https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

It's talking about how we all talk to each other. I think it's main purpose is not to lessen criticisms for corporations so much as to keep the discussion constructive.

The parent comment actually seemed spot on to me. The rule is to assume good faith of your interlocutors. The parent failed to assume good faith of a billion dollar corporation. I think it's reasonable to push back against being asked to tone down the latter, while honoring the rule for the former.

That is a metaphor made with an industrial grade cement mixer.

I don't like the implication here (i.e. white men don't care about harassment/abuse and they are also stupid.) I would wager that most anyone of any color or gender or religion in any high position of authority at any company cares first and foremost about the financial viability of the company they have been charged with running.

Many (most) "white men" do in fact care about this stuff and aren't bigots/sexists/racists. You're naive and part of the problem if you think this is a "white male" issue and not a much more complex problem. In fact, you're exhibiting the bias you attribute to these managers.

Also, we can all have biases without it meaning people are being racist. My parents like rock music, so I'm biased towards listening to that over country. I went to certain schools and that colored my world view. I once heard bias described as a heuristic the brain uses to make quick decisions- something that was extremely useful for primitive humans but which needs to be actively balanced in our complex society. A huge part of that for decision makers is exposing themselves to other viewpoints as a way to collect information they themselves wouldn't have gotten. There's a reason why companies have used things like focus groups and surveys to understand their customers- having more people who understand those customers in leadership at companies is an even better way to do it.

This is nothing particularly new. It's the history of America, which was founded by and for white men, and whose story can be told as white men slowly and reluctantly giving up their power.

If "many (most) 'white men' do in fact care", history doesn't really demonstrate that. Not, at least, in terms of doing anything about it. This is not particularly shocking; people care more about problems they experience, and less about problems that happen to benefit them.

We need only look at how the majority of white men supported a blatant racist and sexist for president. And who continue to support him despite (or because) that has only become more clear.

To the folks inclined to keep piling on to this comment, I think a more charitable reading is that "The leadership consists of very privileged people who likely haven't dealt firsthand with the kind of harassment to which some demographics are routinely subjected. They appear to just not really get it at times."

I think that's a very realistic assessment of how some things remain intractable. People in power have blind spots because it isn't something they have to personally deal with. So they end up doing things that are counterproductive or seriously problematic without really meaning to.

That doesn't make it okay. That's just reality.

Same problem. Who's to say they are "privileged" as opposed to being hard working / talented people? You're pushing the same narrative; white men in positions of power are privileged and don't really deserve what they have. Nonsense. Sometimes that's true, sometimes it's not. Either way it's a useless, tribal way of thinking that does more harm than good.

It's completely fair to comment on this because it is the basis of the GP's argument.

Just like a developer is going to spot defects in applications more than a non-technical user because they are exposed to defects more often and understand where things will fail, people who have lived discrimination will be more likely to see it where it happens, and understand where to look to find it.

It's sort of tautalogical to say "People in power don't live like the rest of the world." And this fact has been a problem in terms of creating policies that work well for the masses since time immemorial.

It's an important distinction as it sets the parameters by which we engage in conversation and debate. If you begin the conversation by accusing the other side of being inherently bigoted then there is no civil or useful exchange of ideas to be had. It puts the other side in a defensive posture from the get go and only leads to more tribal group-think.

Both sides need to give a little here if we aren't going to remain stuck on such topics. And expecting all that giving to come from women, people of color, and other underprivileged groups is merely entrenching white male privilege in a really ugly, toxic manner.

Because I don't believe it is valid. Class/color/gender are not the only influencers on someone's decision making process, yet you two seem to think that's all we need to consider.

Where is the evidence that these people don't care about abuse and harassment because of their class and color? I see a pretty damning statement which includes zero evidence, just what someone believes to be true for <reasons>.

So no, I won't accept your premise or the GP's until I see evidence. If there is no evidence then fine, you and anyone else are free to believe whatever you like, but don't pretend it's a logically defensible position.

>This is a perpetual problem where one group feels unheard, unserved, left out, etc and then they complain about that and then are told their complaints aren't valid because they said them in a not nice enough fashion or something. Both sides need to give a little here if we aren't going to remain stuck on such topics.

Not every complaint _is_ valid, and we have no idea what the GP's motivations were. I'm not going to give any ground. You and the GP are taking a complex issue and boiling it down to something absurdly simple. All that I'm saying is that it's not simple and, if we're ever to have a reasoned debate, it needs to be predicated on facts, not "feelings". If you're going to attribute someone's actions to their gender and race then you had better be able to back it up.

It's telling that you believe _I'm_ the one doing harm when I have made no accusations at all and the GP was inarguably expressing a racist view.

If you really can't get over your feelings of personal insult and your need to defend white men, then please go back and substitute "part of the socially dominant racial group" for "white" and "part of the socially dominant gender group" for "men". In US history, those terms are equivalent. If you don't like that, talk to the founding fathers who set it up that way.

The reason it's material here is that a large portion of Twitter abuse is related to this. You can look at famous incidents, for example. Leslie Jones received a giant wave of racist, sexist abuse: https://www.thecut.com/2016/08/a-timeline-of-leslie-joness-h...

