Lets be honest here. This will be a big story here in Hacker News for a few days, then we will get on with our lives. It will not spread out from that.
This is ironically how the News works. It's new - novel, interesting, unique, temporary.
We will stand up for Scott - but it won't really change anything, and it will be temporary. It's naive to think that what we find important for a bit will have any impact on the real world and real lives. Especially as this is literally what the News does and has done for a hundred or so years.
I don't know what "Standing up for Scott" means. His concerns are that he could lose his job, his patients might not want or be able to connect with him after reading his blog or about it, and dangerous people both online and in his real life would have an easier time finding him in person.
Given these concerns, I have no clue what benefit a supportive forum like this would be. We might all be cheering him on and thinking highly of him, but that wouldn't change any of his concerns.
It means: Pressure the NYT. Write a polite but firm email that this is not an acceptable attitude. If you happen to be subscribed, unsubscribe, and point to this as the reason.
People are cancelling their NYT subscriptions over this. I don't know how many, but a campaign to mass un-subscribe could be successful.
I also imagine that if he was doxxed and wasn't able to make a living as a psychiatrist anymore, many people here would probably fund him through patreon, or purchasing books or whatever.
Sometimes it's really interesting to go back and see what happened with stories that the NYT was absolutely freaking out about a year ago. Remember RussiaGate for example? Daily stories on the NYT for 2 years from anonymous sources amounting to nothing.
Or the Tom Cotton op-ed just two weeks ago. The highest hourly spike in NYT subscription cancellations, James Bennett resigning, employees in disarray, employees threatening to resign, and now we've mostly forgotten about the whole case. I doubt the NYT has incentives to really unpack why it was possible for their paper to publish pro-fascist content in the first place.
Perhaps. But this is also the kind of story that can go far beyond the HN niche, especially given how it can align with current political views. It depends whether they do publish the article, and what it's like.
They need only write something like "Scott has been called alt-right and anti feminist online" (as I'm sure somewhere they have, once) and then any public defense of the character can be labelled as being racist and toxic.
there are other simple strategies that can be put into place to make any defence of a person harder and most people will look at the surface representation and move on to the next story. Eventually the story about the story will itself fade away.
> 'Scott has been called alt-right and anti feminist online'
Who hasn't? I mean, I see your point and it would be correct in many cases but if people can use this so easily to score points against the NYT, they aren't going to be deterred by that. The online culture that likes to label anything and everything as "racist and toxic" would only make their point stronger.
I think you misunderstood. The NYT could use it to silence support for Scott Alexander because anyone saying "no, he's a reasonable person that writes about the beliefs of people without holding it themselves" will hang next to him as somebody that is supporting Scott Alexander "who many say is prominent alt-right figure and who has lead a hate campaign against feminists on his blog".
This is ironically how the News works. It's new - novel, interesting, unique, temporary.
We will stand up for Scott - but it won't really change anything, and it will be temporary. It's naive to think that what we find important for a bit will have any impact on the real world and real lives. Especially as this is literally what the News does and has done for a hundred or so years.