He labeled the submission itself a "troll" (and locked it) because it generated what he called "high-indignation, low-information" responses. Read the responses and decide for yourself. It's pretty clear that "high-indignation, low-information" just means "doesn't support my ideology".
> it would be healthier if people stop this self persecution
If only it were self-persecution.
It's actually persecuting other (infinitely less powerful) white men and boys by implying "You—as a member of the group who will be most negatively affected by the policies we are discussing—are not allowed to object."
I have to say that I've lost some respect for HN today. While there are many times I've missed the quality of the community from the early days of 2007, it's only been recently where I've wondered if the front page might be as censored as Digg was around the time I first discovered HN.
Not sure what you're referring to? I can tell you, though, that HN has never been a purely vote-driven site, not in 2007 or any time since. It has always been a blend of user votes and moderator curation. What has changed is that (because users asked us to) we've been more transparent over the last few months about how the site works. It's a mistake to misinterpret this change in reporting as a change in HN itself.
I've been aware of the hiring ads on which no comments were allowed, of course. Have moderators been doing things like un-flagging and keeping specific stories they disagree with off the page for so long?
It is entirely possible I was mistaken, but I was under the belief that HN was mostly hands-off when it started. I.e., things other than clear attempts to spam, etc were off the page. Also, I think the focus of the site was narrower and clearer. It was dominated by technology and business with political pieces specifically discouraged. Now, political posts are pretty common. This broadening and blurring of the borders of what's "hacker news" can leave more room for mods to simply boost those they agree with and silence those they disagree with.
The particular article above is disturbing to see suppressed since it's clearly factual, isn't spam or similar and it's about the bay area tech scene, but apparently it's politically inconvenient.
This is merely a theory to explain your observations. I think a more plausible alternative explanation is that the moderators' beliefs about what makes up worthwhile discussion is different from yours.
>I think a more plausible alternative explanation is that the moderators' beliefs about what makes up worthwhile discussion is different from yours.
I generally think it's worthwhile to let the community decide what's "worthwhile" and what isn't. Interfering to suppress spam or a flamewar is reasonable but interfering to suppress things which contain ideas you personally disagree with is not.
Similarly I don't have a lot of respect for you downvoting all my comments in this thread and on the previous one we were both on. It's the same principle, just on a lesser scale. I made a valid point in the GP post and was answering Dang's question.
> I generally think it's worthwhile to let the community decide what's "worthwhile" and what isn't.
If HN were decided purely by votes, the front page would consist of outrage, gossip, and fashion, and the site would be unrecognizable. HN has never been decided purely by votes. It has always been a blend of community and moderation—and I do mean always, from day one. If you believed otherwise, you were mistaken; if you thought HN was good, consider why. All that has changed in this area is that we're being more transparent.
You've repeated several times the false claim that we buried that article because we "personally disagree" with it. Obviously, we don't "personally disagree" with a factual article. That would make zero sense unless the facts reported are wrong, and I have no idea whether they were in that case.
The article was two years old. It was posted by a serial political troll whose sole interest (to judge by the account history) is in using HN for ideological provocation. Predictably, that worked. The thread brought us such jewels as "Oh, do fuck off and take your strawman with you". Is that the civil, substantive discussion that HN calls for?
Weighting that thread off the front page was an obvious call. What we did not do was kill the story—the discussion could and did continue [1]. Such is the balance we try to strike. This has exactly nothing to do with our personal politics, though that of course is the first thing, and the cheapest, that we're accused of. Not to penalize such stories would put HN at the mercy of arsonists. You seem to imply that online communities, or at least this one, are robust enough not to be damaged by such provocation. That, sadly, is wrong.
The user in question has a bunch of accounts. One they are careful to use for legitimate purposes; the others just push an agenda. Many have been banned. Of course, when we ban them, they make new ones and accuse us of censorship [2].
Many if not most of the ideological throwaway accounts you see on HN are the work of the same few users. I don't think it's unfair to call them trolls. They've shown up in this thread, too, of course, even posting the same link. I wonder why it's necessary to repeatedly push a two-year-old article. It must be quite a classic.
1. But that didn't stop a second serial political troll from accusing us of doing exactly that, presumably because what we actually did wasn't spicy enough to justify cries of repression.
2. The irony is left as an exercise to the reader.
Thanks. I had no idea the other poster was a troll with multiple sock-puppet accounts.
