Ask HN: How it Works: what do the Dave Winer threads tell us about sexism in IT?

[flootch]

In the past 48 hours there have been two threads "about" Dave Winer, and I think they have given us food for thought about the Hacker News Community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5744224

First, I recognize that in many ways, Hacker News was abusive of Dave Winer, and for that, I am sorry that we were abusive to any person. And I hope we can conduct this thread without any more such abuse to anyone.

I think the Dave Winer threads are the control in an ongoing experiment in Hacker Community Sexism.

And so I do wonder how it works: http://xkcd.com/385/

Significant themes in the two Dave Winer threads were:

    Dave Winer is a *blankety blank*
    I'm sick of hearing about Dave Winer
    Dave Winer is expected to suck it up when we tell him off
    Our behavior in telling Dave Winer off is just SOP for IT
    If Dave Winer complains, it just proves our point

In the past year, we've seen many similar incidents all around the Internet, and at Hacker News that work like this:

    Wow, IT is really sexist.

But when something very similar to these other incidents occurs to a man, it works like this:

    Wow, IT has a lot of jerks

So I wonder, if Dave was a woman, would either thread have gone down the rabbit holes? Would the same participants in each thread have behaved in the same way?

Substitute a woman's name for "Dave Winer"....

And would we be reading about Hacker News sexism today at Salon, Slate, The Washington Post, Reddit, Huffington Post, the Guardian, The New York Times, Jezebel, etc.?

Maybe we ignore our real problems by lumping individual misanthropic jerk behavior into a claim of collective misogyny. Perhaps people should stop projecting onto all of IT, the behaviors of a few.

[brudgers]

A blog would be a more suitable format for these opinions and speculations.

[redmarx]

It doesn't matter. Seriously, this is a ridiculous thread. Dave Winer is always a controversial topic. Know why? Because he's been severely caustic in the past, to many, many people.

Some people go to far, of course, and they only make Winer look like a victim. But Winer is only getting a backlash from the way he's acted the past 20 years.

So saying "would a woman receive the same abuse" is a useless question. It should be "would a woman that has attacked and abused and been generally a dick towards many people over the past 20 years" receive the same treatment.

Dave Winer has done some cool things in the past. He's also been an asshole for many years to many people. That's the truth, and saying that doesn't make me a hater, or a troll. Lastly, you're playing right into his hands. The more threads the more Winer loves it, and the more he can claim to be a victim.

[davewiner → redmarx]

If there was any truth to what you were saying you'd put your actual name on it, instead of creating disposable accounts.

One of the things they could do to make HN work better is to add a waiting period for new accounts.

Like buying a gun. You can't use the account for five days.

Maybe we can still have anonymity in the cases where whistle-blowers need to say something and be protected.

But hit and run comments like this one are what's poisoning this place.

[demachina → davewiner]

His anonymity and the truth of his statement have absolutely no correlation, not sure why you even think there would be a correlation.

You have a tendency of making people regret they ever get in to it with you so its not suprising a lot of people would prefer anonymity when getting sucked in to these little flame fests, lest they star in your next blog post.

Marissa Mayer for example made the mistake of meeting with you and you apparently made her angry or frustrated enough she walked out. Your response, years later, is to write a one sided account of it on your blog to try to make her look bad. It was one sided because you neglected to really describe what you said or how you said it, or accept that you might have been at least partially at fault for making her want to leave.

She may have done some calculus and deduced it was a no win for her. She stays in the meeting, listens to you, keeps her mouth shut and just gets angry. Or she gets in an argument with you which would have been even worse. By walking out she probably took the option with the fewest bad consequences. The way I see it you pretty much have two noble roads you can take in life:

- You can be abrasive, stick to your guns, and deal with the fact a lot of people aren't going to like you for it. You take this road you need to grow a skin thick enough to deal with it instead of whining and demanding everyone who is mean to you back be blocked. You might not be popular but there is honor in this tack.

- You can try to be nicer to people, especially people you dont agree with, and then its OK to expect people to be nicer to you in return. Its really easy to be nice to sycophants who agree with you all the time. That's what you do on your blog and Twitter all the time. It takes character to be nice to people who disagree with you and are willing to stick to their guns.

Or you can take the ignoble road you seem to take time after time. You go out of your way to abrasive, insulting and dismissive and slag people who disagree with you. Then when people slag you back, or walk out of the room rather than get in to it with you, or don't invite you to SXSW to speak, you whine about the fact people aren't being nice to you and expect everyone whose not being nice to you to be muzzled and ostracized.

