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

The web runs on tolerance

shkspr.mobi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 183 posts

Re: The web runs on tolerance

#31

Post by Nextgrid »

The right-wing extremism we now have in the US is the expected knee-jerk reaction to the left-wing extremism that came before it.

In both cases there's a few true believers and a lot of opportunists who use the cause as a way to further their own agenda. It happened with the left (the master branch rename being the stupidest example), it's now happening in the right, with big words and performative actions such as ICE raids while the root cause of the problem is not addressed (industries reliant on large-scale illegal immigrant labor are left alone).

The right answer is somewhere in the middle of the two camps. Unfortunately until then people suffer on both sides while opportunists use the conflict for their own interests.

Re: The web runs on tolerance

#32

Post by wredcoll »

didgetmaster wrote: post #7

This guy lost me when he started talking about diversity issues instead of tech. I couldn't care less about the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the person(s) who created the hardware or software that I use. Does it work? Is it easy to understand and use? These are the things I am interested in. I am reminded of an early cartoon of a dog sitting at a computer saying 'On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog!…

Except there are people right on this forum who will happily talk about how dogs deserve fewer/no rights. Do you think that this makes the "dogs" feel welcome and do you think that these words have no effect?

Like, it's cool and great that you personally are in a position where most of the ideologies of hate aren't affecting you, right now, personally, but is it too much to ask that you spare a thought for the people it does affect?

Re: The web runs on tolerance

#33

Post by fwip »

charcircuit wrote: post #14

>But the web works because browsers are tolerant. This is more of an artifact of needing to be compatibile with other browsers and more of an arbitrary decision where once one browser starts allowing all sorts of input than everyone else may start needing to if content starts relying on it. >But the world is better for it. It makes compatibility between different browsers more complicated due to adding a ton of edge…

> I disagree that this happens. At best it discourages a subset of the next generation, but it is not a subset I would like to work with.

The subset most discouraged is likely those targeted by discrimination - women, minorities, gay people. Not a great look to say you'd rather not work with that subset.

Re: The web runs on tolerance

#34

Post by wredcoll »

whycombinetor wrote: post #13

What a bizarre bait and switch. Starts talking about browsers allowing malformed HTML and uses that to draw conclusions about allowing certain types of people.

My god, and we thought those english teachers were idiots when they insisted we should learn things like reading comprehension and metaphors.

Re: The web runs on tolerance

#36

Post by wredcoll »

echelon wrote: post #30
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #4

But in contrast, web communities run on moderation, i.e. a sort of intolerance of bad content. The lesson is that technical issues and social issues really don't mix. You can't conclude anything from one versus the other. Case in point, cryptocurrency was supposed to be the anarchist's dream, but now it's being adopted by some central banks.

The internet I grew up on barely had any moderation at all. Or polarization. Or algorithms that feed on that polarization. I grew up in a conservative, religious family. The internet, forums, and IRC exposed me to lots of ideas outside my upbringing and helped shape who I am today. I was already starting to really dig biology, science, and evolution as a teenager. Early internet culture helped tip the scale. I'm now…

> Critically, the internet was not so polarized back then. Conservatives and socialists and liberal democrats (were they a thing?) could all talk amongst one another and generally get along

Really? 4chan has been around preaching death and hatred to all sorts of minorities for, like, 20+ yeara at this point and it's hardly the first or only.

It's great that there are better places on the web than 4chan, but those places, without exception, are better because they ban the hateful and intolerant.

> The Obama presidency was an incubation period to normalize this. Reddit, Tumblr, and lots of other forums became dominated by liberals censoring conservatives

This is such a weird lie to insert in the middle of this rant and it really makes you wonder about the rest of it.

No one is required to tolerate assholes spewing hate no matter how liberal or tolerant you are supposed to be.

