
A Guide To Hacker News For People Who Aren’t Men (2018) - curation
https://medium.com/@melissamcewen/a-guide-to-hacker-news-for-people-who-arent-men-5737bc3e68a
======
jolux
Caveat: I think it’s valuable to avoid creating threads that devolve into
flame wars over gender politics, and largely respect the decision of
moderators to flag these articles as a result.

However, I’m a woman, 21 years old, and I’ve been a Hacker News member since
2014 and a reader for much longer (perhaps since I was 11 or 12?). I passed
500 karma years ago. I lament that I cannot easily connect with other women
over our use of this medium, because this article alone gave me a lot of
valuable advice and more things like it would definitely help me feel more
welcome in the community. It’s a complicated situation and I think dang and
sctb have done a laudable job of splitting the difference in this space over
the years, one that more internet moderators of tech spaces that want women to
participate would do well to emulate.

~~~
bE9a3S5So8igd3
I don't really understand what "welcome" means. Historically on the internet
people are simultaneously "welcome" and "not welcome," i.e. people discover
places of socializing and choose to participate or not. In my decades of
socializing on the internet, most places are hostile to some degree. I also
wouldn't bother to complain, because hostility is an unavoidable part of human
nature, even hostility toward hostility. Some set of people within a given
community will be "nice," and some will be "mean." Most people inhabit some
indefinite point on the nice-mean continuum. It would be ideal if comments
like "females suk lol" were removed, but something tells me that's uncommon.

I think that "I would feel more welcome if..." (a very common motif in modern
activism) suggests a few things:

(1) The operators should care about me/my demographic (2) The operators should
signal that they care about me/my demographic (3) The operators should
preferentially signal that they care about me/my demographic (4) The operators
should counter-signal, i.e. counter-welcome other people/other demographics
(determined by perceived opposition to me/my demographic)

This may seem like a trivial exercise, but consider how non-welcome a person
with conservative political interests would be not only on HN, but in the tech
industry as a whole. Consider how non-welcome a white male might feel on
Twitter, etc.. Hell, consider how non-welcome a person who thinks Rust sucks
would feel on news.ycombinator.com. (tip: very non-welcome)

It seems futile to resolve each individual's sense of welcome; to provide a
safe-space concurrently for religious white nationalists and black trans
activists, and assorted fringes.

~~~
jolux
>It seems futile to resolve each individual's sense of welcome; to provide a
safe-space concurrently for religious white nationalists and black trans
activists, and assorted fringes.

That's easy: I don't want to participate in spaces where religious white
nationalists feel safe, as don't I suspect a lot of people on HN (most?).
Spaces that prioritize making religious white nationalists feel safe are not
interesting spaces to participate in in general (check out the front page of
Gab (edit: I think I meant Voat) if you need a sense of what I mean).

It's also not really about being nice or mean, it's about comments like these
suggesting I want preferential treatment from moderators. If my original post
wasn't clear: I think the moderators are basically doing the best job that
they can at weeding out obviously sexist, racist, and otherwise unproductive
comments.

So, I'm not really complaining about how the space is moderated, I think it's
at a pretty stable equilibrium and I'm pessimistic about it getting much
better than this for women, with what it prioritizes (primarily, open
discussion about controversial topics, so long as it remains civil, even when
one side is expressing repellent views in a civil manner). Obviously, this is
not disqualifying for me, because I'm still here, and I have a lot more karma
than you.

However, in my years of being here, I had never read this piece before, and I
frequently feel pretty alone as a woman when there are comments that make me
uncomfortable. It is just nice to know that there are other women in the space
who share my experience, and I wish there was something like a women HNers
social group or something, I guess.

~~~
skinkestek
> That's easy: I don't want to participate in spaces where religious white
> nationalists feel safe,

As a white, religious person, - but not a nationalist: I always felt safe on
HN and I hope most HNers are OK with that as long as I play by the rules?

Why shouldn't everyone feel safe as long as they play by the rules?

Edit: I'm not hurt. I'm hoping to get a better worded explanation from you :-)

Edit 2: The reason why I ask is because sentence is quite absurd and cannot be
what you mean. Just try to imagine someone saying: "I don't want to
participate in spaces where atheistic colored globalists feel safe," here on
HN.

