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Deleting the golang subreddit (groups.google.com)
358 points by sacado2 on Nov 25, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 367 comments



This response seems knee jerk to me - the actions of Reddit's CEO were made public and the backlash was considerable. As long as we're not running on fully distributed communication services the idea of fully impartial site owners remain hypothetical. I mean: the complaint itself had to be posted/linked on a Google service, another company that I guess should be shunned for being embroiled in various unrighteous actions. Not feasible or reasonable in my opinion.


This is about trust.

If a space where a community gathers isn't trusted, core members of that community are going to want to leave.

Trust is delicate. Trust is giving someone the power to do harm you or to misuse what you have given them, in the belief that they will not do those things.

The trust has been shattered, and probably only the core members currently realise this. Those are the users for whom "this is our voice, this is what we've said" is important.

It is really sad that the trust has been broken, but there you have it. If key people in any community believe that their words (which are their reputation) can (will) be edited, misrepresented... then there really is a problem.

The worst-case logical conclusions are legal liability, the best case is stress and friction caused by confusions and mis-truths.

I run forums, I know this is about trust, I've seen it played out.

When I designed the forum software for the sites I run I made the database an append-on-write system to store historical revisions of every comment. I can't display those (if a user edited something to remove something that had legal/personal implications then they should not be public) but I do store them and provide no moderator any access to edit them.

Trust is really important. This isn't, as others suggest, petty.


Look, you can ramble all about your 'trust'. But the fact is that the community on Reddit still trust Reddit. They're not asking to shut down the subreddit. It's the moderators in power, who use google groups instead of Reddit, who want to shut the subreddit down.


Ironically you're both in agreement without knowing it. Yes, trust is important and yes, the 'community on Reddit' still trust Reddit.

The bulk of Reddit users don't mind that spez had a momentary lapse of judgement and corrupted some r/The_Donald stuff. They find it amusing; left to them r/The_Donald would have been nuked long ago on the way to making Reddit into the sort of safe space echo chamber they want. The fact that spez had a little fun with it just affirms that he's on the right side of that mentality and secures his trust among these people. They're not proud that one of theirs has been caught so embarrassingly, but he's on their side so it's easy to forgive.


This reaction seems a little overwrought, but then again the frequency of this kind of drama generated by reddit really seems to be pathological.

What is it about a critical mass of people in one place on the web that causes these kinds of behaviors?


It's Brad and a couple of others who are to blame here, the golang subreddit didn't do shit to deserve being killed.


> It's a wretched hive of scum and villainy. The Go subreddit was the only thing similar to human and it is downright painful most of the time.

How lucky that their group happens to be the good one!


The person who made this comment in the mailing list appears to have been made a moderator of subreddit 9 days ago...


It's this line of thinking that makes me question their logic in suggesting this action.


Their motivation for leaving Reddit is incredibly silly. Especially given that Google Groups -- of all things -- is their preferred alternative.


I was the one who proposed deleting /r/golang.

Google Groups is not my preferred alternative by any means. Google Groups is a 1990's webmail interface to crappy but federated SMTP.

There is very little to like about it, but at least the underlying protocol (SMTP) is federated.

It is NOT an alternative to Reddit, which has a nice UI & voting system.

It's unfortunate that Reddit is not a reliable platform which can be trusted.

If Github were modifying our code for their own amusement we wouldn't trust them for a platform either.


Did Reddit modify your content? Was the CEO's action in anyway suggestive that he would pose an actual risk to the Go community? Because I'm seeing a theoretical and unlikely risk as opposed to one that's something about which to worry.

I think this is an overreaction. If Google were found to be manipulating search results, would that be cause to leave Google? If Google were collecting information in a means inconsistent with user privacy agreements would that be cause to leave? How about Google collecting wifi data in violation of several countries' laws? (To be fair, the wifi issue is a fact the others are just hypotheticals.)

My point is if we are becoming self righteous about the CEO of Reddit doing something stupid, must we also maintain similar outrage when Google does something illegal or unethical as well?

We might run out of internet if we disengaged every time a company did something stupid.

