I'm not sure this is a PR disaster. Googling, I only see major coverage in this HN thread, and on /r/technology on Reddit. There was a big thread on /r/programming but the mods there deleted that. There are another several discussions on assorted minor subreddits.
None of the major tech news sites or blogs seem to be picking it up. /r/technology can be enough of a cesspool that many tech people don't bother with it. Unless the news sites and blogs are just waiting for more information before running their stories, it looks like this might blow over with little damage to livecoding.tv.
"Might" is quite a stretch here. A search for "livecoding" now ranks this thread in the #2 spot, just after the site in question. The damage has already been done, I think.
I think the public here is the Hacker News/SV SWE community. As others have said, a good portion of livecoding's target demographic now has a negative view of their management.
> Commenters here should be considering scenarios in which glee would not be a humane response.
Maybe I'm just having a brainfart, but I simply don't understand this sentence at all, and I really would like to. I'm really not trying to troll you, I just feel like this is an interesting statement that could use some clarification :)
Sorry, I don't usually go in for circumlocution but this is a tough one. Let me try again. There may be factors beyond 'obvious bad behavior deserving of mob wrath', which (if they knew what they were) would make some commenters here ashamed of what they've posted. For example, I think most people would be ashamed to publicly express glee over something that turned out to be, say, a health issue.
Sometimes in cases like this, there's an information vaccuum for a reason. Unfortunately, since the Internet abhors a vaccuum, Schadenfreude rushes in, which brings out the ugliness in people and leads to frenzy.
Normally we penalize such threads, but HN's policy is to intervene less when a bad story is YC-related, so we held off. But this morning, when I saw the dozens of comments that Michael had posted overnight, and the condemning and goading responses, it was dismayingly clear that this is something other than the usual trainwreck that people find so entertaining.
The line between righteous indignation and cruelty is not obvious, and worse, is a line that feels great to cross. If we're not mindful of that, cruelty is the default, so let's be mindful of that.
I had absolutely no idea this was happening, I caught it on page 8 of the index long after everything that happened had gone down.
This does to me look like something problematic might be going on health-wise. I can relate to a tiny extent: I sometimes have a harder time processing life than average due to high-functioning autism, and I reckon there are certainly circumstances and situations that might well overload my system and provoke Undefined Behavior due to the stress, but not nearly like this.
I have showdead turned on, and DrMJG_HN's posts show a truly impressive level of paranoia that I don't think I've ever seen before. My reaction is an unobjective sort of pity (for want of a better way to say it; maybe I'm referring to empathy): there's a person behind those posts, and they deserve a better frame of mind than they seem to have right now.
I reckon HN's reaction to this - and your explanation, for those who needed it - has been really great.
I think they're suggesting that there's an explanation for Michael's errant behaviour that we should be more sympathetic toward. I don't buy it, though.
The mental illness hypothesis seems disturbingly close to home here. Nothing justifies egregious behavior but we could be more compassionate for the people involved.
Ah, okay. So, there are possible scenarios that are going on in his life that we should be considering before laying certain gleefully harsh judgments on him. Gotcha.
Commenters here should be considering scenarios in which glee would not be a humane response to all this.