Please review my recent comments on this post, which have been flag killed. If you believe they were fairly downvoted and deserve to be flagged, then please delete or permanently ban my account.
Trying to re-frame a discussion about the victimization of women to include offhand comments about men is not just off-topic but insensitive too. In the general case, you can't do that in any discussion where tensions are high without either doing it deftly and articulately or being quickly shouted down.
Out of all the topics that come up from time to time on HN, this one is pretty much unique in that there is strictly one point of view acceptable to put forward, and every other one is guaranteed to get you instantly flag-killed under the guise of "wanting high quality discussion". If I valued my Internet Points, I'd just steer clear of these altogether and go click through to a React vs. Angular discussion instead.
That's not true at all, as anyone who skims through the last few days' threads on the topic can easily see.
The one thing that ideologically committed HN readers all seem to agree on is that the community is full of (and the mods secretly in league with) their enemies. If you were in our shoes you'd find it as surreal as I do how consistently we hear this from all sides. The sincerity is similar in all cases, but obviously they can't all be right because their interpretations are opposite.
I don't think 'we must be doing things right if all sides are criticizing us like that'; that's a bad argument because the truth doesn't average out that way. But I do think that perceptions of the HN community and moderation are dominated by cognitive bias in way that makes it hard to have a clear conversation about it.
I'll second dang in saying this is not true (thanks dang for the moderation by the way, it really does help, even if no-one agrees with every decision). Here's an example of a viewpoint you probably think of as part of the orthodoxy being voted down and flagged:
There definitely is not only one viewpoint allowed on these threads, with others flagged or voted down.
The threads attract more flagging and up/down voting wars than usual, but the votes are not all one way, and frankly if anything I think the comments on HN on these threads are pretty male dominated and hostile to the women concerned, plenty of those comments are allowed to stand.
thaumaturgy|8 years ago
Zikes|8 years ago
[deleted]
ryandrake|8 years ago
dang|8 years ago
The one thing that ideologically committed HN readers all seem to agree on is that the community is full of (and the mods secretly in league with) their enemies. If you were in our shoes you'd find it as surreal as I do how consistently we hear this from all sides. The sincerity is similar in all cases, but obviously they can't all be right because their interpretations are opposite.
I don't think 'we must be doing things right if all sides are criticizing us like that'; that's a bad argument because the truth doesn't average out that way. But I do think that perceptions of the HN community and moderation are dominated by cognitive bias in way that makes it hard to have a clear conversation about it.
grey-area|8 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14677258
There definitely is not only one viewpoint allowed on these threads, with others flagged or voted down.
The threads attract more flagging and up/down voting wars than usual, but the votes are not all one way, and frankly if anything I think the comments on HN on these threads are pretty male dominated and hostile to the women concerned, plenty of those comments are allowed to stand.