The question that really should be asked: is this an ongoing pattern of behavior that harms users or is this just a knee-jerk bout of self-righteousness?


You're overreacting.

The CEO of reddit edited a few posts, after having been sent masses of hate mail, then backed it out and apologized. You cannot seriously think there's any chance he'd do the same to /r/golang; there's little chance he'll do it again at all.


> You're overreacting.

While I agree deleting the subreddit is excessive, I think you're downplaying it. Reddit has increasingly censored more and more content that the admins disagreed with (rightly or wrongly). Now they've taken it a step further and started to modify content they disagree with. If this was early on in reddit's history and they made the modifications as a joke then it wouldn't be a big deal, but the CEO modifying posts seen by probably 10s of thousands of people (that subreddit has 300k very active subscribers) is a huge slip down the slippery slope. I mean, think what your reaction would be if I misquoted you at the top, and I'm just a random user quoting you, not an admin actually changing what you said.


Let me make something very clear - your threats are irrelevant. Anything you try to do will be quickly reversed or replaced. In fact there are already replacement reddits in place.


> Google Groups is a 1990's webmail interface to crappy but federated SMTP.

You put the word 'crappy' in the wrong place. Google Groups is a crappy webmail interface to federated SMTP.

Hundreds of Googlers, during a dozen years, never managed to get SMTP or NNTP right, whereas many clients written by single independant developpers were at the same time more fully featured, more reliable and more respectful of standards and good pratices of interoperability. For many years, Google Groups was to NNTP/mailing lists web interface what Outlook was to mail clients. The difference is that after those many years, Outlook improved a bit.


can you tell me why you want to punish users of your language - normal people - because politics? how that does make you better than u/spez? i'd argue this is worse.


Defending the liberal Reddit CEO on the liberal HN site.


As I've said before, there are more than enough willing community members to moderate the subreddit in the absence of the Go team. No reason for it to have been brought up like this, instead of a simple "I don't like reddit anymore, so I'm deleting my account and here's why"


The CEO edited comments critical of him.

Did that happen in the golang subreddit?

If so, those comments should in fact be deleted entirely. Criticizing the CEO of Reddit is not topical in a golang subreddit; it is off-topic trolling.


I think even saying the comments were critical gives them too much credit. He edited comments that were harassment to, childishly, redirect them to other people. But this is small potatoes really.

Reddit has multiple faces; if you're in your technology subreddit you exist in another world from all the literally crazy drama and harassment that goes on. Running reddit is not likely to be a pleasant experience anymore.


This seems like an extremely silly move.

Reddit can broadly be partitioned into a small number of very popular "front page" subs, such as /r/TIL, /r/AskReddit, and /r/news, where drama and toxicity abound, and a vast number of topical subs (such as /r/golang), where discussion is focused on a specific topic, and generally friendly, civil, and useful.

I'm not a fan of the front page myself, although usually for reasons unrelated to the recent drama. But with a nicely curated set of subreddit subscriptions, I find the site to be a nice collection of news and discussion that interests me.

Hopefully the golang community shows some maturity and doesn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.


I thought it was a joke but I realize they are seriously considering doing this.

Overreaction much?

People want to talk about Go, regardless of how the Go team feels about reddit's ethics. I'm not sure what doing this will serve except lead to the creation of another Go subreddit that's no longer moderated by the Go team.

Really su2rprised and disappointed by bradfitz and team's childish (over)reaction to this.


Always Overreact!!11one. Seriously I expect a bit more by people that for work apply logic everyday.


Weren't they (Golang core team) only recently considering removing golang from StackOverflow like they own the thing?

It seems like a pattern of trying to enforce the unenforceable.


Simple question.

What happens if spez modifies comments you put on Reddit in the ancient past to make you seem like a Racist, ISIS supporter, Homophobe, or simply puts threats to various heads of state in your name?

Can you really trust him not do to so? What if one day he decides that golang is bad because they are badmouthing something that spez really likes?


Go through the comment histories of frequent posters to /r/The_Donald .

It would be extremely hard to make any of them look 'bad'. They relish being as... deplorable as possible.


