And the worst is kids. If you think you can go off track and say dumb things as an adult, think of the 14yo self. I thank God I was a teenager before the modern internet. There is no forgiveness. The doors of college education can be shut on a whim for a bad joke. Where and when I grew up, your political opinion was irrelevant to your college admission. You didn't have to demonstrate your committment to the polical cause of the moment to apply.

The talk also mentions this article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/us/spring-break-gets-tame...

Kids nowadays can't party like we used to - because they need to consider that everything mildly interesting they do will be uploaded to our machine overlords for monetization. Bare breasts probably monetize well, so they were one of the first "casualities" of ubiquitous social media.

I grew up with internet, and had to deal with cyberbullies long before most knew what internet was. I think my inclination to clean up after myself and natural aversion for exposing too many personal details (I.e. didn't sign up for any social media, nor any (local) precursors) helped me steer clear of the worst of this. I'm surprised that so many are so blasé about this, while it's raining stories of cyberbullying, measurable increases in youth depression and lonelyness, identity theft and then regular theft.

I wear a seatbelt, a mask, and I take care of myself online as well. Seems like the facts are clear on all of those.

> Where and when I grew up, your political opinion was irrelevant to your college admission. You didn't have to demonstrate your committment to the polical cause of the moment to apply.

And... is this the case today? Do universities exclude your application or scrutinise your political beliefs?

I have heard from interns that colleges want to see engagement for social justice or diversity causes during the application process.

I have also heard that for research grants you need to show “diversity and inclusion” efforts. One guy I talked to from a Nevada school said these are often won by rich colleges who are almost purely white but know how to talk diversity whereas poorer colleges that are actually way more diverse don’t rate well on the diversity and inclusion scale.

> I have heard from interns that colleges want to see engagement for social justice or diversity causes during the application process.

It's been 15 years since I did the college admissions dance, but I do remember that most of the superstitions about the application process don't apply if you score above a 33 on the ACT (perhaps you'd need a perfect score to have the velvet rope lifted if you're applying for MIT). All the rules of thumb about taking at least three years of a foreign language and balancing between 2–4 extra-curricular activities are for the students who won't be immediately offered merit scholarships.

I believe cases like this pretty much qualify here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28757882

Still a spectacularly better proposition than most of US history, where admission were far more restrictive. Many Ivy League schools did not admit women until the 1960s and 1970s. Weird how we forget this stuff and somehow pretend we're living in the more restrictive era.

Sure but the momentum today goes towards more restrictive norms, contrary to what was happening in the 70s.

I can forgive kids, but it is fully adult humans that engage in this type of cancellation.

This is a typical witch hunt based on insecurity. At least academics should have enough self reflection to question their behavior, but they don't and they are the worst offenders here. And some of them even say they want to display leadership. What a sad joke...

> Where and when I grew up, your political opinion was irrelevant to your college admission

I agree that people should be forgiven for mistakes they made as children, and that the internet should be more anonymous in general, but you lost me there. You sound like a right-wing conspiracy theorist decrying "Cultural Marxism".

Wait where do you have to "demonstrate your committment to the polical cause of the moment" to apply to college

For grad school across fields a statement supporting “equity and inclusion” is becoming the norm. While this does not sound political, the use of the word “equity” vs “equality” is political.

Specifically, equity explicitly entails redistributing resources based on lack of privilege. This is instead of equality, which entails providing everyone with the same resources and opportunity.

Now we are left with question of how to fairly distribute resources. These are centralized decisions made by career bureaucrats. If the distinction was made along economic lines, this would not be all that political. However, lines are commonly drawn along race, gender, and sexual orientation. Now those making these decisions have decide based on belief structures about what groups are the least privilege. These structures are inherently political and a poor proxy for economic status.

And, if people are wondering if these statements are evaluated in a particular way, you can view a typical rubric here:

https://ofew.berkeley.edu/recruitment/contributions-diversit...

Which speaks for itself.

I want to add from anecdotal experience that this conformist ideology spans beyond just university applicants. I have had to declare my views and positions on "equity and inclusion" at job interviews for software development positions here in the Bay Area. I'll call them out; it was DoorDash in SF.

How did they ask that question? How direct are they in determining a candidate's ideology and political leaning?

