8 ms·

Brendan Eich resigns as CEO from Mozilla

86 points by parallelist 12y ago

pg_is_a_butt 12y ago
fags rejoice and re-install
dmazin 12y ago
It is somewhat interesting whether these links keep getting killed because HN's response has been so wholly immature or for some other reason.
- eshyong 12y ago
  HN posts drop in rank for being too controversial, IIRC. (comments to points ratio gets too high)
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  dang is specifically demoting and killing them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7527229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7527229 I'll wait for his post on the topic to form a final opinion on that, but my initial reaction is that it's wrong to bury a story of this magnitude in the tech industry.
  - bronson 12y ago
    That sounds odd. If dang wants people to comment on the original story then he should leave it on the front page. Kinda fun to see routing around censorship in action. :)
  - 3am 12y ago
    I can completely understand his motivation, even though I believe the efforts to demote/kill them will ultimately be futile. Like you said, this topic will demand discussion. The main thread should at least not be flagged off the frontpage or the new links will keep coming in.
  - md224 12y ago
    > There is already a major thread on this topic, and it has already spent time on the front page. Anyone who wishes to participate in that thread is welcome to do so. Is he saying that because a thread exists for a topic, anyone who wants to discuss that topic needs to go and track down the buried thread? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If the community still wants to discuss something, why not let them? Why force the discussion into a rarely-visited thread ghetto?
  - dang 12y ago
    No, you're right. For stories of this magnitude, one should be on the front page, and discussion should be consolidated there.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
codezero 12y ago
see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525198
MWil 12y ago
Quick question: Am I supposed to not be learning JavaScript because of him? edit: apparently downvotes are being used instead of "no, that's silly" which was really the point
- judk 12y ago
  Not using JavaScript would be a personal sacrifice, which is well above the slacktivism limits of trying to get someone fired from their job.
coldtea 12y ago
A win for bigotry everywhere. If we don't like your personal opinions we wont vote or back a proposition against them -- we'll make you lose your job.
- benched 12y ago
  Really? Is there a rash of this sort of thing going on that I don't know about? Or is it pretty much just Brendan Eich right now, reaping the consequences of expressing bigotry publicly?
  - saryant 12y ago
    Try working in the oil industry in California. When I was a kid, my father was in charge of PR for one of the refineries in the Bay Area. Local activists routinely tried to get him fired since he was the face of oil in that small town, some even going as far as saying so at city council meetings. An orthodontist even refused to take me on as a patient because of who my father was.
- gagaga 12y ago
  Yeah, those people in the 50s who fought against desegregation just had a different personal opinion on what was okay. Nothing wrong with that!
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >Yeah, those people in the 50s who fought against desegregation just had a different personal opinion on what was okay. Nothing wrong with that! Hundrends of millions of people had similar opinions in the 50s -- they didn't know better. Do you propose they all got fired? Even if you do. I don't recall that being the case historically, anyway. Instead, black and pro-civil rights people fought for their rights, with marches, public speeches, voting, and such. Not with campaigns targeted at individual people. The KKK used to do that.
- benrhughes 12y ago
  I'm not sure it's bigotry when people are held accountable for their public opinions. Free speech cuts both ways.
enupten 12y ago
This is sad. I know about Brendan Eich's views, but Mozilla is an organization devoted to open source, none of whose concerns, as far as I can tell, have anything to be with sexual minorities. Were he still the CEO, he really couldn't have used his office to act on his views; so why all the castigating ? He has a view, and sure a lot of us (including me) don't agree with him, but this culture of outrage is disgusting.
- benched 12y ago
  I don't think you and so many others would say the same thing if the issue was inter-racial marriage, today. Is it really so hard for people to get a little bit ahead of the progress curve for a change, instead of digging in and dragging heels behind it? What is it that makes it so hard?
  - lolwutf 12y ago
    No, but the difficulty with which your personal viewpoint can be adopted is not (nor should not) be the benchmark of his responsibilities as Mozilla's CEO, which is what he is there for.
- trustfundbaby 12y ago
  I think what happened is that Gay rights stopped being a matter of opinion and turned into a matter of civil rights ... and Eich just got caught on the wrong side of it. On one hand I feel kind of sorry for him, but on the other, I'm happy to see American society making progress in this way. I think its a lesson to all of us to be very careful and forward thinking about the battles we choose to fight in life. Not to make this any more controversial ... this could easily be the story of a racist person in the who got caught in the same position after the tides shifted and being openly racist just wasn't acceptable any more ... for example Trent Lott.
- imsogay 12y ago
  Until recently I've been sympathetic towards their cause, but I'm starting to fear they'll make taking it up the ass mandatory soon.
codeoclock 12y ago
Weird that these are being demoted. Regardless - I've seen some people defending him for various reasons, most prominently because he has a right to free speech. Of course he has a right to free speech, and he exercised it. He also has the responsibility to accept the consequences. His actions/speech made enough people angry enough to exercise their speech to the extent that Eich's position was no longer tenable. People too often forget that rights don't mean that there will be no consequences to exercising those rights (within the bounds of the law, and other things).
jypepin 12y ago
So if someone doesn't think like the mass, he looses his jobs? I find it sad, he definitely had views opposed to mines, but he definitely would have done a great job as CEO at Mozilla...
dang 12y ago
This post was killed because a great many users flagged it. Moderators don't, as a rule, kill any stories that have an active thread. That way those who are interested in the discussion can keep it going. The most we would do is demote an item in rank. There are exceptions to this, but they're so rare I can't remember any. I'm unkilling the post, because I want to reply to some of the moderation questions downthread, and I figure if I'm allowed to keep commenting here then everybody should be.
- codezero 12y ago
  Is there any reason not to "boost" the original discussion if new ones keep getting pushed to the site? It seems duplicative to allow repeat stories just to keep the discussion going. Better to downrank the dupes and uprank the original one if the discussion is still ongoing enough to draw constant repostings.
  - dang 12y ago
    Good question. That's the intention, and also what ended up happening this afternoon. But there's a countervailing factor: when the discussion is so toxic as to be beyond the reach of pinpoint "Please don't be a jerk on Hacker News" nudges by the moderator. [1] Empirically, the HN community has proven to be incapable of discussing certain subjects without immediately turning noxious. Once that happens, it's more than just a technical question of how best to consolidate the threads. The values of the site—intellectual substance and personal civility—are being grossly violated. If we allow that, how can we claim they're the values of the site? And if they're not the values of the site, who on earth would want to stay here? That is the harder problem. We don't know yet what the long term solution will be, but we're going to keep experimenting until we find one. [1] As you may have noticed, I've been making a lot of those this week--but they don't work on threads that have completely lost it.
    - codezero 12y ago
      There are some practical approaches that could be used to do more than nudge when discussions turn toxic. Allowing fresh threads just leads to the inevitable if there isn't a solid solution to the toxic behavior in general.

