Some people are going to say that he was in the right, and some will argue this is a consequence of being wrong, but this doesn't matter. What this illustrates is the dangerous precipice that the world of blogging is hanging on to, where the violent hatred that spews forth when anyone writes a remotely controversial opinion threatens to silence any opinion that sways too far from mainstream consciousness.
The fact that the first comment that was posted here was just more critique about the original blog post and how supposedly "wrong" it was illustrates how much of a problem this has become. Whether or not his opinion is wrong doesn't matter. What matters is that he expresses it as an alternative perspective to mainstream conciousness.
Problems are solved and society is moved forward by a multitude of various opinions, all right and wrong in their own ways, interacting with each other. Each perspective provides a unique method of solving a problem which may not yet exist. The more perspectives we have, the more ideas we have to work from when we try to solve a problem.
By violently critiquing such controversial stances, we are indirectly silencing those voices, and ultimately destroying our own ability to find progressively better solutions to problems, because we get stuck inside a single point of view and refuse to move outside of it. It is not simply a matter of ignoring trolls either, because many of the most hurtful comments, at least in my experience, are otherwise highly intelligent people who completely missed the point of what you were trying to say, and have spent 10 minutes writing a scathing critique against a nonexistent problem.
If we continue to censor ourselves, it will destroy us.
"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire
I see this from a different perspective. We are finally getting to the point where a critical mass of people are not going to tolerate sexist misinformed crap as they encounter it, and will instead speak out en masse.
The blog post on sexism wasn't a "controversial opinion." The author wasn't bravely standing up to the mainstream. It was just his crappy opinion that tech needs to continue to try very hard to move past.
Most importantly, his opinion was NOT silenced. Why do people in this arena of conversation seem to consistently misinterpret the meaning of free speech? He espoused his opinion, and then a whole bunch of other people espoused theirs. Nobody was silenced. Quite the opposite, actually.
> "We are finally getting to the point where a critical mass of people are not going to tolerate sexist misinformed crap as they encounter it, and will instead speak out en masse."
Except this critical mass of people behave more like an angry mob with pitchforks and torches, rather than a room full of shouting retorts.
The internet has given us a remarkable freedom in expression - it has also lowered the floor for discourse. Instead of writing an angry email explaining how you're wrong, there are more people who will post your address, take satellite pictures of your home, threaten to kill/rape you... I could go on.
I don't think this post was about the people who disagreed with him (for the record, I do disagree with his first blog post), but rather the extreme, vitriolic, disturbingly violent blowback that we see so much these days.
And this applies to all subjects and all sides. On the internet it seems if you say something sufficiently controversial, you will be deluged by a flood of extreme sociopathic behavior. We're talking well beyond just ad hominem attacks and insults - many a blogger have been entirely silenced from blogging due to personal threats, mob outrage, incitement, and simply inhuman levels of anonymous cruelty that, prior to the internet, were the sole territory of deranged psychopaths.
> "He espoused his opinion, and then a whole bunch of other people espoused theirs. Nobody was silenced. Quite the opposite, actually."
I don't think the mild, "I think you're stupid and wrong" responses are why he's quitting Twitter.
> The blog post on sexism wasn't a "controversial opinion." The author wasn't bravely standing up to the mainstream.
So very much this. The author wasn't deviating from the mainstream, he was promoting mainstream, sexist points of view regarding women and work. That many people took offense to this and called him out on it is to be expected.
Can you point out exactly where he promoted "sexist points of view regarding women and work?"
Because as far as I can tell, regardless of whether he is right or wrong (I think he is wrong), his blog post had very little to do with expressing a sexist point of view of women, and was more of a critique of how we currently judge discrimination and how the current dialogue around sexism is framed.
He was silenced with thousands of page views on his blog. He was silenced with hundreds or thousands of tweets. He was silenced by making HN front page. Yeah "controversial" opinions are really in danger.
I'd be curious how many people here find this beyond the pale. As a data point, I didn't. I don't agree with all of it, but I don't see what part of it counts as sexist, in the sense of advocating discrimination based on gender.
