throwawaymaroon

This sounds like the kind of thing you say when you are annoyed but cant find a good argument against the points being made.

The status quo justifies the status quo, said every market leader ever.

A bigger concern for me is the grating cheerfulness in what is a very critical article.

Don't pretend you're not fighting fire with fire with this article. You're mad and you're showing it. When you say stuff like...

>To sum up, I love that you brought up these concerns in an article.

I don't believe you! Disingenuous.

(You should also think about whether or not the Riot.js author is worth responding to. Just because he's a framework author doesn't mean that framework has ever been held in high regard.)

as a leftist... I can only feel the left is fucked.

on the other hand, I am arguing in a thread that contains that complete altrightgarbletwat banned below.

on the other other hand, your aggrieved-on-behalf-of-my-lady-friends stance is just so freaking overwrought and gross.

you're attacking a position that no one has advocated for, with the exception of the altrightgarbletwat. go bug him.

and final edit: by the way, the moral imperative I advocate for is to burn these companies to the ground and to scald capitalists with their own failures. it wouldn't matter to me if Uber managed a PR save here because Uber's shitty heart will not change and nothing of value will be lost when it dies.

do you get it? a system will do the bare minimum to exonerate itself and continue perpetuating the SV failures of greed and misplaced tech idealism: there's no story here because it doesn't fucking surprise anyone clued when someone comes out with yet another harassment story in tech and it doesn't fucking mean anything when some token firings take place over the next few weeks.

Uber will still be a piece of shit unsustainable company in a tech world coopted by greedy would-be visionaries, hopefully destined for the scrap heap in the near future.

my lady friends don't need you here. read up on performative allyship and then check a mirror.

yich.

pointing out that we're an audience without legal standing, playing with pitchforks, is not harassment or condoning harassment.

That's a terrible example. Remember Google+ accounts and Youtube?

you know, I've come to like you dang. I still detest this place and everything it stands for, but seeing you chipper (if somewhat resentful about having to be chipper) towards the kind of problems that come with your job has a way of cheering me up. Like you know the check will clear, but even so, no one works for money.

not that you asked, but both as a clearer moderation policy than we've seen before and as an experiment, I think this is a good move. there is some regret that you're lagging well behind Reddit's knowledgebase, as this sort of thing has been done many times there, and there's not much new information to be found.

That said, it does exacerbate the filter bubble of this place: based on how subreddits' experiments have gone, expect the moderate center to support you and press to make it permanent, expect a little bit of grumbling that might make you think that you've made your point and don't need to make it permanent, and expect... a few more people to leave silently.

You're a prop for the VC establishment, but damn if you aren't an earnest human, too.

I wouldn't describe myself as a dang fan, but egotistic? Sure, he's just a low-ranking enforcer used to shield YC from criticism, but he's just doing his job. It's not exactly his fault, as a pawn, if the overall system is poisoned.

But as to the rest of it, yeah, the HN hivemind is insane in exactly the same way Startup Culture is a sick, greedy mess.

It would be more accurate and insightful, I think, to note that psychiatry is the attempt at a verified track record. It's not so much that it is the only game in town as it is the result of recording our attempts in a coherent fashion.

Its failures point to the difficulty of the problem more than anything.

I don't think it's particular to the tech crowd, and I think it's a stumbling block even for psychiatry.

The problem is that psychiatry as practiced is an attempt to solve people, and people can't be solved; or if they can, it is unique (as you say) to the individual.

And really you're no different: you're giving out advice to people on how to manage their mental health. Your advice is harmless from a societal perspective in that it's literally what psychiatrists want you to be saying.

That doesn't mean you're not one of the misinformed internet commenters. It's not universally applicable. Most people don't have the time and money to shop around, even if the actual problems of their mental state allow them to seek help.

You can't come up with the words that are going to make people better. Nor should you be expected to!

Recognizing that psychiatrists are the ones we pay to be expected to act to make people better and they are themselves human and subject to human failures: this, I think, is why criticism of psychiatry emerges in topics like these.

I'm not disagreeing with your general advice, just criticizing your smugness and certainty in your opening lines. You're not better at this than we are just because you're giving the generic safe advice.

It's pretty simple: focus on the flaws of the EFF instead of the problems the EFF points out. If you want to be against the establishment, you have to be perfect in pedigree, politics, and poise. Your arguments must not only be factually correct on every level (which by itself would be fine to point out) but must also be in obeisance to the status quo by explicitly recognizing the good intentions of the establishment.

