[dang]

Treating anyone this rudely is a bannable offence on Hacker News. Please take the civility requirement more deeply to heart (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and please don't do this again.

If a fellow community member has a first-hand involvement with a situation under discussion, such as working for a company that some people are mad at or does some wrong thing, we're all responsible for reacting responsibly. Otherwise bad things happen, such as first-hand observers being scared to post because they'll get lashed out at, and the already-weak community bonds we have here getting weaker. We all know what the culture of online shaming has led to and it's all our job not to do it on HN.

[ruffrey]

Ok. You're right, that last line was not necessary.

[kordless]

> We all know what the culture of online shaming has led to and it's all our job not to do it on HN.

This is, in and of itself, a blaming statement. Blaming statements, such as the one contained in the comment you replied to, are a result of a) dissonance and b) inability to resolve the dissonance.

It is, in fact, unknown what the culture of online shaming has led to in our society. In fact, I'd hazard "shaming" online is actually just raw blame provided by some rationalized thought process driven by Internet interactions themselves, not the people reacting. See This Video Will Make You Angry on YouTube for context. Screwing with people's Internet in contextually what could be considered "wrong" behavior becomes highly polarizing. In as much as someone coughs because they smoke, people blaming is a result of a larger problem, perhaps related to the fitness of memes and some people's weakness in being hacked emotionally by memes with higher sophistication. Again, that problem is noted by the dissonance and inability to resolve it, but the behaviors emerging from those who are "infected" by the thoughts are not exactly theirs to bear alone. We blamed the tobacco industry for smoking. Why can we not blame the employees who are providing the rationalizations for bad behavior? One might argue that they shouldn't be blamed because they have no choice in the matter. It may be their job to argue otherwise for the company.

The irony here is that vast majority of the denizens of HN are likely responsible for creating most of the "mess" we're in today by writing software without considering the long term effects on consciousness and perception of reality. That "mess" would be defined as means, by algorithms or neural networks, to attempt to exploit weaknesses in human nature to spread other's beliefs in a unnatural way. Growth hacking. In some cases, like Comcast, those beliefs are rooted in sophisticated rationalizations which sound good when limited in scope. But! I don't care what anyone says about it, changing the content of a page which, when requested from one place returns one thing and when requested from another (which ones pay for I might add) returns another thing entirely is a violation of TRUST. At least it is to me. I like consistency in my data.

If one of the "members" of this group we call HN wants to make a blaming statement against someone who is defending this irrational logic, then I say let them blame! How else are we to uncover the dissonance and solve it? Or, perhaps, that dissonance is desired to be left in place by our complicit behaviors trying to be "nice" to each other.

I've suggested before social media sites could benefit from a "this is a blaming statement" flag on articles or comments. I stand by that assertion today. Logging back out again. Thank you for all the hard work that goes into running this place.