they're doing it in ways I'm failing to see or else it's being cleaned up effectively enough that it's gone by the time I look.

It seems your experience is very different. Where should I be looking for some examples?

12. arp242+EL2[view] [source] 2023-06-08 08:40:52
>>sussma+(OP)
> vile posts in the deads and a couple sprinkled inbetween. I’m not sure if HN staff doesn’t care about it, agrees with them or simply isn’t aware.

So basically you're judging a community by the posts the community and moderators deemed inappropriate and moderated away? Rather curious metric.

If you don't want to see dead posts then turn showdead off (which is the default). That you get some transparency in the moderation is a feature, IMHO, but it's also opt-in.

Maybe there should be a "verydead" for these kind of outright idiotic posts so they just won't display at all for anyone, but then how do you prevent abuse and keep the mod workload reasonable marking endless posts as "verydead"?

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