~~~
indigo945
You are arguing in bad faith. Obviously one should be made welcome no matter
whether they're white, a nationalist, religious, or all of these, but it
should be easy enough to infer from context that this is not what the parent
comment was about. It is about making clear that this welcome does not extend
toward making other groups feel unwelcome, that is, toward _prioritizing_ that
welcome over others.

~~~
skinkestek
> You are arguing in bad faith.

I'm not. I also read and re-read it too.

One possible explanation could be that I'm not a native speaker.

However if anyone wrote: "I don't want to participate in spaces where
atheistic colored globalists feel safe," I'd flag it instantly as I originally
did with this before I unflagged it and asked instead because while I think
some kind of nazi crap could write that I don't think that is what she means.

Edit: also I think it is bad for the conversation to state as fact that I
argue in bad faith. If you'd be kind enough to rewrite that I'll also try to
remove this edit.

~~~
jolux
What I meant was that white nationalists feeling safe in a space (particularly
them feeling safe expressing white nationalist views) is a decent heuristic
for that space being poorly moderated or of poor quality overall. At the very
least I’m not interested in the content of that space and I find white
nationalists repugnant.

~~~
tptacek
Just for clarity's sake: I spent a year monitoring HN (somewhat primitively,
but with automation) for white nationalist content, and I stopped because it's
become increasingly clear that the site itself finds white nationalism
repugnant.

Though it's not explicitly stated in the guidelines (the guidelines would be
long indeed if they had to state every pathology that emerges on an Internet
message board), it's abundantly clear from the "informal moderation log" (the
feed of comments from 'dang) that overt appeals to racial, national, or
religious superiority are against the site rules. People are routinely banned
for this stuff.

It's also just pretty clear that the community on the site has much less
patience for racism and misogyny than the rap it gets on Twitter (which is an
objectively worse site, for whatever that's worth). The real reason monitoring
for white nationalism got boring is that practically every comment I'd catch
would get modded down and flagged. I used to report things to Dan when I saw
them, but I was batting less than .200 on reporting things that weren't
flagged by the time Dan saw them.

What's problematic about evaluating the site --- and you don't have this
problem, because you're a regular, but lots of other people do --- is it can
be extraordinarily bad if you snapshot it at the wrong time. Anyone can join!
Without a credit card or a phone number! They can post whatever nonsense they
want! You have to watch the site in action over the course of hours to see
what the community actually thinks about something. That's plenty of time to
make an effective Orange Site Dunk on Twitter.

I don't believe the status quo is really acceptable, and there must be room to
improve it. But it's better than a lot of people think it is.

~~~
jolux
> I don't believe the status quo is really acceptable, and there must be room
> to improve it. But it's better than a lot of people think it is.

This is basically my position. I have a hard time convincing others of it
because of the reputation, though. It’s been an invaluable space for me in
learning from people like you posting and I have no doubt that I have gained a
significant amount of social savvy and also technological sophistication in
using the site. I have trouble thinking of specific ways that it could be
improved, specifically because of what you mention.

~~~
tptacek
It's hard! Like, I don't think it's reasonable to say "the site needs 6 more
Dans" because it's hard enough to find one Dan that no other site like HN has
managed to accomplish it.

I appreciate you sticking through it, though. I know this place can get hard
to take.

------
gus_massa
Note that the comment highlighted in this article
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13020973](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13020973)
is already downvoted and flagged by the community. It has even a warning
comment added by dang (that is the mod here) (and the warning doesn't use the
usual polite tone).

------
Grumbledour
I am always a bit surprised how often people call hacker news toxic. Has that
word changed or am I just to old and jaded? I mean, sure, it's opinionated,
it's got quite a few blind spots, it's a bit rough around the edges sometime.
But the only comments I would really call toxic are already dead [0]. Now, I
am not saying hacker news could not be nicer, but many people here seem to at
least try to make reasonable arguments and I have yet to see it devolve into
shouting matches like so many other places on the Internet. Maybe I just read
to many Forums back in the day, but Hacker News by and large seems civil
enough to me.

This is of course enforced through the only thin sheer of community, where you
really have to look out for peoples usernames to get even an idea of who you
are talking to. While probably beneficial in this regard, I often wish there
were some sort of avatars or other features to more easily recognize people
from thread to thread.

[0] Though it is interesting, that among the dead comments is nearly always
one that just seems harmless and often even a valid argument. So turning dead
comments to display seems kind of important to not miss those. I wonder what
is up with that?

