I agree completely. Filter bubbles in general are not necessarily a bad thing. Personal filter bubbles are even less likely to be an issue, as they reflect the values of the specific person maintaining them; they're no more or less problematic than the values they protect. However, the more people inside the bubble, and the fewer people it takes to keep something out of the bubble, the more likely it is that the bubble is implicitly reinforcing a set of values that many people inside the bubble would not agree with if stated explicitly.
As mentioned in my parenthetical at the end, I think HN has multiple serious problems in its community. I'm interested in how to fix it.
There are a pile of commenters demonstrating both active and institutional sexism. While they do typically get downvoted and occasionally flagged (though rarely enough to disappear completely), they're not actually removed from the community, and thus they retain their ability to upvote/downvote/flag. (And the institutional sexism sometimes passes unnoticed when it manages to honey its words enough to be subtle and sound plausible.) It doesn't take many flags to bury a story, so all it would take is a few of those people systematically flagging stories to cause the effect that Matthew has repeatedly called out. And thus HN's filter bubble filters out stories about how bad online abuse is, how broken the tech community is, or how to fix it. (The stories that get through the bubble tend to be the positive success stories, which compounds the problem by making the situation look better than it is.)
It's one thing to systematically filter out all discussion of social/community issues as off-topic. That would be understandable and defensible; not all forums need to support discussion of all topics. However, it's pretty clear from the comments that that's not the whole story at HN; there's clearly a set of people who specifically target any stories about sexism and gender-specific issues. And while HN has progressed enough to call out and squash outright "brogrammer" garbage, they're years behind in terms of understanding and dealing with the institutional versions, as well as in having an explicit understanding of even the 101-level issues (e.g. no, the police will not track down and arrest people for online abuse; no, attempting to creating a meritocracy doesn't actually result in one; no, a code of conduct does not mean you can't tell someone how their patch is broken).
Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Aurora. Ex-biologist. mjg59 on Twitter. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer. Also on Mastodon.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-07-08 06:06 pm (UTC)As mentioned in my parenthetical at the end, I think HN has multiple serious problems in its community. I'm interested in how to fix it.
There are a pile of commenters demonstrating both active and institutional sexism. While they do typically get downvoted and occasionally flagged (though rarely enough to disappear completely), they're not actually removed from the community, and thus they retain their ability to upvote/downvote/flag. (And the institutional sexism sometimes passes unnoticed when it manages to honey its words enough to be subtle and sound plausible.) It doesn't take many flags to bury a story, so all it would take is a few of those people systematically flagging stories to cause the effect that Matthew has repeatedly called out. And thus HN's filter bubble filters out stories about how bad online abuse is, how broken the tech community is, or how to fix it. (The stories that get through the bubble tend to be the positive success stories, which compounds the problem by making the situation look better than it is.)
It's one thing to systematically filter out all discussion of social/community issues as off-topic. That would be understandable and defensible; not all forums need to support discussion of all topics. However, it's pretty clear from the comments that that's not the whole story at HN; there's clearly a set of people who specifically target any stories about sexism and gender-specific issues. And while HN has progressed enough to call out and squash outright "brogrammer" garbage, they're years behind in terms of understanding and dealing with the institutional versions, as well as in having an explicit understanding of even the 101-level issues (e.g. no, the police will not track down and arrest people for online abuse; no, attempting to creating a meritocracy doesn't actually result in one; no, a code of conduct does not mean you can't tell someone how their patch is broken).