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by eropple
3489 days ago
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> ... 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. |
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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.