You used a question mark, but it's not clear that you were asking a sincere question. Actually, the way you phrased it ("I assume") suggests otherwise. So do your ideologically charged comment elsewhere in the thread and the hostile "Are you ok" bit here.
If someone wants to share that she's a woman, that's up to her. Abruptly challenging another user personally about that is usually a bad-faith move in online conversations—especially on a divisive topic like this one, where people are primed to post aggressively. Since you didn't explain why you were asking, all the reader can do is pattern-match, and we know how comments like that tend to pattern-match in flamewars.
If you meant it in good faith, there's a simple fix: include enough information for the reader—not to mention the person you're asking—to be able to feel that.
I've been careful not to accuse you. That's why I said "it's not clear", "suggests", "usually", "prone", "enough information", "pattern match", "good faith", and "simple fix".
If you're participating in this thread in good faith, what could be easier to make clear? Unfortunately, some internet commenters specialize in posting aggressively while staying inside the line of plausible deniability. That's abuse, so moderators have to do something—but moderation is guesswork, and there's no way to guess perfectly. If I guessed wrong, I'll be happy to correct the error. But if I guessed wrong, why do you up the ante with each reply? That doesn't help clear things up.
That was a description, not an accusation. If you can think of a more accurate phrase to describe when someone cuts abruptly to a bald personal question without clarifying why, or establishing good faith, while hinting ("I assume") that they don't mean it neutrally—I'd be happy to edit my description. It's hard to find precise language for these things.
> So you’re accusing me of something I didn’t intend just because I didn’t ask my question in the way you would have liked
Even if you had asked your question "in HN's way" it would not have been liked. The polite veneer is just that ... a veneer. HN including its moderator has their own ideological bias (for example, there is a bias towards plant-based diets) and they will downvote or flag posts they don't agree with it, no matter how nice you phrase it.
That's quite untrue, as anyone can see by looking at how we moderated this thread. Thoughtful comments on both sides of the issue are fine. Unsubstantive flamebait, and so on, is not fine. This is all just standard application of the site guidelines: https://hackernews.hn/newsguidelines.html. The word "polite", btw, is not one we rely on.
The leap to plant-based diets is... interplanetary, but it's a great example of how people construct their image of moderators, or the community. It's always a mosaic of things the observer ran across and didn't like. Since people dislike different things, they construct different images.
I'm afraid it's completely true. As moderators you really need to decide on your positions with much more rigor and systematisation. I enjoy reading Hacker News but its biased moderation is by far the most regrettable part of the experience.
In this thread you have decided that James Damore's very name is something you hate so much that mentioning it should be hidden - a classic problem with the definition of the term "flamebait". To see this, can you create a page on this site that gives a non-circular definition of flamebait? The only obvious definition I can find is "a topic that encourages angry responses" but actually using this definition would allow any tiny minority to ban topics at will, simply by posting angry responses to mentions of them (exactly what's happened here). "Unsubstantive flamebait" is an even more useless term - you can't define that in any way that wouldn't be 90% your own personal opinions projected back at you. One man's unsubstantive flamebait is another man's pithy observation, after all.
For a site to claim it encourages intellectual curiosity it must be resistant to manipulation by small minorities, but that in turn requires policing of tone and not opinion. That won't be possible at the moment because a big part of creating trustworthy moderation is rigorously separating personal opinions from moderation decisions.
In this thread your own highly debatable views on gender relations and James Damore are clearly dominating the discussion. Even things you view as incontrovertible fact are not actually facts, they're debatable opinions. For instance you claim he wasn't fired because of an "offended woman" although this article literally is headlined
"YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki explains why the ‘Google memo’ author had to be fired"
"Wojcicki was part of the team at Google that decided to fire Damore"
and talks about her feelings of offence and hurt at what he wrote. There are many other such articles specifically naming Wojcicki as a major force in the decision to terminate Damore.
Clearly, when it comes to what Damore said and what happened afterwards, there's enough scope for debate that any reasonably neutral moderator would step back and stay uninvolved as long as the conversation remains polite. Hacker News is clearly failing this standard.
I know how easy it is for things to seem this way. And I'm happy to admit being wrong on mistaken moderation. But I don't think any of this comes close. L'affaire Damore is what the HN guidelines call a "classic flamewar topic". The effect of dropping one of these into unrelated or marginally-related threads is well understood: it turns them into the same ball of fire that it did the last N times it came up. That's why pg added that guideline 10+ years ago.
When someone does that, we have two options: moderate it or let it burn. Who wants the latter? Only those who are eager to vent indignation and/or smite enemies, and though they tend to post a lot, those are not the users HN is for. HN is for curious readers, and curious readers find repetition boring. They thrive on diffs. In this case the diff was a new survey of male managers—that was the interesting part.
This is bog-standard HN moderation. You can't derive my "views on gender relations" from that. No matter how convincing the derivation feels, it's an illusion that springs up when moderation calls go the wrong way, relative to one's own views. It always feels like that. Were you on the opposite side, you'd have the opposite image. Indeed some people indeed do. This shows up when you say "James Damore's very name is something you hate". How could you know that? You can't. (FWIW, I don't hate either James Damore or his name.)
As for "rigorously separating personal opinions from moderation decisions", I'm far from perfect at that but can at least claim to have had a lot of practice. I'd be happy to receive further instruction from anyone more skilled at it than I am. There's a bit of a burden of proof there, though. People tend to invoke such phrases less out of passion for impartiality and more because the refs made a call against their side. It always feels like the mods are against you in that case.
p.s. The Wojcicki thing strikes me as stretching thin indeed. That entire business was a large institutional and media fooforah, not the merely personal sort of conflict that was alluded to upthread ("if you inadvertently offend a women and they complain"). Leaping to Damore was a classic flamewar tangent, precisely what leads to angry tape loops and nothing else.
Unfortunately this is the nature of moderated communities. And of course unmoderated communities tend to attract trolls and extremists. I don't think this is a solved problem yet.
This is going to sound weird, but I think it makes sense: this would be a more compelling statement if instead you added that you’ve also given negative feedback to women, put women on PIPs, denied them promotions, or fired women for incompetence.
This is going to sound weird, but I think it makes sense: this would be a more compelling statement if instead you added that you’ve also given negative feedback to women, put women on PIPs, denied them promotions, or fired women for incompetence.
It doesn't sound weird at all to me, but it is telling that you think the issue is women filing complaints for negative feedback versus women getting harassed in the workplace.
