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Comment by ForrestN | Hacker News Reader

Why was this downvoted? Asking sincerely in an effort to understand and learn.

Threads like this get pretty weird voting patterns, I wouldn't read too much into it.

Upvoted GP as a corrective measure.

Because there are tons of apologists in the valley. Men who also harass women like McClure and feel they're entitled to it, especially against women of color.

The overwhelming majority of HN votes don't come from "the valley". And to the extent we have data on this the geographical trend is probably opposite to what you're suggesting.

Thanks for "pulling back the curtain" and giving us a peek at the data.

There's really been a considerable change in HN in the past few years. A couple of years ago, a thread like this would have been 100% apologists and victim-blaming, laced with a heavy dose of outright misogyny. It would have been flagged off the the front page in minutes. Today, the threads are much better with only a small amount of that.

I'm unclear whether this is because a) Silicon Valley is changing b) the user composition of HN is changing or c) the misogynist types are just feeling less confident. Regardless of the reason, it's a change for the better.

I have to credit 'dang and 'sctb's public moderation and tone-setting for a lot of it (and I've been a critic of weak and permissive moderation here in the past, so credit where credit is due). HN still has some really profound problems with punching down, but so does everywhere else and it's improved significantly; amongst the places I hang out it's gone from perhaps the most egregious example of the kind of nastiness in the industry to somewhere better than the median.

I will second that the moderators deserve credit for the change in "tone" as you put it. But it is not really a change in tone, but rather that the hold-on-a-seconders, whose "tone" is generally utterly anodyne in comparison to the reflexive vituperation they receive (not that it bothers me) have been warned off contributing. And so it goes.

The contributions of those anodyne 'hold-on-a-seconders' should not be missed. There was a reflexive script that they worked off that sounded all very mature but pretty much came down to people wandering into every thread and reminding everyone that sometimes victims lie.

They never had any specific reason to do this; it was never the case that these guys had new information. They just felt consistently moved to remind us all that No-one Really Can Know All The Facts every time an allegation turned up, like they had just invented epistemology and wanted to tell the world.

Exactly this. It's whataboutism designed to discredit and damage the victims and to that end I actively don't respect (and do downvote, and sometimes flag) those posts.

> There's really been a considerable change in HN in the past few years. A couple of years ago, a thread like this would have been 100% apologists and victim-blaming, laced with a heavy dose of outright misogyny.

I wonder how far back you mean; I haven't noticed that in past two or three years.

> It would have been flagged off the the front page in minutes.

Sometimes those topics get flagged simply because people might be getting tired of the pervasive guilty-until-proven-innocent attitude that's frequent with these stories, especially that they often turn out to be overblown, more complex than presented, or outright false.

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