I think it's a thoughtful post. It's clear that he doesnt like discrimination against anyone, and is proposing how we should act in order to treat everyone in an inclusive and fair manner, for the benefit of all parties.
"Sexist" is advocating discrimination based on gender in the same sense that "theory" is used to trivialize evolution. Both mean a whole lot more than a brief look at them outside of the context in which they are rooted leads one to believe.
Well, /he/ is not silenced, but definitely the next thoughtful persons will likely decide to keep silent.
In a very brief skimming of this topic, I noted even tweets dragging his employer (and by extension his livelihood) into this, which imo is likely the real reason for his departure from tweeter.
The fact is that there are dissenting views on this topic by well meaning and civilized humans.
That is no fact. I hold that the status quo, which is the opinion expressed in that blog post, is finally facing the criticism it deserves.
Well-meaning and civilized has nothing to do with it. Your intent and whether you view yourself as sexist has little to do with whether the views you espouse are actually sexist.
With regard to further opinions of this type being silenced... this will not take place, going by the lengthy historical precedence.
Letting such perspectives pass without criticism does not help us solve problems; quite the opposite. A few outlandish suggestions are amazingly useful insights, but most of them are outlandish for a reason; it's not a case of every idea being right and wrong in different ways, there really are objectively good and bad ideas, and being able to cull bad ideas quickly is vital to progress.
To my mind this is a case of "if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen". If you're deliberately offering an unusual perspective, you should be prepared for it to be rapidly shot down. If it's on an emotionally charged issue, you should be prepared to be shot down viciously. The author can't have been unaware that his original post was going to offend a great many people.
Do people's emotional reactions get in the way of solving sexism? Maybe. But if you've found a way to take the emotion out of it, you're probably 9/10 of the way to a full solution already; if not, complaining that people treat the issue emotionally without offering a solution is rather empty.
Summary: Vicious responses are lazy and should be considered ignorant until proven otherwise.
I agree with you that vicious responses to different positions on emotionally charged issues are common. The word 'vicious' bothers me though; it's not ok to use non-arguments and threats or insults to respond to an argument. If someone told me that Abraham Lincoln was the current President of the United States I don't think I'd respond viciously... I'd tell him he was an idiot and show him some evidence on my phone. If he kept it up I think I'd just leave because I'm not responsible for someone else's idiocy. If someone argues with a more complicated position that I hold dear, then I can see how I might respond viciously if I had no actual counter-argument or if I didn't want to spend time to argue with this person. I think you're recognizing how the world works, for complex issues with a bunch of ignorant people you're likely to see very vicious responses because most people cannot articulate the reasoning behind their position or choose not to spend the time to and instead use violence (virtual or otherwise). Perhaps some have real counter-arguments and choose not to present them and instead just respond with arrogance; if so that's sad because no one is informed by better understanding.
My initial thought after reading your post was that your view is practical and accurate, that people like Antirez who care more about their primary work (Redis in this case) and not some other issue they have a perspective on (sexism in software) will be drowned out and crushed under the common view and those who choose to elevate a particular view or cause to their primary purpose. I think (with disdain) about "pundits" whose job is to promote some position regardless of its merit; people who spend their lives arguing passionately for whatever pays the most... that is ugly and works against adapting a culture to handle new ideas and situations.
>I think (with disdain) about "pundits" whose job is to promote some position regardless of its merit; people who spend their lives arguing passionately for whatever pays the most... that is ugly and works against adapting a culture to handle new ideas and situations.
I don't know; a certain degree of specialization helps society function better. Espousing contrary positions is valuable to society and at the same time emotionally draining (which is mitigated if you do it often); having it done by dedicated people seems like a win.
(I felt kind of similarly about the story of the disabled guy who goes around suing places for ADA compliance as a full-time job: if we really care about making businesses accessible for the disabled, it's more efficient to have him doing the lawsuits and other disabled people getting on with their lives)
> "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire
Wouldn't you then likewise defend the right of people to criticize the post, including to criticize it harshly, even if you disagree with he criticisms or the way they're phrased?
edit: That said, I can see a case for communities maintaining discourse norms, in order to promote discussion/etc. But to me that's precisely the opposite of a free-speech absolutist view, because discourse norms are limits on what/how/when to say things.