And the company admitted they had failed massively: https://people.com/movies/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-speaks-out...

You could also look at the differential experience of white men versus others on Twitter. E.g.: https://www.theroot.com/twitter-has-a-serious-harassment-and...

Note also your standard here. You, a white man, refuse to accept that race or gender could be relevant to a social problem until other people take the time to spoon-feed you. Why isn't it your job to know something about American history? Why isn't it your job to learn about the problem of online abuse before deciding that the privilege afforded to white men couldn't possibly be the relevant? Answer: because you were raised to believe that whiteness and maleness were the default and were good. So you choose that as your supposedly neutral stance, and require others to prove you wrong.

The true neutral stance would either be "I don't know about this problem and would like to learn" or "let's assume that online culture has some relationship to the existing offline social dynamic".

The employee who is familiar with them.

The problem is not the genetic characteristics of whiteness or maleness. It's that they grew up in a society that favors whiteness and maleness, and is much more accepting of the abuse of people who aren't so favored. If Twitter had started in China, where the Han are favored over ethnic minority groups like Tibetans and the Uyghur, it would be the same dynamic but with different ethnic groups.

Of course, tech is disproportionately white and male, so it's entirely unsurprising that HN readers have risen up en masse to defend the honor of white men. It exactly proves the point. White men will say that fighting abuse is important. But when they have to show their real priorities by how they allocate time and effort, actually understanding the abuse problem and how it disproportionately effects minorities comes well after defending their own interests.

(And: Yes yes, not all white men. Generalizations are general statements that may or may not apply to an individual.)

I'm not a feminist. I'm a former homemaker that self proclaimed feminists routinely crap on. I come to Hacker News because I need a place where I can engage in meaty intellectual discussion so I don't lose my marbles. That is my only agenda for being here. However, dealing with sexual politics is not something I can entirely avoid what with posting as openly female.

Suffice it to say that I don't really want to be associated with this toxic attitude and I am kind of wishing I had not said anything at all. I am starting to feel like "The only winning move is not to play" and I failed to make that move.

Not judging the individuals, but the history of this culture is very well covered.

That's an awfully biased viewpoint you've got there, good grief.

Wow. Racist much?

Twitter could have stepped in and halted things, but that would have required Smyte to have acknowledged breaching the contract and forfeiting $$.

This is all guess of what seems to me more likely than any Twitter exec pulling any triggers like this. Of course, it's still a screwup by Twitter to have not been tuned in and aware that fingers would point to them.

But that's a very different kind of mistake than "I have an idea, let's hit the power button at 6:30. Team: you have 30 minutes to let all our customers know."

But you're actually right -- if the acquisition hasn't closed yet, they're independent and independently responsible.

My hunch as an outsider is that Smyte wasn't GDPR compliant. Their leadership knew it, they knew they couldn't easily become so (for instance, they may have been using Kafka in a way where compaction wouldn't help, and didn't want to build an encryption-based monstrosity [0]), realized that they wouldn't increase in value as a business due to that risk, took an acquihire for cheap in order to give their employees a decent landing and give a return to their investors, and couldn't tell anyone about these plans in advance because it might jeopardize the transaction.

EDIT: They were indeed using Kafka per [1], and due to the strict latency requirements on their business, that may have ruled out the type of encryption scheme in [0].

[0] https://danlebrero.com/2018/04/11/kafka-gdpr-event-sourcing/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ByXQfIq5uU

GDPR does seem like the most likely culprit here, if they've been planning an aquihire for a while it wouldn't have been worth implementing GDPR and Twitter likely made it a condition that the service is shut down before the acquisition completes

I'm quite surprised none of the cloud vendors were interested/could offer more than Twitter for this team though, seems like a logical service to add.

It could also hamper their ability to make further acquisitions. In future, a startup being linked with a possible Twitter acquisition is going to cause its customers to panic and start moving elsewhere. That'll make startups more reluctant to engage, and may turn some off entirely, if they're not comfortable with the prospect of totally screwing over the customers who've supported them during their early stages.

I think potential for reputation damage, on an activity they don't do very often, and where they will justify it, will be weighed up against the financial benefit now, and disregarded.

I think it's possible to overstate the relevance and importance of people typing furiously on internet forums about things like this. Twitter is what it is - most people aren't using APIs, third party clients etc and will never notice this.

This isn't about people typing furiously on internet forums. This is about business risk, as weighed up by people whose job it is to care. Acquisitions take time and negotiation. Just because a startup is talking to Twitter, doesn't mean the acquisition will definitely happen. But if customers get wind of it, then they may start looking to move elsewhere, anyway, instead of waking up to find services they rely on have been shutdown without warning. If you're the customer of a startup Twitter is negotiating to acquire, then you're negligent not to reduce your reliance on them. And if you're the CEO of that startup, then you have to consider the risk of customer flight (and your own comfort with the thought of screwing them over) vs. the likelihood of the acquisition happening.

Why would anyone else?

Let's not forget that those customers are also likely candidates to advertise on Twitter