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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

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Pay attention to the downvotes, and browse HN with "showdead" turned on, and you'll see that HN stays the way it is in large part due to aggressive exclusion of those who can't stick to society norms up to an including the metaphorical "door guy" (bans).

Self-filtering is a start. But pretty much all cliques and scenes also have lines you will get ostracised if you go past. The extent of their reaction if you will vary, and sure, there's a difference between proactively judging you based on appearance and retroactively judging you by actions, but in some scenes your appearance is part of the game. That sucks if you don't fit in, but it also sucks for those who want something specific if you're that one person who can't self filter and insist on ruing the experience for everyone else.

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Exclusion based on contribution is different than exclusion based on discrimination.

It's a very important difference.

If I, just some random dude, submitted a correct mathematical paper solving a millennium or Hilbert puzzle to a prestigious journal, for instance, they would publish it regardless of the fact that I'm not so and so from Princeton. They wouldn't exclude my valued contribution.

Discrimination would be me submitting the correct solution but first having to find and tack on so and so from Princeton as the author in order to even get considered.

Now I'd probably have to wrangle them a bit to convince them, but that's just credulity, not discrimination.

That's quite different than say Hattie McDaniel, a black actress, being excluded from the premiere of her movie, Gone with the Wind and unable to accept her Oscar on stage because of discrimination.

Discrimination exists regardless of contribution for reasons ultimately unrelated to the nature of the contribution

None of the people you're arguing with here have been defending exclusion based on discrimination of the kind you're objecting to, so it's then unclear why you're making this argument.

The specific comment you replied to that I replied to did not argue for the kind of discrimination you're talking about here either.

I'm absolutely sure that the kind of discrimination you're talking about is also an issue with quite a few clubs, but they are two very different issues.

Sure but consequences come from systems, structures, and institutions and not from intentions.

You can tell me it's some vibe check but it's structurally set up to discriminate based on classic markers and there's been intentionally zero remediations to avoid it.

In fact, many reports of xenophobia, antisemitism and racism persist, just Google it, it's everywhere.

That's why we had to fundamentally re-form our institutions in the US in the name of inclusion and not just have better intentions.

Berghain and Tresor can to whatever the fuck they want, I don't care. But let's call a spade a spade and not pretend it magically turns to something else based on wishes and dreams.

Then attack the lack of remediation, and the lack of more objective criteria, not the notion that there are criteria for participation in all kinds of communities including in most of the ones you used as examples of inclusive ones.

> That's why we had to fundamentally re-form our institutions in the US in the name of inclusion and not just have better intentions.

Are you suggesting that worked?

> But let's call a spade a spade and not pretend it magically turns to something else based on wishes and dreams.

The problem is that you appear to call a spade something else entirely, and attack a position nobody has taken. I note that you have expanded on specific issues and pointed out another club that has specific policies that can be easily conformed to elsewhere, and that was a much more productive line of argument to take.

Some of the dead can be interesting as long as the discussion does not touch topics that send them off. Makes you wonder if you could create a discussion direction tag based partial shadowban.

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