All of this will be prefaced with "I'm no fan of the TPP, but..."

Here's how you write as an establishment equivocator:

---

There are certainly parts of the TPP which overreach. But the EFF is well known for taking things out of proportion [ignoring the absurd proportions of the actual situation]. Here we see another example: [point out something from the current EFF statement that is alarmist or not quite relevant to the TPP specifically, for instance...] a lot of what the EFF describes about copyright is specific to US law and copyright. The EFF is really just hitting its usual talking points and very little of this relates to the TPP; the TPP is just an excuse to talk about what they always talk about.

The point is that you've put the criticism on the person in the situation (Snowden) instead of the people/system that created the situation.

There isn't any perfect way, in the eyes of the state, to deal with a police state because it's a police state.

Expressing an opinion on how protestors can best conduct themselves to accomplish their political goals does not indicate a disruption of my social ideas.

... until the connection pool is misconfigured or something and the writes can't get in.

Touching mission critical things always has risk and those risks have to be mitigated at a political level. If the programmer is this bad at respecting political ownership of responsibility, he has no business touching production this way.

Guide to your equity: you should assume your equity is worthless just out of the nature of startup risk.

Even if it ends up being worth something, you should assume that your employer will do everything they legally can to dilute or otherwise devalue your financial reward from equity.

Getting employee equity will always be, at best, a few crumbs from the loaf you're helping to build.

This is a straightforward way of saying the problem people have here isn't with Reddit, but with humanity.

There's no point pretending tech as a whole is somehow holier than government here. If only there were a similar plan for Google or Facebook.

How will I know if my comments have successfully been vouched for?

Oftentimes racism or sexism topics aren't flagged off the homepage, but subject to decreasing rank based on comment activity. Lots of comments -> likely flame wars, or so the argument goes.

Vouching won't change how those topics are treated. And to be honest, I don't know that I mind. HN has a problem discussing sexism in a nontoxic way. I accept the argument that sexism in particular should be a banned HN topic (the way politics is) for the sake of healthy discourse.

Now I think that the conversation on sexism in the tech industry is important, and I think 'healthy' discourse is an illusion used to mask certain political motives, and I have a generally low opinion of HN's moderation policies, implementation, and clarity.

That doesn't mean that banning sexism as a topic would be inconsistent. It would be too consistent: instead it's easier to just penalize quickly commented posts, which happens to frequently apply to topics on sexism.

I just wanted to point out that "interesting fodder for discussion" is not exactly a goal of the moderation team, at least not if it includes "racism or sexism in the tech community."

Sorry this took so long. I was rate-limited and still rate-limited before I went to sleep.

What do you find offensive about being reasonable with those you disagree with?

To start, here it feels like you're trying to put words in my mouth. I didn't say it was offensive to be reasonable with those you disagree with.

Now I can see, on closer reading, that you're just extending what I said about finding a middle ground. And it's a good way to detect where a miscommunication is by saying what you think I meant (that is, you're telling me how you received it).

But it causes a miscommunication in that I receive it as an uncharitable reading: the tone of "I'm lightly incredulous that this is what you mean, please clarify" becomes "You believe something utterly and obviously ridiculous."

But that's not really what this has been about. More to the point, I think the problem you're having is that you assume someone has to want to meet you in the middle. There isn't any rule that says this about discussion, even if it's generally assumed and often true.

mreiland made his point and then he didn't want to spend any more time with you.

Your post perfectly shows part of the problem, which is... you can give it, but you can't take it. If you're not prepared to give people the benefit of the doubt, why would you expect something different in return?

>You missed my point, have a good day.

In some ways it's unfair of him to do this, but at least he did it directly and honestly. And you still had, in my opinion, a chance to re-engage him. You tried:

>>Then let's discuss what I missed, perhaps I did misunderstand you. Let's start again from this, do you agree with the golden rule? What does it mean to you? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Rule

Why did this fail? I think it's at least partly true that you weren't being fair to him. You are trying to find middle ground, it's true, but it's middle ground you're beginning with conditions favorable to you.

And more importantly it's a bit absurd to ask him to move to a discussion on basic ethics terms. That's where I got the 'school exercise' bit: you're asking him to jump through hoops to satisfy your desire for a peaceful resolution, or a 'further understanding,' or whatever it is your goal was.

