Weird that these are being demoted. Regardless - I've seen some people defending him for various reasons, most prominently because he has a right to free speech. Of course he has a right to free speech, and he exercised it. He also has the responsibility to accept the consequences. His actions/speech made enough people angry enough to exercise their speech to the extent that Eich's position was no longer tenable.
People too often forget that rights don't mean that there will be no consequences to exercising those rights (within the bounds of the law, and other things).
This post was killed because a great many users flagged it.
Moderators don't, as a rule, kill any stories that have an active thread. That way those who are interested in the discussion can keep it going. The most we would do is demote an item in rank. There are exceptions to this, but they're so rare I can't remember any.
I'm unkilling the post, because I want to reply to some of the moderation questions downthread, and I figure if I'm allowed to keep commenting here then everybody should be.
Is there any reason not to "boost" the original discussion if new ones keep getting pushed to the site? It seems duplicative to allow repeat stories just to keep the discussion going. Better to downrank the dupes and uprank the original one if the discussion is still ongoing enough to draw constant repostings.
Good question. That's the intention, and also what ended up happening this afternoon. But there's a countervailing factor: when the discussion is so toxic as to be beyond the reach of pinpoint "Please don't be a jerk on Hacker News" nudges by the moderator. [1]
Empirically, the HN community has proven to be incapable of discussing certain subjects without immediately turning noxious. Once that happens, it's more than just a technical question of how best to consolidate the threads. The values of the site—intellectual substance and personal civility—are being grossly violated. If we allow that, how can we claim they're the values of the site? And if they're not the values of the site, who on earth would want to stay here?
That is the harder problem. We don't know yet what the long term solution will be, but we're going to keep experimenting until we find one.
[1] As you may have noticed, I've been making a lot of those this week--but they don't work on threads that have completely lost it.
There are some practical approaches that could be used to do more than nudge when discussions turn toxic. Allowing fresh threads just leads to the inevitable if there isn't a solid solution to the toxic behavior in general.
1) The easiest thing you can do is have a friendly reminder about what is and what is not acceptable to post right next to the comment textbox. When I was in grad school they used to remind students of the honor code before each and every test, and apparently it reduced problematic behavior.
2) Posters in heated conversations care more about advancing their view than keeping HN civil. You can't rely on the downvote system, because mean comments that advance the "right" view will be upvoted regardless. You can't call them out, because your thread will be one of many, and the damage is already done by the time the comment is read.
They simply need to be deleted, and I don't see much deletion on HN.
3) there is a 99.9% chance a post is spam if it broadly criticizes the behavior of HN as opposed to the person they are replying to. These posts should also be removed.
4) For every topic of political contention, there is a group of people that ONLY post about that topic. These people should be monitored closely. I don't consider these posters to be participating in good faith--this is (or should be) a community of tech people that occasionally talks politics. So if you only post about a particular political issue, and never about any technology-related topics, one wonders if you are there just to advance your political viewpoint. As an aside, these posters mostly come out of the woodwork for gender-related topics, which I think are consistently the worst category on HN in terms of comment quality.
5) we need a clearer idea of what is and what is not acceptable on HN. Honestly I want to flag most of the political stories. I hate them. But I don't, because I am afraid of losing the feature.
6) ignore people who whine about censorship. There are a ton of other forums they can post on.
7) a more radical idea that I am less sure about: remove all political stories, and make politics.ycombinator.com. The twist: make membership invite-only. If someone is uncivil then it reflects poorly on the person who invited them. This is, as far as I can tell, the only effective solution to stopping uncivil discourse. When tensions are high, any amount of incivility can trigger another user. The only way to stop this problem generally is to stop it completely, there is no half way.
EDIT: to be completely clear: this advice really only applies to topics where the posters on each side have what can only be described as religious devotion to their point of view. Civil discussion requires humility, and there is rarely humility in political discussions.
I ran moderation at Quora, the interaction was definitely different but comment interactions were a really important thing to deal with. I'll drop you an email with some ideas if you want.
>Really? Is there a rash of this sort of thing going on that I don't know about?
Yes. How about the guy who lost his job for making a dongle joke, personally to his friend at a conference that was overheard? (And, then the woman who outed him on the internet lost her job too, again for reasons of public reaction). And tons of other examples besides -- people calling for others to get fired etc, because of their personal, not work related, opinions.
>Or is it pretty much just Brendan Eich right now, reaping the consequences of expressing bigotry publicly?
He never expressed "bigotry publicly". He privately backed a cause he believed in (right or wrong) with a donation.
As for "reaping the consequences", for me this amounts to a lynching mentallity that I'm uncofortable with.