At Google, a couple years back they swapped out one of the technical interviews for a G&I interview, which is really just a behavioral interview. But the questions come from an approved question bank, with each question tagged with a different attribute it's supposed to probe. One of these tags is DEI, and you're required to ask at least one question tagged DEI when conducting one of these behavioral interviews.

Usually the question does not explicitly call out race or gender, but the grading rubric definitely dings the candidate if TC doesn't reference them in their answer or says anything about political, economic, or regional diversity instead.

The one saving grace of this system is that no one expects any meaningful hiring signal to come out of these interviews unless TC is a total idiot when answering the questions.

Just had two nieces start college last year. Both in Large midwestern state colleges. These were not Ivy League or staunch liberal arts colleges.

Both put a huge emphasis on extracurricular activities which needed to be focused on social justice areas. Both were petrified they didn't have enough activities to get accepted.

In the end, they got accepted to where they wanted to go, but the shift to tow the line for social justice, inclusion and other hot topics of the day has been surprising to me. When I applied in the early aughts, the only thing my classmates were worried about were our SAT/ACT scores. Nobody cared at that point about your political leanings. Seems like today that is a greater focus than ever before.

It's not like there is some peer reviewed study I can cite for you, but in my own anecdotal experience one of my admissions essays needed to be about "what Diversity means to me". I, of course, said it was the greatest thing since sliced bread because I can't help but think a neutral or contrarian viewpoint would instantly get my application rejected. One of my Gen. Ed. requirements was to take a course that was flagged as co-curricular with "Human Diversity". And, the school I went to isn't even considered that liberal.

On the sections for extracurricular activities, volunteering, etc. where you try to make yourself look saintly. Just guessing, but six months volunteering at a homeless shelter for refugees will probably help your admissions more than six months volunteering to catalogue 19th century clogs at a museum.

Coming from country where even behavioural interviews are rarity and only very specific fields have something beyond entrance exam the whole extracurricular activity thing feels extremely strange. Why should that have anything to do with academic performance.

> Publicly espousing an unpopular opinion now can be career suicide

Let's not pretend this is new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist

The difference now is that visibility is more uniformly distributed across the population.

> The difference now is that visibility is more uniformly distributed across the population.

And that you don't necessarily have to chase said visibility. Before, visibility was a goal very few people could attain. Now it's a bomb that can be thrown at you without warning.

I think the extent matters as well.

I am not sure if humans can exist without blacklists. Some people definitely have the instinct to create them.

But nowadays it is fairly easy for every employer out there to check out whether there is a 'controversy' in your past or not, even if you are not a traditional celebrity.

Being less employable in Miami is one thing. Being less employable in the entire Anglosphere is another.

>Let's not pretend this is new

Let's not pretend the scale of the phenomenon today and mass surveillance capacity of today plus mass exposure and permanent public record of social media, web forums, even public spaces and events (e.g. with someone recording a video) is in any way comparable to the McCarthy era.

Or the the "offenses" people get social-mob-attacked, pilloried, and fired are in any way comparable to the offenses (even if BS) people were prosecuted for in that day: being considered an enemy of the state working to overthrow the government.

Most of the people I'm seeing get actually cancelled are... being considered "an enemy of the state working to overthrow the government".

I'm also seeing a lot of base-rate fallacy and availability bias issues (surprisingly, from many of the same people who complain about other people falling prey to the base rate fallacy w.r.t. Covid). That you can think of a few instances where people were loudly pilloried for, say, weaponizing the state use of force to racist ends, doesn't mean that it happens that often.

The detrimental effect doesn't lie with thousands of people getting cancelled, it lies with thousands of people not speaking up anymore.

Except that I never had a chance of being on a hollywood blacklist in the first place. I don't even use social media, and it's still possible I could say something off-color somewhere and find myself canceled.

Or not say something. Refusing to join in can be an offense.

Sort of a “join us or die” accept killing is not usually needed to shut someone down. Shunning is usually enough these days.

"Silence is violence" and "In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist".

Logical fallacy that leads to oppression and genocide.

Poor kids couldn't get a job in Hollywood. Oh the humanity!

What's going on now is being blacklisted by multiple industries. People who get marked as such never work in "normal" companies again and have to move continents to find work.

You are comparing being blacklisted by a group of people to being blacklisted by society at large.

> People who get marked as such never work in "normal" companies again and have to move continents to find work.

Who?