Rereading your comments more closely, I'm starting to think maybe the problem is that you're charmingly naive (and I mean that well): you're a genuinely positive person with thick skin and an earnest desire to communicate. Maybe today that reacted badly with a gruff and grumbling persona; maybe in communicating with friends you can successfully get people to sit down with introspective and meditative discussion questions like this one:

I know I've made mistakes in the past. If I make a mistake in something I've said, does that exclude me from being able to learn from it? How will you know who is capable of learning without exploring their reasoning?

"Let's go around the circle and share an experience, shall we?" -- Fun in some situations, but not really appropriate to mreiland.

I think that's most of what I can think of to say about your tactics.

I'd like to broaden something out to make a meta-point, though, because none of that explains why mreiland was so deliberate about ignoring you. In some sense, the conversation is about the right to write someone off. It's a right mreiland exercised gleefully in your case; perhaps even a touch too gleefully, but even that's part of the point: it's his right to do so if he chooses, because you can't force him into a conversation.

There's also a sense in which that was a necessary part of his strategy: refuse to muddle that point and stick solely to the right to discontinue conversation. I don't know how well he managed that in the end, but the main event is still: mreiland made a level-headed comment saying "I'm inclined to write people off," and got written off by the community.

You understand that not everyone can blur between words the way you do, right? It's not something they teach people; I'm out of practice.

So yes, everyone here is focused on money and not beauty and definitely not poetry. This is a cesspit. It is one of the worst online communities there is, and I wouldn't be here at all if I weren't stuck in the web tech sector for at least a little longer.

But you're going to have to accept that if you want to share output here, you're doing so in a hostile environment, not because people don't care, or aren't interested, or aren't loving, but because what they can't understand they're going to downvote. Even if they strip downvotes from the audit log, other comments that say more mundane things will get upvoted more than yours.

Just like I accept that my downvoted comments were mostly a bland stand for anti-authoritarianism no one really wants to hear.

You just keep talking at him. You don't seem to understand that he's winning. Everything you're saying just slides off him.

He's stated his position and believes it's confirmed by how he's been downvoted and flagkilled. For what it's worth, I think he's right, I think that whatever you think of his comment, the reception was disproportionate; but that doesn't matter now: he's gone.

And you jabber on and on. You find his other comments so you can make him read more, desperate for another chance. You can't walk away.

You hate to lose.

I bet you want to respond with some gimmick about how you're concerned about him. Stop lying to yourself: he left the conversation with you, and you're alone talking to yourself. This is about you now.

(Well, and me. But I'm trying to teach you something about how your constant search for a middle ground is in reality pretty condescending.)

The flaw in yours is that a community without poison isn't worth having (and probably doesn't exist anyway). And nothing makes people happier than seeing poison dissolved amicably, right?

In fact, from a certain point of view poison is a valuable resource, and needs to be harvested. Good criticism is hard to find. Limiting it to that which is polite towards you is a good way to end up in a filter bubble, especially if there is a one-sidedness in how politeness is determined.

This thread divides commenters into roughly two camps. There's the "Yes, sir! Let's all get along!" camp, and there's the "You can't make people get along, why are you trying?" camp. And I suppose it might be a good idea to stoke the enthusiasm of the first camp, so maybe I'm just not the intended audience.

But in that case you're either just stirring the pot, or you're actively driving away those that favor substantive criticism when it's called for. Maybe those people aren't really listening to the specifics of what Altman is saying, but that just means it's being communicated poorly.

Smart people leave for a multitude of reasons. I've been rate-limited, or maybe you've got this topic rate-limited, or whatever, but you responded to me: doesn't that mean you want to hear my point of view? I mean, maybe I'm not smart, maybe I'm just presumptuous and acerbic.

But either way, you've got policies that increase the poison. I'd have been done with this topic by now, but having had another comment written up already I'm not going to discard it. I'm going to wait, and grow irritated that your system is attempting a patronizing herding tactic to 'tame' discourse. A tactic that isn't working, because the poison always leaks through, and this topic is already poisoned, why are you even bothering to stop me from responding to you?

And I think... it's true. You're just another authority, making sure that points of view you agree with are given preferential treatment. You don't want me here. You don't want dissent. I'm not free to speak my mind here, because you don't like the bitterness I want to share earnestly and substantively.

You're poisonous.

Another group of shunners shunning other shunners. And the poison concentrates: if I can never make this comment, I'll still have the poison from having been treated like this, and it will spill over some other way. Maybe in a meaner way.