Most responses were zingers or did not show a basic understanding for what he said. They are noise, and noise is not worth defending.
I take his argument as supporting individual merit, and condemning praise for the seemingly meritless based on being a minority (what is often called affermative action). A proper disagreement with this position might be based around a purposeful cultivation of the minority to overcome the historical imbalance or avoid a flawed evaluation of merit. Debate then between cultivation and pure meritocracy is a valuable exchange, both sides of which are worth defending.
There appear to be many responses to sound bites taken out of context. Many of them are additionally vitriolic reiterations of much less insight and nuance than what antirez said. They do not contribute to progressing the core discussion, and are only valuable to the extent that we attempt to answer a subtle social issue by taking a vote of twitter users. Which is to say, they are not valuable at all.
Most responses were zingers or did not show a basic understanding for what he said. They are noise, and noise is not worth defending.
Surely you see the problem with that line of argument.
His piece was hardly insightful. In fact, he did not show a basic understanding of the issues he was pontificating on and the piece was mere noise, not worth defending by anyone.
Once you start trying to parse out who's right, you're missing the point of free speech aren't you?
You're pandering, but you do raise the point that I should have said "worth considering". All speech is worth defending as free, but our time in life is limited and we must each be selective about what we spend it on. Whether or not you appreciated his post, it is probably a waste of your time to make shallow, unsubstantiated comments regarding it.
For what it's worth, I'm not pandering ... that's more or less how I feel about his piece. But the point is, neither you nor I can have it both ways: free speech isn't just about protecting speech we like or think is substantive.
I really do believe arguments about the 'freedom' of speech should be kept to the context of government versus the populace.
The government censors people through force, sometimes in autocracies this quite literally means a gun to a dissenter's head.
It is a separate thing all together, On the other hand, if individuals freely choose to criticize, flame, or just simple disassociate themselves with someone else because they disapprove of their opinions. We should all be free to do at least this without fear that merely by agreeing with the majority we will be accused of 'censoring' the minority.
The point is, some types of free speech should be encouraged and some types discouraged. I think you should be allowed to flame people, but I'm not obligated to provide you a venue to do so, and I'd really rather you didn't.
No, thats defamation/libel, and it is a civil offense, even a criminal offense in some cases. Free speech is not an unconditional right, it places responsibilities on those who exercise it.
Defamation laws are one of those laws that skirt on a thin-line of interfering with free speech rights (similar to hate crime laws).
It's also not simply offending language that equals defamation.
From wikipedia:
"Opinion is a defence recognized in nearly every jurisdiction. If the allegedly defamatory assertion is an expression of opinion rather than a statement of fact, defamation claims usually cannot be brought because opinions are inherently not falsifiable."
also
"In Common Law it is usually a requirement that this claim be false."
>It's also not simply offending language that equals defamation.
Based on the post, many of the tweets were insult - direct attacks against the author, and not simply criticism/opinions.
All but 4 states in the US also recognize cases of defamation per se, where the truth of the claims is irrelevant, and the damages are predetermined. Claims which impute the following fall under that category (I've omitted 2 of the 4):
1. Allegations or imputations "injurious to another in their trade, business, or profession"
2. Allegations or imputations "of loathsome disease" (historically leprosy and sexually transmitted disease, now also including mental illness)
Many of the tweets directed at him fall into that category, and hence are defamation per se.
Defamation per se is very limited under the First Amendment, and mostly historical at this point, dating from an era when courts would entertain prosecutions for calling someone's honor into question. To the extent it survives, it's been limited mostly to where "regular" defamation would also apply, to false statements of fact. For example, "injurious to another in their trade" can't be used to prosecute any comment that could harm someone's business, but only false factual statements that could do so, such as accusing someone of selling counterfeit parts. Nowadays the only real distinction is in showing damages: in a per se category, once defamation is proven, the plaintiff doesn't have to further prove that they were harmed, because harm is assumed in those categories.
I think mostly we're discussing something else here, angry and vitriolic "piling-on" responses, which is a different issue from defaming someone.
