Twitter has been a tough one - I got involved in local politics which has been a challenge. Large accounts typically do have to block a lot to make it usable, and in particular I've had problems with folks doxxing my former home address (I had to sell that house and move), and making threats of violence against me.

I'm sorry if I got it wrong, and I am happy to unblock if I did get it wrong.

I'm seeing many people say you've blocked them without ever having interacted with you. Many have jumped to the conclusion that you simply block people who disagree with your politics. I don't tweet about SF politics, but after I tweeted this, you replied tell me it's funny but wrong, and then blocked me: https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1491167231467999236

Which is fine. I block plenty of people. I also mute people, because a block carries a message. And if I found myself in role that gets considerable scrutiny, I'd probably reevaluate my entire approach to social media.

I'm in the blocked club and have no idea why. Here's the one tweet I ever sent @garrytan, responding to his reply to me: https://twitter.com/nelson/status/1185919273065041925. (I'm happy to report that business reopened with new owners and the rumor was the old owners just went broke.)

I agree blocking people is fine and should be stigma free. But Mr. Tan's framing of his reasons for blocking seems at odds with the visible pattern. Fair enough; feel free to block me just because you're tired of my bullshit.

I don't think I ever interacted with him on Twitter, but I do from time to time press the "like" button on tweets in favor of criminal justice reform, in favor of the tax measure that voters passed in San Francisco to support homeless services (and that Stripe and its investors, YC included, loathe), and some similarly "progressive" issues in the Bay Area. FWIW, I also press "like" on some number of tweets that are considered "moderate" (to use the wacko language of San Francisco politics) but that's neither here nor there.

I don't particularly care that I triggered his Twitter blocking scripts. But I do take it as a sign that he wants to send a signal to founders looking to raise from his firm that they'd do well to support his political views or stay quiet on social media.

> ... in favor of the tax measure that voters passed in San Francisco to support homeless services ...

Ok come on, a tax on gross receipts is asinine. Of course low margin businesses with high volumes left. Square left, Stripe left, PayPal left. That cuts into the tax base which in turn means less revenue to help the homeless.

Regardless of whether you think what they did with it was good, the actual calculus of who has to pay how much makes zero sense.

Then of course there's the fact that money went to putting the hobos under highway overpasses in tent cities instead of building more houses.

I'm with Garry on this one.

I’m old enough to remember when the Square CEO campaigned for the gross receipts tax. It was the tech industry’s idea.[1]

Bonus points for saying “hobo”!

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/SF-Citi-video-plugs-...

God I was there at the time. I’m also old enough to remember when he looked like a normal human. Although with that in mind I was referring to Prop C in 11/18.

This was his reward for actively working to push out politicians the right wing VC set didn't like

I'm in the blocked club and have never interacted with him!

I am not blocked by him, which means I haven’t spent enough time making fun of him for putting “.eth” in his name then silently removing it.

Same. It's clear there is a connected graph of follow edges all of whom were blocked by this guy. Seems he can't live outside his filter bubble. Perfect for the leader of YC, honestly.

If bias is built in, being transparent is a favor to the always fleeting time.

It is very imperfect, I would say

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

There are a bunch of block-tools which are of the kind "block everyone that liked this tweet", "block everyone that follows this person" etc. Casting that wide of a net probably also carries some "false negatives" (which could explain the "I'm blocked but never interacted with the person).

Paul Graham does something similar. (He's blocked me and we've never interacted.) He said somewhere that he blocks people when he sees them behaving badly, or something like that, and that in the past when he has randomly stumbled across somebody he had previously blocked and taken a second look at their tweets he's felt only vindication.

Now, look, Graham blocked me on these grounds, so I'm not thrilled to say that I think he's completely right about this. I block people I haven't interacted with all the time. Not everybody on twitter is a good actor there, even if they're nice people in other contexts, and it makes life easier to kick some of those people to the curb before they're even aware you exist.

I probably said something tendentious or snarky or unfair or maybe even mean and I might have blocked somebody for the same thing, were the shoe on the other foot.

to be fair i block people too when i don't like their memes

The thing is you’ve also been quite aggressive toward other people on twitter. Making yourself out to be a victim is definitely en vogue.

