Item — HN Reader

> oh shit it's hacker news I've heard that people from the orange VC site are linking to this post! You are absolutely not welcome here. Cohost is not a place for you. you are bad and you hang out with white supremacists. please leave.

Is this an attempt at humor (in which case, I don't get it), or is the author serious?

11 comments

HN at least definitely has a Bay Area libertarian bro-ey vibe in a lot of corners of the internet. I think the white supremacist part is up to your interpretation but the intent behind it is serious, at least.

Helps that the posts on HN are largely technical so discussions are generally politically neutral, but any time a political post that isn't even remotely relevant to tech or VC shoots to the top, the worst takes and sometimes downright bigotry will break loose and flood the comments. Most of them do get caught eventually with downvotes/flags/moderator action, but often the damage has been done as they remained visible for far too long.

My take is that political discussion/disagreements on HN are often avoided/stamped out, to prevent it taking over the site. If anything stands out about HN politically vs. the rest of the internet, it's mostly a "we don't talk about politics here" vibe.

However, when political discussion does happen, I tend to see a very wide diversity of political opinions on HN. There's a decent number of users who are generally against any sort of feminism, LGBTQ, anti-racist views, quite alt-right feeling, and there's a decent amount of overlap between those views and libertarians. However, there's also plenty of people with very opposite opinions, very left wing, pro feminism, pro LGBTQ activism, pro anti-racist activism, etc. Kinda like Reddit, you get all ends of the political spectrum. It does have probably the most "Bay Area libertarian bro-ey vibe" of any online community I spend significant time in, and while I'm personally not a fan of that viewpoint, I also think it's only one of many viewpoints on this site.

I've encountered the odd bit of really nuts racism that doesn't get moderated/removed, even if flagged (example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31722179), but that's rare, and I think that more falls through the cracks vs. dang literally being a white supremacist.

While I have seen a lot of it on the site, dang seems pretty willing to push back directly in a comment, or hellban such users (or uphold the hellbanning on review, I don't know how much is automatic).

My understanding is that comments and submissions can be flagged to death by users, but "hellbanning" -- that is, marking a user such that all of their future comments and submissions are dead by default -- is a manual action by dang or other moderators.

Accounts can be auto-killed via sufficient flags, plus some computational scoring I suspect.

I'll see and report spam accounts. The usual response is that those already were autokilled, or were killed shortly after I emailed (and prior to the moderators' response).

You'll also see dang occasionally commenting on autoflagged "green" (new) accounts. E.g.:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23686501>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638699>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22377470>

An overview of how/when accounts are killed and what notice is given is here:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21082164>

Huh my impression was always that the Bay Area is one of the least libertarian areas of the US, and the biggest ideological clashes on HN tend to come from the Valley startup scene views colliding with the rest of the world in an open forum. See how much wailing and gnashing of teeth there is over AI safety in the Californian startup scene, in which safety gets defined as a fear that an AI might talk like or have the views of normal people.

hackernews have a tendency to be very, very, very convinced that they're right, are smarter than other people, and that other people's lived experiences are irrelevant. Part of it is the common assumption that if you're smart in one area then you're somehow smart in all areas; for example, consider doctors like Ben Carson. Part of it is that many people in tech are on the spectrum or have underdeveloped social skills. Part of it is that one moderator can't possibly moderate everything as fast as on other forums. Part of it is that many people in tech are downright rich compared to most people. Part of it is that technically-minded people have more aggressive debating styles in order to get to the core of an argument and uncover the correct answer or solution faster, which can be very offputting to those not used to it

Some examples are any threads where the author uses nonstandard pronouns, such as this one from a few hours ago. Some people have terrible takes, and the proportion of them compared to places like for example reddit is higher https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34446673

Anywhere which allows diversity is going to allow opinions you despise. Otherwise 1) it's not diversity or 2) you don't despise anything. Conclusion: Hacker News is more diverse than @arborelia. (Whether that's a good thing is up to you.)

It has become unfortunately common for people to brand others with whom they don't fully agree as bigots.

I don’t read any indications of humor, and I expect they’re serious, given the topic.

Made me not read the article... oh well HN comments are usually better anyway.

Yeah that's the first I've heard of that one. Turn deleted comments on and you'll see a fair number of people banned for racism.

This is very serious.

JWZ also provides some very colorful images if you link to his site from here. I think "techbro man children" is his commentary.

And from Twitter before the fall, HN was known for alt-right hard libertarian hypercapitalist hellscape.

So having this person be hard negative here is not at all surprising.

Calling me a bad person because I occasionally interact with Hacker News is pretty surprising though. Nevermind her implications that I would be racist as well.

As much of a childish reaction as I feel her response is because she saw HN in site stats, I instantly won't read won't she wrote because of that.

Oh that's totally normal for people like that. There is an ambient assumption that everyone other than them is an empty vessel, waiting to be filled up by whoever happens to randomly pass by on that day, so if A is seen anywhere in the vicinity of B, then A must automatically have the same views as B, and that applies transitively to B and C and then C and D and so on ad infinitum. The only people immune to this are the woke who, of course, develop all their ideas independently and are totally immune from persuasion of any kind.

That's what she means by "nazis at the bar". It's some woke meme that says it's not possible to discuss anything with people who you disagree with, because you'll instantly become exactly like them.