As the first poster you're referring to, my post was a direct response to THIS post. It was to say "I agree the vitriol toward you was uncalled for, please don't let it take away from the serious critiques of your post".
What is wrong with that? I was defending both his right to speech suggesting people shouldn't shit on him for his views and also the need for conversations to be two-way and for him to consider the contrarian viewpoints that were too often expressed hatefully.
I'm encouraged that I've received net-upvotes for that comment, but I worry that EITHER I didn't express myself clearly enough or that people on HN are really committed to not re-thinking their views on sexism given how many downvotes it received. I'll fully accept that it's likely that it was my poor wording.
This isn't about censorship, but sensitivity. I don't see how you drew from this that the world of blogging is in peril--if you write things that generate tons of hate comments, and you don't want to read those comments, disable comments. The discussion will continue elsewhere regardless. The haters aren't even censoring themselves (I guess you could make a case that their existing biases prevent them from seriously considering opposing views, but that's not exactly "self-censorship"). If you want to solve some of the problems exemplified by this article and its responses, talking about censorship isn't the way; instead, encourage people to grow thicker skins.
I'm not closing my blog, where I think I'll post more controversial stuff, as I've a controversial indole. Also I'm not sensible at all, the problem is, I'm realising that Twitter is becoming mostly low content replies. Among the trolling replies I got, a lot were from respectable developers, sometimes even of products somewhat related to Redis. If it's so low quality why should I stay in an environment where that's the level? I'm quitting based on quality, not as I'm offended or alike.
My comment about sensitivity was mostly directed at the people flipping out about what you wrote, but it's nice to have confirmation that you too aren't so sensitive that you stop writing altogether. It makes sense for you to ditch Twitter.
I'm sorry, but, what? Critique is not censorship. The spread and evolution of ideas necessitates a dialog--critique, further reform of your idea, more critique, etc. etc. etc. This is how pretty much all intellectual expression works. Ideas do not exist in a vacuum, they exist among all other ideas and opinions and among data and personal anecdote and so on.
Without critique, ideas fail.
Edit: If you think someone is wrong, you should tell them (if you can articulate it in a well-reasoned, well-supported manner). Controversial ideas especially shouldn't get a free pass from critique just because they're on the dubside of mainstream thought. How does that even make any sense? Mainstream ideas are, by definition, more popular. While this popularity could lead to less (direct) critique, it still leads to more people thinking about the idea, refining it, etc. There's more brainpower behind a mainstream idea than behind a controversial one. All ideas are deserving of critique, but the ones that have been built with less human hours should probably be looked at a little more closely.
The difference between opinion on the editorial page of the paper and opinion in the world of zero filters. Perhaps one in a million people is a flaming loon but that's over 7,000 people given the world population. Sadly a lot of them have Internet access.
So the folks who are moderate and make up the bulk of the population don't respond, and the ones who are most easily incensed do. In a newspaper the editor would get all the letters that came in as rebuttals to an opinion and print the ones that were insightful or made a reasoned argument, and they would simply throw away all of the letters from folks who were ranting. This allowed for reasoned (if heated) debate to be carried out in the opinion section of the daily paper.
Twitter doesn't 'fix' this, I don't think they see it as a problem, but a bit of moderation goes a long way toward providing a better environment.
It is an unsolved problem to date, perhaps App.net or identi.ca or some other micro-blogging service will take it on and make things better. I expect it would attract quality posts and quickly gain a solid base.
"What this illustrates is the dangerous precipice that the world of blogging is hanging on to"
If I may... this wasn't the world of "blogging". This was the world of Twitter et al.
Blogging itself actually has a very interesting property, which is that even if somebody tears you a new one in their own blog post, you don't actually have to know unless you go looking for it. It's a lot easier to blog a controversial opinion than it is to twit it, Facebook it, or post it here or in a forum, because they all have the characteristic that any body with a pulse and a computer anywhere in the world can essentially stick their reply in your face. After the first couple of thousand nasty replies, this can start to wear on a person.
