
New York Times developers squabble over decision to doxx Scott Alexander - ALittleLight
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-slate-star-codex-doxxing-is-the-latest-squabble-inside-new-york-times
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aspenmayer
Do posts mentioning HN make anyone else feel like they’re in on the joke, in a
way? I get the same feeling when a movie title is mentioned in the movie. It
just feels nice.

> The Slate Star Codex incident set off a tense conversation in the Times’
> “newsroom-feedback” Slack channel, an internal message board in which staff
> have felt increasingly emboldened to criticize and raise questions about the
> paper and, inevitably, the work of their own colleagues.

> Following Alexander’s blog post, several non-editorial newsroom staffers
> from the paper’s tech and product teams asked why he was being “doxxed,” and
> pointed out that the blogger’s cause was gaining traction on the computer-
> science site _Hacker News_. Another non-editorial staffer said they flagged
> the not-yet-published story for the paper’s customer care department “in
> case this snowballs into a spike in cancellations.” [italics mine]

~~~
hanklazard
yes, and i also think the description as a "computer-science site" is
hilarious for some reason. maybe just that HN is so much more than that.

~~~
Balgair
Just be glad they don't call HN a 'deep dark message board where notorious
hackers and the Silicon Valley elite come to discuss politics and religion on
a global scale' or 'some weeb hacker site'

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cgriswald
> Several Times staffers pushed back, noting that the paper was not “doxxing”
> Alexander, as that term is widely used to describe situations where the goal
> of revealing a person’s identity is specifically to encourage harassment.

If ever there was proof that writing and reading comprehension are two
different skills.

~~~
e8e73ieurj
Considering that we're talking about professional writers, it seems really
unlikely that this argument was made with genuine sincerity rather than simply
out of need for a passable defense to give their peers. "That's not even what
doxxing means! You're being melodramatic!" sounds a lot better than "Who
cares? It's a small blog and we're the NYT".

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SheinhardtWigCo
I don’t know why any organization would want a Slack channel containing
thousands of people, let alone one that is specifically intended for people to
air grievances. Surely nothing good can come of that.

~~~
pjc50
Every organisation has a Slack channel (or similar) where grievances are
aired. It's a question of whether management want to have it where they can
see it or not.

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aspenmayer
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200626022626/https://www.theda...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200626022626/https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-
slate-star-codex-doxxing-is-the-latest-squabble-inside-new-york-times)

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raxxorrax
Well, if you talk about naming X and whether it is reasonable, the name of X
will be known to more and more people. So one side of the argument seems to
loose in any case. I do think it would be better to leave him pseudonymous, if
that is his wish. I can comprehend why telling a name is preferable for
writers to enable readers to check the story themselves, which gives the press
some credence. But I think the current climate would lead X to write
differently and perhaps less controversial. Pseudonymity or anonymity can be
very advantageous.

------
sincerely
Paywalled, outline.com doesn’t help

~~~
ALittleLight
Odd. It wasn't paywalled for me.

Does this work? [http://archive.is/Oj2qI](http://archive.is/Oj2qI)

~~~
aspenmayer
That site works fine as long as you don’t use Cloudflare for DNS. It’s
technical and opinionated at the same time[1]; I don’t have a side or stake in
it, but I found I couldn’t make archives on it or otherwise access this domain
while I was using Cloudflare DNS, so this is still happening as of a month or
so when I last tried it using the Cloudflare DNS iOS app[2]. Try it for
yourself. Set your DNS to 1.1.1.1 and try to visit your link.

Again, I’m not disagreeing with the archive.is stance either. I do think their
argument has merits; I just think this is a case of competing incentives for
archive.is and Cloudflare. Archive.is likely has reason to not want their
server or scraper IPs burned, or otherwise blocked by Cloudflare or associated
sites or users, anymore than archive.is would want to be blocked by any
domain; it’s counter to the purpose of the site, regardless of what site
operators may want. By that same token, Cloudflare has a financial and
business interest in doing what customers request of them, within their SLA
and product matrix. I don’t find either party’s position surprising, but I
don’t know where it goes from here, if anywhere.

DNS is an unwieldy holdover from a past era, but it’s what makes URLs _work_
for many use cases. Tested, functional software is a good thing, but so are
alternatives. This isn’t meant to be about DNS generally, just about archiving
services, I guess, and how hard it is to find the good ones we have, as well
as create new ones.

Maybe things like Web3Torrent[3] can bridge this gap?

[1] on HN (2019)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317)

[2] [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/1-1-1-1-faster-
internet/id1423...](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/1-1-1-1-faster-
internet/id1423538627)

[3] [https://blog.statechannels.org/introducing-
web3torrent/](https://blog.statechannels.org/introducing-web3torrent/)

------
throwawaysea
> While some employees debated the Slate Star Codex decision on Tuesday, one
> staffer also raised issues about opinion staff editor Bari Weiss, saying
> that when she posted on Twitter about her dismay over the anger about
> Cotton’s column, she “straight up lied about a nonexistent battle within the
> new york times because she knew it would be a juicier tweet.”

Wow so this staffer manufactured false outrage using social media to incite a
staff mutiny and get a colleague fired? This matches what friends have seen
with purposeful leaks in tech companies that seek to invite pressure from a
captive twitter outrage machine. It seems these tactics are in common
widespread use. Or maybe common at least in left-leaning cities/organizations
- I am not personally aware of brazen actions to harness Internet outrage like
this elsewhere.

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mondaygreens
I think you've misread; the referenced tweet is about _dismay over_ the anger
that got the colleague fired.