Maybe I'm just not paying attention to the news, but I somewhere missed the great wave of American software developers migrating to Europe for a better life for their families.

This is a distraction and diversion from the original comment.

Hollywood is not at the scale of the internet. Some privileged people got cancelled in Hollywood, who cares. When a hard working person gets cancelled by saying something stupid, the consequences are back breaking.

While I agree that ordinary people being cancelled for saying something stupid is a bad thing that should be condemned[0], I'll play devil's advocate: however unfair these events may be, are they truly statistically significant? Or is concern about "cancellation" of hard working people itself a moral panic amplified by the nature of modern media?

Sure, we've all heard of donglegate, or about that guy whose hand did an "OK" gesture on his car door and was accused of "far-right" symbolism, or about that teenaged girl who once said the И-word in a video celebrating her driver's licence which resulted in her rejection from university, and many many more. Yes, these things are injustices and they should not happen, and they should be stopped. But on the large scale of things, does saying something stupid really pose a significant risk of disproportionate public shaming to a normal person?

The online hatemob only has so much attention span to dedicate to its latest victim(s), and there is only so much airtime and tweets to be dedicated to the latest outrage. And, in the meantime, hundreds of millions of people live their lives as normal, with more-or-less online presence, saying, doing and posting things which may well be "cancellable" according to this or that neopuritanical value — and yet, nothing happens to them. And this is good.

Don't get me wrong, I do think that fear of "cancellation" inhibiting people's openness to express themselves and their mental well-being is itself problematic, however statistically irrational this fear may be. However, focusing attention on these rare events, even if it is to criticise the phenomenon, may only make the problem worse.

If you'll forgive the somewhat melodramatic analogy, it's a bit like terrorism. Just like disproportionately instilling fear of terrorism only serves to help the terrorists' objective to instil fear, so does disproportionately insisting on the unfairness and disproportionate consequences of "cancel culture" only serve to help the cancellers themselves in their desire to influence society.

[0] For a given meaning of "cancelled" and "saying something stupid", that is.*

I don't think it matters whether its that statistically significant. You can increase expected-value by increasing likelihood of occurrence, or increase the value of the outcome.

Take a loan shark, for example. You don't need to take a leg every time a loan is late. You just need to do it to enough of them, visibly enough, that everyone gets the message -- you can miss a payment, and maybe get away with it... but you also might get seriously fucked up.

And suddenly, no one's missing payments. Because the % chance of failure might be low, but the damage done is dramatically high (potentially infinite, if you escalate from taking legs to taking heads) -- giving you a very a high expected-value.

You only need to expel a few people from society for espousing wrong-think, to get most people to fear speaking wrong (accidentally, or intentionally). And it's perfectly rational.

Regarding terrorism, it's the same thing. You don't need to have that many terrorist events for it to be rational to defend heavily against them -- if they do enough damage (e.g. 9/11), they've made up for their rarity. The problem with defense-against-terrorism is that it's used to justify things that have nothing to do with it, or very weakly related (eg invasion of countries, elimination of security protocols, invasions of privacy, etc) and is used as a scapegoat for all sorts of nefarious activity.

The part that's irrational is not the fear of terrorists, but rather the mindless interpretation of anything that claims to help resolve that fear.

When have you ever given the "OK" hand gesture around a politician? Why are you saying that like it's some innocuous thing that anyone would do?

To your first question, I do not remember having given any hand gesture around a politician. Have you ever done so?

To your second question, where am I "saying that like it's some innocuous thing that anyone would do"? And what does it matter?

No, I haven't made any Nazi hailing gestures around a politician, and I think it's super weird that Republicans do that.

Forget Hollywood. Imagine trying to build the career of your choice as a black person, or a woman or an out gay person in that same era. Society was casually blacklisting the literal majority of Americans from most professional realms.

Yes, but that was the case for most of history, and America (and the world) at the time did it progressively less and less (first the abolition of slavery, then women right to vote, civil rights, de-seggregation, and so on).

Whereas today it's a new phenomenon, that gets progressively worse even though the problems you've mentioned (regarding blacks, women, gays, etc) are at their historical lower point.

So while America was progressing then, this is a regression now.

And it also affects blacks, women, gays, lesbians, republicans, demoracts, old-style lefties, and so on -- all of those categories have had members cancelled or mob-attacked for wrong opinions... (even someone like Dave Chappelle, who is a comedian of all things, has been attacked on such grounds).

