

The dark side of HackerNews: negativity at best, suppression at worst - dorkitude
https://keen.io/blog/42042716172/the-dark-side-of-hackernews-negativity-at-best

======
chc
So, I'm not one of the people who downvoted that story, but I understand why
they did it.

Although I am sympathetic to the subject of sexism in our industry, this
doesn't mean every article about it deserves to be on top of Hacker News.
Michelle's piece was perfectly fine as blog posts go, and I'm glad she shared
her thoughts, but it didn't really offer any new insights in the way that a
Hacker News submission should.

The purpose of Hacker News is not, as this follow-up post seems to believe, to
"draw attention to justice-oriented problems." I personally feel Hacker News
has too much content based on politics and outrage these days, and it crowds
out interesting technical content. I am sympathetic to many of the causes
espoused, but just because I agree with you doesn't mean I'll upvote something
that doesn't substantially contribute. Stories like that that don't introduce
something new tend to just reignite old arguments, which isn't interesting or
productive.

If Michelle had actually been calling attention to a novel problem in need of
a solution, that would be a different story. But as far as I can tell, she was
just kind of summarizing something that happened that made her upset. Again,
I'm sympathetic and find the same things upsetting, but that still doesn't
make it relevant.

None of this is a judgment of Michelle's post, and it doesn't mean what she
was writing about is unimportant. It just means that, like 90% of things that
interest me, it's not a good fit for this particular forum.

------
pg
Actually what happened was that the post triggered the flamewar detector. And
judging from the comments, correctly so.

~~~
mwetzler
Good to know, thanks for responding.

I fear that Hacker News flaggers are now over-generalizing "complaining about
sexism" and lumping anything near that into the category of "nothing left to
say".

My post was about what companies can do when they are faced with a gender PR
problem. I'm glad it got some reads from the community, but I'm sad it got
dismissed so quickly due to flaming in the comments. This leads me to question
the algorithm for flamewar detection, since it seemed like a valuable
conversation.

I also fear Hacker News readers are mistaking "complaining about sexism" as an
attack or complaint about males in general. I think that's why we get so many
defensive, flaming comments in threads discussing gender bias. This behavior
only proves how much being male is engrained into the identity and culture of
the tech community. When a woman says something about the tech community,
males feel their gender is being attacked and very emotional posts result.

I consider myself a member of the tech community working on building it, not a
person attacking it, so this response was unexpected. This is a good lesson to
consider when writing about gender in the future.

There is a lot of good work we can do together to get more women into tech,
and to give women here more confidence (did you know there has been a flight
of women from the industry?). As tech becomes such a vital part of every
company, I feel women are missing a huge opportunity if we don't become more
involved here. Women need more encouragement than men do to make a go in this
industry. I think that's worth writing about.

So many bay area companies are doing great things to help with this cause.
That's part of why I was so shocked that the online community was so
dismissive of this post.

I have another post planned to try to inspire the tech community to get more
engaged. The reason these posts keep coming up is that there is still a lot we
can do to make working in this industry better (if we can agree that having
more technically skilled women is something worth working toward).

I believe discussions about how to attract, maintain, and train developers are
important to this community. I also believe there is a lot of opportunity in
encouraging women to build skills and join us.

I ask the Hacker News admins and flaggers of my post today to please consider
the value of this discussion.

PS: I think I will make it a point not to use "Sexism" in the title for future
posts. Hopefully that will help.

------
wmf
Speaking as a HN regular, I think we've drawn attention to this topic over and
over, which would explain the flagging. And every new article resets the
discussion to zero, giving room for uninformed comments and the resulting
drama to be posted for the Nth time.

~~~
mwetzler
I don't understand. I took the time to write this post because it's something
that is important to me as a person in the tech community.

It's obviously something that impacts many people in this line of work,
otherwise this community would not have such strong opinions about it.

Does Hacker News suppress other topics or just gender bias?

This is so hurtful.

~~~
mpyne
I truly don't mean to be snarky but I don't think taking the time to write up
a post, even about something you care deeply about, is sufficient
justification on its own for HN to care about a topic.

That is, if the topic is important and valuable to HN it will be valuable even
if you didn't necessarily care so much about the topic.

~~~
mwetzler
Agreed with you that not all stories need be shared. However, this one made it
to the front page because it generated a lot of conversation. In fact, people
cared so much that it set off the flame detector and it sank the post.

That's sad, because there was good discussion going about objectification in
marketing, and if the tech industry should be held to a higher standard as
compared to other industries.

------
tokenadult
From the submitted blog post:

"Either:

"The post is being flagged en masse by our fellow HackerNews community
members."

That is the most likely reason the submission dropped rapidly from the main
page to a lower page. People who participate here regularly use flagging power
to keep the submissions with thoughtful, interesting comment threads that are
essentially on-topic higher than submissions with arguing, repetitive comment
threads that aren't as close to the core topics of Hacker News. That, and luck
of the draw as to which time of the day the blog post was submitted (meaning
which HN participants happened to see it) is explanation enough for why the
submission sank.

The moral of the story? Submit something next time that is closer to the core
topics of HN, and write it very carefully to maximize the probability of
thoughtful, interesting comments. Especially make sure that you have a new
take on one of the recurrent issues, or are bringing up an issue that is fresh
and rarely discussed here. Good luck.

------
DanBC
Just a quick point: 51687a on white is unreadable. It's especially hard to
read the MLK quote in Helvetica Neue.

------
Humjob
Maybe HN is becoming more negative. Or maybe, just maybe, HN users weren't in
the mood for holier-than-thou moralistic berating about how evil the tech
industry is for focusing on the bottom line of innovation and profits rather
than trying to bend reality to fit some postmodern wet dream of inherent
equality in STEM-skills based aptitudes between genders.

In other words, Larry Summers was probably right. Then again, he was fired
shortly afterwards for daring to express disagreement with one of the popular
ideologies of our era.

------
dorkitude
Okay it's actually pretty amazing that this post made it to the frontpage
immediately, then was flagged down and buried.

I like justice and all, but ironic humor trumps even that ;)

~~~
chc
Heh. I've found HN meta-discussion actually is really controversial, so it
usually goes that way. Some people will upvote it because they think it makes
a good point, and then others will downvote it because they feel like, "I
don't come to Hacker News to talk about Hacker News."

------
armored_mammal
The goal of Y Combinator is not to encourage discussion of controversial
issues. If something is divisive and not related to a debate strictly to do
with technical topics they probably consider it in their best interests to
bury it. Sadly. Hence why special people seem to have super down vote powers,
etc.

Remember, the goal is to create the illusion of community in order to market.

~~~
mwetzler
Hacker News just did a great job showing me that I'm not welcome in this
community.

~~~
obituary_latte
You are as welcome as anyone else.

I don't think anyone hit the "instaban" button nor did I see anyone advocate
you go away. You put yourself out there and this is how the community reacted
-- don't take it personally.

Take your passion and keep fighting for what you believe in. So long as your
actions align with your values, it doesn't really matter what anyone else
thinks, says, or does.

:)

~~~
mwetzler
Thank you. I am shocked by the comments and finding it hard not to take it
personally. But I know you are right.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
This is not really a community anymore, it's more like an open park. There are
some old regulars, and they are recognized by the handles, but that's about
it.