That's all craziness of course - some sort of personality disorder in which basic empathy is lost and the way other people's minds work is badly misunderstood. These sort of people can be dangerous to those around them, and probably need psychiatric help, but it's not formally recognized as a disorder.

I have not seen anything up-voted here that is non-tech opinion.

As in posts or comments? Because there's plenty of disagreeable opinions in the comments who get upvoted at least some of the time.

I'd disagree with characterising everyone who uses the site like that, but also don't agree with people who think the comment quality is flawless.

Often the brigade down-voting of things that certain people consider to be a non-tech opinion is itself based on a highly-biased approach to what is appropriate for technical discussions. These are often the same sorts of discussion used dismissing discussions of alternative naming of git primary branches and other technical terms that have more accurate and less degrading names, or are entirely dismissive of codes of conduct for code repos or conferences.

I have quite often seen COVID-19 disinformation upvoted here, as well as many other conspiracy theories unique to a particular subset of the population.

I have often debated whether I want to remain part of the HN community—it is often toxic. But I also don’t want to cede space to people whose worldview is inimical to my own, so I stay and argue against the worst parts of it.

Are you being purposely obtuse or are you unaware of the reputation of this community outside of this forum? They're likely serious.

I'm not aware. If anything, I've seen a few cesspits and HN doesn't look like one. So, I'm surprised, and, naturally, would like to see a follow-up with more details.

Also, with all due respect, your comment reads aggressively, as an attack (my apologies if this wasn't intended as such), so I suspect you're going to get some strong reactions.

Just like that "if you're from HN you're bad, go away" banner. For what it's worth, I've also seen a few examples of groupthink bigotry, and I felt certain resemblance.

> would like to see a follow-up with more details.

Oversimplified summary of the complaint as I understand it: HN’s moderation policy is “thoughtful debate.” Marginalized groups do not appreciate their human rights being treated as being up for debate, politely or not.

If anything, I’ve seen HN be aggressively moderated in the opposite direction, where if you do something like point out men aren’t wholesale profiteers of modern society (pointing out suicide stats, education, often guilty until proven innocent & harsher sentences, etc) your comments get detached by dang.

Not OP, but the note surprised me too - I’m aware of a lot of the tendencies in conversations here, but it’s hard to really assess something from the inside, and the note feels harsher to me than I’d expect to be the common sentiment about this place. Can you share more?

I believe the answer is there when she complaints about the moderator. Probably she asked that someone was censored and didn't have her way. Now call me a white supremacist, but I tend to trust dang slightly more than someone that says that I'm bad without having met me.

> Your site is full of sexism and racism that you can't report to the main moderator because he approves of it.

No idea what they mean. I read HN all the time, and haven't seen anything remotely like sexism, racism, or white supremacy.

It depends on the topic, with posts that are mostly about technical stuff (which of course is most things that get posted on HN) there's generally no hint of any of that.

But when anything gets posted that can be linked to race, or celebrates some minority, or talks about the climate I notice a disturbing amount of people crawl out of the woodwork and post some truly awful/ignorant things.

I browse with showdead turned on and all of that stuff gets downvoted or reported into oblivion.

You're using the standard definitions of those words. People like that use totally different definitions that are ideologically based, for example, expressing concern over discrimination against men = white supremacy to them.

> the reputation of this community outside of this forum

More like "the reputation of this community has with mega-narcissists who lack the empathy to cope with the fact there are people in the world who don't quite see things the way they do, and can't stand forums that allow people to voice opinions they don't like".

There are plenty of thing I don't especially like about HN, but "filled with literal white suprematists" is not one of them. I'm sure you can find the occasional post here or there that gets by unnoticed in some little seen thread, but that's certainly not the norm.

I am unaware. This place seems generally fine to me. Certainly no worse than others.

As someone who has been a daily active 4chan user for atleast a decade, that kind of verbiage seems very extreme when describing HN in context.

For people to whom anti-racism is a philosophy, you're a racist if you do or say racist things. For people to whom anti-racism is a religion, you're a racist if you're not sufficiently and publicly pious.

What are you talking about? What is the supposed reputation??

Being a toxic cesspool of the worst aspects of Silicon Valley tech-bro culture - racism, misogyny, antisemitism, conspiracy theory, elitism, aggressively ignorant hot takes and toxicity. For a lot of people - particularly women and LGBTQ+ in tech - this place looks like a den of alt-right creeps and incels, and being posted here is the last thing they want. If you want evidence of this you can just hang around with showdead on for a while in any thread that even vaguely broaches a political topic, or follow moderator dang's account long enough. You can also follow certain tags on Twitter or subreddits that archive the worst of HN. Some of what they discuss is taken out of context, but a lot of it isn't.

And to be fair, Hacker News is a diverse community, not a monoculture. It's entirely possible not to see the worst side of this place, depending on where and how often you post, and it's entirely within anyone's rights to dismiss criticisms of the community (although I think that would be a mistake.) But that reputation also isn't entirely unwarranted.

I'll be in the stocks if anyone needs me.

I didn’t know it’s portrayed as low as 4chan

I am also completely unaware, ive never noticed anything like that in my few months here

The idea that this is a WN forum is absurd. Like, clear onset of mental illness absurd.

HN doesn't immediately ban people for wrongthink, that means we're all Nazis.