> (even someone like Dave Chappelle, who is a comedian of all things, has been attacked on such grounds).

Dave Chappelle, with his recent $8-figure deal with a prominent pop-culture/FAANG company, who keep publishing and promoting his specials, seems like he's actually a counter-argument to your point.

Not for lack of trying.

YC has a blacklist of people and companies.

Not sure what will land you there, but I know they have it and use it.

If there's an actual blacklist where YC employees can just arbitrarily ban founders from working with certain companies that's quite surprising and maybe pretty bad for YC's reputation.

If you mean YC has a strong community of founders who share war stories of how people and companies were difficult to work with, and the other YC founders pay attention to those stories though, well, that's not a blacklist.

There’s both.

About the blacklist, I don’t know exactly how it works, who specifically has access to it or who can add entries to it, but I know it exists, I know people who have been affected by it, know people who have been told explicitly about it and know that at least some partners have access to it.

I have no idea what you're referring to, and if you're going to make such insinuations you should be specific and concrete. Otherwise it's impossible to answer, and that makes it a smear.

If anyone wants some insight into one of the ways that YC manipulates this site against their competitors, compare these two lists:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew

* https://news.ycombinator.com/show

YC competitors go straight to shownew to minimize visibility and they have no hope of landing on the front-page. Whereas YC companies go straight to the front-page.

That's not even touching on the dirty tricks the YC network plays with the VC community. They will work hard to ensure that no YC competitors get funded, including spreading false dirt on founders of competitive companies.

None of that is true!

/shownew and /show are clearly explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html ("Every Show HN appears on shownew. Once it clears a small points threshold, it will appear on the show page in the top bar.") and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html ("All submissions appear on newest, and all Show HNs on shownew, but there is a small points threshold before a post appears on ask or show.")

The stuff you're saying about how YC works is not just completely made-up, it's the opposite of the truth. YC often funds competitors to existing YC startups—first because if you're funding 1000 startups a year, that's inevitable; and second because startups don't usually die because of competition, as PG and YC have been explaining to founders for many years. A startup that's building something people want will almost always find a way to differentiate itself.

We don't moderate Show HNs to favor YC startups or disfavor other startups. We do give YC startups the chance to post Launch HNs that get placed on HN's front page (as explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). But these don't go on the /show tab (they used to, but I disabled that so YC startups wouldn't get too much of an extra advantage). Plenty of Show HNs make the front page, and the overwhelming majority have no connection to YC—in fact, I can't fathom how you'd have thought otherwise, since this seems quite obvious.

When a non-YC startup is having a successful Show HN, I often help them and also encourage them to apply to YC. When a non-YC startup posts a Show HN that isn't successful, I often email them with suggestions about how to rework it so the community will like it better, and if they do that, I often put their Show HN in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it gets a random placement on HN's front page.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28810941 I gather that you're upset about something that happened to a specific Show HN. Rather than jumping to false conclusions about what happened, you should post the link so that (a) we can look into it and respond, and (b) readers can make up their minds for themselves. Since the comments you're posting contain no specific information, the more you post dramatic claims, the less likely readers are to believe you.

There could be a ton of reasons why your friend's Show HN got demoted, ranging from setting off the flamewar detector, the voting ring detector, getting flagged by users for some reason, getting downweighted because it broke the Show HN guidelines, getting downweighted because it broke the HN guidelines, various kinds of spam or abuse behavior (the worst of which is buying upvotes from spammers, which people unfortunately do but which typically causes their post to get buried immediately, and their account and site banned on HN). I'd need a link to say for sure which of those, if any, it was. Or maybe it just didn't get enough upvotes to clear the hurdle from /shownew to /show. That often happens. It happens to YC startups too.

If your friend(s) didn't do anything bad, you or they should email us so we can look at the post and possibly help. That's what people do when they assume good faith, and that approach has a much higher expected value than the approach you've been taking with these comments. You/they should do that out of simple self-interest if nothing else. Even when people did do something bad, we usually forgive and unban them if they take responsibility for it and promise not to do it again.

Not only do we not lie to the community, we try never to do anything that isn't clearly defensible to the community. To do otherwise would be not only wrong but stupid, since it would risk losing the good faith of HN users. Why would we do that? That's the only value HN has. It's precisely by not doing it that we can keep HN in the high esteem of this audience, and therefore keep YC in a kind of special relationship with users here. That's what makes HN valuable to YC (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).

