I am quite glad for heavy moderation on these topics, look at reddit for example, this kind of talk would quickly go off topic and devolve into mud slinging.

There is certainly an odd dynamic on the "nerdy" websites when it comes to promoting the under-represented gender.

That said, comments like yours (and mine) are only adding to that problem. I guess I'm a hypocrite.

> There is certainly an odd dynamic on the "nerdy" websites when it comes to promoting the under-represented gender.

There have been plenty comments here discussing the "why", and the gist of it is the concept of "under-represented".

Why are so many so afraid?

Would they be afraid of a "Black Founders Conference"?

What about men tackling issues like work/life balance and getting connections to their families? A "Men as Parents" conference?

I am a long way away from San Francisco so I really have no idea what the ins and outs of the local culture are, but I see this same fear here. Not a nostalgia for old gender roles, but some sort of fear about being left out. It is changing, but has a long way to go.

I haven't yet seen any evidence of fear.

Not taking any sides, but this whole "HN is more mature than reddit on these topics" meme is wrong and out-dated. I mean, goodness, look at this thread (well, if you have showdead on at least).

If the comments are dead, they are not representative, in fact, they are clearly exactly what the community rejects.

And, in my observations, similar toxic conversations and people acting in bad faith are downvoted on reddit.

Who cares? My point was more that "at least we're better than reddit" is tacky. I don't think either of us are likely to objective make an assessment here either way on "toxicity of a topic on HN vs reddit".

>And, in my observations, similar toxic conversations and people acting in bad faith are downvoted on reddit.

I suppose I disagree with you there, as someone who hasn't used this website super much (about a year maybe?)and has been using reddit for about 5 years, HN seems much better to me in providing a longer, more concerted discussion. I didn't realise it was a meme though.

But that's just a personal opinion.

> they are clearly exactly what the community rejects

aka. "HN herd mentality." It feels me with sadness when I see the same trend over and over. People who have different opinions on certain political/social matters are being silenced by this whole "community rejects" bullshit.

Ok, forget "community" then. Point is, there is no agreed "The opinion of HN" in dead comments.

dead comments are not representative in general of HN since the downvotes/flags outnumber the upvotes/vouches.

That presumes all members vote & have down vote privilege: which is not true in either case.

This is an excellent point. Sadly, people who share less popular opinions will (probably) never get to the point when they can start up/down voting. So the only way to get these "superpowers" is to join the HN circle jerk.

That's only True if you constantly make unpopular opinions, such that they outweigh your regular ones. There are all sorts of neutral comments that can be made, a point a piece..

depends on what you consider to be a member. If there wasn't a karma cap, it'd be easy to sock-puppet-fake the votes.

Explain?

"...look at this thread."

If you go into your profile settings and turn on the [showdead] option, you'll be able to see all of the comments that were flagkilled. That will give you a better picture of just how nasty a lot of them were.

Thanks, I did not know about that.

I am puzzled by some of the decisions. Whatever, up to the moderators how they moderate.

If a comment gets flagged by enough users or downvoted far enough it gets killed, that's what's been happening in a majority of cases on this post.

Totally agree about the need for moderation. I am not complaining!

I am not sure how our comments are adding to the problem. We should not act as if there is no problem with prejudice and bigotry in society generally. Sexism and misogyny in technology in particular.

> Why does women organising together create such hostile excitement?

I believe the primary reason is that creating similar exclusionary venues for men is considered ethically and legally beyond the pale. It's the kind of thing that tickles the "equality" bone for MRA types.

I had to look up MRA.

It is a shame that men's rights activists cannot spend time advocating for men in areas where men need it.

I would assert that is clearly not in tech! But in areas such as family law, societal expectations (fight, fuck and make money), violence, prisoner's rights... These are all areas that arguably men's rights are a thing.

Instead men's rights activists spend their time pushing back at feminists.

Sad.

Not really. "Exclusionary" venues like this exists for men too.

http://www.aamn.org/events/aamn-2017-annual-conference

https://www.naspa.org/events/2017CCM

http://blackmaledevelopment.com/about-2017-conference/

http://ndeo.org/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=893257&modul...

https://stopmalesuicide.com/national-conference/

https://directory.sdes.ucf.edu/article/3757

http://www.malepsychology.org.uk/product/male-psychology-con...

http://www.firstmensconf.org/f/Home.html

http://athomedad.org/convention/

https://www.partnershipfordads.org/fathers-conference/

https://www.fatherhood.gov/about-us/events/18th-annual-new-e...

This was interesting. Thank you.

this documentary was made by a female feminist. I found it very interesting:

http://theredpillmovie.com

The fact that I'm seeing your comment at all suggests they've improved in the last few years. This is the first time I've bothered to comment on HN, as a woman interested in the topic of "Women in Tech" in ages, because it was such a barren hellscape here not long ago.

As always, comments on stories about feminism prove the need for feminism.

Why do the topic create such polarized environment where any disagreement is seen as hostile and everything else must be in full favor? Can't we have a moderate disagreement in regard to political events?

Let me present a moderate disagreement. I dislike events like this because it can't be made universal. Let say we had a common rule that said: any industry has this bad gender segregation should have exclusive events for the minority gender. Given a 80/20 ratio, this would result in around 30% of all industries which employs about 40% of all people in my nation. A significant amount of events would turn either exclusive male or female, with the majority being exclusive male, and I personally doubt it would have a positive outcome on society. I am open to be convinced otherwise.

I agree that whenever these political topics arise on HN, you generally get the same situation - a few politically unpopular comments being downvoted to oblivion, even if the comment was well formed and wasn't snarky, unnecessarily cruel, etc. Simply saying "I think that this isn't an event that should be encouraged because X, Y, Z reasons", should not be downvoted if they provided interesting insight, reason, logic objective angles, etc.

And as we've seen in this thread, the usual few HN snobs come in making insubstantial points-seeking comments deriding how toxic all those downvoted comments were. I'm rather tired of how a growing number of HN users like to play "morality-police" on these kind of topics.

If anything I found your comment rather insightful, and it's sad to see it downvoted. It has an interesting links to the ongoing Facebook moderation debacle where their ridiculous "minority-ness" rules have been complicated so much that they can be gamed so that you can hate on a certain group because they don't score enough "minority" points, but another very similar group gains "protection status" from hate.

Come get me downvotes, I'm ready!