Or you'll succeed in driving off everyone that stirs up trouble.

I sympathize with you because internet moderation is an unsolved problem because people are an unsolved problem. It sounds like you have some awareness that the current penalties are too much (when you talk about rescuing flagged or downvoted or hellbanned comments).

But there's a difference between moderating the id and amputating it.

This topic doesn't moderate the id because the cheerful collaborative people you're not worried about are the ones theorizing on how to make conversation better.

It does, however, successfully marginalize people that disagree and honor the process of disagreement. (Which is funny, because we're not even talking about practical policy enforcement, we're just socially reinforcing what was already a general guideline. Nothing changes for this site as a result of this discussion, the discussion is the only end result of the discussion.)

---

Here is some fragment of the comment I had written, in response to your comment here (https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=9318451)

---

Sometimes the other isn't in good faith, or it's necessary that that good faith be constructed or established in a critical environment.

I sympathize with you, because there's something utopian you're striving for, and I mean that as mostly a compliment.

But I don't want to live in your utopia, because living in a community where people never take their negative feelings out on one another is equivalent to a community where no one has negative feelings.

You're not going to get anywhere by throwing discussion questions at him like this is a school exercise.

You missed his point and he's gone.

Edit: Oh, don't mind me, I'm just dwelling on how you seem to be in some starry-eyed optimistic we're-all-in-this-together quest to "further understanding" in a pit of petty verbal combat.

We are actually very close to agreement here. I agree, it is an accusatory question.

Do you see how you've reduced the relevance of Sam's motivations to whether or not discussion of them is well grounded?

I'm simply saying that it is anyone's right to argue that a criticism is grounded, just as it's anyone's right to contest that criticism.

So it's fair for you to say "I don't think Sam's motivations are relevant" and then go on to engage discussion of what we all think Sam's motivations are and how that does or doesn't inform his actions. (Supposing, of course, that I had made a more thorough argument instead of alluding to a hypothetical starting point for one.)

But it's not fair to take this guideline and say "This is unacceptable because it is criticism," which is what jseliger did.

It is not the inflammatory nature of a comment that makes it acceptable or unacceptable. You're trying to set up a filter on what's acceptable that is affected by what you personally believe.

And when anyone in a position of power tries to set rules on discourse, we have every right to examine what that does to the shape of discourse.

Online discussion simply isn't the same as being in a room with someone, or more precisely, it's a type of 'room' all its own.

We're not being introduced to each other by mutual acquaintances who then have to get along with one another for the remainder of an evening. We're not even at a house party in a city we've never been to before meeting people that may become good friends. Nor are we at a press conference asking questions of a PR representative.

Instead we can take up and discard facets of these situations as we see fit.

...I'm not saying it's a bad idea to consider your hypothetical when talking with other people online. It's probably a good idea in almost every discussion.

But this room also allows us to be marvelously direct. The questions that everyone is thinking but don't get asked in a press conference can be addressed.

That's why I back the right to be negative so heavily. Even if it means that we have totally rude, toxic threads that no one likes, I'd rather have that if it means we get to keep our online rooms open. (Partially because we're going to have those toxic threads anyway.)

Everyone's an equal in the comment section, even if that means we're all equally poisoned.

In other words, it's a policy with no teeth, a simple admonishment?

I mean, I don't disagree: I think this changes absolutely nothing. If anything it's a renewal of the old guidelines, not an addition to them.

I suppose I think there's some ambiguity into what is intended, and there's therefore some investigation into HN's relationship with negativity going on.

There's a kneejerk reaction to view this as an attempt to prevent people like me from spouting their usual hostility towards the tech scene, and I demand the right to be booed off stage!

I hope it helps to remember that this is a non-topic: it's not going to change anything, and so this thread is almost a ritual, about making appearances, saying our piece, and moving on. Gotta love community-as-immanent-voice maintenance!

This is a sensible policy only until you have to define what is and isn't substantive.

Since "substantive" tends to evaluate to "it changed my mind or I don't believe it to be completely wrong," it becomes a subjective game very quickly.

Arguing something that many people disagree with outright is inherently going to look negative no matter how 'substantive' it turns out to be.

What the heck is a fluidic writer doing in this haunt of logic? Wonderful to stumble across your ologies; keep churning, spurning, turning the logos as you see fit, my friend.