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Comment by fortran77 | Hacker News Reader

I suspect you're right. I stopped participating in SE years ago not for "political" reasons like this, but because it seemed to be dominated by power-happy mods and people whose main goal was to collect points and not to help others.

This kerfuffle, and I only got a little summary of it, makes my eyes glaze over. I'm certainly not against treating people with respect, but I'm not willing to stick my neck out for some of the unsavory characters here who aren't acting in good faith.

What they did to Monica Cellio was disgusting. And most likely based on pure hate.

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I'm in the same place as you are, but in relation to wikipedia rather than stack overflow.

I remember adding a [citation needed] tag to an inaccurate claim, and then discovering that my change has been reverted. The reason the moderator gave was that [citation needed] didn't look good on the page. How do you argue with people like that. I'm not going to spend hours reading on wikipedia's policies just make it better.

SE is bad, but at least I get something out of it. That and the fact that SE's meta game is easier to play than wikipedia's. You just need to make sure you word your question in a way that it can only be answered definitively (no opinion), and preempt duplicate-heads with a list of similar questions and why they don't answer your question.

I've yet to have a question of mine closed as a duplicate, though mods have treated me passive-aggressively for taking away their sticks :^)

Can you give an example on how to word a question?

On Stack Overflow? A good question contains a reproducible problem (or at least an understandable question) and it's worded such that people with the same problem will find the question and answer by googling.

Better than that is better, but that's the threshold between bad and good.

So include error messages instead of just typing "I got a certificate error when …", because people who get the same error will paste their error message into google. Some of then paste it into bing. None type "I got a certificate error when …" into google.

Stack Overflow is about building a knowledge base where people find answers. SEO is essential to that.

What they did to her was wrong from my point of view, but it certainly was not 'based on pure hate'. Don't speak this exaggeration and nonsense. The person who fired her simply had no intention to spend time dealing with Monica's questions and chose the easy route of getting rid of what she perceived as a troublemaker.

Well, it is a pretty hateful way of doing things. I mean, that's how I treat people I hate; shun them, ignore them, not reply to them. So there's an argument there.

I agree though. It seems to me to have more to do with aggrandizing power and influence than with hate. What better way to get rid of competitors than to bait them into behaving "bigoted"? Look at the Monica case. She never refused to use someones chosen pronoun. She was baited into admitting that she already avoids certain ways of addressing people out of kindness and politeness and a desire not to rub people the wrong way. Now she's out. This has nothing to do with bigotry, and everything to do with a group of people that want to kick everybody else off every position of power or influence.

> I mean, that's how I treat people I hate; shun them, ignore them, not reply to them.

That’s also how I treat people I completely don’t care about or am aware of. My default behavior is to ignore, that doesn’t mean I hate everyone I ignore. If I assume this about people who ignore me, I’ll probably be wrong.

Should I assume Comcast is shunning me when they don’t respond? Or that they hate me? Or maybe they are just a stupid org that doesn’t care at all about me.

> "Well, it is a pretty hateful way of doing things. I mean, that's how I treat people I hate; shun them, ignore them, not reply to them."

That is a striking perspective, but perhaps just reflects a generational difference?

In a social media driven culture, where people grow up feeling that "attention == validation"... I suppose they could also feel that "indifference == hate" as a corollary.

I'm 56. I didn't grow up in the "Social Media" culture. But I recognize when a moderator of Mi Yodea is being attacked for seemingly contrived reasons.

Also, I suspect if she weren't a moderator on Mi Yodea the "woke" community would have had much less of a problem with her. (Even on HN, the politically-correct have to attack everything related to that issue.)

They intentionally took action against her on the Shabbos and Rosh Hashanah when they knew she couldn't respond. If you accept the trans community's claim that misgendering is an act of violence, then if follows that this is was act of 'violence' too.

> If you accept the trans community's claim that misgendering is an act of violence...

I've found that members of the cisgender community almost uniformly take offense at being misgendered. And responses from the cisgender male community often include threats of physical violence, especially when one persistently misgenders them or challenges the validity of their maleness.

That said, I'm rather troubled by Monica's treatment in this situation, especially its coincidence with Shabbos/Rosy Hashanah.

I get misgendered all the time! I go by "Ruvi" (short for Reuven) and English readers see that as a female name. So on forums I get called "she".

It's never bothered me.

Btw that cisgender community you speak of doesn't exist, right? You just made that up.

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