I really appreciate the amount of detail in your reply. In all honesty, I severely underestimated the level of top-down editorial control on HN from the early days. I had thought that it was basically just PG, that he was too busy to deal with this kind of thing and that the type of discussion was due to the user base having come mostly from his essays. I have been lucky with the much smaller communities on my own websites over the years in that there were relatively few bad apples and only one sock puppet that I knew of.
I must admit, it is very difficult for me not to dislike "softer" forms of suppression even more so than outright removal of posts. This may be due to how I have seen media manipulation manifested living abroad for most my adult life. I sincerely apologize if I've mistaken comments by the OP to mean something other than they did. Once again thanks for the transparency.
> Interfering to suppress spam or a flamewar is reasonable but interfering to suppress things which contain ideas you personally disagree with is not.
By "what makes up worthwhile discussion" I was referring to a content-neutral or viewpoint-neutral notion of the idea. (The general category of "Not written for the reader's sake" encompasses most of the badness.)
> On top of that, if you ever tried to submit that "evidence" in defense of a rape accusation, you'd still go to jail for that crime, so your so-called motivation doesn't hold water.
Yes, you would go to jail for recording the sex act (assuming a jury didn't show mercy on you), but you would not go to jail for the rape you didn't commit.
In terms of your future reputation and life opportunities, it's much better to go to jail for recording a sex act than for a rape you didn't commit.
As the throwaway account mentioned, this issue is handled by state law.
In the case that I was referring to, the law under which the person was convicted also registered him as a sex offender, so neither path would've avoided that. Which is as it should be.
Furthermore, apart from what the male-dominated herd wisdom of the internet would like to believe, people don't just get convicted of rape because someone makes a baseless accusation. If you got convicted of rape, it's just like any other criminal case, and that means there was a solid, evidence-backed case against you, and a jury of your peers decided that you were conclusively guilty.
I'm not saying that a false conviction never happened. But if you're someone like the sicko with the throwaway account, filming your every sexual encounter because you're afraid someone's going to accuse you of rape, you're probably not approaching your sexual encounters with a healthy attitude.
> I’m not wild about the precedent that [suing for libel] sets for other women to come forward in cases of actual sexual assault.
Very, very, very few men have the wealth, fame, connections, and social media presence that Max has. He can defend his reputation; most men can't. He has to know this.
He is openly trying to set the precedent that suing over a very public false accusation is somehow anti-women. That's just gross.
The trade-off he has presented can be translated like so: "The overall problem of women not feeling able to come forward to report sexual assault is worse than the overall problem of false accusations by women of sexual assault"
I would agree with that statement, and do not consider it gross at all.
I was just about to write exactly this in reply to a comment above until I kept reading, saw this comment and saw you'd already expressed it succinctly.
Very, very, very few men have the wealth, fame, connections, and social media presence that Max has. He can defend his reputation; most men can't.
There's something about that statement that just feels so very... off to me. A rich man should fight on behalf of all poorer men against the all-conquering, all powerful woman? Because that's not in any way representative of the power women have in situations like this.
The balance of power in these cases seems to be very finicky. Sometimes the woman hasn't a chance of getting the man convicted; sometimes the man hasn't a chance of living a normal life ever again even if he is acquitted.
In the United States, 77.8% of homicide victims are male.
But no, Sean is having a public anxiety attack because a company chose a photograph of two actual attendees in a photo booth who chose chose to dress slightly more provocatively than his sensibilities allow.
Sean isn't being brave. He's sucking up to women in an extremely politically expedient way.
When three men and three women are murdered, we focus completely on the women. When men are overwhelmingly disproportionately the victim of homicides, violent crime (including violent crime from strangers), we instead choose to have a society-wide struggle session[1] on the plight of western women.
Western culture is hypersensitive to women's issues. In particular, hyper-affluent White men seem to derive some carnal pleasure from throwing other men under the bus.
As long as people care far more about the plight of women than the plight of men, and as long as Twitter/HN activists mock anyone who points out the compassion disparity ("WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ?"), we're never going to achieve anything resembling equality.
> As long as people care far more about the plight of women than the plight of men ... we're never going to achieve anything resembling equality.
I'm unclear on your thesis here: is your position that the reason women are disadvantaged in society in general and tech in particular because we "care more about the plight of women"? Because that seems illogical.
But the only other interpretation I can think of is that you think men are at a disadvantage to women, which is a laughable assertion.
Your account is 6 days old, of course, so I may be just feeding a troll here.
