
Brendan Eich resigns as CEO from Mozilla - parallelist
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26868536
======
codeoclock
Weird that these are being demoted. Regardless - I've seen some people
defending him for various reasons, most prominently because he has a right to
free speech. Of course he has a right to free speech, and he exercised it. He
also has the responsibility to accept the consequences. His actions/speech
made enough people angry enough to exercise their speech to the extent that
Eich's position was no longer tenable.

People too often forget that rights don't mean that there will be no
consequences to exercising those rights (within the bounds of the law, and
other things).

------
dang
This post was killed because a great many users flagged it.

Moderators don't, as a rule, kill any stories that have an active thread. That
way those who are interested in the discussion can keep it going. The most we
would do is demote an item in rank. There are exceptions to this, but they're
so rare I can't remember any.

I'm unkilling the post, because I want to reply to some of the moderation
questions downthread, and I figure if I'm allowed to keep commenting here then
everybody should be.

~~~
codezero
Is there any reason not to "boost" the original discussion if new ones keep
getting pushed to the site? It seems duplicative to allow repeat stories just
to keep the discussion going. Better to downrank the dupes and uprank the
original one if the discussion is still ongoing enough to draw constant
repostings.

~~~
dang
Good question. That's the intention, and also what ended up happening this
afternoon. But there's a countervailing factor: when the discussion is so
toxic as to be beyond the reach of pinpoint "Please don't be a jerk on Hacker
News" nudges by the moderator. [1]

Empirically, the HN community has proven to be incapable of discussing certain
subjects without immediately turning noxious. Once that happens, it's more
than just a technical question of how best to consolidate the threads. The
values of the site—intellectual substance and personal civility—are being
grossly violated. If we allow that, how can we claim they're the values of the
site? And if they're not the values of the site, who on earth would want to
stay here?

That is the harder problem. We don't know yet what the long term solution will
be, but we're going to keep experimenting until we find one.

[1] As you may have noticed, I've been making a lot of those this week--but
they don't work on threads that have completely lost it.

~~~
codezero
There are some practical approaches that could be used to do more than nudge
when discussions turn toxic. Allowing fresh threads just leads to the
inevitable if there isn't a solid solution to the toxic behavior in general.

~~~
dang
_There are some practical approaches_

I'm all ears!

~~~
chrismonsanto
I run a large community. Here are my opinions:

1) The easiest thing you can do is have a friendly reminder about what is and
what is not acceptable to post right next to the comment textbox. When I was
in grad school they used to remind students of the honor code before each and
every test, and apparently it reduced problematic behavior.

2) Posters in heated conversations care more about advancing their view than
keeping HN civil. You can't rely on the downvote system, because mean comments
that advance the "right" view will be upvoted regardless. You can't call them
out, because your thread will be one of many, and the damage is already done
by the time the comment is read.

They simply need to be deleted, and I don't see much deletion on HN.

3) there is a 99.9% chance a post is spam if it broadly criticizes the
behavior of HN as opposed to the person they are replying to. These posts
should also be removed.

4) For every topic of political contention, there is a group of people that
ONLY post about that topic. These people should be monitored closely. I don't
consider these posters to be participating in good faith--this is (or should
be) a community of tech people that occasionally talks politics. So if you
_only_ post about a particular political issue, and never about any
technology-related topics, one wonders if you are there just to advance your
political viewpoint. As an aside, these posters mostly come out of the
woodwork for gender-related topics, which I think are consistently the worst
category on HN in terms of comment quality.

5) we need a clearer idea of what is and what is not acceptable on HN.
Honestly I want to flag most of the political stories. I hate them. But I
don't, because I am afraid of losing the feature.

6) ignore people who whine about censorship. There are a ton of other forums
they can post on.

7) a more radical idea that I am less sure about: remove all political
stories, and make politics.ycombinator.com. The twist: make membership invite-
only. If someone is uncivil then it reflects poorly on the person who invited
them. This is, as far as I can tell, the only effective solution to stopping
uncivil discourse. When tensions are high, any amount of incivility can
trigger another user. The only way to stop this problem generally is to stop
it completely, there is no half way.

EDIT: to be completely clear: this advice really only applies to topics where
the posters on each side have what can only be described as religious devotion
to their point of view. Civil discussion requires humility, and there is
rarely humility in political discussions.

