FYI, his original post contained incoherent ramblings about Peter Thiel sending people to gangstalk on him for the past 20 years, and how he's on the verge of killing himself.
he's responded here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3065098
with the same attitude he displayed in his original blog post. Not sure there's much point entering a dialog with him.
The blog post DHH made also listed mostly work that he wasn't the primary contributor to (one of his contributions was primarily done by someone who left the community because of him!), and that didn't go over well.
As he escalates the drama he is largely seen as creating, people who have no interest in drama are leaving.
Yes you are correct. Thankfully, as mentioned, I have mostly moved on from this. This appears to be his first post on HN, so, I felt compelled to comment to make him aware that his presence in forums, etc can be upsetting to people.
And, while I don't think he should necessarily retreat from forums... I just hope that he is conscious of how his presence and words may affect people.
Indeed. He states "I gave up on the feeds because they were making me angry."
I found that the things that were making me angry were the reposts of garbage by friends and family who don't apparently have an original thought. If someone posts a cogent comment that I disagree with, I'll be happy to discuss. I don't see that very often. I just blocked viewing for the people that posted that kind of crap. I do miss the occasional interesting thought that they post but I also don't see all of the garbage.
Yes, this puts me in the bubble of blocking the things I don't agree with, but very little of the stuff I disagree with is anything beyond an inflammatory repost.
As usual, dang helicopters into a conversation, snipes out the least relevant part of it, makes a fuss and leaves.
He has executive power by dint of the admin controls, but for the health of community driven sites it's important to ignore people like him, or no discussion can be had.
Your opinion and words still stand visible, I'm afraid.
> Nah buddy I didn't even post when you did update 1 don't even try fam
1. I didn't mention your name anywhere, yet you got offended.
2. That's a lie. I made the update after you posted.
3. Look at all the comments around. You're the only one spreading hate here. The few other posts partly disagreeing with me are still civil and polite. So the point of my comment still stands.
> spend a couple days on HN telling people they shouldn't be mad about it.
It was actually a only a couple of hours and a few (very inflammatory and highly downvoted) comments, near the beginning of the thread, and then radio silence as the fire raged on.
I think that he took a step back and began reconsidering after realizing that his comments weren’t helping any, but because they were the only thing he said in that thread and a lot of discussion was focused on them it seemed like a lot more activity than it really was. (Not that this excuses anything, but I think it’s important to be clear about what happened.)
> Normally, of course, we'd downweight this sort of petty drama.
Down weight? So you guys internally pick and choose topics to weight down? I thought HN was purely community driven with only comments being moderated.
Of course on the surface you guys say you only downweight petty drama but I truly wonder if that's actually true. The fact that you guys downweight anything without trusting the community makes me question how fair, balanced and unbiased things are on HN.
Additionally the person who this tweet was about posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27400221 and it doesn't seem like drama. It seems like injustice and misinterpretation and stubborn refusal. His only option is to appeal to the public but of course YC has to color it with their bias.
It really looks like he was kicked out over a tweet from his perspective. Getting kicked out of YC may seem petty to YC but it is not petty to the person who was kicked out. Even Dang calling this kind of thing "petty drama" does unparalleled damage to his reputation.
The right way to deal with this is not to touch this post and let paul make blog post or something and see if the community votes it up on HN.
It could be that he's not allowed to say anything about the matter. It reads to me more like an honest attempt at damage control while at the same time not divulging anything about the situation. So far his communication has been the most reasonable and levelheaded of all the reddit admins. I doubt he's lost his touch with the community, rather that he's been gagged and cannot say more than he does.
He also retweeting someone saying they would poop on laptop if the Code of Conduct was removed. This was used as an argument that he was happy he upset people, rather than the obvious pointing out the insanity of the people arguing against him.
One thing he forgot to mention is that SO has for some time been following a similar trend as Wikipedia. Namely, that there are a number of established "gatekeepers" who guard their realm of influence jealously, shutting down questions and answers that threaten their supremacy or their sense of aesthetics or affect an internal political order. It gets so infuriating that I've mostly stopped participating. And yes, I do know that this only exacerbates the problem, because when the good people leave, the bad people only strengthen their stranglehold...
He himself doesn't even agree with his response. In the Reddit open thread on the topic he said he reacted rashly because the idea that somebody would be smart enough to come up with it and then stupid enough to post it publicly (his words, paraphrased) did not occur to him in advance. I think currently he's primarily deleting posts for it because once you've started that trend, there's not really that much to make up by stopping.
> Why would people have issues with you simply posting you...went and got a jab? Is there more to the story?
From the tweets now deleted, looks like the internal bookface post in question wasn't all that popular and got roundly criticized.
At least it got 0 upvotes and every single response told him he was wrong. Doesn't seem like he learned his lesson, however it's clear almost nobody else approves of this mentality.
(I think the first one was way worse; he was advocating lying.)
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