I can tell you but you might be disappointed! What prompted this is a year (maybe two) of slow, slow reflection over how best to clarify what kind of site HN is, plus dismay over the uptick in harsh comments and primarily-political accounts that we've been observing as moderators this year.
When I say slow, I mean slow. I see part of my job (and it's my temperament anyway) as taking care to understand what this community is and how its system functions, and then to protect that and help it thrive. In practice this means that we take a long time (especially by startup standards, not that HN is a startup) to make changes, and have a strong preference for subtle changes. If we do make a significant change, you can be sure that we waited a long time for the need for it to develop.
But this isn't a significant change, not yet; it's a one-week experiment to see what happens.
Can I get a true or false response to each of the following props:
"A story about systemic gender discrimination in tech should be flagged under this policy."
"A comment regarding a person's startup experience that describes how their experience has been impacted by their race or gender identity should be flagged under this policy."
"A discussion of the sociological impact of Facebook's news curation tools should be flagged under this policy."
Those feel like gotcha questions in a cross-examination, but let me try.
I'm not sure what you mean by "this policy". Do you mean this one-week experiment to try something for a week and see what happens? I wouldn't call that a policy. To me that word implies something intended to be permanent, which is precisely what we're not proposing.
Either way, though, the answer can only be "maybe", because any one of your descriptions could cover a huge range along the axis we're talking about (intellectual interest vs. political battle). So it would depend on the specific stories.
Since we've asked people to err on the side of flagging for just this week, obviously the odds of a story being flagged become higher, for just this week. That doesn't make those odds 100% on those topics. And since the way things normally work is erring on the side of not flagging them, it's hard for me to see this week as very significant. That's actually why we're doing it this way: a week should be enough to learn something and not enough to be that big a deal, even in the worst case.
> ... since the way things normally work is erring on the side of not flagging them, it's hard for me to see this week as very significant. That's actually why we're doing it this way: a week should be enough to learn something and not enough to be that big a deal, even in the worst case.
I hope you take it in good faith that I'm not saying this in anger or in any way except a desire to make this community something worth continuing to participate in: you've made it, and publicly trumpeted that you've made it, more risky and more difficult for someone to be something other than a straight white male here. (That's not one from me; I am paraphrasing a friend who has pulled the ripcord. She expressed to me that the alt-right movement here would use telling you this herself as a way to hurt her either personally or professionally or both, because that's the world she has to live in because of how tech works.) You're tacitly accepting that this helps to silence those folks because their lives are inherently and inescapably "political" due to the deviance from the straight-white-dude status quo represented in tech. That's why I formed those questions as I did. They're not "gotcha" questions. They are hard questions in the gray areas of what you're saying, where you are--I believe not with malice, but you are--giving people who wish those elements of your community would go away forever can under your own policies (and I did use the word intentionally, because "experiment" is much more innocuous than I think this effectively becomes) silence them. Because when you aren't a straight white dude, your life is "political" by the standards of the tech world.
People look to this place for a kind of cultural leadership in tech. (Whether or not you want them to or whether they should!) You're taking a stand on the issues of the marginalized and the underrepresented whether you want to or not. I would ask that you consider whether it's the stand you actually want to be taking. 'Cause, I mean...silence means status quo wins.
I actually agree with some of the points you've been making, both here and in other comments, and I've noticed and appreciate your clear effort to be civil. I know how far from easy that is.
The problem I have is that you seem to set at zero the other set of concerns here—the ones I described at the top—intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive conversation. Those things are the raison d'etre of this site. Do you think I'm wrong that political flamewars don't threaten them? Or that they don't matter?
I understand why a politically committed person might say "screw those values, the cause is too important", but that amounts to a scorched earth approach that doesn't see this place as much worth protecting and can easily progress to other battlefields for further scorching. My job is to make sure this place doesn't burn, so it's hard to take advice from that quarter. I'm all for suggestions about how better to serve the site's values—and by the way, 'civil' includes being welcoming to others—but objections that don't think they matter are harder to credit. It's pretty easy to say what we should do if you don't share our goals; not so easy to struggle with the tradeoffs if you do.