86 points by parallelist 12y ago

fags rejoice and re-install

It is somewhat interesting whether these links keep getting killed because HN's response has been so wholly immature or for some other reason.

eshyong 12y ago
HN posts drop in rank for being too controversial, IIRC. (comments to points ratio gets too high)
waterlesscloud 12y ago
dang is specifically demoting and killing them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7527229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7527229 I'll wait for his post on the topic to form a final opinion on that, but my initial reaction is that it's wrong to bury a story of this magnitude in the tech industry.
- bronson 12y ago
  That sounds odd. If dang wants people to comment on the original story then he should leave it on the front page. Kinda fun to see routing around censorship in action. :)
- 3am 12y ago
  I can completely understand his motivation, even though I believe the efforts to demote/kill them will ultimately be futile. Like you said, this topic will demand discussion. The main thread should at least not be flagged off the frontpage or the new links will keep coming in.
- md224 12y ago
  > There is already a major thread on this topic, and it has already spent time on the front page. Anyone who wishes to participate in that thread is welcome to do so. Is he saying that because a thread exists for a topic, anyone who wants to discuss that topic needs to go and track down the buried thread? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If the community still wants to discuss something, why not let them? Why force the discussion into a rarely-visited thread ghetto?
- dang 12y ago
  No, you're right. For stories of this magnitude, one should be on the front page, and discussion should be consolidated there.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

codezero 12y ago

see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525198

MWil 12y ago

Quick question: Am I supposed to not be learning JavaScript because of him? edit: apparently downvotes are being used instead of "no, that's silly" which was really the point

judk 12y ago
Not using JavaScript would be a personal sacrifice, which is well above the slacktivism limits of trying to get someone fired from their job.

coldtea 12y ago

A win for bigotry everywhere. If we don't like your personal opinions we wont vote or back a proposition against them -- we'll make you lose your job.