~~~
dang
Thank you for taking the time to make this highly thoughtful reply, which at
first sight looks excellent. I'm going to need time to re-read it and reflect
on it.

------
coldtea
A win for bigotry everywhere.

If we don't like your personal opinions we wont vote or back a proposition
against them -- we'll make you lose your job.

~~~
coldtea
> _Really? Is there a rash of this sort of thing going on that I don 't know
> about?_

Yes. How about the guy who lost his job for making a dongle joke, personally
to his friend at a conference that was overheard? (And, then the woman who
outed him on the internet lost her job too, again for reasons of public
reaction). And tons of other examples besides -- people calling for others to
get fired etc, because of their personal, not work related, opinions.

> _Or is it pretty much just Brendan Eich right now, reaping the consequences
> of expressing bigotry publicly?_

He never expressed "bigotry publicly". He privately backed a cause he believed
in (right or wrong) with a donation.

As for "reaping the consequences", for me this amounts to a lynching
mentallity that I'm uncofortable with.

If you don't like someone's opinions on civil rights, fight them in the court
of public opinion and/or voting.

~~~
dragonwriter
> He never expressed "bigotry publicly". He privately backed a cause he
> believed in (right or wrong) with a donation.

Political donations (at least, of the size Eich made) are public, otherwise,
this would never have been an issue.

~~~
judk
Public, but not at all connected to his work at Mozilla.

------
jypepin
So if someone doesn't think like the mass, he looses his jobs?

I find it sad, he definitely had views opposed to mines, but he definitely
would have done a great job as CEO at Mozilla...

------
codezero
see:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525198](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525198)

------
dmazin
It is somewhat interesting whether these links keep getting killed because
HN's response has been so wholly immature or for some other reason.

~~~
waterlesscloud
dang is specifically demoting and killing them.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7527229](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7527229)

I'll wait for his post on the topic to form a final opinion on that, but my
initial reaction is that it's wrong to bury a story of this magnitude in the
tech industry.

~~~
md224
> There is already a major thread on this topic, and it has already spent time
> on the front page. Anyone who wishes to participate in that thread is
> welcome to do so.

Is he saying that because a thread exists for a topic, anyone who wants to
discuss that topic needs to go and track down the buried thread? That doesn't
make a lot of sense to me.

If the community still wants to discuss something, why not let them? Why force
the discussion into a rarely-visited thread ghetto?

------
enupten
This is sad.

I know about Brendan Eich's views, but Mozilla is an organization devoted to
open source, none of whose concerns, as far as I can tell, have anything to be
with sexual minorities. Were he still the CEO, he really couldn't have used
his office to act on his views; so why all the castigating ?

He has a view, and sure a lot of us (including me) don't agree with him, but
this culture of outrage is disgusting.

~~~
benched
I don't think you and so many others would say the same thing if the issue was
inter-racial marriage, today. Is it _really_ so hard for people to get a
little bit _ahead_ of the progress curve for a change, instead of digging in
and dragging heels behind it? What is it that makes it so hard?

~~~
lolwutf
No, but the difficulty with which your personal viewpoint can be adopted is
not (nor should not) be the benchmark of his responsibilities as Mozilla's
CEO, which is what he is there for.

------
MWil
Quick question: Am I supposed to not be learning JavaScript because of him?

edit: apparently downvotes are being used instead of "no, that's silly" which
was really the point

~~~
judk
Not using JavaScript would be a personal sacrifice, which is well above the
slacktivism limits of trying to get someone fired from their job.