Twitter character limit makes tweets terse by default, which helps devolve any polarising topic into a frothy flailing ball of flamewar... it's one of the reasons people keep coming back for more IMHO, finding a tribe and an enemy tribe then the adrenaline rush of the tweet battles...

Hey garry it seems you blocked me on twitter today! I didn't say anything bad, I'm really confused. I guess it's a mistake - see https://twitter.com/sracka_omacka

I have been blocked in your Twitter. We just had differences of opinion on certain things. I guess you might have under lot of stress at that time so I understand.

I'm blocked by you and have no idea why! Same name on twitter.

The fact that you've got countless people who have never heard of you blocked, would seem to indicate that you have in fact got it wrong.

I don’t see what’s wrong about it. They are probably on some blocklist of low value reply guys.

No, I think he blocks anyone who likes a tweet that disagrees with him. Not necessarily people who are replying to him.

I really don't think he's that petty. Also, Twitter can be toxic as hell. He should block a lot of people if he wants to stay sane while using it.

He is 100% that petty. He literally mass blocks people who have simply liked or followed anyone he disagrees with, no interaction. Not an exaggeration at all.

If you read his post above, he stated that he was being threatened and doxxed. I'm sure he was dragged down by a lot of negativity on Twitter so mass blocking seemed like a decent strategy.

I don't have a problem with him blocking people on Twitter at all. I actually sympathize with him. Twitter is a troll fest and he exposed his real self by getting involved in local politics. You know how "passionate" people can get when it comes to politics.

My problem with Garry isn't with his "pettiness" or Twitter blocking. It's solely with his crypto shilling.

Like with the crypto shilling, he's full of shit.

so? it's just twitter

I was just correcting you're incorrect point...

I am blocked by Garry despite having zero interactions with him on Twitter (nor ever tweeting anything controversial). I see numerous reports of other people stating the same both in this thread and on twitter: https://imgur.com/a/MOPDVSl

Besides the "block anyone remotely progressive" approach to social media (including industry folks like Anil Dash [1]) - he seems extremely uncivil and rude [2]. And Sam Altman has explicitly referenced his politics as a reason for this decision [3].

This gives me the impression that there's a specific political agenda being advanced at YC ...

[1] https://twitter.com/anildash/status/1564285359755874304?s=20...

[2] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FH6Y9DCUYAEkV1p?format=png&name=...

[3] https://twitter.com/sama/status/1564256798323851265

edit: deleted a not very clear link about certain politically charged individuals.

So, why the downvotes? We're not allowed to talk about this?

(Edit: the GP comment was edited after I wrote this - more about that below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32642696.)

Hardened political rhetoric and seasoned talking points aren't on topic here (regardless of which way the political vector is pointing). If you check out the site guidelines, it should be clear why: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You don't have to agree with anyone's views but this style of argument is deathly to the curious conversation we want here. Curious conversation requires, among other things, respect across differences—wanting to learn more about how someone thinks, and why they think that way, and trusting that they have good reasons for all that even if, in the end, they're wrong. And, of course, you and your views deserve the same consideration.

If you want to argue against someone's views here (Garry's or anyone else's), you'll get much further by making your substantive points thoughtfully. We're trying to avoid the online callout/shaming culture here, at least to the extent possible on the open internet.

The culture of political attack goes very much the other way, of course—people save screenshots of the worst things they can find, bring them up at every opportunity, and so on. Guilt by association is another common tactic. None of this helps us really understand each other—anyone can be made to look bad that way, so it really doesn't have much persuasive power. It does get one's own side riled up (in a yay way) and the opposing side riled up (in a boo way), but riler-uppers are what we're trying to avoid on HN, because they destroy the curious conversation I was just talking about.

(I hope it's clear that all of the above should and does apply equally to opposing political sides.)

What is the difference between "shaming" and "referencing facts", exactly? I genuinely don't understand the distinction. Also, I'm commenting on YC's choice, not Garry's views. I understand if YC doesn't want to host criticism of its decisions, but you should be upfront about it.

I explicit reject this idea that it's unfair to point to things people have said, even if they're screenshots. Sorry, that's just deciding that you can pick and choose data to ignore.

Callout/shaming culture is a stock phrase I use to describe the sort of internet culture we don't want here [1]. Maybe the word 'shaming' isn't so applicable in this case, though I do think shaming is part of why online warriors like to preserve the worst internet traces left by those they dislike, and copy them into each fresh discussion.

