Re:Out on the Town: Magnus Hirschfeld and Berlin’s Third Sex
by dang on Thursday June 09, 2022 @10:18PM
(#31689259)
That's an extremely inaccurate description of HN. When I see those, I always feel like someone needs to respond.
HN is a large public forum. Any such site gets a long tail of comments—every slot on the spectrum gets represented—but absolutely not to the same degree. A minuscule minority of egregious comments does not characterize the community. Not at all.
Perceptions like this are strongly affected by cognitive biases. For example, people are far more likely to notice and remember painful data points than pleasurable ones. Therefore, a handful of (in this case) homophobic comments will make orders of magnitude more of an impression than tons of moderate, favorable, or loving ones. This is the way we're all wired [1], but it unfortunately leads people to highly distorted impressions of the community [2].
HN is a large public forum. Any such site gets a long tail of comments—every slot on the spectrum gets represented—but absolutely not to the same degree. A minuscule minority of egregious comments does not characterize the community. Not at all.
Perceptions like this are strongly affected by cognitive biases. For example, people are far more likely to notice and remember painful data points than pleasurable ones. Therefore, a handful of (in this case) homophobic comments will make orders of magnitude more of an impression than tons of moderate, favorable, or loving ones. This is the way we're all wired [1], but it unfortunately leads people to highly distorted impressions of the community [2].
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098