~~~
djaque
I think it depends where you hang out on HN. I also think it is civil for the
most part, but there are a few threads I have been apart of where I was
shocked at the racist, homophobic, sexist comments coming in. They did get
downvoted pretty quickly, but I was still surprised by them appearing in the
first place.

~~~
Viliam1234
> They did get downvoted pretty quickly, but I was still surprised by them
> appearing in the first place.

Apparently many people feel like this is not enough, but what more can be
done? I can imagine a few policies that would reduce the chance of such
comment even appearing, such as:

\- Some problematic comments could be instantly removed algorithmically, e.g.
by having a list of forbidden substrings/regexps. Trying to avoid that list
e.g. by intentional misspelling would result in a manual ban. (And the
misspelling would be added to the list.)

\- Moderation could be so strict that even a hint of heresy would result in a
ban. If you merely seem like a person who probably would say something racist
or sexist in the future, let's ban you before you actually do it.

\- The values embraced by the website should be expressed by (e.g. anti-racist
and anti-sexist) slogans at the top of the page, along with explicit warnings
against heresies, so that people would immediately know which opinions are
allowed and which are not.

I do not really think any of these suggestions is good. My question is,
without them, how can you avoid the situation, apparently very unpleasant to
some people, where problematic comments sometimes appear, even if they are
soon downvoted/flagged.

(I suspect than a combination of the second and third option is what the
author of the article would like to see. But I'd rather hear it explicitly
from people who mean it.)

~~~
dang
>> They did get downvoted pretty quickly, but I was still surprised by them
appearing in the first place.

> Apparently many people feel like this is not enough, but what more can be
> done?

I don't think much more can be done. On a public forum where literally anyone
can make an account and post, there's no way to control what content appears,
and you can't accurately assess the community by that. The tail of the
internet is long, and the bottom of the barrel is deep.

You have to assess the community by how its immune system reacts. It has to be
enough if, after a while, the worst comments are downvoted and/or flagged.
Unfortunately "after a while" takes time, perhaps several hours, and in the
meantime many readers encounter the worst shit before the immune system has
gotten to it. Some of those readers are shocked—understandably, because it's
shocking shit. Some of them don't understand the dynamics well enough to read
the situation accurately—they just think "OMG Hacker News said $SHIT". And
some of those take to Twitter and post shocking things, and another scandal
cycle repeats. At this point there have been so many scandal cycles that I can
at least say that it's second-order trauma to run into them. They used to
upset me for days.

If you stop and think about it, it's clear that this is the price for hosting
a public forum—there's no way to avoid the shit. The best we can hope for is
an ever-improving immune system. HN's immune system—consisting of users,
software, and moderators—at least functions reasonably well, and there's room
for it to get better.

It's easy to forget the good side of having a public forum: anyone can show up
to post, regardless of who they are or who they know. If they have something
interesting to say, they automatically and instantly belong. This is precious.
It's how we get magical threads like
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23676862](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23676862)
(still on the front page), where the founder of a beloved publisher gets to
talk to his devoted fans 20 years later.

