Ask HN: How it Works: what do the Dave Winer threads tell us about sexism in IT?

6 points

13 years ago

In the past 48 hours there have been two threads "about" Dave Winer, and I think they have given us food for thought about the Hacker News Community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5744224

First, I recognize that in many ways, Hacker News was abusive of Dave Winer, and for that, I am sorry that we were abusive to any person. And I hope we can conduct this thread without any more such abuse to anyone.

I think the Dave Winer threads are the control in an ongoing experiment in Hacker Community Sexism.

And so I do wonder how it works: http://xkcd.com/385/

Significant themes in the two Dave Winer threads were:

    Dave Winer is a *blankety blank*
    I'm sick of hearing about Dave Winer
    Dave Winer is expected to suck it up when we tell him off
    Our behavior in telling Dave Winer off is just SOP for IT
    If Dave Winer complains, it just proves our point

In the past year, we've seen many similar incidents all around the Internet, and at Hacker News that work like this:

    Wow, IT is really sexist.

But when something very similar to these other incidents occurs to a man, it works like this:

    Wow, IT has a lot of jerks

So I wonder, if Dave was a woman, would either thread have gone down the rabbit holes? Would the same participants in each thread have behaved in the same way?

Substitute a woman's name for "Dave Winer"....

And would we be reading about Hacker News sexism today at Salon, Slate, The Washington Post, Reddit, Huffington Post, the Guardian, The New York Times, Jezebel, etc.?

Maybe we ignore our real problems by lumping individual misanthropic jerk behavior into a claim of collective misogyny. Perhaps people should stop projecting onto all of IT, the behaviors of a few.