When it first got going around 2000, I found this very interesting, and I still think that there's something about that model that we need to find a way to recover in the Next Great Social Medium. It isn't perfect, because you don't get that immediacy that you get in a forum, and it's easy to end up feeling like a lone voice in the wilderness due to lack of feedback, and presumably that's why this medium faded as a means of generating community, killed by the immediacy and quick feedback hits of the more popular community mechanisms. To me it's pretty abundantly clear that all the "any idiot in your face" community technologies ultimately start falling apart (requiring either an inhumanly thick skin or flat-out sociopathy), and somehow I'd love to see if there's a way to build something a little more immediate and a little less likely to isolate people entirely, while at the same time retaining the fact that you aren't assaulted by what feels like an entire Internet of knaves and fools every time you open your browser.
Unfortunately bloggers who thrive on page views, but don't have any actual knowledge to share use Twitter to locate the Mass Indignation Of The Day, and spin off 10-100 times 140 characters to feed the trolls.
> If we continue to censor ourselves, it will destroy us.
Hence, the title of OP's post.
It was all really inevitable though.. The collective code we write spawned this. We make it increasingly simple for humans to share.. and equally as easy for humans to collaborate. These forces will combine for good and/or evil.
Take this past week on reddit as an example... If you don't know it, one of their most prolific users, Violentacrez was forced to close his account for simply sharing controversial photos. As a result, he became a target of ShitRedditSays, Project Panda, and RedditBomb. He was doxxed and threatened IRL.. He is now offline.
If we were to listen to Voltaire unequivocally, then the same should go for OP, and Violentacrez.
"Simply sharing controversial photos"... nice disingenuous way to say "creating a platform and framework for sharing sexualized pictures of preteens and photos of women taken without their consent, for years, while doing everything in his power (and mostly succeeding) in normalizing the process".
Honestly, it's like when people say "free speech" they really mean "be able to do anything I want no matter how horrible with zero consequences or criticism." I'm glad VA is gone. I hope he gets thrown in a jail cell.
I don't think we have to behave positively towards all behavior that falls short of illegality. In Violentacrez's case, he was long-term harassing people, posting creepy photos without their consent, etc. It may not have risen to the level of a crime, but I don't see any reason people shouldn't strongly criticize his behavior, including criticizing him by his real name, if they can discover that name through legal means. Why should him posting sexualized photos of people (including kids) without their consent be tolerated, but suddenly one violates some threshold of civility to say: "I've discovered that the guy posting these photos is Michael Brutsch, and I would like him to stop."
I guess my point was that if you really take a hardline free-speech view seriously, as in the (attributed) Voltaire quote, then "doxxing" people etc. also has to be defended, as long as there wasn't a crime committed to obtain the information—because the Gawker article is just more speech, after all. It's speech that can have a negative effect on a person, but then so were the original postings he was being criticized for. I do think both violate some kind of a right to privacy, but I'm not really comfortable with unilateral disarmament, so to speak. I would be interested in some kind of broader privacy norm, if something coherent could be defined.
Anyone smart enough to have an interesting opinion on this topic is probably also smart enough to see that there's absolutely no upside to expressing that opinion. It either parallels the mainstream (in which case it's redundant) or it differs in some way, in which case it invites a retaliatory shitstorm.
In a nutshell Salvatore said that he prefers to raise the level of abstraction (as programmers are wont to do) from focusing on how _female_ humans are treated unequally to focusing on how _all_ humans are treated unequally. At worst isn't this a disagreement on methodology rather than a disagreement on values?
What purpose has been served by turning this topic into a third rail?
>Anyone smart enough to have an interesting opinion on this topic is probably also smart enough to see that there's absolutely no upside to expressing that opinion.
That's my exact conclusion for pretty much every interesting/controversial topic. There's a very small circle of people (not necessarily friends by the way) with whom I exchange ideas on politics/religion/philosophy or anything potentially controversial. I know these people are smart and enjoy an educating conversation. To the rest of the world I just spew the usual boring conventional opinion when I'm forced to, or change the subject altogether when I'm allowed to..
