There's no flame in what he's saying. There is also no way he is encouraging others to flame.
He's stating his opinion on the topic, and it is not popular with others. How is that against the guidelines?
I realize that details like that can be activating, but in this case it was a clear swerve into offtopicness. This is not a borderline call!
Offtopic swerves can be fine when they're interesting and unpredictable, but classic flamewar swerves are the opposite of that.
It wasn't even remotely off-topic. This is a RELEASE banner/promo website for the product. He discusses that.
It seems just like censorship, and that's cool. I understand the requirements to keep narratives flowing. But we'll all end up in an echo chamber, unable to admit when we feel like something feels wrong.
You keep using words like "flamewar" and "flamebait" for the topic of someone feeling that a race was purposefully neglected for marketing. It sounds like you're the one trying to smooth over a very validly concerned topic.
Edit: I realise you are now attempting to delete his comments because he replied to other comments that were clearly not very nice (in his edit). So I guess you're just torching the flames that he's already tried torching? But with force?
If you familiarize yourself with the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and the moderation practices here (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang), you'll soon see that they're applied pretty consistently and don't favor any narrative nor any particular issue position. It's common for people to feel like the mods are biased against their view when they see a comment that they happen to agree with getting moderated (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), but this is just a cognitive bias—a form of sample bias, in fact, because those cases always stand out more (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
The problem with changing the subject from the original topic (the new phone) to a generic flamewar topic (race grievances) is that the latter tend to quickly take over a thread and to quickly lower comment quality. In that respect, they are like flames—they spread quickly and consume everything—so "flamebait" and "flamewar" are good words for this.
> I realise you are now attempting to delete his comments
I haven't deleted anything. If you're referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28921996 being marked [flagged] and [dead], that's because users flagged it.
It's really easy to jump to conclusions about this kind of thing, which means it's best to hesitate and sift through what you've actually observed vs. what it seems-like-it-absolutely-must-be, because the latter is usually a misinterpretation. This applies to all the moderation practices here. For example, if you see a post getting moderated and conclude that we must be opposed to the views expressed in the post, that's a big non sequitur. We moderate posts with the opposite views just the same way, when they break the site guidelines.
You can disagree with the guidelines and/or refer to moderation as censorship if you like—people differ about such things. Nonetheless the HN guidelines are the rules by which this site operates (we're not trying to impose them anywhere else!) and, agree or disagree, users here need to abide by them.
I understand. I've seen several cases where you've moderated unfairly in order to maintain some form of status quo, where the quo is just an opinion that we all have to share.
Familiarised myself with the rules long ago, but it doesn't really matter since anything that someone might get upset at is suddenly hovered within there.
Your statements about moderation are inaccurate in ways I think I just addressed.
That's cool though. It's your website, not ours. You're free to censor whatever you want.
My statements are accurate though. You won't be able to censor that out.
Edit: Since you seem to miss a lot of actual inappropriate material, I've flagged it for you. Hope you can learn from my experience.
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23RealTone&src=typed_query&f=t...
I'm going to assume that because the copy just says "skin tones" and doesn't specifically call out darker skin the gp (or whatever the first commenter is) is confused by what they're seeing and reading.
I did a bit of searching just now and found that Google is calling this update "Real Tone." https://store.google.com/intl/en/discover/realtone/
From what I can tell, they have likely improved things for people of all skin colors, but probably moreso for those with darker skin due to increased focus on ML training. They include a person with fairly light skin on that page in comparison to the product page.
The copy on the page itself seems to disagree with you
> Portraits on Pixel represent the nuances of different skin tones for *all people* beautifully and authentically.
(Emphasis mine)
There does seem to be a discrepancy between the copy saying "all people" and the photos above that paragraph only including individuals with darker skin.
Edit: I'm acknowledging that there are photos of white males elsewhere on the page, but I think my comment's parent is specifically talking about that one section?
Aside from that, you can also infer from the negative view that the copy is implying that other phones do not represent the nuances of all people, which is the reason that they said it to begin with.
But you knew that already, didn’t you?
2. Even if it was true, welcome to not being included for once in your entire life. Now maybe you can start to begin to understand what others have experienced basically every day of their life.
[0] https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/s6bCli03aqnY_KvZoPaTgiFqCj...
[1] https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Zq1FVWVv9GOCRJ3oHJg0PHzWgE...