I've responded more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28817887.

> There could be a ton of reasons why your friend's Show HN got demoted, ranging from setting off the flamewar detector, the voting ring detector, getting flagged by users for some reason, getting downweighted because it broke the Show HN guidelines, getting downweighted because it broke the HN guidelines, various kinds of spam or abuse behavior (the worst of which is buying upvotes from spammers, which people unfortunately do but which typically causes their post to get buried immediately, and their account and site banned on HN).

"We have half a dozen opaque excuses" isn't the argument you think it is. The fact is this site shouldn't even exist due to the crystal clear conflict of interest between running a vc firm and a startup "news" site. That's not just journalism 101, it's common sense 101. It's not defensible.

> Not only do we not lie to the community, we try never to do anything that isn't clearly defensible to the community.

If you take one step outside the HN/YC echo chamber, you'll find that most people know that this site is a scam and heavily weighted toward promoting YC companies as that's the only reason it exists. Only a very, very foolish person would believe otherwise.

Also LOL that you hid this reply! It's because there is no defense for a vc firm pretending to run a "news" service and you know it.

I didn't hide any of your posts - I've been unhiding them*. They are getting filtered by software. I've also been turning off the user flags that you've been attracting.

This has become repetitive, though, so I'm going to stop doing that now unless you have some specific information to offer.

* because we moderate HN less, not more, on YC-related topics [1]. Less doesn't mean zero, though. I think this can stop now unless you have something non-repetitive and informative to say.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I'm giving ta1234567890 the benefit of the doubt upthread, but this comment is definitely a false, substanceless smear.

You're lying. Next time you nuke one of my friends Show HNs off the front page, I'll send them a link to this comment so they can call you out publicly. YC partners don't hold grudges and work their network against people who have damaged their ego??? Bull fucking shit. I know YC companies call in hits all the time on people as they brag about it relentlessly. You have all kinds of levers to pull here and you pull them without hesitation. The YC network spreads false information about competitors all the time. They kill deals, focus companies against those they don't like and generally are one of the least ethical group of people operating in the tech space (and that's saying a lot). That you'll get on here and make an outright brazen lie saying that this doesn't happen is very par for the course.

None of this is true. I mean, I suppose there could be an invisible YC cabal acting completely out of character in ways the rest of us never observe, but that's so unlikely, it would be a Russell's teapot. I have never observed anything along those lines, and I've observed countless things going the other way.

I've also helped many (dozens if not hundreds by now) non-YC startups with their Show HNs, so the truth is actually the opposite of what you say. The goal is to have HN be the most interesting community it can be, because that's how HN serves YC's interests in the long run (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). The global optimization is worth more than the sum of any local ones. We try never to do things that aren't defensible to the community, because the good faith of the community is the only asset HN has. Risking that would be dumb.

You should really supply specific links if you're going to post accusations, so that readers can make up their minds for themselves. Otherwise the community here is going to compare the extremeness of your claims to their lack of any specific information, and discount them.

I've responded in more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28817827.

No normal person will deny this.

But there is no comparison to a small population being affected (ironically in the USSR, lots of artists and authors got not only blacklisted but sent to the Gulags --gee, I wonder if they wrote to Stalin on behalf of their brethren) to potentially anyone and everyone being a potential subject at any moment for something otherwise innocuous.

What’s more this is much worse. It’s not about a singular subject (communist sympathizer) but just about anything at any moment. It's a shifting landscape so much so that there is internecine sniping among all groups.

Today you can’t even make a genuine faux pas without the risk of someone coming down on you and risking your livelihood. That’s quite different.

If Pelosi said off handedly, you know Trump did a couple of things right, or you know I don’t agree 100% with everything BLM she’ll be in trouble and she’s the top politician outside the president. Imagine a school teacher…

> But there is no comparison to a small population being affected to potentially anyone and everyone being a potential subject.

If I may paraphrase... there's no comparison between oppressing a minority I don't belong to, and the entire population being subjected to the same risk.

It doesn't matter how you put it.

If you say "tax the rich 95%." That's bad. "Tax everyone 95%" That's really bad. I don't understand how you cannot see that. The fewer people affected by something, the less evil it is even if it's evil.

