The dark side of HackerNews: negativity at best, suppression at worst

So, I'm not one of the people who downvoted that story, but I understand why they did it.<p>Although I am sympathetic to the subject of sexism in our industry, this doesn't mean every article about it deserves to be on top of Hacker News. Michelle's piece was perfectly fine as blog posts go, and I'm glad she shared her thoughts, but it didn't really offer any new insights in the way that a Hacker News submission should.<p>The purpose of Hacker News is not, as this follow-up post seems to believe, to "draw attention to justice-oriented problems." I personally feel Hacker News has too much content based on politics and outrage these days, and it crowds out interesting technical content. I am sympathetic to many of the causes espoused, but just because I agree with you doesn't mean I'll upvote something that doesn't substantially contribute. Stories like that that don't introduce something new tend to just reignite old arguments, which isn't interesting or productive.<p>If Michelle had actually been calling attention to a novel problem in need of a solution, that would be a different story. But as far as I can tell, she was just kind of summarizing something that happened that made her upset. Again, I'm sympathetic and find the same things upsetting, but that still doesn't make it relevant.<p>None of this is a judgment of Michelle's post, and it doesn't mean what she was writing about is unimportant. It just means that, like 90% of things that interest me, it's not a good fit for this particular forum.

Actually what happened was that the post triggered the flamewar detector. And judging from the comments, correctly so.

Speaking as a HN regular, I think we've drawn attention to this topic over and over, which would explain the flagging. And every new article resets the discussion to zero, giving room for uninformed comments and the resulting drama to be posted for the Nth time.

From the submitted blog post:<p>"Either:<p>"The post is being flagged en masse by our fellow HackerNews community members."<p>That is the most likely reason the submission dropped rapidly from the main page to a lower page. People who participate here regularly use flagging power to keep the submissions with thoughtful, interesting comment threads that are essentially on-topic higher than submissions with arguing, repetitive comment threads that aren't as close to the core topics of Hacker News. That, and luck of the draw as to which time of the day the blog post was submitted (meaning which HN participants happened to see it) is explanation enough for why the submission sank.<p>The moral of the story? Submit something next time that is closer to the core topics of HN, and write it very carefully to maximize the probability of thoughtful, interesting comments. Especially make sure that you have a new take on one of the recurrent issues, or are bringing up an issue that is fresh and rarely discussed here. Good luck.

Just a quick point: 51687a on white is unreadable. It's especially hard to read the MLK quote in Helvetica Neue.

Maybe HN is becoming more negative. Or maybe, just maybe, HN users weren't in the mood for holier-than-thou moralistic berating about how evil the tech industry is for focusing on the bottom line of innovation and profits rather than trying to bend reality to fit some postmodern wet dream of inherent equality in STEM-skills based aptitudes between genders.<p>In other words, Larry Summers was probably right. Then again, he was fired shortly afterwards for daring to express disagreement with one of the popular ideologies of our era.

Okay it's actually pretty amazing that this post made it to the frontpage immediately, then was flagged down and buried.<p>I like justice and all, but ironic humor trumps even that ;)

The goal of Y Combinator is not to encourage discussion of controversial issues. If something is divisive and not related to a debate strictly to do with technical topics they probably consider it in their best interests to bury it. Sadly. Hence why special people seem to have super down vote powers, etc.<p>Remember, the goal is to create the illusion of community in order to market.