English (UK, US and others?) meaning something like "having no parallel; especially : having no equal or match"

Hard to find a worse or larger echo chamber than Reddit, no? Seems like a good use of “unparalleled” to me.

I don't know how many important conversations hinge on the ability to use racial slurs. My naive take would be: few.

But that wouldn't be content policy, that would be tone policy. You can say incredible racist things without using any slurs. If you want to police the content, you'll outlaw saying racist things (or rather: things you perceive to be racist). If you want to police the tone, you'll outlaw the use of slurs, insults etc, but allow the content.

I assume that Reddit has an issue with the content, not its presentation.

I wish the average age on Reddit was 12. That would explain a lot of things but it's far from true.

The biggest group on Reddit are millennials, those between 25 and 35 years approx. And it's pretty sad because they don't want to have a civil conversation with anyone. They only want to hear what they already think/believe.

The real value Reddit has it's the small niche subreddits that fly under the radar. Small communities that are not dragged by the hive mentality.

True. I actually considered clarifying that. But if we're being pragmatic, the chances are awfully good that a new "black" board member will understand the issues.

Have to say, unless the board member is also a prickly character, there's a high likelihood, even with an understanding, that he or she won't really rock the boat anyways.

not every person with a certain skin color has experienced the same thing

True, but try finding an Afro-American that haven't faced racism.

    > I guess doctors who treat end stage 
    > dementia need to have had it too?

I did specify "other factors being equal." A brain disease is clearly a special case, since the real advantages bestowed by first-hand experience (eg: better empathy, fuller understanding of symptoms) are negated by the doctor also becoming a mental vegetable. Further, unless you equate being "black" with having brain damage, how would that example even apply to the original issue?

The remainder of your comment rails against a position I do not hold, and did not claim to hold. My best guess is that you were thinking of Affirmative Action? Affirmative Action, as I answered someone else in this thread, is its own issue.

Steve Jobs was treated by someone who didn't know anything about cancer; that didn't turn out well

I am sure and I think we shouldn't fall into this kind of traps.

First of all it doesn't guarantee anything. They will pick someone black with the same line of thought that they already have on the board. They won't be selecting, let's say, a black conservative. So in the end, their skin colour would be less important than their ideology but at the same time it'll be the decisive factor, which is stupid. Just as stupid as it would be to fire someone not white to hire a white person.

I'm saying this as an immigrant and hence a minority. I wouldn't even think about taking a job where they want me because of where I come from. It would make me feel like if I had some kind of disability or special needs and I couldn't do the same thing as others.

Race problems won't stop until people understand that the more emphasis you put into race, the more you'll divide people.

We cannot know what the requirements are other than the one announced here.

Maybe that choosing people based on their ethnicity or skin color is wrong, whatever they might be?

Culture is not race or skin color, nor dependent on them.

old.reddit.com is the only way to reddit.

Maybe we should embrace the concept of an Internet License, after all :(

Likewise. Regulation of communication is beginning to look like the only way out of this trap.

I don't know about others, but for me the "top" subreddits are filled with things that I consider very hateful and it goes way passed the "hate" radar of most of the mods due to the politics.

E.g. I was on the main gifs subreddit the other day when a gif of a wall being erected around the Whitehouse was shown. The amount of vitriol, hatred and borderline violent/violence-encouraging comments I saw that was at the top and mostly directed at conservatives/Donald Trump was just too much. It was truly hateful, but because it was directed at the right groups/people, it went unpunished and mostly upvoted.

Here's hoping that all hate and violent stuff like that gets removed from reddit, instead of just having it aimed at "the right", because that's their goal here really. Maybe we can then have an honest conversation about left/right politics.

I'm not sure if this is good or bad. Maybe time will tell.

One thing popped up in my mind was YouTube demonetized a lot of videos that are not 'family-friendly', and eventually destroyed a lot of great content creators.