What about my comments? I am not from that sub, but what if spez decides to do something to my 5 year old reddit comments just because he doesn't like that I am criticizing him?

Have you every commented on Reddit? If so, now it could be a threat on the life of a head of state and the investigation could greatly complicate your life just because you ticked off spez.



As mentioned by others in the thread, deleting it would just make it possible for someone to take it over the open it again. Setting the community to private not only solves the issue, but it allows them to bring it back in its current state at any time if they wish to in the future.


What issue does it solve exactly? the users want to keep using it, only Brad and a couple others want to kill it.


The issue of investing time in a language which prefers to push a political agenda at the expense of alienating their community.


Even if they effectively delete /r/golang or close it while retaining control so others can't use it, the users will just create another one. I doubt it will have a large impact on the future of golang on Reddit, it will just get rid of years of discussion and make it slightly more difficult to use. You don't want to use Reddit? Cool, don't. There are still millions who do want to use it and some might use that to find information on golang.


> I would argue that a moderator shutting down a community of 25,000 individuals because of their own personal opinions is just as much if not the greater abuse of power. (blitzd)

This is emblematic of what's wrong with so many subreddits and so much of the social web that comes in the form of "forums" -- it seems like we have entire generations of users who have associated the totalitarian nature of forums with things being "advanced" on the internet.

Social media isn't mostly about free thought, free speech, and free inquiry anymore. Nowadays, it's mostly about the rapid dissemination of conformity. Woe betide you if you actually have a nuanced opinion that doesn't fit neatly with either side of an issue. Your fellow posters/commenters will reject their pattern-match and call you a liar and 5th columnist for the other side.

Technology came and killed the impulse towards freedom. It taught people through repeated iteration that conformity to the mob was the highest good. It taught smart people that wrangling their way into positions of centralized power to exercise authoritarian rule was the insider move. It taught everyone that suppression of anything that you didn't like was the winning move. It was called the internet.


How about we let the drama stay in the drama subreddits, and in the non-drama subreddits we act like adults.

For fuck's sake, not everything in life has to be a cause.


This guy should be applauded. Here's why: He made a mistake by making a childish response to a childish attack and then he admitted fault.

That's so rare. I wish more CEOs had his backbone.

I'm sorry to be inflammatory, but it seems like people take reddit a little too seriously and this is the real world not /r/relationships. It's probably not time to: "lawyer up, hit the gym, delete /r/golang".


Why pollute HN with reddit drama? Aren't we all glad to have left reddit behind?


Now would be an awesome time for reddit to add support for signed posts and comments.


The reddit admins allow subreddits that loudly promote white supremacism. Comment editing is not the most pressing ethical failing of that site.


Why is the initial reaction to delete the sub instead of find a new owner?


I know people are talking again about a distributed (blockchain-based?) forum preventing problems like this, and once that happens it will make "message forgery" like this a lot harder. But a "low-tech" solution in the mean time would be for users to post a public-key under their username/account. Then when they publish a message, they include a private-key encrypted SHA256 hash of the contents of their post and append that to their message (in effect, signing it). Other users' client-side tools (say browser plugins) could pick up the hash, verify the message and indicate the message is authentic. Forging the public key or an already posted message would raise an alert for automated tools, other users and/or the poster. Would reduce the need to log all message contents, just the keys. Of course, does not prevent message deletions but that is under moderation scope anyway. Just a sketch.


There's Bitmessage[1] but it needs a lot of work before it could replace Reddit.

[1] - https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page


So, reddit actively continues to be a playground for fascists, racists, and sexists, has a history of hosting borderline child pornography, but what drives the golanger in question to finally leave is spez had a bit of a temper tantrum (with some of said fascists I might add) and edited some posts harassing him?

Some people's values are utterly alien to me.


Here's the thing. I read the whole pizzagate vs reddit thing and decided it was interesting in the "let me please think about it in a few years time" kind of way. There's rights and wrong and subtleties but fuck it. I've got more important things to worry about.

If I was a Go dev now I'd be furious because this bizarre incestuous little drama suddenly is affecting my actual working day (assuming the golang subreddit is a viable community).

