How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

We are descendants of 40% of males and 80% of females. As religious and legally enforced monogamy decline across all societies, we will see increasingly vicious status wars across all human societies.

This writer is double dipping for his status points, as not only did he specialize in attacking the status of others, but is now acting as the merciful lord who has chosen to forgive those sinful peasants. Clever.

Monogamy was an aberration and an affront to nature, because it forced average females to mate with average males, robbing them of their desire for the highest status male's genetic material. In the past, male resource provisioning was important, but the state has nullified that variable by providing for all.

Status reigns supreme. Defend yours at all costs. Oh, and the best defense is a great offense. Ah homo sapiens...such a fascinating species.

The reason I was annoyed about it was because signatures are the way you see who is saying something in a conversation thread. Back then you'd click on the person's username and get easy access to their pages, talk page, block links, contributions, etc. it also made it really hard to see what they had contributed. I was also concerned that someone would go what I in essence did - which was a really dumb move on my part, like I say.

Regarding Bryan Cantrill, never forget this post (a one-line reply at the bottom):

http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html

Which I link not to shame him for what he wrote as a recent college grad 20 years ago, but to say that everyone does dumb, borderline offensive things sometimes, and what matters is that you are not obstinate in your dumbness.

Maybe Bryan would have fired the person he was then; that's fine. We need both effective, meaningful punishment, and also effective rehabilitation. It should be possible to go from Bryan Cantrill in Sun to Bryan Cantrill in Joyent. It should be possible to go from Ben Noordhuis in Node to Ben Noordhuis in io, or Justine Sacco in IAC to Justine Sacco wherever she is now, or Sam Biddle to chastened empathetic Sam Biddle, or whatever.

This much is true.

> HN is in general no longer held with the same regard it was a couple of years ago.

This may be true in some circles, but I don't think its generally true. Its probably true that HN is seen by some who participated in it earlier as less of an exclusive club of like-interested folk as it has gained popularity, but that's going to happen with any narrow forum over time that doesn't have an exclusionary wall for membership (and exclusive walls of membership have their own problems which will can erode the image of a forum over time in different ways.)

> Note the number of progressive, well-respected regulars who've left this place behind.

Such as...?

> There are other avenues to discuss tech and tech issues without ancaps, MRAs, and anti-SJW crusaders trying to internet-fight you at every turn.

Well, I suppose you could have a forum with a political litmus test for membership or heavy-handed pre-publication moderation of comments, but given how much the tech community overlaps with the ancap, MRA, and anti-SJW crusader communities -- and, perhaps more importantly, the reaction many outside those communities would have to the kind of approaches necessary to eradicate the unwanted comments -- you'd probably lose some value for actual tech and, particularly, tech issues discussions.

But where do you see those better alternatives?