Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Game Over

antirez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 99 posts

Re: Game Over

#81

Post by hakunin »

This discussion has little meaning. Everyone makes a call. Author made a call to express his controversial view, and there is no point in saying that his free expression was thwarted by others' free expressions. Others made a call to respond by teaching the author how wrong he is in many constructive and destructive ways. All of this is meaningless, because controversial opinions are appreciated when they are the right call, and hated when they are the wrong call. It's a coin flip for the most part.

Author complains that people are acting badly, but these people are everything that the world consists of. There is nothing else on the receiving end of his message except these (and other) people. Who else to express your opinion to? I'd assume author knows that. When you add salt into your tea, you don't blame your tastebuds for disliking it. Occasionally, however, you dip bacon into chocolate and your tastebuds go "whoa, awesome". This is the risk of controversial opinion. If you make it, just prepare yourself for the inevitable. There is a reason experiments require goggles.

As a community, we should strive to be calmer and more thoughtful about the way we express ourselves, and try harder to make the right calls. If everyone could do that, however, we probably wouldn't have the sexism problem in the first place.

Re: Game Over

#82

Post by _pius »

ynniv wrote: post #80
_pius wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most responses were zingers or did not show a basic understanding for what he said. They are noise, and noise is not worth defending. Surely you see the problem with that line of argument. His piece was hardly insightful. In fact, he did not show a basic understanding of the issues he was pontificating on and the piece was mere noise, not worth defending by anyone. Once you start trying to parse out who's right, you'…

You're pandering, but you do raise the point that I should have said "worth considering". All speech is worth defending as free, but our time in life is limited and we must each be selective about what we spend it on. Whether or not you appreciated his post, it is probably a waste of your time to make shallow, unsubstantiated comments regarding it.

For what it's worth, I'm not pandering ... that's more or less how I feel about his piece. But the point is, neither you nor I can have it both ways: free speech isn't just about protecting speech we like or think is substantive.

Re: Game Over

#83

Post by ChuckMcM »

blackhole wrote: post #8

Some people are going to say that he was in the right, and some will argue this is a consequence of being wrong, but this doesn't matter. What this illustrates is the dangerous precipice that the world of blogging is hanging on to, where the violent hatred that spews forth when anyone writes a remotely controversial opinion threatens to silence any opinion that sways too far from mainstream consciousness. The fact th…

The difference between opinion on the editorial page of the paper and opinion in the world of zero filters. Perhaps one in a million people is a flaming loon but that's over 7,000 people given the world population. Sadly a lot of them have Internet access.

So the folks who are moderate and make up the bulk of the population don't respond, and the ones who are most easily incensed do. In a newspaper the editor would get all the letters that came in as rebuttals to an opinion and print the ones that were insightful or made a reasoned argument, and they would simply throw away all of the letters from folks who were ranting. This allowed for reasoned (if heated) debate to be carried out in the opinion section of the daily paper.

Twitter doesn't 'fix' this, I don't think they see it as a problem, but a bit of moderation goes a long way toward providing a better environment.

It is an unsolved problem to date, perhaps App.net or identi.ca or some other micro-blogging service will take it on and make things better. I expect it would attract quality posts and quickly gain a solid base.

Re: Game Over

#84

Post by tomasien »

blackhole wrote: post #8

Some people are going to say that he was in the right, and some will argue this is a consequence of being wrong, but this doesn't matter. What this illustrates is the dangerous precipice that the world of blogging is hanging on to, where the violent hatred that spews forth when anyone writes a remotely controversial opinion threatens to silence any opinion that sways too far from mainstream consciousness. The fact th…

As the first poster you're referring to, my post was a direct response to THIS post. It was to say "I agree the vitriol toward you was uncalled for, please don't let it take away from the serious critiques of your post".

What is wrong with that? I was defending both his right to speech suggesting people shouldn't shit on him for his views and also the need for conversations to be two-way and for him to consider the contrarian viewpoints that were too often expressed hatefully.

I'm encouraged that I've received net-upvotes for that comment, but I worry that EITHER I didn't express myself clearly enough or that people on HN are really committed to not re-thinking their views on sexism given how many downvotes it received. I'll fully accept that it's likely that it was my poor wording.

Re: Game Over

#85

Post by bsg75 »

powera wrote: post #29

Just from reading the blog posts, it seems like this is a bit of an overreaction to some mild criticism of a mediocre blog post. Then I looked at Twitter. If there are multiple people tweeting basically "you're stupid" dozens of times ( https://twitter.com/kendall seems particularly egregious) it's not being in any way productive, it's a bunch of people being assholes and claiming "you're sexist" as a shield against…

> https://twitter.com/kendall seems particularly egregious

Who just coincidentally works on a product which may (or not) be in commercial competition, and could just possibly be attempting to gain some measure of the internet fame his target has earned in actually producing something of value to many developers.

I can't help but notice in all of the vitriol, the loudest are those who appear to do little more that talk (on the internet).