I recently became active on the Django subreddit because it seemed more approachable than the main IRC or Google Group. If that suddenly got vanished because of subreddit drama I'd be fairly annoyed.

Can we just have a separate room for the children to play in?


Spez edits comments directed at him in a toxic community that has been pretty much the root of the alt-right echo chamber for the last year.

I'm just sad he didn't delete the entire sub.

/r/golang can do what they like, but this is no reason.


Leave it to them to make themselves out to be the victims even though constant username pinging is considered harassment on reddit. (to say nothing of the content of the comments themselves...) The funny part is that if spez is deposed, he was likely the last one fighting against their sub's removal. The same thing happened in the past with Ellen Pao . According to Yishan Wong (another ex-CEO):

> Ellen had to take over (I'm not sure she wanted to, but she was the only one) and the board wanted her to just ban all those subreddits but she had been around long enough to know that you can't just do that (they'll just spring up again) so she resisted. (https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/58zaho/the_...)

> on at least two separate occasions, the board pressed /u/ekjp to outright ban ALL the hate subreddits in a sweeping purge. She resisted, knowing the community, claiming it would be a shitshow. Ellen isn't some "evil, manipulative, out-of-touch incompetent she-devil" as was often depicted (https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3dautm/conte...)


Aside from the valid point and the little drama involved, the more important point is that reddit just lost its safe harbor protection over that issue, which means it will be either closed down soon (too expensive and risky) or heavily censored with only a few subreddits, which means golang sooner or later might need to find another place. So better look now.

https://twitter.com/infinitechan/status/801627024431271936


That's nonsense. Safe harbor can apply to some parts of a site even if the owners of the site exercise editorial control over some of it. Google has both curated/edited content and user generated content, YouTube has both, facebook has both, newspaper websites have both, WordPress.com has both.

It is not a switch that gets flipped for the entire website when one editorial action happens somewhere on a website, and it exhibits total lack of understanding of the safe harbor provisions to suggest it is.


Oops not, apparently too many conspiracy folks involved.

https://np.reddit.com/r/law/comments/5eq9tl/what_does_it_mea...

It looks like it lost it accidently on the same date. A technicality.


PLEASE don't force me to use google groups more then I have to!


Well, being a lurker in /r/golang for about 8 months now has shown me that the official team was always looking for a way to clear out the reddit community. They have a strict moral police and do some weird shit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/59nk46/stalking_peo...


Wiping away a massive trove of contextualized historical discussion and even technical content, particularly one about a widely used open source project, is sickening and in my eyes is so much worse than what anyone at reddit did I am shocked that someone would even propose it much less that other people on this mailing list were not only willing to consider it but seem to actively support the idea.


That's fine. I'm not on any mailing lists but I am subscribed to the golang subreddit. I guess this means I will just not stay up to date with whats going on.

Edit: https://www.quora.com/What-are-examples-of-Google-acting-une...

Perhaps we should close down the google groups too?


This is the oddest consequence of the pizzagate thing I could have dreamed of.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/fact-check-this...


It would be nice if a usenet newsgroup like comp.lang.golang existed and all posts made to the golang subreddit could be reposted there.

Then, IMO, deleting the golang subreddit would be a non-issue. The newsgroup doesn't have to be moderated and, if one wants moderation, they can do it via the newsreader program.


I don't understand the argument that this is outrageous and there should be auditing and all of that. How do you know there isn't? How do you know new policies will come into place that prevent this?

Jumping ship less than a week after it seems crazy to me.


Classic reddit drama: reacting to a childish action with even more childish actions.


Surely it should be for Google to suggest and the community to decide?


Since the golang community was originally independent, and then the golang owners took it over, instead of deleting it, they should return it to the community with a disclaimer it's not an official venue.


I totally understand the reason, but deleting a subreddit just hurts the community more than it hurts reddit.

Working on an alternative to reddit and then dropping reddit once that one works may be a solution.


I think that the CEO of Reddit should step down. I believe that the odds of him getting caught for this were very small - So that begs the question; how many times did he pull this off in the past without anyone noticing?

