New York Times developers squabble over decision to doxx Scott Alexander

Do posts mentioning HN make anyone else feel like they’re in on the joke, in a way? I get the same feeling when a movie title is mentioned in the movie. It just feels nice.

> The Slate Star Codex incident set off a tense conversation in the Times’ “newsroom-feedback” Slack channel, an internal message board in which staff have felt increasingly emboldened to criticize and raise questions about the paper and, inevitably, the work of their own colleagues.

> Following Alexander’s blog post, several non-editorial newsroom staffers from the paper’s tech and product teams asked why he was being “doxxed,” and pointed out that the blogger’s cause was gaining traction on the computer-science site Hacker News. Another non-editorial staffer said they flagged the not-yet-published story for the paper’s customer care department “in case this snowballs into a spike in cancellations.” [italics mine]

> Several Times staffers pushed back, noting that the paper was not “doxxing” Alexander, as that term is widely used to describe situations where the goal of revealing a person’s identity is specifically to encourage harassment.

If ever there was proof that writing and reading comprehension are two different skills.

I don’t know why any organization would want a Slack channel containing thousands of people, let alone one that is specifically intended for people to air grievances. Surely nothing good can come of that.

Well, if you talk about naming X and whether it is reasonable, the name of X will be known to more and more people. So one side of the argument seems to loose in any case. I do think it would be better to leave him pseudonymous, if that is his wish. I can comprehend why telling a name is preferable for writers to enable readers to check the story themselves, which gives the press some credence. But I think the current climate would lead X to write differently and perhaps less controversial. Pseudonymity or anonymity can be very advantageous.

Paywalled, outline.com doesn’t help

> While some employees debated the Slate Star Codex decision on Tuesday, one staffer also raised issues about opinion staff editor Bari Weiss, saying that when she posted on Twitter about her dismay over the anger about Cotton’s column, she “straight up lied about a nonexistent battle within the new york times because she knew it would be a juicier tweet.”

Wow so this staffer manufactured false outrage using social media to incite a staff mutiny and get a colleague fired? This matches what friends have seen with purposeful leaks in tech companies that seek to invite pressure from a captive twitter outrage machine. It seems these tactics are in common widespread use. Or maybe common at least in left-leaning cities/organizations - I am not personally aware of brazen actions to harness Internet outrage like this elsewhere.