I mean, what are you saying, H-wood blacklisting was bad, therefore what we see in social media ostracizing is acceptable? That seems... strange.

Of course not all sympathizers of communism also agreed with death camps, re-education, stifling of progress, etc., etc., but they tacitly contributed to to those bad things. A young person, or someone who thinks they are being funny or whatever caught in a bad moment is different from someone who knowingly supports tyrannical forms of government.

Modern bidirectional communications tools make it easy to wide-cast a message and then have that message responded to by potentially millions of receivers.

I think we don't respect the power we wield often enough. That's a terrible capability to provide via a system that also encourages you to blurt something out in 280 characters or less. Every single tweet is a shout from a mountaintop (and since it's time-stamped and on the timeline forever, that shout echoes perpetually).

Additionally, that infrastructure incentivizes gravitation towards some flat-mass-"centroid" of acceptable cultural practice, and there's no particular guarantee that such a thing across the bulk of humanity is either possible or desirable.

Where do you draw the line though? Are we never allow to criticize someone for their opinions or "jokes", regardless of content or context?

It's easy to just state "People should be able to make jokes or have a bad day." and while maybe that's true, I don't think we should be able to brush off all behavior by just labeling it a "bad day".

You draw the line at where it has an actual, measurable impact on other people. “Joe Schmoe has an opinion you don’t like” doesn’t impoverish anyone, it doesn’t prevent anyone from getting food or housing or any other need. It’s just a person having an opinion.

Going into hysterics over trivial nonsense that ultimately doesn’t matter is not helping anyone. It’s not making the world a better place. Quite the opposite.

The early US had many people of the opinion that black people were inferior, more akin to animals than humans. Do you think that led to anyone not getting food or housing, or to anyone living in poverty?

Indeed, and in that time people having the opinion that black people should be free would have been considered to have “wrong” and “dangerous” opinions that would cause great damage to society.

Would we be better off today if those in power then had been able to silence unpopular opinions?

> had been able to silence unpopular opinions?

They definitely could, it just didn't matter because people spoke up anyway.

We are best off when we acknowledge that "opinions" can and do deal deadly harm every day, and not avoiding that point when it is explicitly made.

Today's valid opinion is tomorrow's invalid opinion and vice versa

It is pretty clear which opinions that are accepted by many people today well be unacceptable tomorrow. So why not examine that further? It feels like you're denying your conscience.

Yes, the opinion that we need to demand the firing of people we disagree with does indeed impoverish them.

If enough Joe Schmoes have bad opinions it does in fact impoverish people and prevent them accessing necessary goods like food and housing. Many ideas are in fact wrong and if widespread terribly dangerous.

There are two issues being discussed here: the ability to speak/censor opinions, and the ability to control unspoken opinions.

First, every individual has what should be a rather obvious and fundamental right to think whatever thoughts and have whatever opinions they like. Nobody gets to decide what opinions an individual holds, except for that individual.

Now, as for the spreading of those ideas:

Power to censor is frequently used to silence good ideas and allow bad ones to flourish - see modern-day censorship in China, Russia, North Korea, India, and Australia, or older censorship around the Vietnam War and slave liberation (back when owning slaves was in fashion).

The fact that someone is silencing an opinion has very little to do with whether or not that opinion is actively harmful - and, at the very least, those in power have a strong tendency to use their power (including censorship, if available) to gain more power, and those in the public realm will use their own speech and censorship (including via "canceling" aka mob justice) to benefit their own group, regardless of whether their cause is just or their tactics are fair.

So, it's all well and good for you to say "this opinion is harmful", but that's not really well correlated to whether that opinion is actually harmful. Even when the majority of the country agrees that an opinion is harmful, that doesn't actually mean that it is - but, as a democracy, we choose an imperfect system that works most of the time. That system, however, involves passing laws that declare some speech harmful, based on representatives elected by majority vote of their constituents. Twitter-based outrage from a tiny fraction of the population defining "bad opinions" is so antithetical to the idea of democracy that it shouldn't even be considered in the first place.

tl;dr we have an existing mechanism for controlling "harmful speech" and it's the government, not social media mobs.

I think context, rather than impact is the most important thing.

Private dialogue among friends is just that.

Unless they are actively plotting violence or some kind of action, or making unambiguous bad statements such as 'I hate people of this group' or an admission of a crime, then otherwise, it just shouldn't be news.