Just some constructive criticism, please think about it. You have a lot of wisdom and technical brilliance. You would go much farther if you weren't hacking everyone off all the time. Its OK to hack people off once in a while when they really deserve it, but you do it all the time often for no reason.

[davewiner → demachina]

I am nice to people. Esp people who don't start out conversations saying personal and negative things about me. With that kind of beginning I either ignore them or defend myself.

Why I think anonymity correlates with cowardice? Because it does. Some things are just not worth arguing about.

[demachina → davewiner]

As an aside there is one tactic Scoble uses to deal with critics on Twitter and elsewhere. He actually retweets posts from people who are criticizing, filleting him and trolling him. It shows he has a thick skin.

Trolls WANT you to get angry. Since you do get angry nearly 100% of the time, it makes you ideal troll fodder. If you retweet criticism like Scoble does, and laugh it off, it completely neutralizes a lot of trolls.

[demachina → davewiner]

Exactly, unless people start off being nice, complimenting you, agreeing with you and telling you how great you are you shut them off, instantly. For as long as I've read your blog and twitter feed you simply will not have a conversation with anyone if they start out by disagreeing with you.

Your feed swings between wonderfully interesting and insightful and arrogant and galling. On a daily basis I debate whether your insights are worth having to wade through all the angst. So far I keep finding in favor of your wisdom and insight but its always close.

If you toned down the arrogant and galling parts you would be a much greater leader in the tech community, more people would listen to you, and you would probably be advancing your goal of an open web far faster than you are which would be a win win for everone. You seem to want to be a leader, but you don't want to adapt to the limitations that come with being a great leader, one that people want and like to follow.

You didn't say "anonymity correlates with cowardice". You said anonymity correlates with untruth. Those are too completely different things. Anonymity does correlate with "cowardice" thats why /. has called them anonymous cowards since the dawn of web time.

There can be a LOT of truth said under the cloak of anonymity. Do you think Bradley Manning was a "coward" and a liar for using Wikileaks to give him a shroud of anonymity when he was speaking truth to power in his way?

When dealing with a personality like yourself anyone who who criticizes you under their real name knows they are going to regret it. You are the one compelling people to speak to you anonymously because you don't accept criticism, you instantly block people rather than engage in dialog and you broadcast your grudges on your blog like you did with Marissa Mayer.

You have the luxury of being self employed, so am I. You can say whatever you want under your real name, as long as you are OK with the reputational damage yourself. People who work for other people can't if its going to explode in to a reputation damaging, and employment endangering, flame fest which is what happens to a lot of people who engage with you. Some people operate under different constraints in this world than you and you don't seem to recognize that.

Not sure why I'm still trying to engage in a dialog here. Chances are you stopped listing right after your last post. That is most definitely your style.

[879ijko → demachina]

Brilliant summary, well done sir.

[davewiner → demachina]

You misread my comment.

[demachina → davewiner]

Please expand.

I quite carefully read your comment about anonymity and truth, which suddenly morphed in to anonymity and cowardice when I called you on it.

I appreciate maybe I bent your meaning a little when you said you are nice to people except when they say "personal and negative" things about you. I bent it partially based on reading your Twitter feed and blog for years and seeing how you actually deal with people there.

Quick question, do you think the stuff you said about Marissa Mayer might be considered "personal and negative" by some people? If so why is it OK for you to say personal and negative things about other people, but not vice versa.

I should apologize for generalizing. I am sure you are nice to a lot of people. A lot of people seem to have a very high regard for you. You may be very nice in real life, I have no way to gauge that.

The issue at hand here is are you nice, or at least civil, to people if they disagree with you, especially online? Judging by comments on HN, you seem to have really viscerally angered a lot of people over the years. Why do you think that is?

[davewiner → demachina]

Maybe you just misunderstood. When I said I am nice to people who are nice to me, that doesn't mean they agree with me on everything or even most things.

I have a friend who is a Republican, and has many political views that I find abhorrent. However, he's an incredible thinker and doer when it comes to technology, and a great story-teller. I totally enjoy hanging out with him. I even like talking politics with him, and he seems like it too. Debating that kind of stuff with him is more about exercising my mind than emotions.

I am unusually interested in differing opinions, most people aren't. Some even think that if you disagree with them, that you are somehow disrespecting them, they take it personally. I am not one of those people.

