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

How Basecamp Blew Up

platformer.news

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 1001 posts

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#591

Post by dang »

predaking wrote: post #122
dang wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't cross into personal attack and name-calling. You may not owe (or feel you owe) $person better, but you owe this community better if you're participating here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair enough! Thanks. I’ll edit! (or apparently I can't, but I'll note it for the future - feel free to take out my last sentence there if you have editing privileges!)

Thanks for the kind reply! don't worry about it - examples are good for learning, and the main thing is just to course-correct going forward.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#592

Post by philosopher1234 »

arp242 wrote: post #315
darkwizard42 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laughing at names did not lead to genocide and no one implied that. What someone did was share why it was important to treat this seriously and not let it slide... lest the offending behaviors continue to escalate. An example was shared from social science on a pyramid of normalization where such behavior eventually gets normalized. Classic and indisputable example might be Germany in WW2. It wasn’t like citizens wok…

People did equate the names list to some mass shooting of Asians though. A name like, say, "Fuk Yo" is accidentally similar to the English "Fuck you". It's kinda funny in a childish way, but I don't think that making fun of it automatically implies that they think these people are of lesser value. i.e. I don't think it's automatically racism in the first place. It's inappropriate because making fun of your customers…

>And maybe some employees who worked on that list were racist; there is no way for us to know. I like to opt for a more good-faith interpretation, which seems very uncommon these days.

Racism is the air we breathe. I grew up around mostly white kids, and there is undeniably more fear amongst those kids (myself included) when interacting with black people than with white people. It seems similarly undeniable that affluent white people are more afraid of african american people when its dark out than they are of other white people. When a black person applies to a job, their blackness is not neutral. It seems to me that most people have underlying feeling about blackness, and that people of color have to contend with that when they're going through their lives.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#593

Post by js2 »

gustavo-fring wrote: post #575
js2 wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Republican party has cynically been using race for fifty years to split the working class vote. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy So for someone to say they aren't Republican because they aren't racist is hyperbolic, but it isn't wrong. What is Scary Gary?

Yes and the first Jews and African-Americans that gained positions in government gained them as Republicans. Prior to the Southern strategy, the democratic party was the party of Jim Crow and lynchings and backwards ass race hatred. But they, like people, changed. It really says nothing about the potential of the parties today. If you are so ideological that you can't see that calling people you just met racists is a…

Except that the GOP is still cynically appealing to racism. The parties in their modern form began after their realignment with the civil rights movement. They haven't fundamentally changed since the sixties.

Yes, I agree it doesn't persuade anyone to call them names. I don't excuse that behavior. But again, it isn't wrong to say that the GOP uses racism to this day to win votes.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#594

Post by dang »

tha0xa2 wrote: post #264
dang wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, please don't take HN threads straight into ideological flamewar hell. Second, since you've been using HN primarily for that, we've banned the account. We ban accounts that use HN primarily for ideological battle, regardless of which ideology they're battling for, because there's nothing more destructive of the intended use of the site. Not to mention its intended spirit, which is gratifying curiosity , not smi…

This user is also almost entirely involved in ideological battles: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cozuya

I'll take a look, but it's rather unsavory to point the finger at someone else instead of taking responsibility for your own actions.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#595

Post by anon7725 »

thrownaway564 wrote: post #181
Tainnor wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. But this is (was) a 60-person company. That's about the size of the company I'm currently working at. In other words, you should know everyone and interact with a sizeable chunk of these people somewhat regularly. It strikes me as very odd that you would suddenly so fundamentally distrust your co-workers with whom you share so much. But I'm also not in the US and maybe this is just the current climate over the…

The culture here is getting bad. We have an "inclusion council" that hands out these diktats. The word ban list (not blacklist!) is approaching 100 words including husband, housekeeping, normal, hacker and meritocracy. Worse part is we're a security company edit: "here" is okta, not basecamp

What’s wrong with husband?