Agreed. Any relationship where you can freely "entertain ideas without accepting them" (- Aristotle) is something to be cherished. pg wrote an essay on this topic, for anyone interested:
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
I think it's fairly natural for some topics to become third rails, if they attack views people hold strongly, or are seen to be outside the acceptable range of debated opinion. You even occasionally see it at HN: I recall a thread some months ago where someone expressed a leftist, vaguely anarcho-communist viewpoint on something, and got a flurry of replies that weren't really engaging the comment's content in debate on an intellectual level (if you don't like capitalism you shouldn't be typing this on a computer, accusing him of ignoring gulags, etc.). Certain opinions are just outside various communities' "ok to debate" range, which varies by community, and will get you piled on if you cross a particular community's line (trickier these days because web communities are very fluid and stuff criss-crosses between them).
There seems to be a very specific pattern where someone says a problem is not as bad as it's made out to be, and they are immediately jumped on as an enemy who is not "serious" about the issue by those wishing to position themselves as being "tough on X" for whatever reason. It doesn't seem to happen in the other direction much, ie there seems to be little negative consequence about getting too excited about a particular problem.
One sees this all the time:
- outrage about someone saying that, all things considered, paedophiles are not a particularly large risk to children
- outrage about someone saying that terrorists are not the huge threat they are made out to be
- outrage about someone saying we should consider a more nuanced, pragmatic approach to drug strategy
- outrage about someone saying that maybe the IT industry is not solely comprised of misogynistic psychopaths out to crush every woman under their boot at every chance
I really hate this pattern. Needless to say there is little nuance to any of the smears, it's all just claims of "terrorist sympathiser" or "he's just sexist too". Is there a name for it?
Just from reading the blog posts, it seems like this is a bit of an overreaction to some mild criticism of a mediocre blog post.
Then I looked at Twitter.
If there are multiple people tweeting basically "you're stupid" dozens of times ( https://twitter.com/kendall seems particularly egregious) it's not being in any way productive, it's a bunch of people being assholes and claiming "you're sexist" as a shield against anything they might do.
I don't know if it's something specific to Twitter, or just making people "celebrities" who aren't ready to handle the stupid comments that come with it.
It's twitter-endemic, if not twitter-specific, for the simple reason that it's hard to express a coherent, well-justified argument in 140 characters, but easy to express anger.
The anger might even be justified; just don't go to twitter expecting to read the justification.
Who just coincidentally works on a product which may (or not) be in commercial competition, and could just possibly be attempting to gain some measure of the internet fame his target has earned in actually producing something of value to many developers.
I can't help but notice in all of the vitriol, the loudest are those who appear to do little more that talk (on the internet).
It is a shame to see such hate against people. @antirez was attacked for openly sharing his thoughts about sexism. The sad part is that those who attacked him seek respect for their points of view yet do not give it to others.
While I agree that vitriol isn't the best response to someone displaying a lack of understanding, as you did, I hope you don't get defensive and instead try to learn something from the people who made reasonable critiques of your thoughts. Because they need some adjusting.
(edited because it was in the wrong place in the conversation)
Your thoughts about sexism, at least how to express them? Absolutely. I don't want to diminish you or your ability to assess a complex system, but it seemed to me (and a lot of other people) that you expressed a great deal of ignorance and a lot of classic misguided assumptions based on limited and biased personal anecdotal experience.
But if you don't agree after considering that, then that is just that. I only urge you to take this opportunity to do some thinking. Isn't that why you put your thoughts out publicly in the first place?
based on limited and biased personal anecdotal experience.
It's not as he presented his case as stone-cold fact and call me crazy, but aren't personal anecdotal experiences exactly the things that give birth to opinion?
Since when did sharing a belief/stance/daring to opine on something demand anything other than anecdote? I don't like that thought pattern at all.
I'm not saying they're not valid because they're based on anecdotal experience, but that anecdotal experience is much weaker than say, serious study. Saying his opinions were based on anecdotal observations isn't why I'm saying they're off, it's why I'm saying perhaps there are deeper resources to be examined. That's all, I'm really not trying to demonize his experience in any way, just hoping for further reflection rather than simply being defensive against the extreme reactions from some
It doesn’t demand anything other – but don’t be surprised when other people then tell you that you are wrong, misguided, ignorant or biased. It’s a quite unsurprising consequence of only relying on your gut-feeling when you opine.