I don't know if you guys remember, but 6 years ago, just before he handed over
HN to us, pg implemented a feature called "pending comments"
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484304](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484304))
in which comments were all placed into a queue to be approved of before they
would appear in the threads. This is a technical solution that would actually
work to prevent the worst shit from appearing here. But it sparked a huge
firestorm and the first thing that I did on taking over HN was to roll that
back. It was clear that the community didn't want it (not so surprising) but
also the social critics of HN, the kind who write articles like the OP or post
critiques of HN on Twitter, felt that it was elitist and would put too much
power in the hands of entrenched users.

------
tasuki
> I’d love to downvote comments like: "Males have evolved to extract resources
> from the environment. Females have evolved to extract resources from males."
> But for a long time I couldn’t.

Yes well, because you didn't have enough magical points. Other HN participants
had more magical points and downvoted that comment to oblivion. This isn't a
good example to show how HN is sexist.

> That’s nice but like many well-meaning men they can’t seem to realize that
> more sophisticated forms of sexism cloaked in fancy language (“women are
> biologically programmed to XYZ”) aren’t any better than the crude type.

I'd like to think I'm well meaning and don't get that. Are you saying the
phrase "women are biologically programmed to XYZ" is _always sexist_? What
about "men are biologically programmed to XYZ" \- is that also sexist? Why?
What about "turtles are biologically programmed to XYZ"? Or "plants are
biologically programmed to XYZ"?

Where is the boundary between what's ok and what isn't? (I am biologically
programmed to ask these questions.)

~~~
starkd
I fear there's a deep anti freedom of speech sentiment in her complaint. Why
is it not enough to reply with your alternate opinion and engage in a
discussion about such issues? Why such emphasis on attaining an ability to
downvote, if not to stamp out dissenting views? Such censorship should be
reserved for malicious comments that are intended that way.

I'll probably get downvoted for this, which will be ironic. HN is becoming
tiresome with these discussions.

~~~
tptacek
Because it takes far more effort to carefully rebut a slur than it does to
make it, and if you let it stands as is, you've lent it credibility. We all
intuitively understand this, which is why overt arguments in favor of crimes
against children (which arguments do occur!) are instantly flagged off the
site; we don't entertain them or carefully rebut them, and practically no one
on the site expects us to. It's just that a noisome faction on the site does
expect us to entertain slurs against women.

~~~
cloudier
For a similar example in a different site, see
[https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/the-askhistorians-
subre...](https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/the-askhistorians-subreddit-
banned-holocaust-deniers-and-facebook-should-too.html)

“In this endeavor, deniers focus on many minor and obscure details and leave
out crucial context. It takes them little effort to formulate a wrong
assertion, but it takes historians a long time and a lot of words to refute
one. Our early attempts to engage on these points have shown that length and
nuance do not play well on the internet and do not interest the deniers. The
point of JAQing off is not to debate facts. It’s to have an audience hear
denialist lies in the first place. Allowing their talking points to stand in
public helps sow the seeds of doubt, even if only to one person in 10,000.”

------
dybber
I've been a Hacker News user since August 2007, and I still don't have the
ability to downvote. For many many years I didn't even know it was possible to
downvote.

I guess I'm not posting enough, but I didn't really feel any need to obtain
the karma even after learning about downvoting was a thing. After reading
this, I feel more obligated to get above the threshold and help weeding out in
the comments.

~~~
majkinetor
You need around 500 karma.

~~~
gnulinux
I think you need exactly 501. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

~~~
majkinetor
I dont know, who cares :)

There also seem to be 2 treasholds - one for topic and one for users.

------
ddevault
The flagging system on HN is terribly broken. I sent this to dang a while ago
on the subject:

I realized something interesting the other day - users gain access to downvote
comments once they reach 501 karma. I've always inferred that this is to make
it so that users cannot downvote until they have demonstrated some
understanding of the community and an ability to fit in with its norms.

However... users get access to flagging at 31 karma. A flag is basically a
super downvote in several respects:

\- It works on comments _and_ posts

\- It works on direct replies to your own comments

\- Just a few flags is enough to remove content entirely

\- A flagged post cannot be vouched for until after it's been removed, whereas
a post can be upvoted before it's downvoted.

