These are all great points. I recently quit too. It was mostly because like this post, I found someone I really respected and it turned out he was a raging bigot against people like me.
The technicalities of you being fired or left no choice is hardly the point. We’re at a point in time that we need less bigotry and racism, not accidentally financing more of it.
As I said right in my first sentence, they started out intending to host what other platforms were trying to get rid of. But I don't think they intended to host only terrible people. It's not like they kicked you out for posting something that wasn't awful.
I think their intent was as stated: to create a Twitter competitor that a lot of people used for a lot of things. Yes, they they intended to be a home for bigots. But it was never a tenable business as a place that was only a home for bigots. I just don't think they understood how their differentiator would inevitably become their whole brand.
Aw, the poor white supremacists can't find anyone who's willing to work with them because of their hateful ideology. I shall shed a single tear for them.
I'm really upset that the site, which was started to host neo-nazis and violently racist mass-murderers, founded by a person who was kicked out of ycombinator for harassing and threatening other founders, can't find anyone else willing to stand alongside them to fight back against decency and civility.
The reality is that their site is a toxic boil on the internet, and if other companies don't want to have anything to do with them, then I see no problem with that.
On HN you're more likely to get told that choosing to make your group more inclusive and accessible to people of color is tantamount to supporting blacklists and suppression, but rest assured that there are a lot of people who appreciate this kind of thing.
We have to get past this notion that there's something virtuous and inclusionary about protecting bigots by giving them the ability to benefit from your platform. This perpetuates the culture of disinclusion we're already saddled with... it shows that more people are willing to speak up for those beliefs than of any person of color who might feel uncomfortable with the presence of a person who thinks they are biologically inferior and entitled to less status as a human being.
And speaking up about that doesn't make you in support of doxing, quote decontextualizing, online harassment, threatening the employment of others, blacklists, criminalization of expression, pogroms, etc. The irony of the slippery slope argument is how often its wielded to make the community less friendly to real diversity.
You know what makes for a good user experience? Not using a website that hosts white supremacists, but staying in your little corner that doesn't deal with them (you hope).
Totally agree with 'genericpseudo and 'joesmo. YC's created the environment that's so tolerant of racism and sexism. If they don't want people who care about bigotry to abandon the site, it's up to them to change the dynamic.
It's not a delusion, it's the association that kills new startups.
You can rail against suppression of speech all you want, a company whose loudest and most active users are white supremacists either has to lean-in to that culture, remove it from the site entirely, or hide it. The first option is moral bankruptcy, the second option is an uncomfortable practicality on the limits of free speech, and the third option makes your new site look dead from the outside.
You act like this is a simple problem to solve, but it's far from simple, and getting it even slightly wrong means startup death, period.
I'd bring back screen names. Some sites are nice and isolated like HN but most aren't. It's much easier to ignore death threats and racist tirades when they come from xXBonerLord420Xx than when they come from Steve Smith.
> using the website to display anti-black ideology and actively plan rallies to remove my rights.
When it's not a crime and it's completely based on your subjective view: you're kidding yourself if you think that process is going to be a just measure. Likely, it's just going to be a free for all, whoever gets offended at what.
Let me add another colleague to your mix.
Asian guy: I don't agree on these statements. I'm quitting if we remove this content.
Sure, lets all push for that "supernice" community vibe that avoids any and all controversy by giving numerical means to point out and grounds to get rid of those members raising tough and controversial discourse.
Push it into the fucking ground! Get rid of people like me, like every other platform does to provide a "high quality site for all members"! Curbstomp the undesireables for the sake of the greater community (even though it's actually to avoid political fallout and protect the shareholders than the community).
It doesn't matter everyone has their proverbial nuts cut off if it happens to foster an "inclusive" community. This is TOTALLY not like China's social credit system, right guys?! PROTECT SOCIETY FROM THE UNDESIREBLE! COMMUNITY OVER THE INDIVIDUAL! COMMUNITY OVER THE INDIVIDUAL!!
Fuck you if you think this is anything but a garbage idea that fosters virtue-signaling and appropriates the status quo. I'd rather be banned from this place and have a shit social-credit score than be part of the system.
Watch me get compared to the alt-right, my comment deleted and perma-banned from HN for being "rude" -- which completely misses the entire point of this post. It's really easy to rationalize removing someone if he's "undesirable". Sure the alt-right thinks LGBTs are "undesireable", but they always fail to point out the exact same hypocritcal behavior by people like the guy who made this system: the establishment of an undesireable class, and the (beginning of) rationalization to remove them.
Food for thought: Homosexuals, jews and communists all were "undesired" in their time and place. Identity politics is a dangerously slippery slope and modern America -- the entire west is full of it.
Wake the fuck up, quit that shit. PS: Fuck you you fucking fucks, give me the worst fucking score you can give me. Come on! Do it! I'd rather you'd be busy purging me than the others! Can't argue with crazy!
The Tumblr-account-turned-agent-of-social change doxes people who post racist, homophobic, or otherwise bigoted remarks to their social media accounts. RGF then shares their personal information so that followers can contact said bigots' employers and get them fired...
In fact, that’s the exact tragedy that befell Brianna Rivera after her ex submitted a fabricated screenshot of her Facebook page peppered with racist remarks about Ferguson...
So yes, this Kickstarter is/was a spectacularly bad idea.
From what I can tell, just looking at some of the folks the site has raised money for, I see a lot of anti-jewish memes and other nazi related content.
Yeah, sorry buddy. No one wants your site to survive. Maybe try not spreading hate speech. kthxbye
I also experienced the reverse: programming subreddits, tv show subreddits, and even blogs and mailing lists started telling me to support BLM (which isn't a thing in my country), avoid beating up Asian people (which was easy to do since I was living in Asia), etc
I was there for Javascript tricks and they insisted that I check my privilege. It got exhausting, not because it's insulting, but because the signal to noise ratio of what I came to a subreddit or mailing list to see was way off the mark.
This seems to have improved a bit in the last year or two, since Covid stole the show, but not entirely.
I can believe this. Around the time I left people were patting backs for fighting racism by getting rid of terms blacklist/whitelist.
Not something I feel super strongly about, but the fact that it's so scary to go against these stupid ideas is annoying. It's pure politics, there's nobody benefiting from this except the people claiming impact for antiracist work in their perf.
It looks interesting. Your blog says it has "Limited tolerance, especially for assholes." I'd like to ask you a question that would help elucidate this ethos. Let's say a user makes a comment about how illegal immigrants should be deported, and another user calls the first racist in response. How would the site respond & why?
I'm not liking the off the cuff 'white man' references I keep seeing out of Silicon Valley related networks.
The meaning is identical to "the Jews" in context.
This forum has a serious problem. I think I'm more likely to get kicked off it for pointing out this form of bigotry than the people using it as a commonplace.
My former comment which will probably also be flagged for review is pointing out that the URL references child prostitution but submission comments appear more worried with the website's GDPR implementation.
So Daniel/Scott - you should be talking to Ycombinator about the failures of self regulation because neither of these situations is the kind that gets less toxic. Wisdom of crowds this isn't.
The site's tagline should be "Meet your heroes!"
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