If you don't like someone's opinions on civil rights, fight them in the court of public opinion and/or voting.
He clearly doesn't agree that homosexual people should be afforded the same legal rights and societal status as heterosexual people in their personal lives.
It's safer to assume that he would have negativity towards homosexuals in the workplace, e.g. look down upon them due to 'lifestyle choice' or some other bigoted nonsense, than to assume that once he's at work all of his prejudices are put to one side.
Chauvinists and racists rarely, if ever, leave their prejudices at home, so why would homophobes?
> If you don't like someone's opinions on civil rights, fight them in the court of public opinion and/or voting.
That's almost exactly what has happened, yet you call it 'lynching'.
'Public opinion' has forced him to step down before people 'voted' by not using/contributing to Mozilla products.
Nobody has denied him the right to hold his opinion, he's free to carry on doing so, however people have questioned his ability to not discriminate against people in his role at Mozilla, due in large part to fact that he has actively supported discrimination against people in the past based upon their sexuality.
With 15 years under his belt, someone might have noticed if he had trouble separating work from politics. Perhaps his talent in this area is related to how he earn the CEO job over others who are incapable of conducting civil interactions with people they disagree with on unrelated matters.
>Yeah, those people in the 50s who fought against desegregation just had a different personal opinion on what was okay. Nothing wrong with that!
Hundrends of millions of people had similar opinions in the 50s -- they didn't know better. Do you propose they all got fired?
Even if you do. I don't recall that being the case historically, anyway. Instead, black and pro-civil rights people fought for their rights, with marches, public speeches, voting, and such. Not with campaigns targeted at individual people. The KKK used to do that.
Free speech cutting both ways should only mean both parties are allowed to say whatever they like -- and the majority/plurality of the people decide democratically which way to go about it and who they agree with.
If an unpopular speech means you get fired, then it's not free at all. It's "be careful what you say or bad things can happen to you" -speech.
All dictatorships and all opressive regimes have such mockery of "free speech". Heck, even burning Giordano Bruno can be considered an example of "free speech" that "cuts both ways" in this logic.
(Not to mention that he didn't publicly voice an opinion in the first place. He privately backed against a bill -which was his democratic right to do- and the name of the backers was leaked).
Really? Is there a rash of this sort of thing going on that I don't know about? Or is it pretty much just Brendan Eich right now, reaping the consequences of expressing bigotry publicly?
Try working in the oil industry in California. When I was a kid, my father was in charge of PR for one of the refineries in the Bay Area. Local activists routinely tried to get him fired since he was the face of oil in that small town, some even going as far as saying so at city council meetings.
An orthodontist even refused to take me on as a patient because of who my father was.
I'll wait for his post on the topic to form a final opinion on that, but my initial reaction is that it's wrong to bury a story of this magnitude in the tech industry.
> There is already a major thread on this topic, and it has already spent time on the front page. Anyone who wishes to participate in that thread is welcome to do so.
Is he saying that because a thread exists for a topic, anyone who wants to discuss that topic needs to go and track down the buried thread? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
If the community still wants to discuss something, why not let them? Why force the discussion into a rarely-visited thread ghetto?
I can completely understand his motivation, even though I believe the efforts to demote/kill them will ultimately be futile. Like you said, this topic will demand discussion. The main thread should at least not be flagged off the frontpage or the new links will keep coming in.
I know about Brendan Eich's views, but Mozilla is an organization devoted to open source, none of whose concerns, as far as I can tell, have anything to be with sexual minorities. Were he still the CEO, he really couldn't have used his office to act on his views; so why all the castigating ?
He has a view, and sure a lot of us (including me) don't agree with him, but this culture of outrage is disgusting.
I think what happened is that Gay rights stopped being a matter of opinion and turned into a matter of civil rights ... and Eich just got caught on the wrong side of it. On one hand I feel kind of sorry for him, but on the other, I'm happy to see American society making progress in this way. I think its a lesson to all of us to be very careful and forward thinking about the battles we choose to fight in life.
Not to make this any more controversial ... this could easily be the story of a racist person in the who got caught in the same position after the tides shifted and being openly racist just wasn't acceptable any more ... for example Trent Lott.
I don't think you and so many others would say the same thing if the issue was inter-racial marriage, today. Is it really so hard for people to get a little bit ahead of the progress curve for a change, instead of digging in and dragging heels behind it? What is it that makes it so hard?
No, but the difficulty with which your personal viewpoint can be adopted is not (nor should not) be the benchmark of his responsibilities as Mozilla's CEO, which is what he is there for.
People too often forget that rights don't mean that there will be no consequences to exercising those rights (within the bounds of the law, and other things).