It's a bit weird to me that the OP version of downvotes is available to users
16 times sooner than the neutered version. I feel like HN has a problem with
flagging being abused for censorship - this might provide an explanation.

Food for thought.

I won't disclose the response without his permission, but dang: if you're ITT,
feel free to share.

------
rvieira
Although my account is recent, I've lurked HN for many years, almost daily.

I'm not dismissing the experience in the post, and I'm more surprised by it
since I rarely find examples of open bigotry or sexism in the comments
(although I noticed that in recent years some discussions are getting very
polarized).

People in here seem to me to be open to rational discussion, and, yes, you do
get controversial opinions, but mostly I think people are open for discussion.

~~~
jolux
It’s gotten better over the years, to the moderators’ credit, but it’s still
very difficult if not impossible to have civil and compassionate discussions
about articles like this here.

------
JamesBarney
> On Hacker News it is used to remove content from the front page that people
> simply dislike. Often this means content about sexism in tech

I think the main reason these posts are flagged is because the discussion
turns toxic quickly, and not because users are adverse to these posts.

~~~
indigo945
The discussion on this post itself was not toxic, and it has been immediately
flagged anyway. Clearly some users very much are adverse to these posts.

~~~
JamesBarney
You don't usually get feedback on your intuition so quickly, but it looks like
I was wrong, and Melissa was right.

~~~
jolux
In your defense it’s already teetering on the brink, so I think it’s honestly
a difficult decision to make.

------
thereyougo
I worked in an office few years ago, we were mostly mens and a certain kind of
(in my opinion) toxic jargon was developed there.

It might be an unpopular opinion but I do think that when men and women are at
the same place the chances the environment will be come toxic is way lower.

I wonder if it will happen in online community such as HN or even
/r/programming on Reddit.

~~~
jsinai
I 100% agree. For most of my undergraduate, the male-female ratio was a close
to 40:60 (yes there were more women in my undergraduate maths classes than
men, sample size ~400-1000). When I moved overseas to study Part III in
Mathematics at Cambridge, the male-female ratio soared to about 95:5. This was
the first time I was in an absurdly male dominated environment since my karate
classes in primary school and I found it to definitely be more toxic. My
experience thereafter has been the same: more balanced environments are
healthier and less prone to toxic weeding of viewpoints.

~~~
commandlinefan
How do you know that the males in the 40:60 class didn't feel that the
environment was "toxic" in the other direction?

~~~
jsinai
I don’t recall this being a problem in 4 years. Men weren’t put down or
treated in derogatory ways because they weren’t women. If I try to enumerate
typical toxic behaviours, it certainly wasn’t the case that any of this was
systematically disadvantaging men. Contrast that with modern work environments
...

------
seattle_spring
I would love for the author to share some of the comments she thinks were
unfairly flagged.

~~~
untog
Keep an eye on this thread. I would not be at all surprised if it is flagged!
Sometimes you'll see that posts with a ton of upvotes still slide down the
front page very quickly and disappear. That's because users are flagging the
post.

EDIT: this post has been flagged, 30 minutes after it was posted. So if you're
looking for an example, look no further.

~~~
seattle_spring
It's a good example of something being flagged because it's a baseless claim
with no evidence-- one that tries to use an unarguable fallacy as a winning
argument: "You're silencing me because I'm X", not because you're just wrong.

------
syllable_studio
Are you serious? Was this article really just FLAGGED? Was it flagged just
because the article mildly criticises Hacker News and it's moderators for not
having enough diversity?

~~~
golf3
It's clickbait.

~~~
RHSeeger
I don't agree with what some of what the article says, but it certainly
doesn't seem like clickbait. It appears to be an honest expression of
someone's opinion and attempt to help others navigate shortcomings they see
with HN.

------
capableweb
Ironically, this submission has now been flagged so won't appear on the
frontpage anymore, only had about 25 minutes of visibility before disappearing
into the ether.