It's my view that for all its flaws, this community has something worth protecting. Perhaps it only lives up to 40% of its values, but that's still a lot, and it's the reason why people are attracted here to talk about things, some of which are inevitably political, in the first place. If you think significantly better is possible on the open internet, show me where; from what I've seen, everyplace else is so much worse that this one is clearly worth protecting, in the hope of achieving better. And if you think we're not interested in welcoming people who suffer from social or political disadvantages, I don't know what to tell you, other than that you'd be misappraising well-wishers. I hear you that it might happen anyway as an unwanted effect, maybe even is happening, and we care about that and take it seriously. But that information tends to come in complex political and ideological packages, and it can be hard, even for a well-wisher, to decipher signal from noise. The discourse around these things tends to be all-or-nothing, indeed extremely so. For us that's a double bind, because HN can't be either.
> The problem I have is that you seem to set at zero the other set of concerns here—the ones I described at the top—intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive conversation. Those things are the raison d'etre of this site. Do you think I'm wrong that political flamewars don't threaten them? Or that they don't matter?
So...I can't come up with a better way to put this: do you really think that there are intellectually satisfying, civil discussions to be had when your existence is a matter of debate? Like... 'hga wasn't alone. You know that. He was just an idiot who went straight at it straight instead of hiding behind cites of The Bell Curve, instead of "but why should there be programs for black people or women?". I get your focus on "civil, substantiative conversation" and I respect that, but you gotta know as well as anyone that harm happens behind the "civil, substantiative conversation" of just-asking-questions and oh-it-can't-be-that-bad,-can-it?, the soup of toxic sexism and racism that's all over here over the last year or two. The functional result of "no politics" is that that won't be challenged, not that it'll go away. I agree with 'tptacek when he says that most political comments on HN are alt-right trolls; "hey guys, subtext rather than text" leaves a lot of shadows.
You and I are effectively re-litigating the same arguments that have come up in many other places. What would be awesome and a change of pace would be to learn what HN plans to do to make itself civil and welcoming to underrepresented folks, if that's the ethos you want to have. And you say you do, so I believe you. I mean, hell, I'd love to help out if I can; you have a bigger stake, but you're sure not the only person who thinks there's something worth having here.
(As far as other places on the internet--I have a few that come to mind. Open ones, but not ones on which I want to sic the jerkier part of HN just to prove a point in an argument. Shoot me an email if you're curious.)
You've observed elsewhere that both sides argue with your moderation style.
This is true. However, you can observe here that one side petitions you; the other bullies you. This would be unusual in a genuinely symmetric situation...
"Smacked around?" The point is that the left is threatening you, and you're responding calmly, reasonably and at length. Shows the power dynamic. What would we even threaten you with?
One side wants to exist. The other side wants the other to stop existing. It's about as symmetric as lions and buffaloes, although a buffalo will kill a careless lion now and then...
Given perspectives like this, I think it's pretty hard to argue that it's possible to appease the activist community by feeding them.
The equation in their minds is essentially power == good. They want power over you, and over us, so that they can use this power to do good -- for the quite large set of human beings they feel themselves the protectors of (pretty much anyone but a "straight white dude").
No one has really found a limit on how much power they want, or how much good they think they can do. What we do know is: when you feed them, they get hungrier.
you know, I've come to like you dang. I still detest this place and everything it stands for, but seeing you chipper (if somewhat resentful about having to be chipper) towards the kind of problems that come with your job has a way of cheering me up. Like you know the check will clear, but even so, no one works for money.
not that you asked, but both as a clearer moderation policy than we've seen before and as an experiment, I think this is a good move. there is some regret that you're lagging well behind Reddit's knowledgebase, as this sort of thing has been done many times there, and there's not much new information to be found.
That said, it does exacerbate the filter bubble of this place: based on how subreddits' experiments have gone, expect the moderate center to support you and press to make it permanent, expect a little bit of grumbling that might make you think that you've made your point and don't need to make it permanent, and expect... a few more people to leave silently.
You're a prop for the VC establishment, but damn if you aren't an earnest human, too.
I'd submit that it's right there in the writeup. Politics literally activates different regions in the brain, producing a situation in which rational discussion is difficult or impossible. Being a site that chooses to avoid that would make HN much more valuable, because there are so few that do, even fewer of any size.
I wouldn't support a moratorium forever, because there are topics that are both of perennial HN interest and also overlap politics, like intellectual property law and things specific to the tech industry. But I would support bumping off a lot more of the marginal stuff permanently. In general I would say that I see very little HN-specific contribution to most of those topics. (Not quite none, but hardly worth poking through the dross.)
