Everybody needs to stop with this "white-male" nonsense, which is inherently racist. There is much cultural diversity among what is considered "white" and that is painfully obvious. The "black" American guy and "white" American gal might have more in common with each other than the "white" Italian working in the cubicle next door. This also applies to the vast spectrum of "Asians" whose cultures differ significantly.
And just a personal opinion on something else Sam said
"Realizing that it’s hard to speak with much authority here as a white guy"
Completely unnecessary and I think it would be healthier if people stop this self persecution. (Using the same logic, maybe I can say this with authority because I am an indigenous Australian =D)
For example, take a look at this thread from about three months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7662013
He labeled the submission itself a "troll" (and locked it) because it generated what he called "high-indignation, low-information" responses. Read the responses and decide for yourself. It's pretty clear that "high-indignation, low-information" just means "doesn't support my ideology".
> it would be healthier if people stop this self persecution
If only it were self-persecution.
It's actually persecuting other (infinitely less powerful) white men and boys by implying "You—as a member of the group who will be most negatively affected by the policies we are discussing—are not allowed to object."
That's false. We didn't lock anything. We simply made the post not be on the front page.
Edit: I posted a longer reply, but decided it was a bad idea.
It is entirely possible I was mistaken, but I was under the belief that HN was mostly hands-off when it started. I.e., things other than clear attempts to spam, etc were off the page. Also, I think the focus of the site was narrower and clearer. It was dominated by technology and business with political pieces specifically discouraged. Now, political posts are pretty common. This broadening and blurring of the borders of what's "hacker news" can leave more room for mods to simply boost those they agree with and silence those they disagree with.
The particular article above is disturbing to see suppressed since it's clearly factual, isn't spam or similar and it's about the bay area tech scene, but apparently it's politically inconvenient.
This is merely a theory to explain your observations. I think a more plausible alternative explanation is that the moderators' beliefs about what makes up worthwhile discussion is different from yours.
I generally think it's worthwhile to let the community decide what's "worthwhile" and what isn't. Interfering to suppress spam or a flamewar is reasonable but interfering to suppress things which contain ideas you personally disagree with is not.
Similarly I don't have a lot of respect for you downvoting all my comments in this thread and on the previous one we were both on. It's the same principle, just on a lesser scale. I made a valid point in the GP post and was answering Dang's question.
> I generally think it's worthwhile to let the community decide what's "worthwhile" and what isn't.
If HN were decided purely by votes, the front page would consist of outrage, gossip, and fashion, and the site would be unrecognizable. HN has never been decided purely by votes. It has always been a blend of community and moderation—and I do mean always, from day one. If you believed otherwise, you were mistaken; if you thought HN was good, consider why. All that has changed in this area is that we're being more transparent.
You've repeated several times the false claim that we buried that article because we "personally disagree" with it. Obviously, we don't "personally disagree" with a factual article. That would make zero sense unless the facts reported are wrong, and I have no idea whether they were in that case.
The article was two years old. It was posted by a serial political troll whose sole interest (to judge by the account history) is in using HN for ideological provocation. Predictably, that worked. The thread brought us such jewels as "Oh, do fuck off and take your strawman with you". Is that the civil, substantive discussion that HN calls for?
Weighting that thread off the front page was an obvious call. What we did not do was kill the story—the discussion could and did continue [1]. Such is the balance we try to strike. This has exactly nothing to do with our personal politics, though that of course is the first thing, and the cheapest, that we're accused of. Not to penalize such stories would put HN at the mercy of arsonists. You seem to imply that online communities, or at least this one, are robust enough not to be damaged by such provocation. That, sadly, is wrong.
The user in question has a bunch of accounts. One they are careful to use for legitimate purposes; the others just push an agenda. Many have been banned. Of course, when we ban them, they make new ones and accuse us of censorship [2].
