Comment by giraffe_lady
3 years ago
It really just seems like your position here, on this specific issue, is that we already talked about this. We just had a discussion about it the other day, and people were worked up about it, and so we don't need to and in fact should not have a discussion about it today.
The thing is it is still happening, and so people should be worked up about it every day until it stops. And our industry is specifically involved implicated and complicit at the very core of the matter, and so action is necessary from us. From you, even.
Like do you understand that you're not going to be judged on the "tiny blobs of text online" you're going to be judged by the consequences of our collective actions and your role in influencing them? And that your role, specifically dan, is one of power and influence? People are going to write books about the relationship between the american tech industry and the genocide of palestinians and you are going to be in them. I'm not cross examining you but you should reckon with the fact that people will.
By that logic, HN should be a current affairs site, dedicated to talking about the most important things in the world—of which this war certainly is one.
But that's not the kind of site HN is or ever has been, so the question becomes: does a site like HN, with its particular mandate, have a right to exist? or should it be replaced by something more important? This question has been around for a good 15 years. Our answer is: we're trying to have a specific kind of website, and it's ok for it to exist, even though it's not the most important.
People with strong views (perhaps entirely justified) on a topic don't like it when that topic doesn't get as much coverage as they think it should. Often they think it should dominate HN's front page completely and anything less than that is a deplorable failure on the part of the admins, who obviously lack any morals or humanity. If I answer that yes, this topic is important, deserves discussion, and has indeed been receiving it—more than any other topic of its kind—well, one quickly learns that such demands can never be satisfied, short of replacing the site with an entirely different one, and even then probably not. Moreover such demands come in from multiple angles about multiple topics and the people making the demands not only disagree amongst themselves but are even at war with each other.
This dynamic has been playing out for many years, and if we had done as you say, HN would have ceased to exist a long time ago. I think it's a good thing that HN still exists, even though many of the things on its front page are trivial and of so much less importance than the suffering, violence, and cruelty going on in the world that it's grotesque to even compare them.
I'm not arguing for it to be a general current affairs site. But it should certainly be able to address current affairs that emerge from or have a strong influence on technology. Especially the technology that is made and shaped by a significant portion of its userbase, the shaping of which it has a significant influence on.
It's not just that the palestinian genocide is impactful to the world, it is that american tech companies are impactful to the palestinian genocide. This article was specifically a discussion about our role in this atrocity and a call to action to us as creators and users of technology to end it.
Within that context your editorial decision to shut down this conversation, and your invoking your mandate to keep HN functioning in this specific way, is explicitly coming out on the side of order vs justice. I am not exaggerating when I say you are going to be in history books for this one. We are all going to regret this.