The problem is that D&I threads are _not_ intellectually curious. People are too emotionally charged to have a genuine, dispassionate and reasoned discussion about it.

Why does one preclude another?

One can be intellectually curious while also being emotionally charged and passionate.

There is genuinely outrageous behaviour out there in the world. China is orchestrating a modern genocide. Russia is maneuvering to violate international sovereignty. The USA has a humanitarian crisis at its border. And there is a climate change emergency being mostly ignored. It's reasonable to have an emotional charge to all these discussions even while looking for logical solutions to these problem.

The other issue is that a lot of people don't classify behaviours as "emotional" consistently. The prototypical example is feminine expressions ("tears") are deemed emotional while masculine expressions ("anger") are not.

That may seem ludicrous but it happens on this site too. People will go on tense emotion-laden tirades defending personal freedom or outrage over the treatment of <insert problematic public figure>, and they are heavily upvoted and deemed "intellectually curious". While those that are pointing out the problematic behaviour and the impact it may have had through heartfelt experience stories are deemed "emotionally charged".

You've brought up a number of good and subtle points in this thread, so please don't take this comment as a generic disagreement—this stuff is complicated. It's not only hard to get right, it's hard to even discuss precisely. I just want to mention that

> People will go on tense emotion-laden tirades defending personal freedom or outrage over the treatment of <insert problematic public figure>, and they are heavily upvoted and deemed "intellectually curious"

... isn't really accurate. Those tirades are not deemed intellectually curious, either by mods or by the majority of the community. The vast majority of such threads have been flagged. I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713636.

So not trying to be spammy here, but upon reviewing my prior comment I realized I really was not specific enough:

You cannot use the data from hnews to understand the audience hnews is alienating. While I think you've overall been a very positive force here, and moderation has improved from what I remember some years ago, your link is not an adequate response to this issue.

You need to think more about the people who will never tell you what you're getting wrong, because they regard this whole place as too toxic to bother with.

I hear this from time to time but it's hard to know how to assess it. Sometimes it comes from people with strong ideological commitments; in that case the word "toxic" sometimes carries an ideological charge, and in that case it becomes difficult to disentangle how they personally feel on the site from how they feel it ought to be moderated ideologically. Those are different questions, but it's not always possible to discuss them as different questions. It gets complicated quickly—which doesn't mean we don't care. I don't want people to feel badly about HN.

There's another aspect too. In some tech subcultures it became fashionable to diss HN. For a while it was a sport on Twitter to pass around links to something awful someone ran across on HN and use words like "cesspool" and all that. People would unify around how much they abhorred it. This used to bother me, because typically the something-awful would actually have been moderated or flagged or banned here quite quickly, but people would pass around screenshots anyway and talk about it as if that was HN. It isn't a good-faith discussion; the conclusion is predetermined, no one corrects false statements even when they find out the truth, and so on.

Eventually this started bothering me less because it is simply the way subcultures work—when a larger entity becomes perceived as mainstream, subcultures differentiate themselves in opposition to it, and people bond around abhorring the opposed object. It's no different in music, say. That variety of criticism can't be satisfied because the abhorrence itself serves a valuable function, and it would be a category error to try.

I'm not saying that these are the only two dynamics—on the contrary!—but they are factors that make this sort of criticism difficult to assess. Actually, the point you're making shows up often enough that it seems even to be a bit of a trope in certain circles. From that place it's not so easy to communicate further. The only thing I know that has much chance of working is a specific connection with a specific person around their specific experience. We're open to that and do it all the time.

p.s. Re "your link is not an adequate response to this issue" - sure, that link was just responding to what the GP (indirectly) said about Stallman threads on HN. One reason I replied on that narrow point is that there have been many mistaken claims about it. But there's another reason too: it's orders of magnitude easier to respond to narrow points than general ones. I spent over an hour writing this comment, and still I have to be paranoid about whether and how it may be open to misunderstanding. It's nearly impossible to have this sort of exchange in public—there just aren't the hours, and there's so much more downside than upside. Yet it's important to try anyway, sometimes, because otherwise we seem aloof and uncaring, which is also a dead end.

Just my two cents of feedback: amongst my friends and colleagues in industry, I'm one of the last people that still participates here. A few of them only participate to the minimum necessary to help their startup. The rest absolutely abhor this place, and that varies from people I'd describe as ranging from leftists to neoliberals.

There are many people who have been alienated by what the poster above is talking about, and unfortunately there is a very clear demographic slant in who is being alienated.

> The prototypical example is feminine expressions ("tears") are deemed emotional while masculine expressions ("anger") are not.

For what little it's worth, I do classify both as emotional and usually disengage when either happens.

For what it's worth (And I've had plenty of disagreements with dang), I also think he has an impossible job.

By seeing the worst of both extremes, it can be easy as a moderator to think "well there are people who think HN is too right wing, and people who think HN is too left wing. That must mean we're in the center!"

Just in this very thread you have https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26868622 who is an agitator convinced that HN is a liberal cesspool.

Is theknocker genuine? Or a provocoteur? Does it matter?

> By seeing the worst of both extremes, it can be easy as a moderator to think "well there are people who think HN is too right wing, and people who think HN is too left wing. That must mean we're in the center!"

Indeed, and all the more so because (a) the numbers of people who make such claims are roughly balanced, and (b) their comments resemble each other so closely. But I would never use the word 'center' in this context because it connotes political centrism. People sometimes misinterpret my moderation comments on political-bias claims as an implicit advocacy for centrist politics, but that's jumping to a different orbit.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

You're right, and I didn't mean to suggest that's your intent either.

I think the point I was getting at is that no online community has equal participation across the full spectrum of social and political opinions, or representations.

But having an equal volume of opposing but comparable magnitude feedback from the extreme positions doesn't mean that both positions are equally represented amongst the community.

Going deeper would require me to enter conjecture and flamewar-baiting territory but my broad opinion is that the Online Right is far more sophisticated in its ability to persuade than the Online Left.

> I wonder if people on HackerNews are aware that a huge percentage of female and minority engineers that I know find the HN community discussions completely disreputable and unappealing. And it's a direct consequence of how they treat these subjects as "uninteresting" and "off topic", because to the dominant in-group these subjects are just not relevant.

I don't quite see the connection here, too be honest. Just because D&I discussion is mostly not welcome (without judging either way) does not mean the community overall is unwelcoming. I can see why one dislikes the style of discussions on HN and that's fair, but "allowing" D&I topics without changing anything else would probably not fix it IMO. Or am I missing something?

I don’t think anyone here is accusing the community as a whole of being unwelcoming. Rather the problem seems to be that it is disinterested. And when some toxicity arises the lack of interest to address this toxicity comes across as unwelcoming.

I am not a member of a minority group so I’m only guessing here, but I can imagine the frustration of seeing something you perceive as hostile against you, and then see some backlash, but then witness the backlash being deemed uninteresting. If it happens once, okay whatever! But then you see it again, and again, and after a while the frustration is not worth it and you leave the platform.

You only need a few unwelcoming individuals and a community that doesn’t care about correcting it, then the community as a whole can come across as unwelcoming. I think that is the problem here.

The pseudonymous Internet allows us to not wear our increasingly politicized, some might say fetishized identities on our sleeves. Don't assume that minorities agree with the woke agenda. Many find it condescending or uninteresting at best.