Many if not most of the ideological throwaway accounts you see on HN are the work of the same few users. I don't think it's unfair to call them trolls. They've shown up in this thread, too, of course, even posting the same link. I wonder why it's necessary to repeatedly push a two-year-old article. It must be quite a classic.
1. But that didn't stop a second serial political troll from accusing us of doing exactly that, presumably because what we actually did wasn't spicy enough to justify cries of repression.
2. The irony is left as an exercise to the reader.
I really appreciate the amount of detail in your reply. In all honesty, I severely underestimated the level of top-down editorial control on HN from the early days. I had thought that it was basically just PG, that he was too busy to deal with this kind of thing and that the type of discussion was due to the user base having come mostly from his essays. I have been lucky with the much smaller communities on my own websites over the years in that there were relatively few bad apples and only one sock puppet that I knew of.
I must admit, it is very difficult for me not to dislike "softer" forms of suppression even more so than outright removal of posts. This may be due to how I have seen media manipulation manifested living abroad for most my adult life. I sincerely apologize if I've mistaken comments by the OP to mean something other than they did. Once again thanks for the transparency.
By "what makes up worthwhile discussion" I was referring to a content-neutral or viewpoint-neutral notion of the idea. (The general category of "Not written for the reader's sake" encompasses most of the badness.)
Talking about white people or even generalizing about white people is not racist. There is no institutional and systemic power backing discrimination against white people based on their skin color. On the basis of being white, you do not suffer increased chances of incarceration, lack of access to education, worse job opportunities, and so on.
White identity is not the same as Asian identity and the issues facing Asian people do relate to racism. It is a false equivalence to compare whiteness to being Asian.
> Completely unnecessary and I think it would be healthier if people stop this self persecution. (Using the same logic, maybe I can say this with authority because I am an indigenous Australian =D)
There is nothing wrong with a little self awareness of being a member of the dominant social group in tech.
> Talking about white people or even generalizing about white people is not racist. There is no institutional and systemic power backing discrimination against white people based on their skin color.
Unfortunately generalizing about white people is racist. And saying that it isn't, is a "systemic power backing discrimination" based on their skin color.
> On the basis of being white, you do not suffer increased chances of incarceration, lack of access to education, worse job opportunities, and so on.
This supports my original post, I think we should move away from skin pigment based judgements. Also I don't have any references at hand but I recall these statistics being heavily influenced by your socio-economic status. You could replace "white" with "middle to upper class".
> White identity is not the same as Asian identity and the issues facing Asian people do relate to racism. It is a false equivalence to compare whiteness to being Asian
I'm not sure what you meant by this point. But what I meant is that Italian's, Greek's, Irish, American' and Australian's don't fit neatly under the "white" banner and nor do Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian's and Korean's fit neatly under the "asian" banner.
> There is nothing wrong with a little self awareness of being a member of the dominant social group in tech.
"white" is not the master social group of tech nor do people walk around consciously identifying with the "white" group. The Tabs vs Spaces debate does not give a shit if your black or white, extend this to TDD debates, functional vs OOP etc.
Yes, I know racism exist.
> I was just adding a point that is left out of these discussions more often than not. The point is that "white" people aren't unified because of their skin pigment. Europe is a major example and of course the never ending protestant and catholic wars around the globe.
The point here isn't that there are different kinds of people who are white, but rather there is a continuum of treatment, both from individuals and institutions, that white people share. In the US it doesn't matter if I'm from one part of the country or another, having white skin still benefits me in all the ways it would anywhere else. This esp. applies to institutional and systemic things: rates of incarceration, job opportunity, access to education, rates of poverty, etc. are all correlated in my favor. Not only that, but compared to other groups of people I am far less likely to be affected directly by violence based on skin color.
> Unfortunately generalizing about white people is racist. And saying that it isn't, is a "systemic power backing discrimination" based on their skin color.
You'll have to explain a little more, why would a single person's opinion create systemic and institutional difficulties for white people when they currently don't experience that?