Personally, I also didn't notice the presence of white men or lack thereof until you brought it up.
The other pictures I see are:
- White woman
- Asian man
- White(?) man (the guy with a man-bun who's jumping)
- White(?) man looking at mountains (his hand looks beige, so he could be any lighter-skinned race)
- Black woman
- Black man/woman
- White man/woman
- Asian family
- Asian man/woman and Black woman
- children that are too small to see
- Asian woman
- Asian woman
That's 20 people, 15 of whom seem to have an identifiable race. Of those 15, 3 are White, which is 20%.
The US is ~60% White and humanity is ~15% White.
So what exactly are you complaining about? In the grand universe of marketing pictures, White people have been dramatically overrepresented. Did you complain about that in the past?
I think they will survive being slightly underrepresented this time.
Having to squint to find anyone who even remotely resembles you is the lived experience of millions of people. Perhaps you should reflect on why you can’t relate to people in an ad that look different from you? It’s a skill that someone of us don’t have the luxury of not developing.
Does this meet your requirement?
Your examples are proving OP's point.
Your snarky response is what's wrong with the world now a days. I am brown but this over-pandering by companies feels more patronizing and condescending than genuine care. It's like winning an award or being hired just for being a specific skin color and not because of my skills.
This over-correction ends up creating more animosity because people start wondering if their heart surgeon was hired because of their skin color or skills and the brown person starts feeling lower because they aren't sure if they got hired because of their skills or just to tick a checkbox on the diversity list.
This type of over-pandering might be okay if this web page was localized to lets say another country with those demographics. But when countries like US and Canada don't have any representation of the largest demographic, then that's not genuine and mere pandering. I would even go as far as to say it's simply exploitation of skin color.
This may come as a surprise to you, but for most of American history surgeons were hired because of their skin color and genitals (two things not as far as I know used during the practice of medicine). And many probably still are. The number of medical degrees for women is now about at parity [1]. But as far as practicing physicians go, only 38% are women [2]. And the numbers for surgery are much lower. I've heard from multiple friends in medicine tell me that surgery has a culture that's very macho and frequently abusive.
[1] https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/nation-s-physician-workfo...
[2] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/physicians-by-gend...
"Take authentic, accurate portraits with Real Tone. Portraits on Pixel represent the nuances of different skin tones for all people beautifully and authentically."
The point is that now they've broadened the range where the camera works well. So they are showing what's improved.
As a white person I've never had to wonder if a camera would be able to properly capture my skin tone, so them showing pictures of white people won't really give me anything new. The whole point of this is to show underrepresented people that their skin tones are now better supported. Those are the people who care about this new feature. And the photos are there to convince them. A white person doesn't need convincing that a camera can capture their skin tone.
There's roughly 2 dozen photos of people on the page, 2 of which appear to be white-ish men.
One whole section of six photos is explicitly there to demonstrate that their cameras now work as well for people who aren't white. Itself an issue of underrepresentation.
Several others appear to be white-ish women.
You say "I'm not sure why it's ok to vastly prefer one group for representation" but there's many groups represented, black, white, Asian, and men and women of each. The fact you see "non-whites" as one "group" is a little odd. It doesn't seem good to me.
And of course the main point is that if you total the representation in society, white males are still massively, incredibly overrepresented, so I don't think it was really necessary to make this post.
I don't know why they're doing it. But there is an agenda and this is how they do it.
I don't know why they're doing it. But there is an agenda and this is how they do it.
Try reading.
going through it some look pretty white though. ill be the first to admit that i'm not particularly good at classifying people, but this one in particularly looked like a white male
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/s6bCli03aqnY_KvZoPaTgiFqCj...
[0] https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/DPnlGlqAvyUh51bNizF0EIC6Pk... [1] https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/s6bCli03aqnY_KvZoPaTgiFqCj...
They're literally sidelining diversity ahahh.
If this isn't obvious to you, then you've been studying racist history. Asians slaughtered their way through much of Asia with Genhis Khan. In Africa, the Bantus genocided their way through the entire subsaharan region. Arabs ran huge slave societies and conquered much of the middle east and North Africa. Amerindians genocided each other. The list goes on. And none of these groups - including europeans -- should be made to feel guilty for any of this. To suggest that one group should feel bad for their history but not another is just bigotry masquerading as history.
