I think it is going to be extremely hard. From the same article, I opened a tweet and look at what a high voted reply is: https://twitter.com/PocketNihilist/status/133495412981528985...

This line of reasoning means, you can't be pro diversity and fire someone from the underrepresented groups at the same time for their behaviour.

People are conveniently choosing to forget this is the same company which not long ago fired a person when he complained about the company being too pro diversity in their hiring.

I really hate Twitter and its mob culture.

We've created an atmosphere of fear. I don't feel comfortable voicing my opinions even after being anonymous on the internet. That's pretty fucked up.

If we cannot sit down and have a peaceful conversation, calling trolls and other non-sense, please don't divulge in this thread.

Dropping boilerplate ideological provocations onto unrelated threads isn't good-faith conversation. Whether you mean it to be or not, it has the effect of trolling, and on HN, trolling is a strict-liability offense; your mens rea matters less than the outcome.

Please don't do things like this on HN.

I’m genuinely sorry to hear that you feel uncomfortable voicing your opinions. I know from personal experience how hard it is to feel like you have to keep yourself closed off to the world. As a species generally, and as technologists specifically, we have some way to go to create non-toxic spaces for people to share ideas.

Still, you are engaging in fortune telling[0]—you really can’t know that your comments will be downvoted before you make them. Feeling compelled to add notes to the end of your posts encouraging others to downvote is your brain tricking you into tilting the scales to “confirm” what you “knew” to be true. It may feel like a helpful strategy to blunt the emotional pain of discovering that people don’t agree with you all the time, but from what little you’ve said, it sure seems like it’s just reinforcing your negative outlook. I don’t want you to feel bad all the time, and I suspect it is not actually true that most people here are going to disagree and downvote you to oblivion all the time so long as you avoid self-sabotaging.

I know it can be incredibly hard not to take downvotes personally, and, I hope you are able to try to reframe them as what they are: some random people, some of whom are thoughtful and some of whom are not, pushing a button. It’s not a personal attack, even though our brains can make it feel very much like it is. If you truly are getting downvoted a lot, it may be a signal that some of your opinions aren’t fully thought through and need to be re-evaluated, or perhaps that you just didn’t present your ideas well. On the other hand, your brain can and will exaggerate the negative experiences, make them seem like they are happening a lot more than they are, and make you feel bad even though you’re actually doing just fine.

Anyway, while I’m sure it happens (I don’t think there’s any space that is totally immune to bandwagons), I don’t get the sense that genuine and thoughtful comments regularly get downvoted to oblivion here. It’s trickier than ever these days since there is a lot of bad-faith argumentation going on everywhere online under the guise of innocently “just asking questions”[1], and I think it’s fair to say that there is an growing immune-like reaction which is sometimes attacking genuine posters because it’s just impossible to tell who’s being honest and who’s being a shitty troll.

So just keep doing your best, anonymous internet commenter. :-) If you feel like you can’t, I hope you can find a counsellor or friend who will listen and help you into a more positive head space. At the least, your post has generated some reasonable and civil discussion, and that’s what we’re here for, right?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_to_conclusions

[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions

Now...try this instead. Think of downvotes as someone anonymously throwing a tantrum with a keystroke because their tender tender feelings were hurt.

That, my friend.. is not your problem.

Also, I am kind of shocked you would accuse of me something like this. WTF. I am not trolling. I am asking a difficult question that needs to be discussed because no one is discussing it.

You also illustrate beautifully the vapidness of this fad notion of "concern trolling". Because they have not conformed with your view of the issues and used your preferred language, they can only be conceived of as trolling.

The other poster seems to be making a genuine effort to express their thoughts and edited their post to be less combative. Yet you can ONLY see them as being dishonest and disingenuous.

For them to be one of 99.9% of the world who can't mobilize a following to create a complaint about this?

Are we creating a society that makes it impossible to fire a person of color

We so far from such a situation like that that your complaint is absurd. A few places with a history of discrimination may have trouble firing the few people of color they might hire. That's about it. In the real world, incompetent people get fired and often competent people as well. A few people may make a career of playing the race card but that's a limited number of people.

Both racism and opportunists "playing the race card" can be real at the same time.

If a company is responsible in how they manage, follows policies, etc they are fine. If executives or others are allowed to misbehave and the company is too cheap to buy silence, things may not be fine.

What’s the real story here? I don’t see evidence of incompetence. But you can be fired for any legal reason in absence of a contract. Maybe there’s some unknown political or other issue. Maybe some conduct crossed a line. Who knows.

Google has set up a research organization that ostensibly is empowered to ask and ultimately work to openly resolve difficult questions like these... but when the rubber hits the road, they instead throw the researcher under the bus.

The word "fired" often is reserved for terminating someone for cause, where you really broke the rules and get no severance, not even the two weeks minimum that is customary. Non-performers usually aren't treated this way. I'm not sure this is really what happened in this story.

IMO it enriches HN comment sections to allow for people to bring up adjacent topics, things that came to mind or funky little "this reminds me of..." anecdotes.

A workplace that isn't hostile to people of color and evidence of the cause of dismissal

Perhaps instead, in these situations, employers could provide, at the discretion of the dismissed, information gathered while performing due diligence leading up to the dismissal

Since media cannot cover thousands of individual cases, there should be legal avenues without deep pockets for lawyer fees to sue companies for racist behavior.

The court should look at this situation objectively and factually.

This is not good.

There are a lot of things that are illegal but people do it anyways.

No, they don't.