Convincing opinions are supported by facts and theories, by knowledge of past thinking on the topic at hand. All opinions are not created equal.
I’m sorry, but if you write a stunningly ignorant post on sexism that takes so many wrong turns, you shouldn’t be surprised when other people are offended by your displayed lack of knowledge and care. I don’t want to apologize bullying or harassment – that simply isn’t something you can ever apologize – but anything below that line is perfectly ok.
> It's not as he presented his case as stone-cold fact and call me crazy, but aren't personal anecdotal experiences exactly the things that give birth to opinion?
We are talking about the experiences/opinions of a man about sexist treatment of women. This is a classic example of someone speaking over the voices of people actually suffering from sexism and then making opinions that dismiss key issues about sexism. While the author is totally entitled to that opinion and speech, why would anyone be surprised that people got angry about the post?
Hint: you are saying that my thoughts need to be "adjusted".
Yes, he did ... so what? That's his opinion. Didn't you just write an entire blog post about how everyone should be entitled to their own views?
This whole thing is little more than hypocritical whining on your part. You wrote an offensively naïve opinion piece about problems you've never faced and now you're shocked — shocked! — that those whom you've offended have responded in-kind with their own opinions that now offend you?
Embracing free speech also means recognizing the right of others to respond to you.
long story short, a blog post about sexism I wrote generated a reply that remembered me that I was probably not in a communication environment I was happy to be in... so I'm finding new ways to communicate that don't involve tweets.
I tend to treat twitter as a broadcast platform and largely ignore the replies anyway - but I certainly won't discuss sexism on there. It's ... far too easy for topics like that to generate a flash mob; if you don't find "ignore it" to be an acceptable response then leaving seems fair enough - but I'd recommend to anybody on twitter to ignore any replies to controversial statements in any case.
"I'm finding new ways to communicate that don't involve tweets."
They are likely to be old ways (compared with Twitter). You've hinted already on your website, if I understood correctly, about the ideal form of communication on the web. If people want to comment on one of your articles they should write one of their own, giving themselves the time and space to construct something worth reading.
Welcome back to the same sycophantic groupthink that had cast computing as such a breath of fresh air back when you first learned to program. While the legacy middleman economy went to shit, tech matured into the hot new thing - surprise surprise, the ignorant mob has arrived (and no, they care not for Internet philosophy). We came looking for intellectual independence, they come looking for 'social'. Much easier said than done, but don't let the bastards grind you down.
Perhaps it's just me (and the irony of me saying this will be obvious after reading this post) but if you are writing blogs, isn't it obvious that eventually you will get negative feedback and in some cases verbal harassment? My perspective on such things is that say you have 1000 followers of your blog and you write on a topic. Odds are that out of the 1000, 75% of them will likely not give any feedback, 10% will give positive, 8% will give negative and then there's the 2% that may verbally harass you because they are offended. Does this mean that they are bad people for doing something like that? Well I guess it's up to you to decide whether they are.
However, try to remember that there are people out there who were not taught or never picked up on the idea that you should be courteous when talking to over individuals. Maybe they were never taught it, taught the opposite, or have difficulty in controlling their anger. They can also believe so strongly in something to the point of doing something unethical.
The point is not to take things personally when people attack you directly versus your ideas. Instead why not ask them why they felt it was necessary to talk in that fashion?
Apologizing for offending them can also help in alleviating any direct attacks as it makes them aware of how they are acting. A little social engineering is a good thing to know.
Don't just run away from it. There are so many better ways of going about it.
With that being said, antirez, it seems that your experience got too noisy and counterproductive and it makes a lot of sense to disengage a bit. You're missing out on very little.
I have no idea who you are or what you do, so this comment includes a certain naïveté. That being said, turning off comments doesn't accomplish anything. As you see here, your article was posted, and there are comments, and you're reading them, and you have no control over them. People will have opinions and that has nothing to do with you.
The article itself-—as with any article that discusses sexism--was guaranteed to be controversial from the get-go, given its topic. Given that you seem to be somewhat popular, a controversial post from a popular person will elicit all types of discussion, including lots of flaming. I'm not sure why this surprises you, or why you are responding so strongly, but I would definitely encourage you to reconsider; I love interacting with people whose articles I read frequently, and I imagine the same is true in your case with your audience.