We are all standing on a pile of bones. There is no special guilt to the pile of bones that Europeans stand on, nor is that pile particularly larger than any other. Nor is there any such thing as collective or inherited guilt.
"Since they were racist in the past, we get to be racist NOW!" At least you admit you're not morally against racism, you're quite for it, just targeting Whites is perfectly OK.
>You might think it's unfair
There's no "think", it is logically and factually racist, unfair.
The reason why you're seeing this more and more is because White liberals are the only self-hating subgroup [0].
"Remarkably, white liberals were the only subgroup exhibiting a pro-outgroup bias—meaning white liberals were more favorable toward nonwhites and are the only group to show this preference for group other than their own. Indeed, on average, white liberals rated ethnic and racial minority groups 13 points (or half a standard deviation) warmer than whites."
[0] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/americas-wh...
Scrolling is broken, images bounce all over the place, it is slow, laggy, how can Google make such a terrible page? I am using an older phone, it is not a beast, but most of the web works fine, maybe it is a way for Google to tell me I should upgrade to their new phone.
There seem to be a general trend of hijacking the scrollbar in product presentation pages, I don't know why but Google is particularly terrible at that. Also, it doesn't seem to get the idea that you may want to use a language that is not the language of the country your connection originates from. For example your URL explicitly specifies English but I get the French page because I am in France.
Featuring minorities for a while isn't that big of a deal. It would be an incredible moral failing if we pretended racial representation is all fine now.
This is an American company. The US is largely white. A product page for an Indian company wouldn't shock anyone by primarily including Indian faces.
What’s frustrating is that almost nobody cares or is frustrated by it :D
In the US the motivation is entirely political (and a meta layer of playing to political interests). What's the related phenomenon in India about, in your opinion?
Nothing to do with diversity.
That's the point.
Everything about this culture is extremely off-putting to me. I am an immigrant to USA and a person of color if that matters, I didn't sign up for this and really don't want this culture in the place I now consider home.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-b...
https://petapixel.com/2015/09/19/heres-a-look-at-how-color-f...
This is a real issue of racial and ethnic justice with material consequences.
We're still decades away from racial and sexual integration and equality.
"Want to end racism? Stop talking about it. I'll stop calling you a white man if you stop calling me a black man."
- Morgan Freeman
They literally acted instead of talking about it.
Absolutely. How else would a person with attributes typically ignored know that a product was designed for them? Ethnic hair care products is another example. Do you think only white people should be in ads for hair care products for African Americans?
But it's never enough for these types of people that want to push their narrative forward and over anything that stands in it's way. There's never an end to it until the collective just says "No".
You can fight it with agree-and-amplify: "Well Google you included dark skinned people of west african descent, but none of east african. I won't buy your product."
"Well google you only included asians of Han origin, and none of Mongolian descent"
Why stop at basic arbitrary things like skin color? Why not break it down by country of origin, way of speaking, etc. Every tv show should have someone with this list of accents, etc.
Because they are interested in it. Just like some like math, others like sports.
Why e.g. women are the majority of teachers (at least in my country)? They like to teach, are good with children.
That's natural and you won't change that with ads that reverse the ethnic proportions in given country.
Also, depending what on the source white people (in the US) account for between 60 to 70 percent of the tech work force.
So I'm genuinely curious why PoC might get problems with getting interviews? Do US based employees biased in some way, still in 2021?
All that matters for me in interview if is that person smart enough and nice enough to work with.
I don't see a lot of black people in IT, but I see plenty of Indians and Asians - those are also PoC I assume.
But if your parents are good at math, chances are high that you will also. Genetics play huge role here, for some learning e.g. math is harder than for others.
Amazing that people went from "we need all colors represented in ads as best as possible" which was completely reasonable, to "maybe we don't need white people in ads at all sometimes, ok? maybe it's a good thing!" which is objectively an absurd stance.
I don't get how some occasional over representation of minorities bothers people this much.
It wouldn't bother me a bit if it happened in my country.
It bothers a bit because it such an obvious thing, where they had to go through and find the exact people they wanted and you know that they purposely did it because it's "the thing" right now.
Then in this case I say: "why is this not representative of the people of this country!?"
Your response, a smarmy "why not?" and personal attack.
The failure can speak for itself.