Hacker News Reader

My feeling over the last 2 years is HN has largely steered clear of topics related to gender, as they lead awful comment threads. That's an impression which implies the HN moderators have adopted this policy. And in general I think it's a good. thing - there's enough discussion of gender in tech elsewhere.

View on HN

That's not true though, the various gender gaps have been discussed here endlessly. I'm baffled when anyone says there's not enough discussion of these things when they dominated HN for months at a time.

What there isn’t a lot of discussion of is how the space functions in a holistic sense for women, but so it goes for other groups as well. I don’t think “more discussion” is what this situation is lacking, though I couldn’t tell you what it is.

Ignoring the problem is a failure to recognize the problem and only to serves to entrench the viewpoints of the moderators. For some, shutting down the conversation may not be seen as harmful, but all it does is protect the people who most likely to have harmful views against non-males. This in turns makes it harder for other people to be heard. So maybe it is not a good thing, in general (strictly speaking).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com