(A completely unscientific analysis)

Re: Game Over

#86

Post by bsg75 »

jerf wrote: post #64
blackhole wrote: post #8

Some people are going to say that he was in the right, and some will argue this is a consequence of being wrong, but this doesn't matter. What this illustrates is the dangerous precipice that the world of blogging is hanging on to, where the violent hatred that spews forth when anyone writes a remotely controversial opinion threatens to silence any opinion that sways too far from mainstream consciousness. The fact th…

"What this illustrates is the dangerous precipice that the world of blogging is hanging on to" If I may... this wasn't the world of "blogging". This was the world of Twitter et al. Blogging itself actually has a very interesting property, which is that even if somebody tears you a new one in their own blog post, you don't actually have to know unless you go looking for it. It's a lot easier to blog a controversial op…

Unfortunately bloggers who thrive on page views, but don't have any actual knowledge to share use Twitter to locate the Mass Indignation Of The Day, and spin off 10-100 times 140 characters to feed the trolls.

Re: Game Over

#87

Post by brianchu »

king_jester wrote: post #60
ahelwer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this from a different perspective. We are finally getting to the point where a critical mass of people are not going to tolerate sexist misinformed crap as they encounter it, and will instead speak out en masse. The blog post on sexism wasn't a "controversial opinion." The author wasn't bravely standing up to the mainstream. It was just his crappy opinion that tech needs to continue to try very hard to move pas…

> The blog post on sexism wasn't a "controversial opinion." The author wasn't bravely standing up to the mainstream. So very much this. The author wasn't deviating from the mainstream, he was promoting mainstream, sexist points of view regarding women and work. That many people took offense to this and called him out on it is to be expected.

Can you point out exactly where he promoted "sexist points of view regarding women and work?"

Because as far as I can tell, regardless of whether he is right or wrong (I think he is wrong), his blog post had very little to do with expressing a sexist point of view of women, and was more of a critique of how we currently judge discrimination and how the current dialogue around sexism is framed.

Re: Game Over

#88

Post by jamesrcole »

basman wrote: post #75
ahelwer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this from a different perspective. We are finally getting to the point where a critical mass of people are not going to tolerate sexist misinformed crap as they encounter it, and will instead speak out en masse. The blog post on sexism wasn't a "controversial opinion." The author wasn't bravely standing up to the mainstream. It was just his crappy opinion that tech needs to continue to try very hard to move pas…

This blog post? http://antirez.com/post/different-take-sexism-it.html I'd be curious how many people here find this beyond the pale. As a data point, I didn't. I don't agree with all of it, but I don't see what part of it counts as sexist, in the sense of advocating discrimination based on gender.

I think it's a thoughtful post. It's clear that he doesnt like discrimination against anyone, and is proposing how we should act in order to treat everyone in an inclusive and fair manner, for the benefit of all parties.

Re: Game Over

#89

Post by zokier »

antirez wrote: post #47
Jach wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't about censorship, but sensitivity. I don't see how you drew from this that the world of blogging is in peril--if you write things that generate tons of hate comments, and you don't want to read those comments, disable comments. The discussion will continue elsewhere regardless. The haters aren't even censoring themselves (I guess you could make a case that their existing biases prevent them from seriously…

I'm not closing my blog, where I think I'll post more controversial stuff, as I've a controversial indole. Also I'm not sensible at all, the problem is, I'm realising that Twitter is becoming mostly low content replies. Among the trolling replies I got, a lot were from respectable developers, sometimes even of products somewhat related to Redis. If it's so low quality why should I stay in an environment where that's…

> I'm realising that Twitter is becoming mostly low content replies

I'm more surprised that it took you this long to realize that. That statement sounds bit like realizing that 4chan has mostly low quality comments.

Re: Game Over

#90

Post by lmm »

KevinEldon wrote: post #70
lmm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Letting such perspectives pass without criticism does not help us solve problems; quite the opposite. A few outlandish suggestions are amazingly useful insights, but most of them are outlandish for a reason; it's not a case of every idea being right and wrong in different ways, there really are objectively good and bad ideas, and being able to cull bad ideas quickly is vital to progress. To my mind this is a case of…

Summary: Vicious responses are lazy and should be considered ignorant until proven otherwise. I agree with you that vicious responses to different positions on emotionally charged issues are common. The word 'vicious' bothers me though; it's not ok to use non-arguments and threats or insults to respond to an argument. If someone told me that Abraham Lincoln was the current President of the United States I don't think…

>I think (with disdain) about "pundits" whose job is to promote some position regardless of its merit; people who spend their lives arguing passionately for whatever pays the most... that is ugly and works against adapting a culture to handle new ideas and situations.

I don't know; a certain degree of specialization helps society function better. Espousing contrary positions is valuable to society and at the same time emotionally draining (which is mitigated if you do it often); having it done by dedicated people seems like a win.

(I felt kind of similarly about the story of the disabled guy who goes around suing places for ADA compliance as a full-time job: if we really care about making businesses accessible for the disabled, it's more efficient to have him doing the lawsuits and other disabled people getting on with their lives)

Post reply on HN