Ask HN: How it Works: what do the Dave Winer threads tell us about sexism in IT?

6 points by flootch 13 years ago | 23 comments

In the past 48 hours there have been two threads "about" Dave Winer, and I think they have given us food for thought about the Hacker News Community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5744224

First, I recognize that in many ways, Hacker News was abusive of Dave Winer, and for that, I am sorry that we were abusive to any person. And I hope we can conduct this thread without any more such abuse to anyone.

I think the Dave Winer threads are the control in an ongoing experiment in Hacker Community Sexism.

And so I do wonder how it works: http://xkcd.com/385/

Significant themes in the two Dave Winer threads were:

    Dave Winer is a *blankety blank*
    I'm sick of hearing about Dave Winer
    Dave Winer is expected to suck it up when we tell him off
    Our behavior in telling Dave Winer off is just SOP for IT
    If Dave Winer complains, it just proves our point

In the past year, we've seen many similar incidents all around the Internet, and at Hacker News that work like this:

    Wow, IT is really sexist.

But when something very similar to these other incidents occurs to a man, it works like this:

    Wow, IT has a lot of jerks

So I wonder, if Dave was a woman, would either thread have gone down the rabbit holes? Would the same participants in each thread have behaved in the same way?

Substitute a woman's name for "Dave Winer"....

And would we be reading about Hacker News sexism today at Salon, Slate, The Washington Post, Reddit, Huffington Post, the Guardian, The New York Times, Jezebel, etc.?

Maybe we ignore our real problems by lumping individual misanthropic jerk behavior into a claim of collective misogyny. Perhaps people should stop projecting onto all of IT, the behaviors of a few.

brudgers 13 years ago |

A blog would be a more suitable format for these opinions and speculations.

redmarx 13 years ago |

It doesn't matter. Seriously, this is a ridiculous thread. Dave Winer is always a controversial topic. Know why? Because he's been severely caustic in the past, to many, many people.

Some people go to far, of course, and they only make Winer look like a victim. But Winer is only getting a backlash from the way he's acted the past 20 years.

So saying "would a woman receive the same abuse" is a useless question. It should be "would a woman that has attacked and abused and been generally a dick towards many people over the past 20 years" receive the same treatment.

Dave Winer has done some cool things in the past. He's also been an asshole for many years to many people. That's the truth, and saying that doesn't make me a hater, or a troll. Lastly, you're playing right into his hands. The more threads the more Winer loves it, and the more he can claim to be a victim.

davewiner 13 years ago | |

If there was any truth to what you were saying you'd put your actual name on it, instead of creating disposable accounts.

One of the things they could do to make HN work better is to add a waiting period for new accounts.

Like buying a gun. You can't use the account for five days.

Maybe we can still have anonymity in the cases where whistle-blowers need to say something and be protected.

But hit and run comments like this one are what's poisoning this place.

demachina 13 years ago | | |

His anonymity and the truth of his statement have absolutely no correlation, not sure why you even think there would be a correlation.

You have a tendency of making people regret they ever get in to it with you so its not suprising a lot of people would prefer anonymity when getting sucked in to these little flame fests, lest they star in your next blog post.

Marissa Mayer for example made the mistake of meeting with you and you apparently made her angry or frustrated enough she walked out. Your response, years later, is to write a one sided account of it on your blog to try to make her look bad. It was one sided because you neglected to really describe what you said or how you said it, or accept that you might have been at least partially at fault for making her want to leave.

She may have done some calculus and deduced it was a no win for her. She stays in the meeting, listens to you, keeps her mouth shut and just gets angry. Or she gets in an argument with you which would have been even worse. By walking out she probably took the option with the fewest bad consequences. The way I see it you pretty much have two noble roads you can take in life:

- You can be abrasive, stick to your guns, and deal with the fact a lot of people aren't going to like you for it. You take this road you need to grow a skin thick enough to deal with it instead of whining and demanding everyone who is mean to you back be blocked. You might not be popular but there is honor in this tack.

- You can try to be nicer to people, especially people you dont agree with, and then its OK to expect people to be nicer to you in return. Its really easy to be nice to sycophants who agree with you all the time. That's what you do on your blog and Twitter all the time. It takes character to be nice to people who disagree with you and are willing to stick to their guns.