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#596

Post by simondotau »

ipaddr wrote: post #554
newacct583 wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't know the context, but as to your second item... when did denouncing white supremacy become something controversial? I know what you're really saying, which is that people on the right feel persecuted by being implicitly accused of being racists. And... y'know, that's fair. Probably 90% of the time in arguments like this that's an unfounded accusation made in bad faith just to score points. But still... the t…

Demanding you denounce a minority population is how we got into this problem in the first place. Don't you see you are creating white supremacy by demanding everyone persecute it? You create the demand.

That's an interesting perspective which I had not considered before. There are certainly plenty of people out there desperate to sit in opposition to mainstream culture, not merely to be arbitrarily contrarian, but because they enjoy the feeling of being hated. The fire-hose of scorn and derision maintained by such rote denouncements might attract them to the idea like moths to a flame.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#597

Post by jolux »

gustavo-fring wrote: post #586
Poiesis wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't exactly how old your anecdote is, but I think it's pretty well established that Donald Trump is a racist, as are many of the people he chooses to work with. When Trump was president, there was little if any pushback to his racism in the Republican Party, and they chose instead to "close ranks" and support him. Under those circumstances, I can understand why people would say they're a Democrat because they're…

This happened in 2014 when this same group believed that they could win the governership of a conservative state with an abortion-supporter. I'm not making a judgment on that position, I'm just saying that it completely misunderstands the culture of a state, to a scary, scary degree, part of why they don't win. Trump is and was a fraud, liar, and fool. But even Crazy Ted Cruz opposed him. The Bushes were obviously ap…

You turned this into a political flame war for no reason at all. The head of this thread doesn’t say anything about Republicans or Democrats. People didn’t leave because Ryan Singer was acting Republican, they left because he was acting racist. No reason to conflate the two if you believe they’re unrelated.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#598

Post by gustavo-fring »

jolux wrote: post #597
gustavo-fring wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened in 2014 when this same group believed that they could win the governership of a conservative state with an abortion-supporter. I'm not making a judgment on that position, I'm just saying that it completely misunderstands the culture of a state, to a scary, scary degree, part of why they don't win. Trump is and was a fraud, liar, and fool. But even Crazy Ted Cruz opposed him. The Bushes were obviously ap…

You turned this into a political flame war for no reason at all. The head of this thread doesn’t say anything about Republicans or Democrats. People didn’t leave because Ryan Singer was acting Republican, they left because he was acting racist. No reason to conflate the two if you believe they’re unrelated.

This is not a flame war, rather an analysis of what happened. Is that not possible? We really at the point that trying to discuss this objectively is seen as a threat of "war"?

Who is Singer?

Is this thread not an example of the misunderstanding we are talking about? You think I'm acting in bad faith, but really I just want to talk about this, because we don't solve it unless we try.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#599

Post by shkkmo »

acituan wrote: post #558
newacct583 wrote: post #516

> One can empathically agree that such injustice, and any injustice, sucks, and still advocate compartmentalizing between institutions of the society writ large. That depends very heavily on the nature of the injustice, doesn't it? I mean, take Godwin's perspective here: that's literally the logic that gave us the holocaust! Implicit in your statement is the idea that the "injustice" might "suck", but not so much tha…

> Implicit in your statement is the idea that the "injustice" might "suck", but not so much that it's worth blowing up your employer. Which is to say: you really don't think this injustice sucked very much. You're both misreading and over-reading. The comparison is not between how much the injustice sucks vs. the cost of blowing up the employer. It is a) whether all injustices have equitable access to pressuring empl…

I don't think "parasitizing" is accurate or constructive terminology.

I think your conclusion is also obviously false. The access that the civil rights movement eventually acquired at many institutions did nothing to increase the injustices faced by LGBTQ group.

So while unequal access can create further injustices, it is not case they always do. I think that the linkage you are calling out tends to arise when the two groups are in conflict.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#600

Post by [deleted] »

MattRix wrote: post #336
dsnr wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Third, they secretly deleted over a decade's worth of company chat history shortly before making the disastrous blog post. Why? I can think of a reason. To protect employees who are not part of the woke mob from being “canceled” by the woke mob.

any time I find someone like you complaining about “getting cancelled” or “cancel culture”, I just replace “cancel” with “consequences”, since that’s what it really is. They wanted to protect employees from the consequences of their words and actions.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN