For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business

HN reflects the society at large, so of course it proves the article right in that sense. Otherwise the article wouldn't be about the world. Any divisive topic is going to show up as divisive in any large-enough population sample. But there are at least as many comments pointing the opposite way—more, in fact, but we tend to notice the ones we dislike, and to weight them more heavily: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

You're probably experiencing the problem I wrote about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. The fact that HN is a non-siloed site causes people to run into things here that they don't run into elsewhere, and it creates a shock reaction.

I bet you're particularly running into the international aspect, which is so much more influential on these perceptions than anybody realizes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438403. The way people approach this topic in other countries is not at all the way Americans approach it. In particular, arguments that would make Americans wince (or "head desk", as you put it) are obliviously unobjectionable to users in other places, and those users have zero idea about the conventions they're breaking in an American context, or how inflammatory they are. It pains me to see these misunderstandings, but what can we do. "Excuse me, but the person you're disagreeing with is actually posting from $country, to judge by their IP"? Out of the question.

Would HN ever consider possibly adding location as an optional profile field? That may actually be useful in a lot of discussions and avoiding misunderstanding. I realize you can easily add this in your bio, but the explicit field will encourage more people to add it who may not yet understand the reasoning.

I'd say a tooltip could be added for context, but that seems even farther from the HN profile philosophy that exists currently.

Sure, we'd consider it. But in a community that cares a lot about privacy and getting more so, I wonder if enough people would turn such a feature on to make it worthwhile. Also, would we show it by default on every comment? I think probably not, but then it would be less useful for preventing misunderstandings, since most readers won't click through to a profile.

Some message boards solve this issue by letting posters specify their location as a field in their profile (and displaying a flag under the username, etc.). Not advocating this for HN, just pointing out how that gets solved by other communities (weak profile differentiation is part of the appeal of HN, but also a magnifier for these issues).

We wouldn't display flags—textiness is a core principle here—but if people felt like a location field in profiles might help ease misunderstandings, that's something we might do. Would most users fill it out though? I'm kind of doubtful. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23547013