I hope you realize the irony of the fact that you're posting on a forum much more heavily moderated than Reddit.

I'm amused to no end.

What does this actually do though? There are countless examples of hiding disagreeable/hateful/unwanted speech leading to no reduction in action, if not actually increasing it.

I deleted my reddit account. Reddit is becoming an editorialised website where people propose content, slowly but surely. Promoting sub they entirely control and moderate heavily. I used to visit reddit daily for more than a decade. Reddit is dead to me.

Sadly Reddit's announcements have a long history of verbosity, with little to no action taken afterwards. It's a long post but you'll notice very little in the way of actual measurable goals.

The comments in that thread are very telling of how Reddit's admins have chosen to wring their hands, or lament over their lack of involvement in the past rather than address issues, policies or tools.

The HN guidelines are already sufficient: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Isn't the whole point of this upcoming policy change to prevent people being able to hear racist voices?

Also if the replies in here are representative of Silicon Valley as a whole, damn.

The replies in here are coming from all over the world. People assume that HN comments are representative of SV and come to extremely distorted conclusions, because that's quite false. In fact only about 10% of the HN community is in SV and the majority of those are not posting to HN in the middle of the night.

I want to write more about this misconception, because it's common, poorly understood, and unfortunately damaging.

Readers frequently misinterpret other comments because they have no idea of how frequently national lines are being crossed on HN. They misinterpret a conventional comment coming from a different country or region for an extreme comment coming from some other place—usually their own, because that's what we naturally calibrate to in the absence of differentiating data—or else they assume everyone is in SV, which is an illusion as I described above.

This is particularly significant in flamewars about race, like this one. Many HN comments that count as racist, or point that way, in a mainstream American context are being posted by users from countries that don't have the US's fraught history with race. These users are looking at race issues in the US from the distant outside, and often they have poor intuition for the depth and complexity of the issues, the intensity of the feeling around them, and the conventions by which Americans debate them.

Because these comments get widely assumed to all be coming from American commenters (which, to be sure, some are, but many are not—certainly the majority in this thread were not), suddenly the population sample appears highly skewed, and much more extreme, to readers who are familiar with the US.

Some people will say 'racist comments are racist, period', but I bet that they, along with everyone else, make many fine-grained adjustments of interpretation when they have information about someone coming from a different background. For example, they would be more likely to perceive a comment as ignorant, and respond by educating the other person, if they think of them as foreign—and more likely to perceive them as an enemy if they come from nearby, even if the comment is otherwise identical.

It's likely that many of these adjustments aren't even conscious. Humans are deeply conditioned to react to nuances in social cues, and foreignness is one of the biggest categories of social cues. Unless we're arguing about specifically national disputes (which is a different sort of flamewar) we make extra allowances in such cases. Unfortunately, most of this nuance is lost in the stream of HN comments, and it puts extra strain on divisive discussions. The social machine runs without the lubricant it typically relies on, leading to excess friction, heat, and damage. This lack of lubricant gets experienced as a defect in the machine—which it is, in a sense, but it gets misinterpreted.

Seems that a new thing these days is that we need to be lectured on what the content mean. And that we are incapable of understanding ourselves. When did we get so dum that some individuals/groups gets to do the explaining. What makes us sure that these actually have the right answer. IMHO, I’m not sure.

The "opinions" section is not for fact checked objective pieces of journalistic integrity; it's for stating the personal opinions of important people, whether factually right or wrong.

My opinion remains that NYT had to apologize and take corrective steps for letting a stray wave penetrate the echo chamber.

I've read quite a few NYT opinion pieces with completely false claims in them in the past, some of them racist (against British people!).

They only start to care now? I thought the point of an op-ed is that it's like a blog. The publishers don't interfere with its content and thus it can be totally wrong.

It apologized for doing it's job badly and publishing materially false statements as fact.

Does that mean they'll also be apologising for The 1619 Project?

Big discussion earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23430575