Do posts mentioning HN make anyone else feel like they’re in on the joke, in a way? I get the same feeling when a movie title is mentioned in the movie. It just feels nice.
> The Slate Star Codex incident set off a tense conversation in the Times’ “newsroom-feedback” Slack channel, an internal message board in which staff have felt increasingly emboldened to criticize and raise questions about the paper and, inevitably, the work of their own colleagues.
> Following Alexander’s blog post, several non-editorial newsroom staffers from the paper’s tech and product teams asked why he was being “doxxed,” and pointed out that the blogger’s cause was gaining traction on the computer-science site Hacker News. Another non-editorial staffer said they flagged the not-yet-published story for the paper’s customer care department “in case this snowballs into a spike in cancellations.” [italics mine]
Just be glad they don't call HN a 'deep dark message board where notorious hackers and the Silicon Valley elite come to discuss politics and religion on a global scale' or 'some weeb hacker site'
> Several Times staffers pushed back, noting that the paper was not “doxxing” Alexander, as that term is widely used to describe situations where the goal of revealing a person’s identity is specifically to encourage harassment.
If ever there was proof that writing and reading comprehension are two different skills.
Considering that we're talking about professional writers, it seems really unlikely that this argument was made with genuine sincerity rather than simply out of need for a passable defense to give their peers. "That's not even what doxxing means! You're being melodramatic!" sounds a lot better than "Who cares? It's a small blog and we're the NYT".
I don’t know why any organization would want a Slack channel containing thousands of people, let alone one that is specifically intended for people to air grievances. Surely nothing good can come of that.
Every organisation has a Slack channel (or similar) where grievances are aired. It's a question of whether management want to have it where they can see it or not.
I wondered that too. What does the slack channel give their organization that it didn't have before? The New York Times is clearly capable of operating without a slack channel. Does it make them more efficient? Can they replace some amount of middle management or meeting time with it? I'd be interested in reading an analysis that made an argument for or against slack.
Well, if you talk about naming X and whether it is reasonable, the name of X will be known to more and more people. So one side of the argument seems to loose in any case. I do think it would be better to leave him pseudonymous, if that is his wish. I can comprehend why telling a name is preferable for writers to enable readers to check the story themselves, which gives the press some credence. But I think the current climate would lead X to write differently and perhaps less controversial. Pseudonymity or anonymity can be very advantageous.
That site works fine as long as you don’t use Cloudflare for DNS. It’s technical and opinionated at the same time[1]; I don’t have a side or stake in it, but I found I couldn’t make archives on it or otherwise access this domain while I was using Cloudflare DNS, so this is still happening as of a month or so when I last tried it using the Cloudflare DNS iOS app[2]. Try it for yourself. Set your DNS to 1.1.1.1 and try to visit your link.
Again, I’m not disagreeing with the archive.is stance either. I do think their argument has merits; I just think this is a case of competing incentives for archive.is and Cloudflare. Archive.is likely has reason to not want their server or scraper IPs burned, or otherwise blocked by Cloudflare or associated sites or users, anymore than archive.is would want to be blocked by any domain; it’s counter to the purpose of the site, regardless of what site operators may want. By that same token, Cloudflare has a financial and business interest in doing what customers request of them, within their SLA and product matrix. I don’t find either party’s position surprising, but I don’t know where it goes from here, if anywhere.
DNS is an unwieldy holdover from a past era, but it’s what makes URLs work for many use cases. Tested, functional software is a good thing, but so are alternatives. This isn’t meant to be about DNS generally, just about archiving services, I guess, and how hard it is to find the good ones we have, as well as create new ones.
Maybe things like Web3Torrent[3] can bridge this gap?
> While some employees debated the Slate Star Codex decision on Tuesday, one staffer also raised issues about opinion staff editor Bari Weiss, saying that when she posted on Twitter about her dismay over the anger about Cotton’s column, she “straight up lied about a nonexistent battle within the new york times because she knew it would be a juicier tweet.”
Wow so this staffer manufactured false outrage using social media to incite a staff mutiny and get a colleague fired? This matches what friends have seen with purposeful leaks in tech companies that seek to invite pressure from a captive twitter outrage machine. It seems these tactics are in common widespread use. Or maybe common at least in left-leaning cities/organizations - I am not personally aware of brazen actions to harness Internet outrage like this elsewhere.
> The Slate Star Codex incident set off a tense conversation in the Times’ “newsroom-feedback” Slack channel, an internal message board in which staff have felt increasingly emboldened to criticize and raise questions about the paper and, inevitably, the work of their own colleagues.
> Following Alexander’s blog post, several non-editorial newsroom staffers from the paper’s tech and product teams asked why he was being “doxxed,” and pointed out that the blogger’s cause was gaining traction on the computer-science site Hacker News. Another non-editorial staffer said they flagged the not-yet-published story for the paper’s customer care department “in case this snowballs into a spike in cancellations.” [italics mine]