Generalizing is not necessarily racist. There is a difference between stereotypes and something like talking about shared experience as a member of a group.
> This supports my original post, I think we should move away from skin pigment based judgements.
People of different races have problems that affect them uniquely compared to races, to not talk about that is to ignore the effect of existing racism on those people. That is not a judgement, that is fact. We have evidence, first hand and statistical, that shows this is true and we should not discard that.
> Also I don't have any references at hand but I recall these statistics being heavily influenced by your socio-economic status. You could replace "white" with "middle to upper class".
Race and socio-economic status are heavily correlated and racism and class are indeed related. However, racism confers benefits and damage that goes beyond class boundaries. Being of a high class may not, for example, protect you from racism at the hands of the police. Being of a low class, for example, doesn't mean you still don't have some kind of privilege or benefit. Moreover, there are many cases in which being white and low class still confers benefits over being not white.
> But what I meant is that Italian's, Greek's, Irish, American' and Australian's don't fit neatly under the "white" banner and nor do Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian's and Korean's fit neatly under the "asian" banner.
Obviously each of these cultures and ethnicities are different. However, that doesn't mean that there aren't shared experiences for both white and asian people and racism plays into that: white people experience less discrimination than asian people as a whole, regardless of ethnicity within those categories. Indeed, for asian people ethnicity erasure and representation is a big deal as their ethnicity is often erased via stereotyping.
> "white" is not the master social group of tech nor do people walk around consciously identifying with the "white" group.
White people are absolutely the dominant race in tech in the US today. Also, people do both consciously and subconsciously identify with and look for white culture signifier in others. Indeed, one of the biggest deals about interviews and hiring in tech today in the US is about culture fit being used as an excuse to look for traits that are most commonly associated with white middle class men. Model View Culture had a whole issue related to mythology in US tech that I highly recommend for more about this. [1]
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_22094415/asian-workers-now-dom...
Based on my experience, I'd believe it, though the proportion is likely less in San Francisco and more in the South Bay.
I wrote more about this here - about over-represented minorities, and self selection: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8088263
Fundamentally, people disagree to WHY certain groups are over-represented - is it mostly discrimination, mostly cultural, mostly self-selection? Discrimination is bad, but how bad - or not - are cultural factors and self-selection? Asians are strongly over-represented - but no one says this is because admissions officers prefer them - there is strong evidence to the contrary - and most agree it is a combination of selective immigration policy and cultural factors on the part of frequently college-educated, first-generation parents. However efforts to take race into account in college admissions no doubt will tend to work against members of this still minority group (in fact - only 5% in the US).
Finally, the attacking white males is basically a motte-and-bailey tactic [1] in which something very obviously wrong, and not defended by a majority of any group e.g. racial discrimination, is then used, strawman-like, to strike down countervailing discussion as "derailing" (no one is saying racism is good). Do white men need to make counter-adjustments in order to correct for previous sins (or sins by others in the same group - see sexual harassment by another unrelated man in the same industry)?
Is that fair to those white men to take steps - perhaps even extending privileges to other groups at their own cost, or is it fair because the discriminated-against groups have experienced injustice? This is the fundamental disagreement in the social justice debate. What makes sense on an individual level can look wrong on a collective level, and vice versa. It just depends on your sense of fairness. The voices on the collective side of this debate are the strongest in Silicon Valley, but a greater amounts of people - and Americans overall - frequently disagree on what needs to be done to address racial disparities e.g. affirmative action or no affirmative action.
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-word...
I know it's hard to believe, but relative to their proportion in the workforce white males are slightly underrepresented in tech. Additionally, people of color are dramatically overrepresented. It's easy to march under the banner of "men in tech shouldn't act like sexist jerks"—what kind of sexist jerk could object to that?—but the more accurate slogan "we need many fewer Asian males in tech" doesn't sound quite so nice. In fact, it sounds rather nasty. And yet, it's the inevitable implication of increasing diversity.