So you've really got it wrong Mr or Ms DeMachina.

You might want to take a look at your process, because in this case it's yielded a very incorrect result. You could never debug a program the way you've tried to understand who I am.

About Marissa Mayer, I don't know her well enough to know how she takes criticism, and I have no idea how she felt about my piece. I got no response from her, nor did I expect one.

My purpose was to share some experiences I had with acquisitions, because that's what we, in the tech blogging world, were discussing that day. I wouldn't write that piece today or next week, unless there was a big buyout in an area that interested me.

I am a blogger. This is what bloggers do. If you don't like the way I blog, my guess that you probably don't like blogging much.

Anyway I don't try to be nice all the time in my blog posts, but I also dont' go out of my way to be not-nice. I really just want to explore stuff and share what I know.

[dodyg → redmarx]

I am tired of this bullshit 'Dave Winer' story. If you don't like his personality or his work, fine but there's no need to run around whinging about it.

He has been writing publicly for a long long time and it makes people think that we know him. Well I don't and you probably don't either. Give the guy the benefit of the doubt and stop psychoanalyzing everything that he writes.

[rcade → redmarx]

"Many, many people" is an understatement.

[davewiner → rcade]

I'm not even remotely in your league when it comes to pissing people off.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh8Wl37HYgQ

You're the popesquatter. ;-)

[rcade → davewiner]

True enough. I'm glad the world's 1.1 billion Catholics didn't hold a grudge.

[davewiner → rcade]

Yeah that can get kind of unpleasant. ;-)

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

[davewiner]

A few ideas for HN to cut down on abuse.

http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/may/aSuggestionForHackerN...

Dave

[jessaustin → davewiner]

I have a strong suspicion as to how you'll take this comment, but please note that "Jess Austin" is my actual name and this is not my first comment.

The problems you perceive with HN are not perceived as problems by many of its users. Since the solutions you suggest have been considered and rejected in the past, one may assume that the operators of the site have a similar opinion. As a user, your response to that reality can take a number of forms. You can simply stop paying attention to HN, and probably cut down on the stress in your life. You can escalate your posting of this sort of opinion, which will probably have a different result.

I suggest that you pause to reconsider your opinions. The "one-off flame" you cite reads like something else to me. It is simply a request for everybody to stop encouraging the submission of uninteresting material to HN. As evidence to back up the request, the poster offers the proposition that your behavior and communications have annoyed many people for many years. I'm sure there are people on Earth who would disagree with that proposition, but they don't post much on HN. I don't mean that to be a judgment of you or of your life, and I doubt that redmarx meant it as such either. HN still isn't a place you'll find much sugar-coating. redmarx's post is just the truth, stripped of all the bullshit that accompanies it in less Aspergian environments, with a bit of vulgarity thrown in for color.

There is probably a response to all of that which wittily acknowledges the inherent criticism while subtly undercutting it. Suffice it to say that you haven't found that response yet.

If you prefer fora in which anonymity is discouraged, please try Facebook or Google Plus.

Thanks for your work on RSS!

[davewiner → jessaustin]

If someone doesn't like the submission, why don't they just say that? Why bash me personally? I didn't submit the piece to HN. I wrote it on my blog. I didn't force anyone to read it.

[Mz]

And this matters why? Wrong is wrong. Does it matter why people were cretins? Does this do anything to help people behave better?

[Millennium → Mz]

It matters to the people they're cretins to.

People crave sense in the world around them, especially when it comes to the bad things that happen to them. When no sense is forthcoming, they will make their own sense of it, and the natural impulse is to assume that one was singled out for some reason, good or bad.

Does this help people behave better? Usually not. We aren't in one another's heads, which makes trying to reconstruct another person's thought processes a process only slightly more reliable than a shot in the dark. The usual outcome is a poor match between the victim's hypothesis and the perpetrator's actual thoughts, and when that happens, it's all too easily dismissed. End result: nothing changes.

[Mz → Millennium]

You have completely misunderstood my question. I think there is no value in this thought experiment that ponders "What if Dave Winer had been named Delores instead?" HN is not the genuine community I originally joined where respectful discussion occurred.

I am female. I think the community is less assholish than it used to be to women, though there is room for improvement. However, it is overall a lot more assholish. I participate less than I used to, in part because of things unrelated to HN but in part because of the degradation. This thought experiment does nothing constructive.

[bowerbird]

please stop talking about dave winer. at all. _please._

-bowerbird