They wrote “I’m being censored” when they should have said “nobody will listen to my rambling”.
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
32 points (68.2% liked)
Programming
17576 readers
128 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The author went out of his way to make a reasonable point in the most absurd way possible.
Which I guess is an achievement.
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?
or if we do take action (the minimum action you seem to be advocating for is ostracism) against the accused
Either way someone's getting ostracized. People who don't ostracize the accused are going to ostracize the accuser.
"Ostracizing" the accuser is generally voluntary. There is a difference between "I'm not comfortable working with this person" and leaving, and everyone coming to you and saying "Get out".
The latter is fairly rare to happen to accusers, but it's expected for the accused.
The latter is fairly rare to happen to accusers, but it’s expected for the accused.
That's not true. Kids have been disowned by their families for reporting SA. Ostracization is a real possibility for victims and it's a very large part of causes rapes to go unreported. Nobody wants to be friends with the person who makes false allegations.
Not to mention you're leaving out all the people who will see someone actually convicted and decide not to ostracize the guilty person because "akchually he's a good guy".
The reality is that it is insanely hard to fence-sit on "I don't believe the accusation but I don't think the accuser is lying either".
But we are talking about a professional community, most people in this community that the post is about aren't friends and likely don't interact with each other outside of the work they do.
This is confusing. Maybe OP has a point that we should just be forthright about whats going on so people can make informed decisions.
My initial reaction is that you shouldn't be sticking your neck out for people you only know in a professional sense.
My second reaction is that as a community if you receive reports of sexual assault and do not act on them in some way you are sending a message that your community is not a safe space for people who have been sexually assaulted.
And I'm still hung up on how you are able to ostracize the accused and not the accuser? Is the accusation coming from outside the community?
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.
But what community is the author talking about? I only skimmed but I still have no clue whom this article concerns. There must be some context I'm missing, but then it would have more sense for the author to give some links, now this just reads like some rambling that has nothing to do with programming
I think the point it to raise awareness that those issues are real and people suffer gravely from them. The idea is that we as members of a community, any community really, show a level of awareness and actually speak out against abuse and toxic behavior in the spaces we participate in.
Oh I definitely agree, and it is a problem virtually everywhere unfortunately. But that's also why I was wondering why this article here, specifically. I looked at the other article of yours, it's even worse than I thought
But that's also why I was wondering why this article here, specifically
Generally because it's worth sharing, but also because I had some not very pleasant encounters in this community, so I think there are people participating here that need to read more of this.
You could say this is an attempt to gauge the depth of this community. Platforms like Lemmy (or Reddit, HN, etc.) make it easy to be toxic in anonymity through the option to just downvote things, but some of the comments on here show that it was warranted I'd say.
His last article, which is referenced in the current article, gives context:
Hmm I don't see the link in the posted article. Thanks!
Wow thanks. This person seems to thrive on creating drama.
Well I've been a part of the Sourcehut (one of his major projects) community for many years and have interacted with him many many times. I've never found him to be a drama queen. Is he outspoken? Yea. Does he stand up for what he believes in? Yea. So he usually goes against the grain and catches flack for it.
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.
Sure, by all means, as I said, in that case I'll just continue downvoting and not being sad when mods take action to keep the discussion on topic.
Edit: I misunderstood, my comment doesn't add anything of value but you can still read it if you choose.
spoiler
Any speech which suggests that the listener may find themselves subject to a non-majority-conforming person in a position of power, or even that of a peer, will have crossed the line; one must speak as a victim seeking the pity and grace of your superiors to be permitted space to air your grievances.
What possible grievance do you have with intersex people?
Do people think before they say things anymore or is it just a race to put as many words on the paper as you can?
Pretty sure they are arguing that any discussion about "non-majority-conforming" persons is moderated or censored by the existing majority to the disadvantage of the minority.
considering they later conclude that progressive speech is allowed you must be right. I was thrown off because in real life the "majority-conforming" opinion is "I do not care what is in your pants".
Edit: it's also not reflective of my time in hacker spaces at all but OP has since confirmed it's not actually about hacking spaces but just tech in general
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.