Re 'facts': this is a red herring. There are infinitely many facts. They don't select themselves; humans do that, and they do so for non-factual reasons [2]. As a matter of fact, "but it's a fact" is the most beloved defense of trolls—not that you mean it that way. (Edit: incidentally, I have no idea whether your claims about Garry, including the ones you deleted, were facts or not - but I'm assuming they are for present purposes because it makes the moderation point stronger.)

The problem with your post is that it was obvious online agitprop—in fact one couldn't find a more classic case (edit: before you edited it—it's less that way now). That's off topic on HN, but not because of trying to protect YC from criticism (we don't moderate HN that way [3] – plenty of people criticize YC here), nor because of political disagreement (there's room for a wide range of views, as long as people are using the site as intended)—but rather because it makes threads more predictable and nastier, and therefore more boring. We're trying to optimize for something else on HN [4].

Edit: I just noticed that you edited your GP comment to take out a couple of extreme guilt-by-association references and to add a relevant tweet by sama. Those are two steps towards an on-topic sort of political argument (good), but if you're going to edit comments after they've gotten replies, it's only fair to do so in a way that doesn't deprive other posts of their original meaning. My description ("hardened political rhetoric and seasoned talking points") was accurate about your original post and is less so now. In other words, you subtly changed the thread to make the moderation look less neutral and fair than it originally was. I hope that was just an accidental side effect, and that your motive for making those edits was a sincere desire to use HN as intended.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...

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

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

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

I always learn from your posts dang - really appreciate this substantive explanation, informs my own thinking as we seek to build our own communities for curiosity.

Out of curiosity, why don't you make "YC churn" announcements read-only, like job ads are?

There's not really much curious conversation when they happen, and not really a huge chance of it, either. As an example, the announcement of sama taking over was a hundred and fifty comments of almost exclusively "Congratulations!"

They're posts that are almost exclusively doomed, either to incurious compliments, insults, or needless pessimism; what questions that are asked usually don't get answered, so there wouldn't really be a loss in it anyway.

I wouldn't call this a "churn announcement" - it's the biggest YC news in years. I guess I can think of a few different answers to your question. One is that since it's significant new information, it's on topic (job ads are the opposite of that). Another is that there's a special relationship between YC and the HN community, and it's good for the community to have space to discuss that. A third is that there is definitely no way that the community would support us trying to close such a topic to comments.

Also, job ads get placed on the front page by software. This submission got on the front page by upvotes like any other.

It's definitely newsworthy and relevant to the community. I support the status quo of non interference (laissez-faire) by the mods into publishing status of this news story and your reasoning stated in this comment.

You can talk about it but when most folks in tech are fairly to extremely liberal, why is it bad to have representation from all sides? The left (which I’m guessing you are a part of) preaches diversity. Shouldn’t diversity also include political views as well as race, class, and gender affiliation?

this is their first and only openly politically-active hire at this level, with the politics explicitly relevant to their hiring, I don't know why you're calling that balanced representation unless you mean that it's balanced to have right wing leader-owners dominate liberals and leftist workers (lol)

For one, it would mean leadership that recognizes that Asians have been unfairly represented.

When we’re talking about left-winged workers, we’re talking about a bunch of ivory tower armchair leftists who get free lunch ( no irony intended ) and artisanal coffee, and have been the privileged class most of their lives.

If we’re talking about actual laborers, the democrats has abandoned that platform and serves the political gap that Donald Trump capitalized on.

Nope. Look up paradox of tolerance

That only applies to fringe extremes in politics. Not to conservatism in general. That is an insane assumption to make.

Kinda wondering what his beef with Hamasaki was that prompted "Resign you piece of shit". Seems like this was a Board of Education person, was he that bad, like poisoning the kids school lunches?

edit: sorry I realise that I may asking some stupid questions that everyone knows already. But to me Garry Tan was just the Posterous guy. I'm just a bit floored to hear that there's more to this and I'm trying to find my bearings. Seeing the name Andy Ngo is a massive red flag to me, but I can't really parse what was being said in the tweet.