Sure we are allowed to criticize someone and if that person has voluntarily posted their content then that person opens themselves up. So much of what happens now is someone filmed without their consent and that video is then posted to social media and the person is doomed. Think of your worst moment and then imagine it was filmed and posted to social media where 100k other people shared it. Very hard to recover from something like that. Imagine for the rest of your life whenever an employer googles your name, the video of that worst moment is the first result. Unless someone is actively doing something that endangers another person, its very rare that the punishment meted out by social media is warranted by the transgression.

it’s unfair that what used to be a passing mistake has turned into the permanent record of your failures. and i think this is much worse for kids than adults

How often does someone, let alone your potential employer, actually know (or care) the name of the person in some embarrassing viral video? It seems like a rare exception for someone to face meaningful blowback from this scenario.

In a post-Donglegate world, I don’t know how interesting this question is. I don’t know exactly where to draw the line, but it seems like we’re so far over it that most people could take “don’t gossip” as a reasonable heuristic.

If you don't know the person, why do you care? Unless it's a politician why do you care? What does it bring to your life to criticize someone on twitter for a bad joke?

Should you care about jokes made by people you have never met in a city far away?

In the real world you would pull your friend aside and criticize him for making these 'jokes'. Now the jokes happen on the internet and instead of criticism from friends, family and neighbors you get attacked by strangers you have never met.

I would say that criticism of opinions or bad jokes is still OK, but given the dynamism of virtual mobs, one should be more careful how it is done. Triggering an avalanche is rarely a good thing, in mountains or on Twitter.

As far as I am concerned, a personal "between four eyes" criticism goes the longest way.

This is one of the primary reasons I stay off of social media. There is not forgetting, no opportunity to learn and grow and change and develop.

I just maintain an anonymous one and never comment. Lets me follow whatever topics I care about and no worries about anything coming back to bite me. I make sure to try and include people I disagree with as well to a certain extent as its a good way to see other points of view and also to reinforce why I disagree with them in the first place. Lets me know I am not in an echo chamber and at least 51% of my opinions are probably my own... maybe.

What's gonna happen when having social media accounts in good standing is required to open a bank account, or take a loan or get an insurance?

You're getting downvoted here, but at border crossings often you'll be asked for social media access. I don't think it's that far off the mark.

Exactly. I'm surprised by the downvotes because, while it is not mandatory (yet?), I have definitely seen financial institution forms with an optional field for social media accounts.

People will downvote you for any number of reasons - some good, mostly bad. Ignore it, don't comment on it - "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." Inquisitive and thoughtful HN readers will read your comment anyway, think about it, and comment on it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I maintain a professional account, that occasionally posts job related materials as well as shout-outs to the local sportsball franchises. Oh and puppy pictures.

While not that widespread yet it is there in some context. For instance regularly miss out on news and updates from.various organizations I was once very active in because they have almost completely migrated to Facebook. A lot of extracurricular activities as well as schools require some sort of social media be it Google, or Facebook to stay plugged into events and check one students progress.

I feel like this is obvious with a major caveat.

You and I agree. Don’t use social media and this won’t be a problem. I think the disadvantages outweigh.

But… what about when Hackernews or Reddit or Discord whatever formerly anonymous some-degree-of-social-network is made not so anonymous? I have a Reddit account that I’ve surely said things if someone was motivated they could make life hard for me - true things - but who cares about that anymore?

It’s not the same thing, but we might not be sure in what ways they are similar.

It depends what your risk appetite is. I see it as layers.

So an organization with skill and motivation, like government agencies vs some specific person with a limited skillset and motivation Who are you trying to "hide" from?

Simply having a different username for each website helps with that. Personally for Facebook / Linkedin I never list my current employer. Enough of a layer to make it harder to track my employer for the casual lookup, but not impossible given enough time/money/competency.

I really like this graphic about what level of security you want vs who you are trying to protect from: https://anonymousplanet.org/media/image3.jpeg

Just don't express yourself online non-anonymously, and in real life don't go to places where cameras are allowed.

> in real life don't go to places where cameras are allowed

How do you do that? There are cameras in

- grocery stores

- restaurants

- gas stations

- other cars on the road

- banks

- hospitals

- pharmacies

- pretty much everyone's pocket

- everywhere else

Well, offline discussions between people you know and trust is the modern Samizdat. But it is crazy that we got there without a repressive state.

