Why is mentioning the fact that they're black somehow flamebait here on HN? This is a story written by a black man, under 'Black Voices' about Black beekeepers with their race explicitly mentioned in the title of the article.

Empirically it might reduce flame wars on HN, but you need to take a long hard consideration as to why it causes flame wars on HN and not other sites. Because to me, that signifies a certain, non-small proportion of the userbase here is unable to handle topics involving race, and that section of the userbase is so virulent that even stories which do not proselytize are wrapped up into the flame war.

And to preempt the argument I already see forming: Yes, social media sites and HN are a reflection of society. But your duty as someone maintaining the site is to control what parts and in what ways it reflects society. It is an excuse. Not an argument. And I find erasing race from discussions because it might inflame racists to be particularly egregious. I can understand doing so if the poster did so in a way as to misrepresent the article, but this was not the case.

This is so evidently false that I'm inclined to think it's even contrary to what you suggest; "other sites" is far too ambiguous.

Your argument about this feels to me a bit like backseat driving. All of HN's problems in these areas are endemic to the category it belongs to: a large, public, optionally anonymous, completely open internet forum. Find one of those we can learn to do better from, and I'll be delighted to.

The sites I'm referring to are more or less microcosms. Larger subreddits, or sites like Tildes, SomethingAwful etc. These sites don't have the traffic of HN, but they deal with similar issues at their own scale. Larger sites can and absolutely should apply ideas learned at smaller scales and try to scale them upwards.

edit: Regardless of my thoughts on the site, I'll stop arguing about it and let things hopefully get back on topic.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-48264941

stories and their headlines have contexts.

Your article has to do with white farmers specifically targeted by the black government of Zimbabwe, literal racism, so the race of the farmers is actually relevant.

I’m all for highlighting achievements. It makes sense to highlight the achievements of those who for varying reasons haven’t had the opportunity.

Yet do don’t always need to do it of course. When you do it’s detrimental to the people you’re trying to highlight.

“Oh, look, Johnny did his homework today, everyone give Johnny a hand”. I’m exaggerating for effect but that’s an undercurrent.

But there may be another, unintentional harm: the harm to the ego of everyone who isn't Johnny. They may feel hurt that their own accomplishments weren't highlighted. They may even try to defend this hurt feeling, by saying something like "So? We did our homework too. Johnny's not special. Don't you care about us?" But the point of the accolade was never to down-play everyone else's achievements; it was merely to recognize Johnny's. But the ego gets in the way, and prevents us from letting someone else have the spotlight. We see ourselves as smaller when our peers are raised higher than us, and this makes us defensive.

Or maybe their race has nothing to do with their actions, and therefore should not be included?

To take the basketball analogy further, "white basketball player makes slam dunk" would be a bad story, because yeah, we know white basketball players can dunk. But "white basketball player becomes all time NBA point leader" would be news-worthy, because it's unusual. What makes a story interesting or unique won't always be dramatic, but it may still be important to highlight.

I don't we should emphasize race in that way, when it's only relevant because "your race is less common in doing this thing". I don't want to see a headline like "white basketball player becomes all time NBA point leader". The race isn't important in that way.

That kind of thinking is what led to the self-fulfilling prophecy of slavery and racism against black people in the Americas in the first place -- the idea that they are less capable and it would therefore be surprising if they achieved something that the white man finds commonplace.

If you've grown up all your life hearing the first bias, you may believe it. And then suddenly you see a story that refutes that bias, and you realize that actually, maybe the bias was wrong. Maybe it shouldn't be weird that this certain kind of person can do this certain kind of thing. It can take a lot of examples over a long period of time, but it works.

Countering the bias requires examples, and you have to actually publish those examples. If you never have stories that counter the bias, people literally just keep believing the bias. If in the 18th century nobody had ever put out stories about freedmen starting businesses, nobody would have believed that a freedman was capable of doing business. They needed those stories published just to change how people thought. That's the purpose of "black man becomes beekeeper" stories - to change perceptions, a little bit at a time.

That kind of story is useless if it's about something that everybody already knows and believes, but it's incredibly valuable if it fights a bias. This is the reason you don't see "white man becomes beekeeper" stories - we already know white people can be beekeepers. We don't all know the opposite. (If this sounds dumb, yes, I agree... but that's literally the kind of bias many people have, and this is how to counter it)

If you want to email [email protected] and commit to posting thoughtful, substantive comments and following the site guidelines, we'd be happy to reset it for you.

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

This is not pseudoscience -- unlike many of the other comments on GMOs and hormones. It's backed by research and the FDA.

Tell me where I'm wrong.

New low for Hacker News.

If people feel like that word in the title is essential to its content, I have zero problem with that. What we have a problem with is threads that fly off into ragey and shallow disputes about titles. Such discussion requires zero thought and zero effort—only reactivity. All people do when they argue like that—on whatever side of whatever issue—is angrily repeat things that have been angrily repeated before. That's not what HN is for. When we see signs of it happening, we've learned that the easiest thing to do is just change the title to reflect the actual content of the article. Unfortunately in this case the attempted cure produced more of the disease. That happens sometimes. In that case we change it back and plead with people to talk about the article instead.

Please talk about the article instead now.

Painting it as something the moderation team systematically does is disingenuous.

"I've never seen it" is a poor metric for making general claims about moderation. People see and remember only what stands out to them, and what stands out is determined by their pre-existing views. That's why the general claims people make about HN moderation are so starkly contradictory. If there's one mechanical, utterly reliable phenomenon I've learned about from moderating HN, that's the one.