[flagged]
This is not good! There are many things Dan could do to make this place more welcoming, from simple things like marking June as pride month/February as Black history month (as many tech communities already do) to loudly banning and making an example out of bigots, making it clear that transphobia, racism and anti-immigrant sentiment (including the open anti-H1B racism so prevalent here) won't be tolerated.
Everyone makes their own decisions, but it is completely reasonable for sites to boycott HN and reject its traffic until this is addressed.
I'm asking because it's really hard to have a meaningful constructive conversation about these sort of topics without concrete examples, IMHO. I could respond with some generic comments, but they may not apply at all to the examples you have in mind.
For what it's worth, I wrote a little extension to completely hide posts from certain users (and all subthreads to their posts) that I had negative interactions with; from my perspective these people just don't exist on HN. I usually add people to this list after 2 or 3 profoundly negative encounters, or if one encounter is particularly egregious.
I can definitely underscore that HN can be an unfriendly place at times, although in my personal subjective experience I found that the "unpleasantness" is not really isolated to a particular ideology or "side", or even limited to politics (the conversation that made me write this extension in a fit of anger was about devops stuff, after someone was just being a complete ass and I decided I never want to talk to them again).
This is really hard to moderate, because usually it's not "you idiot are you mentally deficient?!" type of stuff – that's easy and obvious, but it's usually more low-key: extremely uncharitable interpretations, wildly off-base straw men, spectacularly off-topic tangents about $pet_peeve, aggressive "I am a singularity of pure rationality, intelligence, and genius" attitudes, put-downs like "after 20 years GIMP still not as good as photoshop, ridiculous", boring and annoying "but akshually" pedantry, conspiratorial nonsense, and stuff like that. Everyone can have a bad day – and that's okay – there's a limit to how "bad" your day can reasonably get, IMHO, and if half your days are bad days....
Even as someone who really tries to keep a cool head about things and typically just "steps away from the computer" if things get too heated it has made my HN experience significantly better.
Maybe I'm just too sensitive; I don't know. I try to be forgiving of people's faults (being forgiving of them is also part of being kind), but I can't control my emotions, so shrug.
> simple things like marking June as pride month/February as Black history month
These seem like meaningless token gestures to be honest. And the US-specific black history month seems a bit inappropriate for an international site like HN, IMHO. I'm not opposed to it or anything (other than being US-specific, as there is already enough US-centrism going on).
> These seem like meaningless token gestures to be honest.
They're not meaningless gestures! Thry stake out a clear position on controversial topics with all the attendant effects.
Whether or not they should be banned just for this: I don't know – maybe? It's not a new account and I didn't check their history, who knows what they meant with "colored"? I'm guessing dang never even saw it; there are hundreds if not thousands of posts every day!
Killing the entire thread was probably a good thing though; there is nothing productive there.
Their mind probably wasn't changed, but having civil discourse about intolerance is important.
I'd much rather see a racist post with thoughtful dissent (which the OP can then read, and is pretty much guaranteed on HN) than for racists to just get excluded, and have no cause to change their mind.
They then go to a more extreme forum, with people who only agree with them. The hate gets amplified instead of dissuaded.