Or you can take the ignoble road you seem to take time after time. You go out of your way to abrasive, insulting and dismissive and slag people who disagree with you. Then when people slag you back, or walk out of the room rather than get in to it with you, or don't invite you to SXSW to speak, you whine about the fact people aren't being nice to you and expect everyone whose not being nice to you to be muzzled and ostracized.

Just some constructive criticism, please think about it. You have a lot of wisdom and technical brilliance. You would go much farther if you weren't hacking everyone off all the time. Its OK to hack people off once in a while when they really deserve it, but you do it all the time often for no reason.

dodyg 13 years ago | |

I am tired of this bullshit 'Dave Winer' story. If you don't like his personality or his work, fine but there's no need to run around whinging about it.

He has been writing publicly for a long long time and it makes people think that we know him. Well I don't and you probably don't either. Give the guy the benefit of the doubt and stop psychoanalyzing everything that he writes.

rcade 13 years ago | |

"Many, many people" is an understatement.

davewiner 13 years ago | | |

I'm not even remotely in your league when it comes to pissing people off.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh8Wl37HYgQ

You're the popesquatter. ;-)

davewiner 13 years ago |

A few ideas for HN to cut down on abuse.

http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/may/aSuggestionForHackerN...

Dave

jessaustin 13 years ago | |

I have a strong suspicion as to how you'll take this comment, but please note that "Jess Austin" is my actual name and this is not my first comment.

The problems you perceive with HN are not perceived as problems by many of its users. Since the solutions you suggest have been considered and rejected in the past, one may assume that the operators of the site have a similar opinion. As a user, your response to that reality can take a number of forms. You can simply stop paying attention to HN, and probably cut down on the stress in your life. You can escalate your posting of this sort of opinion, which will probably have a different result.

I suggest that you pause to reconsider your opinions. The "one-off flame" you cite reads like something else to me. It is simply a request for everybody to stop encouraging the submission of uninteresting material to HN. As evidence to back up the request, the poster offers the proposition that your behavior and communications have annoyed many people for many years. I'm sure there are people on Earth who would disagree with that proposition, but they don't post much on HN. I don't mean that to be a judgment of you or of your life, and I doubt that redmarx meant it as such either. HN still isn't a place you'll find much sugar-coating. redmarx's post is just the truth, stripped of all the bullshit that accompanies it in less Aspergian environments, with a bit of vulgarity thrown in for color.

There is probably a response to all of that which wittily acknowledges the inherent criticism while subtly undercutting it. Suffice it to say that you haven't found that response yet.

If you prefer fora in which anonymity is discouraged, please try Facebook or Google Plus.

Thanks for your work on RSS!

davewiner 13 years ago | | |

If someone doesn't like the submission, why don't they just say that? Why bash me personally? I didn't submit the piece to HN. I wrote it on my blog. I didn't force anyone to read it.

Mz 13 years ago |

And this matters why? Wrong is wrong. Does it matter why people were cretins? Does this do anything to help people behave better?

Millennium 13 years ago | |

It matters to the people they're cretins to.

People crave sense in the world around them, especially when it comes to the bad things that happen to them. When no sense is forthcoming, they will make their own sense of it, and the natural impulse is to assume that one was singled out for some reason, good or bad.

Does this help people behave better? Usually not. We aren't in one another's heads, which makes trying to reconstruct another person's thought processes a process only slightly more reliable than a shot in the dark. The usual outcome is a poor match between the victim's hypothesis and the perpetrator's actual thoughts, and when that happens, it's all too easily dismissed. End result: nothing changes.

Mz 13 years ago | | |

You have completely misunderstood my question. I think there is no value in this thought experiment that ponders "What if Dave Winer had been named Delores instead?" HN is not the genuine community I originally joined where respectful discussion occurred.

I am female. I think the community is less assholish than it used to be to women, though there is room for improvement. However, it is overall a lot more assholish. I participate less than I used to, in part because of things unrelated to HN but in part because of the degradation. This thought experiment does nothing constructive.

bowerbird 13 years ago |

please stop talking about dave winer. at all. _please._

-bowerbird