1. the color of the beekeepers' skin is irrelevant and appears to have been an addition made by the poster
2. "The duo bought their first vacant space on Detroit’s East Side for $340 with the help of the Detroit Land Bank Authority, an agency that works to redevelop abandoned properties."
That is a redevelopment effort designed to get action.
Can anyone comment on how this program and zoning requirements interact?
I'm going to collapse this subthread which, predictably, became a flamewar about the title (and the title change (and probably next, the title changeback)).
You'd be welcome to repost your point about land redevelopment, which I assume doesn't contain any flamebait, in a comment of its own.
Ok, we've shortened the title. Please let's all step away from the flamebait now.
Edit: since some people are arguing that it's an essential element of the story, I'm happy to put it back. The issue here is trying to get the content of the article the most interesting, substantial discussion the community can give it. That requires minimizing the things that push discussions in nasty, stupid directions, which we do routinely on this site all day.
Really? No offense Dang but don't you think that is patently ridiculous if a mere mention of skin color for a relatively benign story invites trolling and racism?
Why is mentioning the fact that they're black somehow flamebait here on HN? This is a story written by a black man, under 'Black Voices' about Black beekeepers with their race explicitly mentioned in the title of the article.
Of course it's ridiculous. The empirical question is what minimizes flamewars. If you don't think that matters, I disagree. It's the difference between this site functioning vs. being nasty, stupid, and not long for this world.
Then this goes back to some of the earlier discussions I've had with you in that there's clearly a deeper issue at hand with the community if the mention of race in a benign story incites flamewars.
Empirically it might reduce flame wars on HN, but you need to take a long hard consideration as to why it causes flame wars on HN and not other sites. Because to me, that signifies a certain, non-small proportion of the userbase here is unable to handle topics involving race, and that section of the userbase is so virulent that even stories which do not proselytize are wrapped up into the flame war.
And to preempt the argument I already see forming: Yes, social media sites and HN are a reflection of society. But your duty as someone maintaining the site is to control what parts and in what ways it reflects society. It is an excuse. Not an argument. And I find erasing race from discussions because it might inflame racists to be particularly egregious. I can understand doing so if the poster did so in a way as to misrepresent the article, but this was not the case.
"Empirically it might reduce flame wars on HN, but you need to take a long hard consideration as to why it causes flame wars on HN and not other sites."
This is so evidently false that I'm inclined to think it's even contrary to what you suggest; "other sites" is far too ambiguous.
I believe you're completely wrong about this not being the case on other sites. If you can find even one site that can fairly be compared to HN which is not at least as bad on divisive social issues, I'll be surprised. If I recall correctly, the last time you brought this up you said you were comparing HN to private, controlled forums. That's not a legitimate comparison. I'd bet that those private, controlled forums are far smaller as well. Any such community is going to have a completely different dynamic by virtue of size and structure alone. It's not because the moderators are more enlightened there or less enlightened here. That may well be the case but I guarantee you it's not the high-order bit.
Your argument about this feels to me a bit like backseat driving. All of HN's problems in these areas are endemic to the category it belongs to: a large, public, optionally anonymous, completely open internet forum. Find one of those we can learn to do better from, and I'll be delighted to.
Of course then this becomes an argument about scale, doesn't it? Twitter and Facebook both suffer from problems of racists and issues relating thereof, but do you really, really want HN to be compared to those sites? Do you view HN as having the same issues adapting to scale and being unable to control their userbase? Do you believe Facebook and Twitter to be above criticism because they have little to no other sites they can be compared to?
The sites I'm referring to are more or less microcosms. Larger subreddits, or sites like Tildes, SomethingAwful etc. These sites don't have the traffic of HN, but they deal with similar issues at their own scale. Larger sites can and absolutely should apply ideas learned at smaller scales and try to scale them upwards.
edit: Regardless of my thoughts on the site, I'll stop arguing about it and let things hopefully get back on topic.
The fact that the race of the beekeepers is only mentioned in the title and never in the actual article makes it fairly clear that their race is not relevant to the story.
I wholly agree with you in sentiment that context matters, but how the hell is that article equivalent to the one here lol, I have to ask
Your article has to do with white farmers specifically targeted by the black government of Zimbabwe, literal racism, so the race of the farmers is actually relevant.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'equivalent', it's not something I said. I'm also not sure you've interpreted the contexts very accurately but if you happen to be unfamiliar with them, you can easily google up brief histories of Detroit and Zimbabwe and the central role race has played in both.
I agree that it depends on the circumstance. Particularly, it feels more like patronizing if we highlight an accomplishment for a particular reason that the party in question finds embarrassing. Maybe Johnny doesn't want to be applauded for doing his homework. But if he doesn't mind, then there is no harm to Johnny.
