[_r0fz]

The cruelty I'm talking about is not individual posters hurting each other. It's how we talk about people who are not here, who can't be here. How we judge the poor and dispossessed, uneducated, addicted and marginalized. People pushed aside and hurt by inequality that WE build in our work and then come here to virtuously discuss.

Can you honestly go look through the comments of any post touching any of those issues and call them kind? It's one thing to say it's out of scope for moderation because they keep it civil and calm. But to say the cruelty isn't there is to choose not to see it.

[tptacek]

It took 15 seconds. I just typed "poor" into the search bar, sorted comments by dates, and the first comment that used "poor" in the sense that you did easily qualified:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27320284

It is wildly not the case that the median HN commenter who writes on stories related to economic inequality is biased against marginalized people.

This is a pretty clear instance of what Dan refers to as the "notice-dislike fallacy"; you've noticed people writing callous comments, because they rub you the wrong way (as they do me), but haven't noticed the countervailing comments, because they're boring (to you).

[rantwasp]

i think we may be moving the goalposts a little here. we were talking about joy, humor, whimsical and we shifted to a straight-up utopia where everyone is kind to everyone and no bad comment is ever made.

Philosophically, I would say HM is like a wealthy suburb. You don't see trash in the street. People mostly follow the law and are good neighbors. Everyone wants their neighborhood to be okay and are okay sharing/learning about gardening and home improvement from each other. Now: are some people disconnected from the what other people experience as the harsh reality somewhere else? Absolutely. This is the case everywhere. What you do when you see or hear someone with a completely different perspective is listen and try to understand what they are talking about. We all need to get better at this no matter where we are (work, store, hn, twitter, etc)