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More people need to downvote direct personal insults.
The author is right that it's a problem.
On a public twitter account, if you block someone they can still see your tweets, and they can still talk about you. You just can't see it.
Blocking a post from HN would mean people on HN wouldn't even see it or be able to talk about it. We might be assholes, but we should still be able to talk about stuff within the parameters laid out by HN.
Another solution might just be to disable commenting in your posts if the referer is HN.
Over the few years, HN has sort of become the Digg and Reddit. There are far and few substantial conversations in visible view (yes count mine as unsubstantial as well).
From the logical perspective, the circle of HN needs to break off from its core and diverge into many different circles. There may already be few inner circles (hidden from the public view) I can't tell. But it seems logical that this big public circle is all inclusive, where everything goes.
On the one hand, being argued about is a problem a lot of people would like to have. I spent two years making a large canvas diagramming library and I would have loved for it to have frontpage'd on HN, even if everyone just told me it was terrible.
On the other hand, I do think the meanness of programming communities is a the biggest problem we have. Programmer-types are just not as supportive/empathetic as nearly everyone else I know. And I'm not talking about criticism, I'm talking about needless mean, shitty behavior that gets repeated and defended all too often. When the Linus/"Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP!"[2] was posted to HN every single top comment was defending Linus' behavior.
Linus' mission and position do not excuse his language. In defending users, he's still attacking a person.
It upsets the hell out of me, and I think its a big part of why many women (and I'm sure men) prefer not to engage in programming communities. Even on StackOverflow I see people being horrible to confused newcomers, instead of steering them in the right direction.
I think rooting out this kind of shitty behavior is the most important thing we can do to advance programming communities and make others feel welcome. By miles. Especially if we want to alleviate gender and general newcomer disparities.
This article reminds me of one from 117 days ago, "What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project".[3]
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[1] There were some remarks in the article that just left me confused, such as:
> They said I thought JavaScript was a bad language. How funny, because I'm writing almost all my code these days in JavaScript. They say I'm old and out of date. Funny. They're the ones who are out of date! :-)
???
~~~~~
[2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75
Some excerpts:
> Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP!
> It's a bug alright - in the kernel. How long have you been a maintainer? And you still haven't learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance?
> If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be to understand?
> Shut up, Mauro. And I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. Seriously.
If you talked to your spouse like that it would be called abuse.
I was horrified by the HN reactions. You can read some of them here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4962912
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I subscribe to the Hacker News feed, which does not include comments. It's very useful stuff. So the links themselves are good. To each his own: My HN reading favors comments over links by at least an order of magnitude.
Yikes, pg is not gonna be happy. Honestly I feel like the only option is to just stop accepting new members at a certain point, because above a certain tolerance it stops being a community and becomes a city. CIP: I'm in a rural town for a couple days and everytime I walk outside everyone I pass says "Hi" or "Good Afternoon," the first time that happened I was kinda surprised I tried to figure out if I knew that pers…
> Finally, I've begun to really like OSC's version of the internet as presented in Ender's Game, at least when it comes to having real discussions. The only things I remember about it is that a) there were effectively several 'internets', and you had to pay to access each one, and b) the Wiggin kids had to have accounts created for them by their parents, who could presumably vouch for them, and would be tied to a rea…
Here's the basic idea: Everyone has access to view basically everything, but for the right to discuss or post things you needed to be invited to that forum/group, so you start out kinda small in the general, "everyone can post here" community and then you were slowly invited in (or kicked out) depending on how much you contributed (and it's quality).
I'm very sorry it has come this far. It's easy to forget we have a tendency to make remarks about people online that we would never bring up in a personal conversation. I'm not excluding myself here, I too feel I'm sometimes harsher online than offline - and it sadly also happened in the Dave Winer thread yesterday. People can come across in a certain way through their writing that we would never attribute to them if…
I thought people were a bit harsh yesterday too