But there may be another, unintentional harm: the harm to the ego of everyone who isn't Johnny. They may feel hurt that their own accomplishments weren't highlighted. They may even try to defend this hurt feeling, by saying something like "So? We did our homework too. Johnny's not special. Don't you care about us?" But the point of the accolade was never to down-play everyone else's achievements; it was merely to recognize Johnny's. But the ego gets in the way, and prevents us from letting someone else have the spotlight. We see ourselves as smaller when our peers are raised higher than us, and this makes us defensive.
And the NBA is 78% black. Should articles about white NBA players (doing something totally unrelated to their whiteness) start with lines like "White NBA players start charity for kids with cancer"?
Or maybe their race has nothing to do with their actions, and therefore should not be included?
It would be notable if white NBA players don't normally do charity. Race isn't the lede, but it's a component that may make the story unique.
To take the basketball analogy further, "white basketball player makes slam dunk" would be a bad story, because yeah, we know white basketball players can dunk. But "white basketball player becomes all time NBA point leader" would be news-worthy, because it's unusual. What makes a story interesting or unique won't always be dramatic, but it may still be important to highlight.
I don't we should emphasize race in that way, when it's only relevant because "your race is less common in doing this thing". I don't want to see a headline like "white basketball player becomes all time NBA point leader". The race isn't important in that way.
That kind of thinking is what led to the self-fulfilling prophecy of slavery and racism against black people in the Americas in the first place -- the idea that they are less capable and it would therefore be surprising if they achieved something that the white man finds commonplace.
But these are different concepts. The bias of racism is one of erroneously assuming a person's capability based on something which has nothing to do with their actual capability. On the other hand, "emphasizing race" in a story can be used to point out the opposite of the above bias, in order to counter it.
If you've grown up all your life hearing the first bias, you may believe it. And then suddenly you see a story that refutes that bias, and you realize that actually, maybe the bias was wrong. Maybe it shouldn't be weird that this certain kind of person can do this certain kind of thing. It can take a lot of examples over a long period of time, but it works.
Countering the bias requires examples, and you have to actually publish those examples. If you never have stories that counter the bias, people literally just keep believing the bias. If in the 18th century nobody had ever put out stories about freedmen starting businesses, nobody would have believed that a freedman was capable of doing business. They needed those stories published just to change how people thought. That's the purpose of "black man becomes beekeeper" stories - to change perceptions, a little bit at a time.
That kind of story is useless if it's about something that everybody already knows and believes, but it's incredibly valuable if it fights a bias. This is the reason you don't see "white man becomes beekeeper" stories - we already know white people can be beekeepers. We don't all know the opposite. (If this sounds dumb, yes, I agree... but that's literally the kind of bias many people have, and this is how to counter it)
This is a really important question and needs addressing. Unless I missed something, it appears the title was changed solely to remove the fact that the beekeepers were black, which is the entire point of the column. If true, this is... well, embarrassingly racist.
We didn't. Its karma fell below a threshold at which its comments get moderated by default.
If you want to email hn@ycombinator.com and commit to posting thoughtful, substantive comments and following the site guidelines, we'd be happy to reset it for you.
Article written by a black man, in a column called "Black Voices", about black beekeepers in Detroit, and moderators feel the need to remove "Black" from the title in order to "step away from the flamebait".
What a cheap shot. I didn't "feel the need". I'm doing what we always do, which is try to set the articles here up for the fairest, most thoughtful hearing the community can give them, and minimizing the low-quality rage and noise that everything can easily slip into.
If people feel like that word in the title is essential to its content, I have zero problem with that. What we have a problem with is threads that fly off into ragey and shallow disputes about titles. Such discussion requires zero thought and zero effort—only reactivity. All people do when they argue like that—on whatever side of whatever issue—is angrily repeat things that have been angrily repeated before. That's not what HN is for. When we see signs of it happening, we've learned that the easiest thing to do is just change the title to reflect the actual content of the article. Unfortunately in this case the attempted cure produced more of the disease. That happens sometimes. In that case we change it back and plead with people to talk about the article instead.
To pick one example amongst many, when there are articles about “12 year old does X”, there is plenty of low quality rage and noise about how valuing accomplishments based on age isn’t acceptable and so on, yet I’ve never seen such a title get edited.
Painting it as something the moderation team systematically does is disingenuous.
I'm sure that we've edited such titles in the past.
"I've never seen it" is a poor metric for making general claims about moderation. People see and remember only what stands out to them, and what stands out is determined by their pre-existing views. That's why the general claims people make about HN moderation are so starkly contradictory. If there's one mechanical, utterly reliable phenomenon I've learned about from moderating HN, that's the one.
It matters that the person theyre responding to is literally asserting, and I quote, “the color of the beekeepers' skin is irrelevant and appears to have been an addition made by the poster.”
It’s ... the point under discussion in this sub-thread.
