One of the best ways to get downvoted is to predict in advance why you'll be downvoted! In this case you appear to be setting up a narrative to claim downvoters are evidence of a particular ideological point, when instead they might be downvoting you because you're being a jerk.

You seem to have misread his comment. He predicted downvotes on the original submission, not his own comment.

He was wrong, but only because you have to click the link and read the full list to see the excerpt he quoted, when most people only read titles and comments.

This really does bug me. The whole "if-you-downvote-me-you're-a-jerk" sorta makes me want to, even if the comment itself has some kind of decent reasoning. With that said, i can also be frustrating when people downvote to invisibility things that are not wrong but with which they disagree.

I meant the overall post/link (where I quoted from), not my own comment.

Oops, you missed out the best bit from your quote: "(Unfortunately)" ;) - I was going to post a comment about how precious this is, but looks like you got here first on this subject, so I'm going to add a reply instead.

The fact that people here will generally flag this shit to death is good. This is a sign of maturity. The community has realised that discussions here on these topics are reliably unproductive, and will therefore kill them on sight.

"But what if this means killing the productive discussions here on this topic?" - well, it's a calculated risk...

It's less about privilege being challenged, more about "inclusion" being used to justify just about anything and often going too far.

Here's a comment in an official nodejs repository that got edited by a contributor to correct a pronoun on somebody else's post: https://github.com/nodejs/package-maintenance/issues/77#issu... (click the "edited" dropdown)

That you yourself come right out the gate guns blazing about "privilege" shows exactly why people prefer to just not have the discussion at all anymore on this forum. It seems more like flamebait and it never ends well.

This reminds me of the whole "master/slave" nonsense. Past HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17954823

I feel like you picked a bad example; I imagine it sucks to be referred to as "he" when you're not a "he".

> I imagine it sucks to be referred to as "he" when you're not a "he".

It does. But I wouldn't go and change someone else's speech to say something other than what they said, rather than just telling them politely, because it also sucks to have one's words twisted. In fact, to have it twisted while attached to your name (which is what happened here) is worse than being referred to by someone, in their words, in the wrong gender.

I think this has less to do with respect and more to do with detracting from the original discussion e.g. source code integrity having nothing to do with human genitalia.

Gender is also not about genitalia, fwiw.

I see that the author of the edited comment got defensive about it and went on an irrelevant rant about singular they. Wish people like that would grow up a bit.

Eh, having others edit comments attributed to us is weird, regardless of the context, I can see why people would get defensive. At least SO shows the editing user pretty clearly, on Github it's almost invisible.

Nah. I think it's just aversion to culture war. I know I get more than enough of my fill on Twitter.