benched 12y ago
Really? Is there a rash of this sort of thing going on that I don't know about? Or is it pretty much just Brendan Eich right now, reaping the consequences of expressing bigotry publicly?
- saryant 12y ago
  Try working in the oil industry in California. When I was a kid, my father was in charge of PR for one of the refineries in the Bay Area. Local activists routinely tried to get him fired since he was the face of oil in that small town, some even going as far as saying so at city council meetings. An orthodontist even refused to take me on as a patient because of who my father was.
gagaga 12y ago
Yeah, those people in the 50s who fought against desegregation just had a different personal opinion on what was okay. Nothing wrong with that!
- coldtea 12y ago
  >Yeah, those people in the 50s who fought against desegregation just had a different personal opinion on what was okay. Nothing wrong with that! Hundrends of millions of people had similar opinions in the 50s -- they didn't know better. Do you propose they all got fired? Even if you do. I don't recall that being the case historically, anyway. Instead, black and pro-civil rights people fought for their rights, with marches, public speeches, voting, and such. Not with campaigns targeted at individual people. The KKK used to do that.
benrhughes 12y ago
I'm not sure it's bigotry when people are held accountable for their public opinions. Free speech cuts both ways.

enupten 12y ago

This is sad. I know about Brendan Eich's views, but Mozilla is an organization devoted to open source, none of whose concerns, as far as I can tell, have anything to be with sexual minorities. Were he still the CEO, he really couldn't have used his office to act on his views; so why all the castigating ? He has a view, and sure a lot of us (including me) don't agree with him, but this culture of outrage is disgusting.

benched 12y ago
I don't think you and so many others would say the same thing if the issue was inter-racial marriage, today. Is it really so hard for people to get a little bit ahead of the progress curve for a change, instead of digging in and dragging heels behind it? What is it that makes it so hard?
- lolwutf 12y ago
  No, but the difficulty with which your personal viewpoint can be adopted is not (nor should not) be the benchmark of his responsibilities as Mozilla's CEO, which is what he is there for.
trustfundbaby 12y ago
I think what happened is that Gay rights stopped being a matter of opinion and turned into a matter of civil rights ... and Eich just got caught on the wrong side of it. On one hand I feel kind of sorry for him, but on the other, I'm happy to see American society making progress in this way. I think its a lesson to all of us to be very careful and forward thinking about the battles we choose to fight in life. Not to make this any more controversial ... this could easily be the story of a racist person in the who got caught in the same position after the tides shifted and being openly racist just wasn't acceptable any more ... for example Trent Lott.
imsogay 12y ago
Until recently I've been sympathetic towards their cause, but I'm starting to fear they'll make taking it up the ass mandatory soon.

codeoclock 12y ago

Weird that these are being demoted. Regardless - I've seen some people defending him for various reasons, most prominently because he has a right to free speech. Of course he has a right to free speech, and he exercised it. He also has the responsibility to accept the consequences. His actions/speech made enough people angry enough to exercise their speech to the extent that Eich's position was no longer tenable. People too often forget that rights don't mean that there will be no consequences to exercising those rights (within the bounds of the law, and other things).

jypepin 12y ago

So if someone doesn't think like the mass, he looses his jobs? I find it sad, he definitely had views opposed to mines, but he definitely would have done a great job as CEO at Mozilla...

dang 12y ago

This post was killed because a great many users flagged it. Moderators don't, as a rule, kill any stories that have an active thread. That way those who are interested in the discussion can keep it going. The most we would do is demote an item in rank. There are exceptions to this, but they're so rare I can't remember any. I'm unkilling the post, because I want to reply to some of the moderation questions downthread, and I figure if I'm allowed to keep commenting here then everybody should be.

codezero 12y ago
Is there any reason not to "boost" the original discussion if new ones keep getting pushed to the site? It seems duplicative to allow repeat stories just to keep the discussion going. Better to downrank the dupes and uprank the original one if the discussion is still ongoing enough to draw constant repostings.
- dang 12y ago
  Good question. That's the intention, and also what ended up happening this afternoon. But there's a countervailing factor: when the discussion is so toxic as to be beyond the reach of pinpoint "Please don't be a jerk on Hacker News" nudges by the moderator. [1] Empirically, the HN community has proven to be incapable of discussing certain subjects without immediately turning noxious. Once that happens, it's more than just a technical question of how best to consolidate the threads. The values of the site—intellectual substance and personal civility—are being grossly violated. If we allow that, how can we claim they're the values of the site? And if they're not the values of the site, who on earth would want to stay here? That is the harder problem. We don't know yet what the long term solution will be, but we're going to keep experimenting until we find one. [1] As you may have noticed, I've been making a lot of those this week--but they don't work on threads that have completely lost it.
  - codezero 12y ago
    There are some practical approaches that could be used to do more than nudge when discussions turn toxic. Allowing fresh threads just leads to the inevitable if there isn't a solid solution to the toxic behavior in general.