We don't have to accept or reject all manner of social consequence as a single unit. That would be absurd.
> w/o also not greatly limiting free speech.
Indeed it would be exceedingly difficult to legislate against it. But something doesn't need to be illegal for us to push back against it. I'm not required to be accepting of all behavior that's legal.
For example, presumably you wouldn't agree with an HN policy change that permitted neo nazi propaganda despite the fact that it generally qualifies as protected speech in the US?
I wouldn't agree with this change. And I'd stop using HN and I'd tell others to also not use it. I'd implement cancel culture on it.
> But something doesn't need to be illegal for us to push back against it.
This is exactly what cancel culture is. It's pushing back on something (usually legal, but behavior we don't strongly don't agree with).
And its absurd to me how the right acts like cancel culture is a left movement. The right has used it too. Look at all the post Charlie Kirk canceling that happened, huge scale -- even the government got involved in the canceling there. Colin Kaepernick is probably one of the most high profile examples of canceling. The big difference is that the right has more problematic behaviors. Although more of it is being normalized. Jan 6 being normalized is crazy to me, but here we are.
So we agree that it's possible to reject a behavior without legislating against it.
You conveniently left out the part about mob mentality there. I don't think anyone was ever objecting to people expressing their disapproval of something in and of itself. Certainly I wasn't.
I'm not sure what partisan complaints are supposed to add to the discussion. I don't think it matters if one, both, or neither "team" are engaging in the behavior. The behavior is bad regardless.
> I'd stop using HN and I'd tell others to also not use it. I'd implement cancel culture on it.
That's a boycott but I don't believe it qualifies as "cancelling". Identifying YC associated businesses and telling people not to patronize them due to the association might qualify. Trying to get people who continued to use HN after the policy change fired would qualify.
What if HN was a group about celebrating the abusing of kids, and the people who used HN were daycare workers? Would you just say that since it happens outside of work no one has the right to report it?
The right? I never questioned anyone's right to do anything. I objected to instigation of others. To mob mentality. I don't object to going about your life and dealing with things on an individual basis as they come up.
The example seems off base. Wouldn't that be conspiracy to commit a crime?
Taking you at (what I assume to be) your intended meaning. Obviously you can contrive various situations that would be sufficiently alarming to the typical person to cause them to justifiably abandon their principles and attempt community organization. Someone posting things that don't fit your worldview and make you mad doesn't rise to that bar.
And here's an example of something worse than cancel culture -- government officials using official state power to do what you disagree with ordinary citizens doing. I don't even consider this cancel culture, but the headline of the article shows that people conflate the two:
> The example seems off base. Wouldn't that be conspiracy to commit a crime?
Celebrating a crime isn't conspiracy to commit one.
> Obviously you can contrive various situations that would be sufficiently alarming to the typical person to cause them to justifiably abandon their principles and attempt community organization. Someone posting things that don't fit your worldview and make you mad doesn't rise to that bar.
Why wouldn't it? You've just constructed your bar, and that's great. I'm glad you'd never want to react on scale based on someone or some organizations postings. If Google's CEO posted that he "personally" thought that selling information to governments was fine if you didn't get caught, you wouldn't suggest to your friends to not use Google because it was just his viewpoint?
At the end of the day the community will decide if an argument to boycott at scale makes sense. If I go around saying to boycott Google because a guy there doesn't like anime probably will make me look more a fool than anyone else.
Your example is off base again. If a rank and file employee gets a DUI and Google refuses to fire them over it yeah it's wrong to try to organize a lynch mob against Google for that.
I didn't construct some arbitrary personal bar. I simply acknowledged that edge cases exist that reasonable people might feel necessitate community action as a matter of self preservation. That doesn't undermine the general principle.
At the end of the day we're discussing social standards so there aren't going to be any airtight logical arguments and the edges will inevitably be blurry. If you adopt an extremist mindset you'll be able to rationalize just about anything. That doesn't mean you're actually in the right though.
My point isn't that edge cases exist or not. It's that what's an edge case to you may not be to others. The culture will dictate what is extreme or not. Now you can argue that this can result in some mob mentality taking down people who aren't deserving. True, but in society we see that we've tended to get better over time at making this determination, even if there are blips along the way. To quote Theodore Parker, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
Now, it's our job, when we see the arc not bending the right way (or fast enough) to do something, but I think to avoid allowing the arc to have levers is not doing ourselves any favors.
And with all the talk of cancel culture (not government action, but just all private citizen action), I've actually seen very few examples of it resulting in something that I consider unacceptable. Note, I'd consider physical threats outside the bounds of cancel culture -- those are just physical threats.
Please don't hound people like this on HN. It's not acceptable to say “I remember you doing exactly that in many, many threads before” and “you're always trying to protect unsavory characters”. It's hyperbolic and unfalsifiable, and not the kind of discourse that HN is intended for. Commenters have the right to have their comments evaluated as they are in the thread, and not coloured by wild allegations of conduct in unspecified historical threads.
The purpose of HN is to gratify intellectual curiosity. Plenty of users are doing a good job of discussing this difficult topic curiously. We want this to be a site where difficult topics can be discussed, and that can only happen if people are committed to curious conversation rather than ideological battle.
If you want to participate on HN, we need you, like everyone, to respect the guidelines, no matter how difficult and activating the topic is.
These lines from the guidelines are particularly relevant here:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> w/o also not greatly limiting free speech.
Indeed it would be exceedingly difficult to legislate against it. But something doesn't need to be illegal for us to push back against it. I'm not required to be accepting of all behavior that's legal.
For example, presumably you wouldn't agree with an HN policy change that permitted neo nazi propaganda despite the fact that it generally qualifies as protected speech in the US?