Re: The web runs on tolerance

#37

Post by trimethylpurine »

sebular wrote: post #21
ktpsns wrote: post #3

The older ones among us remember when XML took over the world and everyone was supposed to use strict XHTML. It turned out that the strength of the HTML ecosystem was its fault tolerance. HTML4 was the "sloppy" answer to XHTML. It brought HTML back from a data language to a markup language. Every Markdown parser is similarly fault-tolerant as HTML parsers. However, CSS and JS are not error-tolerant. A syntax error in…

Nonsense. Open the console on l any mediocre webpage and you’ll see a stream of JavaScript errors. But it’s still working. One script crashes? Doesn’t matter to any other script. Unhandled exception? Rest of the app is still working fine. Hell, that button may work if you just click it again. And CSS syntax error causing only that single line of code to be ignored while every other line of code works fine is the very…

All that is very good. But as a back end guy dabbling in front end, it would be more welcoming if JS was a little intuitive. I'm very thankful for LLMs now helping with that a bit, but honestly even they seem to fail at JS more so than other languages, at least in my experience so far.

Re: The web runs on tolerance

#38

Post by jdpage »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #20
lone-cloud wrote: post #16

When I finished reading it I thought it was an anti-Trump piece, but the author also wrote: "That's why it baffles me that some prominent technologists embrace hateful ideologies.". Was Trump a techie too? He must have been behind the creation of JS. "The ARM processor which powers the modern world was co-designed by a trans woman." This is not factually correct. Roger Wilson was one of the designers of the processor…

Interesting point: was she "trans" before she transitioned, or only afterwards? Lots of queer folks are pretending to be straight. Or do they only become queer when they emerge from the closet?

Yes, the understanding is that trans people were always trans. It may have taken time for them to understand that and perhaps more to decide to adopt that identity publicly, but they're not "not trans" before that. Other queer identities are generally thought of the same way in queer communities: many people have early experiences (e.g. fixating on same-sex characters in fiction the way peers might opposite-sex characters) that they later realise were early expressions of their orientation.

Re: The web runs on tolerance

#39

Post by cindyllm »

wredcoll wrote: post #36
echelon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet I grew up on barely had any moderation at all. Or polarization. Or algorithms that feed on that polarization. I grew up in a conservative, religious family. The internet, forums, and IRC exposed me to lots of ideas outside my upbringing and helped shape who I am today. I was already starting to really dig biology, science, and evolution as a teenager. Early internet culture helped tip the scale. I'm now…

> Critically, the internet was not so polarized back then. Conservatives and socialists and liberal democrats (were they a thing?) could all talk amongst one another and generally get along Really? 4chan has been around preaching death and hatred to all sorts of minorities for, like, 20+ yeara at this point and it's hardly the first or only. It's great that there are better places on the web than 4chan, but those pla…

[dead]

Re: The web runs on tolerance

#40

Post by echelon »

wredcoll wrote: post #36
echelon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet I grew up on barely had any moderation at all. Or polarization. Or algorithms that feed on that polarization. I grew up in a conservative, religious family. The internet, forums, and IRC exposed me to lots of ideas outside my upbringing and helped shape who I am today. I was already starting to really dig biology, science, and evolution as a teenager. Early internet culture helped tip the scale. I'm now…

> Critically, the internet was not so polarized back then. Conservatives and socialists and liberal democrats (were they a thing?) could all talk amongst one another and generally get along Really? 4chan has been around preaching death and hatred to all sorts of minorities for, like, 20+ yeara at this point and it's hardly the first or only. It's great that there are better places on the web than 4chan, but those pla…

> This is such a weird lie to insert in the middle of this rant

Either I should have expanded on that or you're not recalling the same period of time I am.

The Obama years were when Millennials went to college. They're when broadband and smartphones proliferated.

This is when IRC and the indie web died. This is when platforms became predominant and when censorship became top-down mandated. This is when "app stores" over "unlimited web installs" won.

Everyone entering the internet during this period entered into a world where censorship was normalized. Where the algorithm started to take over.

Those of us who used the internet before the Obama years remember a vastly different internet.

It's not that it was Obama that did this. It's simply a marker in time to denote confluence of changes and generational coming of age that coincided with it.

What is interesting is that the Trump presidencies swung the pendulum of who was being censored in the opposite direction of the pop culture that had originally adopted the platforms and set the 2010's status quo.

> 4chan

I remember an internet before 4chan.

Their anonymity, ironically, became something of a protest to the platformization of the years that followed.

Wasn't there once a lot of pro-LGBT stuff on 4chan? I avoid it, but I've read that it's a melting pot? Just very extreme?

I'm more concerned about Kiwi Farms type places. I know friends of Near, and bullying is something that irks me.

Post reply on HN