It is possible for it to be simultaneously true that men are more frequently victims of violent crime, perform worse in standardized tests, and earn less than women[1] and also that women are more frequently the victims of sexual assault[2] and other forms of harassment, prevented from taking the careers of their choice[3], and subject to a greater degree of criticism in the media for the same actions[4].
The existence of things that are bad for men does mean that men have things harder than women. The fact that there are things we should fix for men does not mean we can ignore the things that are broken for women. This is not a zero-sum game, and it is not productive to determine who "has it worse". There are things that are bad for women that happen to women, and we should stop those things happening without questioning whether they are "deserving" of doing so.
[1] Though I have never seen any stats that back up this last assertion, ever.
I have a sneaking feeling that the #YesAllWomen thing might have gone a bit over your head.
It wasn't because more women died. It wasn't because of the plight of the western woman. #YesAllWomen was a more-or-less spontaneous response to the killer's motives. It was because the killer thought that he was entitled to get whatever he wanted from any woman he wanted, and wanted to make them suffer for depriving him of what he felt he deserved (sex with beautiful women). While most men will never go to that extreme, all women have experienced some form of punishment from a male for denying their sexual advances.
If you can't see why society would respond to that the way that it did, I'm not sure that a western society is appropriate for a person with your worldview.
While #YesAllWomen was eye opening in many ways, I don't think your snark was constructive.
I think there's a problem with the sancrosanct way #YesAllWomen is being treated. In my casual browsing, I quickly found someone complaining that she feels guilty for 'friendzoning' a guy and cursing society for that. Guess what, I and many other guys have had that feeling with respect to a woman at some point.
If you can't see why someone might get defensive after reading these tweets (as they were urged to do), I'm not sure that reality is appropriate for you.
Are you trying to say that you have felt threatened, unsafe or like you were going to be alienated because you had to friendzone a female? Because I can't say that I have. And I honestly have a hard time believing that you have either.
I wasn't being snarky, but you appear to take this subject much more lightly than I do. That's fine. I was being serious about what I said. The commenter above mine was either or troll or someone who actually thinks that men have it harder because of the women's rights movement. If it's the latter, he needs to know that it's not an okay attitude to have in our society.
I'm not a hyper-affluent white male, so unfortunately I'm not just confirming his hypothesis.
> Are you trying to say that you have felt threatened, unsafe or like you were going to be alienated because you had to friendzone a female? Because I can't say that I have. And I honestly have a hard time believing that you have either.
Women tend to feel unsafe in situations in which they are statistically not unsafe, at least when compared to men. In fact, men are overwhelmingly more likely to fall victim to violent crime, including violent crime from strangers.
However, because of sycophants like you, a woman must merely say "I felt so unsafe and threatened when the man in the mall wouldn't take the hint that I wasn't interested in talking to him!" for her to suddenly become an example of western injustice against women.
> If it's the latter, he needs to know that it's not an okay attitude to have in our society.
It's not okay to even believe men have it worse (which is itself a subjective measure)?
A thought exercise for our friendly, reasonable, fact-driven hangman:
If far more men than women were graduating from college; if men universally received far lighter prison sentences than women for the same crimes; if young men were earning more than young women; if women had zero reproductive rights beyond "don't have sex with a fertile man"; if women were overwhelmingly more likely to fall victim to violent crime, including (but not limited to) murder; then would you not make a public, loud, brave scene about how unfair life is for women?
I'm still not 100% sure I'm not just feeding a troll, but here goes.
---
> Women tend to feel unsafe in situations in which they are statistically not unsafe, at least when compared to men. In fact, men are overwhelmingly more likely to fall victim to violent crime, including violent crime from strangers.
I googled "statistics women safety" and wasn't able to find anything that pointed to any sort of conclusive study as to where or when a woman should feel unsafe. All I found was page after page of statistics on sexual assaults, rapes, and domestic violence that all seemed to paint the opposite picture of these mysterious statistics that you have been bringing up. For example:
* 12.4% of women had been sexually abused before the age of 15, compared with 4.5% of men, between 1996 and 2005. (Australia) [1]
* Of men who reported that they had experienced physical violence in the 12 months before the survey, 73.7% said that the perpetrator was a male (Australia) [1]
* One in 6 women and 1 in 33 men have experienced an attempted or completed rape (USA) [2]
* 1 in 12 women and 1 in 45 men have been stalked in their lifetime (USA) [2]
* 81% of women stalked by a current or former intimate partner are also physically assaulted by
that partner; 31% are also sexually assaulted by that partner (USA) [2]
I could go on, and on, and on. I wasn't able to find any of these mystery statistics that you've been citing to prove your points, though. They all seem to show that it's probably a decent idea for women to listen to their intuition about a guy they find creepy, even if they are not statistically unsafe.