This would translate to do not leave the bathroom in the US, or at least do not go outside your abode.

Ironically enough, A senatress from Arizona got accosted to a bathroom with video phone cameras in order to convince (bully) her into a position.

What is the purpose of using a different word for a man senator and a woman senator?

To identify their gender. Like the differences between waiter/waitress, masseur/masseuse, actor/actress, and countless of other examples.

>To identify their gender.

The purpose of my question was to lead to the inevitable question of what the purpose of identifying a senator's gender was, at least in the context of the comment I was replying to.

>Like the differences between waiter/waitress, masseur/masseuse, actor/actress, and countless of other examples.

I would ask the same question for those, but at least those might be used simply because they are frequently used and it might be habit. But I have never seen the word "senatress" used in 30+ years of living in the US, and I read a ton of political news.

Although, I id not know about masseur and masseuse. I thought all people who gave massages were masseuses. But I am not familiar with the massage scene. I can see a possible purpose for clarifying a woman performing massages versus a man performing massages since someone might prefer a massage from one rather than another.

>The purpose of my question was to lead to the inevitable question of what the purpose of identifying a senator's gender was, at least in the context of the comment I was replying to.

Gender is a large part of one's identity

There’s the other side of the spectrum as well: what the influencers seek to gain by amplifying criticisms for any odd remark.

Just think of the whole anti-vaccine movements and the spread of misinformation. Folks come out of the woodwork and claim a myriad of side effects but they have no background to scientifically vet the published vaccine research.

Influencers leveraging fear and confusion as a way to amplify bias and shame people making positive comments on a vaccine.

And this generates them massive followings and potentially increases “social status”.

Curiously I’m seeing somewhat of a proportional trend: as peoples ability to amplify misinformation increases, so does the value of censorship. This is kind of scary to be honest—to say that censorship has inherent value in our society.

All it takes is one climate-science denier to change 50% of the population’s opinion. Or to convince the public that one pro-vaccine comment is the scourge of humanity.

EDIT: Just got a downvote and reflecting on how the down-vote makes me feel; how should I proceed? Should I defend my comment? Do I want more social karma on this website? Am I being punished for my opinion. How’s that for some introspection…

Misinformation doesn’t exist.

Lies are real information.

> People used to make tasteless jokes all the time and it was treated as it was, just a joke and life continued.

Except it was only ever "just a joke" for the perpetrators. What we're seeing more of now is the voice of the previously unheard and ignored, and it turns out they don't like being the butt of racist or sexist or bigoted "jokes". This is the same energy as dismissing sexual harassment as "boys will be boys".

"We can't give girls a friendly pat on the ass and compliment anymore. The liberals have taken over and ruined everything!"

Thank you for proving the parent comments point.

He said "People used to make tasteless jokes all the time" and you equated it to "why can't we physically assault girls anymore".

There are shades of gray to all huuman interaction, and thanks to behaviour like yours where people jump to prove they are good, anything can be considered "bad".

Why should people in position of power get to choose what others should and shouldn't be offended by? Both with physical and verbal abuse, minorities and women have been told by people in positions of power to toughen up. All we're seeing now is the repercussions of those marginalized folks getting their voice. I'm sorry you don't like it when they complain about being abused, but telling them to just toughen up is absolutely the losing position to take here.

Real countries don't have at-will employment and should start using anti-defamation laws against internet mobs.

The problem is not, people making mistakes.

The problem is, people making mistakes and saying they weren't mistakes. Or they give non-apologies.

Why do they have to apologize to society for making a mistake in a local setting? Social media has created this bizarre environment where a simple interaction between a couple people offends the entire world and then the entire world crushes the transgressor, ends their employment and demands an apology? That is insanity. Normal people should never be thrust into the position where they are forced to apologize to society for a normal mistake or face complete annihilation. Additionally, its not like social media waits for their target to apologize before wreaking havoc on their ability to feed their family. They just attack and then the apology is used as an additional attack vector because no matter what the apology is never enough.

Looking at the scandals of the last decade, apology usually does not help the target at all. It is just part of the expected sick show before being fired or punished anyway.

One day, we will wake up in a world where apology has died out because it was never rewarded by forgiveness.

I would prefer not to live in an apology economy, thanks though.