~~~
hckr_news
The hckrnews.com client doesn't hide anything

~~~
bryanlarsen
P.S. the hckrnews guy is
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=wvl](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=wvl)
Using his site for your username feels a little scummy.

~~~
hckr_news
I couldn’t really think of a username when I signed up and this is the first
thing that came to mind. I’m willing to change it to something else.

------
jacknews
I'd quite like HN to be completely free of anything to do with sexism, racism
and politics.

~~~
davidgerard
I'd quite like tech to be completely free of anything to do with sexism,
racism and politics, but it turns out it's part of the world.

~~~
YetAnotherNick
The thing is discussing it easily ruins the mood of feeling productive when
opening HN.

Also the benefit of discussing the same mindless discussion over internet
where you already know the points of both sides are minimal in my opinion.
There are better ways to spend time to benefit the minorities/females than
discussing it here.

~~~
dredmorbius
Why does that discussion "ruin" the mood?

Who is doing the ruining?

Who benefits by lack of discussion?

(My view is that silence on contentious issues benefits the status quo.)

------
voisin
Is there a level of karma that upon reaching allows the user to get email
updates to replies to submitted news or comments?

~~~
YetAnotherNick
That seems like a good weekend project idea if there is no such system now.

------
harryf
My feeling over the last 2 years is HN has largely steered clear of topics
related to gender, as they lead awful comment threads. That's an impression
which implies the HN moderators have adopted this policy. And in general I
think it's a good. thing - there's enough discussion of gender in tech
elsewhere.

~~~
golf3
That's not true though, the various gender gaps have been discussed here
endlessly. I'm baffled when anyone says there's not enough discussion of these
things when they dominated HN for months at a time.

~~~
jolux
What there isn’t a lot of discussion of is how the space functions in a
holistic sense for women, but so it goes for other groups as well. I don’t
think “more discussion” is what this situation is lacking, though I couldn’t
tell you what it is.

------
dqpb
Here is my take on the social dynamics: a subset of group A discriminates
against all of group B. In defense, a subset of group B accuses all of group
A. In return-defense, a greater subset of group A accuses all of group B of
unfair accusations... and so on.

------
mips_avatar
One of the interesting things about the 500 vote threshold for downvoting is
that it kind of incentivizes incendiary comments. If you make a comment that
picks a side on a hot-button topic and delight 50% of users and annoy the
other 50%, you will on net get upvotes, because the half who like the comment
have more sway on the voting than the half who don't. I like that we limit
downvoting, but it has side-effects.

------
seattle_spring
Needs a (2018) tag

------
gas9S9zw3P9c
I'm sorry that this is off-topic, but we can we please ban Medium links? I
cannot read the article because of the paywall and I have no interest in
spending my time hacking around it.

~~~
thereyougo
Use incognito

~~~
kimi
It would be trivial to, but it's more a matter of principle. You write content
for a blog so Medium can monetize it and track your readers? that's good, but
I would prefer not to have it on HN.

~~~
jolux
Every major newspaper does this too.

~~~
kimi
Agreed. And I'd happily do without.

I'm not a luddite; I have been a subscriber of The Economist for like 20 years
and I appreciate what they do. Still, I think that it is not appropriate for
HN posts to point to paywalled content.

~~~
jolux
I’d rather know that the community thinks it’s worth reading and make my own
decision to circumvent the paywall, because it keeps us in the good graces of
those organizations and they produce interesting articles.

------
patrick5415
Please. I’ve read plenty of biologically motivated drawbacks of the male sex,
both here and other more “enlightened” corners of the interwebs Supposedly,
they are bunch of pre-verbal, emotionally out-of-touch nitwits so focused on
competition they can’t figure out how to cooperate.

------
syllable_studio
Hacker News, you can't hide from this important topic about a lack of
diversity. We need to discuss this and fix it as a community.

[https://twitter.com/syllablehq/status/1277616493149196293](https://twitter.com/syllablehq/status/1277616493149196293)

~~~
samfriedman
The flagging comes not from moderators, but from users.