I didn't realize what was going on in this thread until I double-checked the article - currently, the HuffPost story still has the title "Black Beekeepers Are Transforming Detroit’s Vacant Lots Into Bee Farms".
The reason this title has "Black" in it is it's part of a HuffPost column called Black Voices; literally stories concerning African Americans. And the beekeepers noted here are indeed black. And I don't know if many of you know this, but there aren't that many black beekeepers out there.
The fact that the beekeepers are black is germane to the column and the story. Removing that from the title is erasing an achievement of a local black community. I think another commenter on here was spot on: someone on HN removed the "Black"ness from the story because it made them uncomfortable.
Sure, I've done so. Happy to, if it's central to the article. The goal here is to get the fairest, most substantive discussion of the article and minimize predictable, stupid, always-the-same flamewar.
> someone on HN removed the "Black"ness from the story because it made them uncomfortable
That was me, and it didn't and doesn't make me the least uncomfortable. What does make me uncomfortable: people jumping to conclusions and accusing us of ugly motivations based on a made-up interpretation of almost zero information. Internet users have no compunction about doing that, and there's a kind of widespread implicit agreement to pretend that it's cost free. It's far from cost free.
> I'll tell you what does make me uncomfortable: people jumping to conclusions and accusing us of ugly motivations based on their own made-up interpretation of almost zero information.
1) You're a moderator - literally a person with more power than everyone else. People tend to get upset around the decisions of people more powerful than them, and jump to conclusions. It has happened in every single organization I have ever seen, including freaking yoga studios. It's on page 1 of your job description. So while I have sympathy for you, I don't have pity.
2) Sharing more detail about your changes can make a huge difference to the people that are affected by them. It may not always make people happy, but often a lack of understanding creates frustration. I appreciate the information you added after the fact, and suggest to add these details with your initial changes.
3) I don't know why you made the original change. Perhaps you didn't realize where the story came from, and just wanted to avoid any conflict at all, and so erased whatever seemed like it might generate controversy. But in doing so, you generated controversy. Like I mentioned multiple times in my comments, it appeared that the change was racially motivated ("Unless I missed something ...", "If true, ..."), even if unintentional, as a side-effect of trying to avoid a difficult discussion. And I may have been wrong, and made an unfair accusation. For that I apologize. But it turns out that the motivation didn't matter at all, because the effect was the same regardless of intent.
4) Sometimes we need to have difficult discussions. Yes, even on the fantasy land called HN, where the real world doesn't happen, and all that exists are interesting stories about technology. In this case, the really interesting discussion is not about beehives, it's about the way people interpret what they read, and how they act based on that. As one example, people may see a word that signals in them an unacceptable idea or scenario and jump to conclusions. For another, it's possible for someone to completely unintentionally have a negative effect on a minority community without even realizing it; which is a really important thing to realize, face, and learn from, but that most people in such a position won't want to accept. And another is that sometimes something that could cause a flame war might be there for a good reason, and people may need to learn to deal with it (as we used to say growing up, "like adults").
What could have been a flame war is (to me) a very important lesson about personal bias, how people interpret the world around them, and the effect they have on others. I'm saving this article as a favorite story to remind myself.
The title of the page I’m looking at is the same as the post here, and is in a section entitled “Black Voices.” I don’t see where the poster changed anything.
And with a by-line from Philip Lewis who is conspicuously melanin-advantaged.
Look. Every demographic that does conspicuously well in an avocation has role models and mentors that children and young adults can identify with, from hard sciences (Feynman comments on this I think as far back as the 70's) to professional cycling.
If it seems childish, recall the target audience. Then take a deep breath, and relax.
Indeed, it is like putting the word human in there, though the prospect that it may goad a few racists to think they can do better, has many positive outcomes.
I'm not being an asshole here I'm Fucking SERIOUS: Why is it "Black Beekeepers..." And not Just "Beekeepers" (And yes I saw the pic of the author who is presumably American of African descent). I fear America will Never shed its segregation roots as long as we keep referring to each other in terms of color. Me, I'm adopted, and when people ask me where I'm from, I'll usually say Earth. Peace.
I'm not sure simply saying "I'm not being an asshole here" precludes you from being an asshole, in the same way that "I'm not a racist but..." is no guarantee that what follows isn't going to be racist.
This reminds me of something my girlfriend heard this weekend when she met up with some old friends. She heard an employer say something like: tell the Chinese girls such n such. Where one would expect to hear just tell the girls.
1. the color of the beekeepers' skin is irrelevant and appears to have been an addition made by the poster
2. "The duo bought their first vacant space on Detroit’s East Side for $340 with the help of the Detroit Land Bank Authority, an agency that works to redevelop abandoned properties."
That is a redevelopment effort designed to get action.
Can anyone comment on how this program and zoning requirements interact?