---
> If far more men than women were graduating from college; if men universally received far lighter prison sentences than women for the same crimes; if young men were earning more than young women; if women had zero reproductive rights beyond "don't have sex with a fertile man"; if women were overwhelmingly more likely to fall victim to violent crime, including (but not limited to) murder; then would you not make a public, loud, brave scene about how unfair life is for women?
This obsession with a perceived unfairness between the genders is starting to get creepy. What man has zero reproductive rights? If you don't want to have a kid and aren't sure if she's on birth control, use a condom for fuck's sake. It's not rocket science.
The study that showed young women earn more than men also showed that women in the same industry with the same degree level earned less than male counterparts, and that their wages tended to stagnate or fall after having kids.[3] It is assumed in the study to be related to the fact that a significantly higher percentage of young women hold college degrees.[3] If it bothers you this much that women with degrees earn more than men without degrees, maybe western society isn't the best choice for you. There are plenty of countries where women aren't even allowed to go to college. I'm sure you could earn more there as an uneducated man than most women.
While it's true that a majority of murders are perpetrated against men, an even larger majority of murders are perpetrated by men! The FBI's latest data on murders in the US shows that 22% of murder victims are female, while only 7% of those that commit murder are female. It's clear from those numbers alone that a male murdering a female is at least twice as likely as a female murdering a female. Had enough yet? How about this: of the 594 cases of murder where a spouse killed their opposite gender-ed partner in 2012 in the US, 84% (496) of the time the victim was the wife, not the husband.[4]
None of your complaints regarding the hardships of males due to females have ANY MERIT IN REALITY. If you're going to pontificate about facts and statistics, at least cite the facts and statistics that you're claiming to be the basis of your opinion. You sound like you are spiteful towards women in general and grasping for reasons to justify your malice.
> By interpreting this purely as an attack on white males ONLY
Come on, man! He's not doing that! He was responding to this claim you made just two posts above:
> I don't think anyone is saying that white men are a "problem". There's so much defensiveness in these counter-articles coming out as though this is some specific attack on white males.
Despite Asian people being overrepresented and White people being underrepresented—in fact, despite Asian men being the most overrepresented of the demographics listed by Google (honestly: congrats!)—CNN and other media go for the fashionable target: White men.
It's interesting: When Asian people succeed, White people admire their hard work and determination. When White people succeed, White people feel shame and guilt.
> When White people succeed, White people feel shame and guilt.
I think that's an exaggeration. When's the last time whites felt shame about Buffett's or Gate's success?
The problem for minorities or women is that it seems like every time race or gender is brought up in tech, the majority comes out in droves to steer the conversation into a discussion of white male hardship while also completely avoiding or the dismissing the original issues brought up about minorities and women in the workforce.
> How you can read the original article as an attack on white people is astonishing.
He probably had that reaction because that's almost always the undertone in American discussions about diversity. It's never actually about reaching relative demographic parity.
Example: Google's charts show whites as slightly underrepresented compared to the working-age population at large and Asians as vastly overrepresented. Despite that, on their brand-new diversity-at-google page[1], what group do they choose to highlight? Asian Googler Network (AGN), under the banner "Connecting and advancing the Asian community at Google".
Interesting, huh?
I hate making comments like this, because it sounds like I'm resentful toward Asian people for their success. I'm not. I love it. Keep at it, guys and gals.
I'm simply pointing out the absurdity of the situation.
> It is beyond question (although I'm sure you question it) that white people are by far the most privileged group of people around today.
"Beyond question"? That's a quasi-religious thing to say. What about Asian-Americans? And what happens when you separate Jewish White Americans from non-Jewish White Americans? Do things change in your mind?
> You may have been disadvantaged in other ways, but by being white you do have an advantage, whether you like it or not.
It's complicated. In many ways, for a given income level, White American children do have it worse than American children of other ethnicities. One minor (but personal) example: They are the only children repeatedly and harshly conditioned to feel guilt and shame toward their ethnicity's success. That really messes you up as you're growing up.
Back to Google. According to your HN profile, you work there. What is the extent to which employees' lives at work are affected by Google's new-found focus on demographic diversity, and how has this cultural shift effected the company's output?