The almost unnoticeable subtlety of the act is what I find most disturbing. It's not that the act was abominable (it could be worse). It's just that this position demands higher ethics than that - It needs someone with the right motivations.

I think people are too easy on CEOs; if a regular employee messes up, they get fired. Why doesn't this apply to executives?

We should be much tougher on executives... It's not like they'd lose their house or their family if they got fired.


I never liked the /r/golang subreddit and its atmosphere. But at the moment it's the most active golang community that I'm aware of.


Lets just remove left-pad from npm while we're at it again


E̶l̶l̶e̶n̶ ̶P̶a̶o̶ Spez should step down!


That is quite an immature thing to do.


Not a problem. They can write their own Reddit in Go, with blackjack, etc.


Yes. Let's delete our accounts from Google for Google's unfair treatment of protonmail and yelp in yesteryears. Let's get off Facebook for fake stories swinging elections. Don't even get me started on Microsoft, just get off it.

Get off everything. Everything sucks


Sounds funny to me, because I'm avoiding Google, Facebook and Microsoft products when it isn't way too problematic, and I do it because of political/moral reasons not in the last place.

I'm not saying I agree with r/golang deletion, by the way. Surely this is stupid and inadequate, as reddit it made out of drama anyway. But getting off something you don't agree with in general is quite noble, I'd say.


I think it is time to sign comments, that way these will be tamper proof.

Regarding the subreddit, I would just leave it. It was hard work of the community to create content that exist there and it will not be nice to remove it just because of some immature CEO.

But once suitable alternative comes to the light, would be nice to disallow further posts and add a redirect to the new community.


Quite frankly, reddit has way bigger problems than that. I mean, do what you want with your subreddit, no skin off my back. But it is borderline insane to me that this is what is turning people against it. Ignominious.


HN moderators absolutely edit user content without notice or attribution.

My comments are partly authored by dang, but you will not be able to tell which words are mine and which are not.


That is false. Coincidentally, we just banned your account for chronic abuse of this site, but seeing this certainly solidifies that decision.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13038244 and marked it off-topic.


Can you provide examples? I'd like to know what types of things they edit.


It's quite untrue.

I can think of a single example where we edited a user's comment without them asking us to, and it happened a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13012176. As you can see, I posted what we did and why. The alternative would have been to kill the comment outright.

Edit: my conscience reminds me that I've also edited several spelling mistakes over the years. That was mostly when I was filling in for pg.


Given what I've seen of your behavior (and sctb's) on HN, I didn't think my parent would be able to come up with any. I generally push back against apparently baseless accusations (which is what I assumed in this case) by asking for evidence.


Thank you. That's a good approach to take, because if people do provide specific links, we can look into what happened and explain it. Grand accusations about HN moderation are nearly always without specific examples, which I suppose is a kind of evidence in its own right.


The CEO of Google was busted by his emails for conspiring to suppress wages.

WikiLeaks recently released a 2014 email[1] from Eric where he appears to conspire with the Clinton campaign/dnc to have "low paid permanent employees".

[1] https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/37262

E: bots are out?


We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13037590 and marked it off-topic.


Wow, you're back and altering my content again?

How is the sub thread not relevant?

It was a direct, positive example of what the person I replied to claimed.

At least make an actual claim, dang.

Edit: and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13037766 still stands

#comedysite


Since many attempts to convince you to use this site as intended have failed, we've banned your account.

If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.


More like acquiescing to Apple's demands that Google do that, and they did quite actively, but not at his/Google's initiation. Which doesn't change the crime that much.

The greater point is that the CEO of a company with digital user assets, let me call them, can be thoroughly evil, while company policy and enforcement keeps his hands from directly tampering with those assets.

Silently changing someone's postings is one of the vilest betrayals of trust a platform can commit, the only worst I can think of is forging new ones out of whole cloth, and if that happens without major changes resulting in the company, that says a great deal about it as a whole, and whether you should have any dealings with it, especially seeing as such assets have been used to criminally convict people, and specifically one Rowan O'Connell for this company.


Your text is nearly white within 19 minutes of being posted.

It's obvious HackerNews is not safe--from certain people.