I don't know if anyone has suggested this, but if I were you, I'd take your original article off to the nearest Women's Studies department at a University. You're far more likely to get a reasoned response than here or on Twitter.
Following antirez on twitter was one of the few really worthwhile sources of real signal there for me. Honestly it is really sad to see him leave, I learned a ton from just reading his feed over time.
This discussion has little meaning. Everyone makes a call. Author made a call to express his controversial view, and there is no point in saying that his free expression was thwarted by others' free expressions. Others made a call to respond by teaching the author how wrong he is in many constructive and destructive ways. All of this is meaningless, because controversial opinions are appreciated when they are the right call, and hated when they are the wrong call. It's a coin flip for the most part.
Author complains that people are acting badly, but these people are everything that the world consists of. There is nothing else on the receiving end of his message except these (and other) people. Who else to express your opinion to? I'd assume author knows that. When you add salt into your tea, you don't blame your tastebuds for disliking it. Occasionally, however, you dip bacon into chocolate and your tastebuds go "whoa, awesome". This is the risk of controversial opinion. If you make it, just prepare yourself for the inevitable. There is a reason experiments require goggles.
As a community, we should strive to be calmer and more thoughtful about the way we express ourselves, and try harder to make the right calls. If everyone could do that, however, we probably wouldn't have the sexism problem in the first place.
The gist is basically "People should be treated the same way regardless of gender/race/...", which I agree to entirely, people who are trolling are probably incompetent women or sexually frustrated nerds afraid of losing the few female interactions they are exposed to in the workplace.
Free speech goes both ways; it is not freedom to consequence-free speech.
Want to express the opinion that women (and presumably men) who are highlighting and combating sexism are just demanding special treatment and wasting everyone's time? That's fine, but everyone else has the freedom of speech to criticize your speech and form an opinion of you based on what you've said. That's how this works.
Hypocrisy is unbecoming. Self-censorship because other people will point out how wrong you are isn't censorship; it's doing your homework. If you don't want to be called ignorant and wrong, don't be ignorant and wrong.
Imagine some journalist coming in and saying the problem with software development was that programmers didn't document enough. It isn't censorship for their opinion to be laughed out of the room.
One thing to keep in mind is that unless people strongly agree _but_ even mildly disagree the will post something in reply. In rest, most people who kind of agree or the ones that are sort of neutral will not feel the need to click reply or post. So anything controversial is bound to receive more negative feedback. Any positive or supportive comments might come as a second wave, in response to a slew of negative comments but those are sort of a second order effect.
Trolls will just detect this is a sensitive topic, and regardless if they personally care or not about the issue, will see a potential for flame war and will not resist the urge to dump a can of gasoline in the fire and then watch the show.
Yes, sometimes being rational and having common sense will get you flamed but what's that got to do with twitter? Antirez is a well known programmer and the amount of reaction he gets is above average. Was anybody expecting anything else?
if you are apt to stop blogging/tweeting because someone(s) leaves a comment that hurts your feelings, then you shouldn't be sharing your opinion in public, anyways.
The fact that the first comment that was posted here was just more critique about the original blog post and how supposedly "wrong" it was illustrates how much of a problem this has become. Whether or not his opinion is wrong doesn't matter. What matters is that he expresses it as an alternative perspective to mainstream conciousness.
Problems are solved and society is moved forward by a multitude of various opinions, all right and wrong in their own ways, interacting with each other. Each perspective provides a unique method of solving a problem which may not yet exist. The more perspectives we have, the more ideas we have to work from when we try to solve a problem.
By violently critiquing such controversial stances, we are indirectly silencing those voices, and ultimately destroying our own ability to find progressively better solutions to problems, because we get stuck inside a single point of view and refuse to move outside of it. It is not simply a matter of ignoring trolls either, because many of the most hurtful comments, at least in my experience, are otherwise highly intelligent people who completely missed the point of what you were trying to say, and have spent 10 minutes writing a scathing critique against a nonexistent problem.
If we continue to censor ourselves, it will destroy us.
"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire