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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This is a an argument built on appeals both to Eric S. Raymond and the last several years of Twitter/Tumblr drama. It doesn't even discuss the CoC; instead, it adopts as a premise that any CoC that refers to "safety”, “welcoming” and “respect" must be tool of Twitter oppressors.

There are valid arguments against widespread adoption of CoCs (for instance: they can end up as window dressing). But this isn't an example of one.

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>This is a an argument built on appeals both to Eric S. Raymond and the last several years of Twitter/Tumblr drama

I see no appeals to ESR (just a "for-further-reading" reference). Did we read the same article? And claiming an argument is "built on twitter drama" is a meaningless abstraction.

> It doesn't even discuss the CoC; instead, it adopts as a premise that any CoC that refers to "safety”, “welcoming” and “respect" must be tool of Twitter oppressors.

This is a silly and naive argument (unless it's just flat-out dishonest). If you proposed selling ground beef hamburgers at a vegetarian restaurant, would you expect the response from the vegetarians to include a detailed dissection of the proposal? No, it would just note that it involved a proposal to sell meat and thus wasn't appropriate for the restaurant.

There's no agreement that a Code of Conduct is even necessary. Jumping right into debating the details of the CoC means you've skipped over that very crucial argument of whether a code of conduct is even a good idea in the first place, regardless of what is in it, specifically. It's dishonestly narrowing the frame of the discussion to favor the decision desired by the CoC faction.

I knew that the #1 "rebuttal" of this would be: "links to ESR: disqualified!"

>it adopts as a premise that any CoC that refers to "safety”, “welcoming” and “respect" must be tool of Twitter oppressors

No it doesn't. It explains its argument for why that is, and provides examples.

Edit: I also knew, when I saw this post had been up for an hour, that it wouldn't make it to hour 2, no matter how many upvotes.

Why did you think it wouldn't make it? Does HN have a policy to avoid anything related to the SJW mess? Genuinely curious, I'm a new user.

Yes. Things like this often get memory-holed. I don't know if it's by users or mods, but because I have showdead on and this post still can't be found on the front (or next) page, I tend to think the latter. It also doesn't say "flagged" on it.

I sure as shit flagged it.

At least you admit to childish abuse of the flag system. The link clearly does not violate any submission guidelines.

This is a weird post: it's been popping on and off the front page for me, which might have something to do with the "vouch" feature I just learned about. It seems like it's the object of a tug-of-war.

That's exactly what it is.

Thanks for the explanation. I'm sorry that my misunderstanding of the UI, and some bias around the subject, led to conspiratorial thinking.

I wish the community didn't have such a slim tolerance for discussion of this subject that's not uniformly toeing the progressive line, as I thought this was fair in tone and argument, but if I'm in the minority, it's nothing to go nuts about. I can see both sides.

Posts about this and related topics get heavily flagged regardless of what side they're on. I don't see the community in toto as driven ideologically one way or the other, though obviously some subgroups are.

We turn the flags off sometimes when an article is particularly substantive. For example, we did that yesterday for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10923885, because that article was factual and had historical value. When we do that, though, it isn't because we agree or disagree ideologically.

It seems more of an effort to retain people working on the project that fall into the protected categories, and losing those people is a real possibility if someone else's negative attitudes get back to them, regardless of whether they're vocal about it.

I'm not sure whether I think the public spaces bit should apply to everyone though. Certainly project leadership should be held to it if that's what they're aspiring to.

No moderator touched this post. It doesn't say [flagged] because we only print that when the thread is dead (closed to new comments) and the software doesn't kill threads when there's an active discussion.

It did say [Flagged] for a while, though. I was reading the discussion and it bounced in-and-out of existence while I was trying to contribute. The Reply button would disappear; at one point the link and title were removed, then restored. I guess this is what the Vouch system is for.

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