They wrote “I’m being censored” when they should have said “nobody will listen to my rambling”.
The forbidden topics are rape and assault? By “hacker” does the person mean white hats and black hats? Or “hacker = somebody who writes code”?
It refers to the hacker subculture in a rather broad sense I’d say, as in “People who enjoy fiddling and building stuff with computers / electronics adjacent”.
🤔 IMO they aren’t forbidden, just off-topic. Most of the time they are allegations. Allegations are just that, allegations. Until a court has decided whether they are true or not, they should be taken as just that, allegations. It is undeniable that rape and assault allegations have more impact than most allegations.
If a court verdict were shared, then it would be much more substantial, but even then, to most people, they are of little impact. What do I care if some person I don’t know is convicted or not convicted of a crime? It’s hard enough to remember the names of all my cousins, let alone some stranger on the web.
What do I care if some person I don’t know is convicted or not convicted of a crime?
That one is totally up to you. What you should care about is whether innocent people are suffering because or your action or inaction.
The article talks about rape specifically, but many forms of abuse exist in communities, both online and offline. Only a fraction of them are prosecuted, but many of them cause real harm nonetheless.
The thing is, you don’t have to remember the people or their stories, all you need to remeber is what is right and what is wrong, or what qualifies as a bad actor vsa good one, and then speak out in support of the good ones. So just two things to remember, way fewer than you have cousins I assume.
If we have insufficient information, how do we know that innocent people are actually being harmed, or if we do take action (the minimum action you seem to be advocating for is ostracism) against the accused how do we know that they are not the innocent ones?
Are we really supposed to resort to broad statistics when making intimate decisions?
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Yeah, sadly true, and sadly also what I expected, given my experiences in this community.
Thanks for speaking up though :)
I agree with basically everything said in the article.
It’s also a bad article.
It’s twice as long as it could be while only saying half as much as it should. An unfalsifiable thesis with an amorphous CTA, and a self-righteous, self-fulfilling conclusion.
How about we get some thinkers on this issue instead of loquacious parrots who love the sound of their own virtue-signaling.
it’s a trend to bloat text lately. recipes, blog posts, LLM output, scrum meeting speeches when working remote.
Of course, it’s forbidden, that’s definitely a more parsimonious explanation than people simply not being interested in reading rape allegations on a tech news aggregator, a technical mailing list or a Github issues page, of all places.
edit: or the Lemmy programming community.
That’s a bit like saying “I’m not interested in compiler warnings, my program works for me.” The issues this article discusses are like compiler warnings, but for the community. You should be free to ignore them, just by scrolling past. But forbidding compiler warnings would not fly in any respectable project.
To clarify, I am alleging that a lot of this “censorship” is just mods deleting posts which have been sufficiently downvoted by people like me who are not particularly interested in the alleged sexual crimes or social justice plights of people, especially when we actually want to read about tech. Give me a way to filter this out a priori or use dedicated channels to discuss it and I won’t have to downvote it.
To use your analogy, write your warnings to stderr which I can easily redirect to /dev/null while still consuming the program output, and we’re golden.
Then it’s a problem of the platform, if there’s no way to either tag content on a particular topic, which people can filter if they wish, or a place for meta discussions, which people can choose not to visit. I still agree with the OP that simply deleting/forbidding this content isn’t a good option.
I do agree, filtering would be a better solution for sure.
We’re not golden because we are not talking about programs here, we are talking about people.
When you decide to ignore “warnings” and “errors” like this, they do not vanish into thin air. Quite the opposite, they cause real pain to real people, and when not addressed, they will keep doing so.
By tolerating bad actors, you are not taking a neutral stance. You are siding with the agressor over the victim, enabling them to spread their abuse unhindered. Bad actors are fundamentally louder and more aggressive than good actors. Left unchecked, they will cause a slow but steady shift in any community, as is painfully observable in communities like Hackernews.
That’s all too bad and obviously I’d rather everyone was well behaved and happy. But I’m sorry to say I still don’t care enough to want to constantly read about this stuff in spaces that are supposed to be about technology (in the case of technical mailing lists and Github issues, literally exclusively) instead of people.
I don’t know what your exact issue with Hackernews is, I rarely visit it.
Ah yes, the old head-in-the-sand strategy.
Can’t think of a time completely ignoring huge problems didn’t work out well.
I don’t have any problems and I don’t want to read about others’ problems constantly while browsing a fucking tech news aggregator.
Good for you. But others do.
Sucks for them. When I want to read about it I open a newspaper.
Unfortunately for you, the world doesn’t revolce around you. And since people who do have these problems and want to solve them outnumber you, they’re going to post about it.
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Nothing Drew DeVault writes is worth reading, and this is no exception.
Mind explaining for the uninitiated?
I keep seeing people say this but I haven’t seen any problems with anything I’ve read him say.