It's plainly off-topic, and the worst kind of off-topic tangent: the kind that makes a thread even more generically political.


CEO of Google emails being used in a court of law to secure a negative outcome for Google, is off-topic in a sub thread about the CEO of Google being able to edit Google emails and other data?

Did Eric challenge the authenticity of the emails? I've never heard him do so.

I now understand why you couldn't specify in what way my comment was "off-topic".


More likely it's because the comment has nothing to do with editing users' content — unless it's meant to suggest that someone else faked Eric Schmidt's email (from the time 5+ years ago when he was CEO of Google) to incriminate him.


The comment has everything to do with editing content. Schmidt was effectively convicted on the content of his emails. I don't think Schmidt was able to edit an email used in that case.

It is a positive example of what the poster I responded to was claiming.

Additionally, this CEO (now of Alphabet) has continued to engage in seemingly illegal behavior over Google email. I'm not aware of Eric disputing any of these allegations, even though I have confronted him on them multiple times.


Then you should have made it clear what you meant because your post looks like a completely offtopic rant.


Perhaps you thought that.

Others saw something different.


  > Additionally, this CEO (now of Alphabet)
You seem to be mixing up Eric Schmidt and Larry Page. People have seen them in the same room together.


What illegal behavior is that?


The broader topic is about some golang moderators not wanting to associate with a company because of that company's actions. The downvoted comment simply extends the reasoning to other areas. It's pretty relevant imo.


And was supplanted with a fake news story about a fictional character?


[flagged]


Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. This is like a poster child of that.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13037254 and marked it off-topic.


> Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. This is like a poster child of that.

Dang it[1], I strenuously disagree. I didn't post some 'generic ideological tangent'; I just mentioned the first two things which leapt to mind as indicators that our industry is silly. I could have mentioned Adria Richards, Marco Ament or Jon Gruber, but those didn't come to mind first.

My point — and I think it's a serious one — is that our industry takes itself far too, and undeservedly, seriously. Choosing to shut down a well-operating group over the misbehaviour of the host site's CEO (and it is serious misbehaviour: my opinion is that he should resign or be fired) is, IMHO, among those silly things done from a sense of inflated seriousness.

[1] Couldn't resist the pun; I'm sure it's not original


> this is an industry in which a CTO would fire an employee for using proper English[0]

I disagree with this being a fireable offense, but I read the post and this wasn't about using "proper" English, since both pronouns were correctly used. It was about using unnecessary gendered pronouns when a neutral one would be more inclusive (i.e. it's wrong to consider the user a "he"). Again, firing would be an overreaction in my opinion, but the neutral pronoun is equally correct from an English language perspective, and should be the default in my opinion.


> the neutral pronoun is equally correct from an English language perspective

The neutral pronoun in English is 'it,' and using it to refer to a human being is always wrong.

The use of singular they is in a few contexts correct, but in many more contexts incorrect. The use of 'he-or-she' is inelegant and incorrect, and the use of generic she is less incorrect than silly.

Seriously, this is remarkably silly. 'Girl' in German is a neutral word, but no-one would say that German girls think of themselves as genderless. 'He' in English is normally the correct word to use generically; no-one sane would say that English-speakers think everyone is male.

(for that matter, the English word 'man' actually is genderless: the English word for a male human being is 'were,' as in werewolf — it's cognate to Latin 'vir')


Yes, I meant "indefinite", not neutral.

You're incorrect about the use of singular they, though: it's both correct in many contexts and widespread. See: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/they

"USAGE ALERT

Long before the use of generic 'he' was condemned as sexist, the pronouns 'they', 'their', and 'them' were used in educated speech and in all but the most formal writing to refer to singular indefinite pronouns or singular nouns of general personal reference (which are often not felt to be exclusively singular): If anyone calls, tell them I'll be back soon. A parent should read to their child.Such use is not a recent development, nor is it a mark of ignorance. Shakespeare, Swift, Shelley, Scott, and Dickens, as well as many other English and American writers, have used they and its related case forms to refer to singular antecedents. Already widespread in the language (though still rejected as ungrammatical by some), this use of they, their, and them is increasing in all but the most conservatively edited American English [...]"