John Hamasaki is a criminal defense attorney in San Francisco who was a former member of the police commission. He seems to advertise himself by being intentionally incendiary, making up lies like the police get paid overtime to participate (i.e. walk) in the pride parade. There is also a group of people around him who amplify his lies. I can imagine people being fed up with being the target of his harassment, which I believe Gary was.

This seemed to be about some board of education thing though - Garry's tweet features a screenshot saying "THANK YOU for donating to our campaign to recall the school board..." but it's aimed at the Hamasaki guy.

Hamasaki takes sides and works with prolific accounts over any salient prog vs. mod local political issue. The fact that the topic in the screenshot had to do with the BOE recall specifically is pretty irrelevant. He had probably been harassing Garry for any local political position for months. Unfortunately, Hamasaki also recently deleted months of tweets to clean up his image for a local election run, so it’s hard to find citations.

> He had probably been harassing Garry for any local political position for months.

This is your red flag for motivated reasoning

I’ve seen other people harassed by Hamasaki and been at the receiving end of it myself, so no, not really.

Garry pushed a political agenda specifically for a tough on crime via punishment approach (in terms of policing streets, not so much tough on wage theft or other more leading crimes). You make it sound like it was some specific tactics that were the issue, rather than that the issue he's taking is with an ideologically diametrically opposed approach to addressing crime

My comment was about Hamasaki being a liar and online harasser and doesn’t have anything to do with policy positions.

Is there a possibility that pragmatism may have played a bigger role than deeply ingrained philosophical and political ideologies? We are talking about a self described highly controversial and extreme political/social experiment in a local political setting that has global impacts for a variety of unrelated issues.

If you had an indefensible objective argument to make, you wouldn't have used a throwaway

Because it reads like an extreme left wing talking point everyone is tired of. So many commens with the same wording makes people wondering if it's not a Russian disinformation/division campaign.

So as an outsider who is literally just trying to piece this together, it doesn't seem extreme or left-wing at all. Can you explain why this is an extreme left wing talking point?

HOLY SHIT no way this is ridiculous, I just wanted to check something that sounded "crazy" and it's true. I liked about 5 anti @garrytan replies as a test and I am unable to tweet or retweet! What the fuck!!!

Are you serious! Garry I pay for one of your fucking services I just wanted to check that these people were WRONG not that they were correct. What the hell.

I can't do shit on Twitter:

https://imgur.com/a/OBnVpUI

Cool! Ok so, confirmed. Garry Tan is a sinister guy. Glad I asked here!

Edit: Sorry but how is this downvoted to zero? I have done nothing except add five "likes" to Twitter and my account is now banned there. This is insane. I was pro-or-neutral-Garry at the start of this convo, he was just the Posterous guy. Now my Twitter is gone. What the hell?

Edit 2: uhh so how do you get an account back?

It could simply be that twitter is having issues. I see weird stuff as well. ("something went wrong" messages all over the place).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32644427

Yeah it seems to be just a glitch. Kinda wild to see "just like some tweets, see what happens..." and then have Twitter completely crap out.

Twitter automatically bans new accounts all the time. (I’ve heard from others that contacting support helps, but I personally just gave up on getting an account.) If you want to test getting blocked, you need to do it with an established account.

Whether it's a ban or a glitch, why would you blame Garry for it? He doesn't control Twitter.

Anil can be combative on Twitter. I have respect for him and positive interactions under my real name, but I’m not surprised he would have gotten into a heated discussion at some point with Garry.

so YC is celebrating having political influence that is explicitly pro-cop, hard on crime via punishment, etc., that's lovely

VC people have always been rightwing. They're not your friend.

Indeed. I might considering applying now.

What's the story here, did this happen a lot or something?

From my understanding he autoblocks anyone who likes a tweet that pushes back on his political takes.

OK so I was waiting for a reply like this that explained the accusation. I read this, liked a few @garrytan replies that weren't positive and ... it appears I'm now blocked!? What the hell!!??

edit: so apparently I conducted my test at a really unfortunate time when Twitter was having some global problems. It has recovered and I am not blocked at all.

Messages just like it are evenly diffused with death threats. That's why.

I've gotten death threats, no joke. Hitman showed up at my house one time. No joke.

No joke.

Many who get into it start blocking lists they get from their bubble.

Didn't expect most of this thread to be people whining about being blocked on twitter. What the hell has happened to hacker news?

lol