"There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me As if I were their well-acquainted friend" - Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors

If it's good enough for Shakespeare it's good enough for me.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neu... for some examples of times avoiding singular they makes the sentence sound silly or ungrammatical.

"The average American needs the small routines of getting ready for work. As he shaves or blow-dries his hair or pulls on his panty-hose, he is easing himself by small stages into the demands of the day."

"... everyone will be able to decide for himself whether or not to have an abortion."


The English word for male human certainly isn't 'were'. It might have been some time in the long past, by in sure less than 5% of people know that now.

Language evolves (yes, I know that's a cheesy thing to say). I think many people do assume "he" is referring to a male -- there certainly seems to be a growing group week want to remove it's use in non-gendered context.


> The neutral pronoun in English is 'it,' and using it to refer to a human being is always wrong.

Absolutely not. It's perfectly valid to use "it" to designate an unborn baby, for example. Another example: "The person, who asked to remain anonymous, said they would press charges".

"it" and "they" have long been valid use cases of pronouns in the English languages and all its flavors (British, American, ...).


"Singular they" is just as valid English as "singular you".


You argue that gendered pronouns are proper English? Sure, but non-gendered pronouns are also proper English.

Given both options why do you feel insistence of gendered pronouns is a positive thing?


Singular they is just as much proper English as generic he. If both are correct why not use the one that minimizes offense?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Usage


> Singular they is just as much proper English as generic he.

In the right contexts, sure — but singular they is not a drop-in replacement for generic he, and using them identically is incorrect.


First of all, Cantrill does not say anywhere that they should be used identically. Second, I'm not sure they cannot be used in a similar way. For example, Wikipedia cites this sentence, "If a person is born of a ... gloomy temper ... they cannot help it," from 1759.



Non-native English speaker here. I’m defaulting to “they” or “one” unless it’s someone whose gender is known and is one of the two widely recognized today. Does that actually fall under incorrect usage of English pronouns?


No, it's correct English and has a long history of use and appears in famous writings.

>The singular they had emerged by the 14th century and is common in everyday spoken English, but its use has been the target of criticism since the late 19th century. Its use in formal English has increased with the trend toward gender-inclusive language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they


Thanks for linking. According to Wikipedia it does seem that in American English gender-neutral “they” is a bit of a touchy subject, in that some people and style guides find it unacceptable, so I took note of that. I’ll keep using “they” though, genderless speech is a neat language feature (and it just doesn’t sound wrong to me in English, like gendered pronouns do sometimes).


Here's a better link

http://www.npr.org/2016/01/13/462906419/everyone-uses-singul...

Basically singular they is used by everyone because it sounds and feels natural in many contexts. It's only a touchy subject when people assume you are using it to be "politically correct."

Style guides are changing, Washington Post just changed theirs to allow singular they.


No, you are using the pronouns correctly.


> Bryan Cantrill stated in 2013 that Joyent will fire any employee who uses English pronouns correctly: https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

He did not. He wrote, "to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense" (emphasis in original).

First, this is very different from "using English pronouns"; you're free to use whatever pronouns you like, but rejecting someone else's use on principle would be a fireable offence.

Second, use of gendered pronouns is not the correct way of using English pronouns, and so the principle in question is incorrect (and, according to Cantrill at least, suggests an ulterior motive that is at the core of his declaration). Use of singular "they" emerged in 14th century, and was in common until late 19th century (which, just as a reminder, suffered from a very polar view of gender roles) when use of the generic "he" was encouraged. Mandating the generic "he" is, therefore, the more recent change, and there's nothing to say this recommendation cannot be reversed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they


Is there any proof that the request was rejected because Ben was "on principle" against neutral pronouns? His comment nicely states "not interested in trivial commits", which is a perfectly reasonable rejection, especially since the commit was possible not done in good faith but rather politically motivated.


They wanted to fire someone that wasn't even their employee.

Since that I've recommending against them.


meh


I fear the collective idiocy of the United States populace is reaching dangerous levels.


Comments on any given internet forum are of no specific importance or authority, which is part of the lesson. This "question" is a non-event. Sheesh.




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