There's a difference between providing information ("Someone significant to many members of this community has died recently") and providing a (arguably very superficial) signal of support for a cause dear to some of the developers.
Agree. I often have to click around to figure out why the black bar has shown up.
> less likely to stoke heated division amongst its users
This is interesting. Why does #BlackLivesMatter stoke heated division among HN users? And what does that say about the community that has been built here?
> and more relevant to the content of the site
I'm sure I don't agree. As the world moves further into automation, machine learning, machine analysis, and sousveillance, the interaction between technology and minorities in our communities is of vital importance to what we do. Questions of interaction between minority developers, customers, users, and community members and the majorities in those spaces impact on questions like hiring policy, behavior analysis and prediction (and the benefits and drawbacks of those tools), unequal treatment laid bare when the cameras are in the hands of the many and not the few (and the consequences of that knowledge), software that only works for a subset of users optimally because it was designed with only those users in mind, and other topics.
Software is growing to touch every part of human existence, and it's probably actually dangerous for hackers to traipse through life ignorant of that fact. We build things that impact people in a huge way, and if some groups are structurally invisible to the builders of those things, we really risk baking inequalities into the very engines of our society.
> Why does #BlackLivesMatter stoke heated division among HN users?
Simply because it is a political issue, on which people might have different opinions. And since that specific issue is not related to tech at all, it just causes conflict without any benefit.
While honoring the death of some generally respected figure in our field is hopefully less controversial and more informative.
> And since that specific issue is not related to tech at all
Black Lives Matter is heavily interwoven with the sousveillance effect... As cameras have moved from a luxury to a ubiquity, control of the narrative of how policing works has fallen out of the hands of the people who do it. It doesn't matter why multiple black men and women were shot to death... People have seen it happen, and they feel in their guts it was wrong. It's hard to get to that gut-level effect without visual stimulus; people have been writing for decades about the negative effects of violent-response-authorized policing.
Now that we know this, how will things change? Will people try to make the cameras go away, will procedures change to account for everyone having a camera, will we all adapt to being seen more often in public? And at present people generally know when they're being filmed... What of the near future, where the tech to film something could be attached to a drone flying too high or too quietly to see?
It's very, very hard to slice a clean cut between technology and its effect on societies.
> This is interesting. Why does #BlackLivesMatter stoke heated division among HN users? And what does that say about the community that has been built here?
It would stoke heated division because different users see that slogan has having different connotations. What it says about the community is that it's actually a fairly diverse community, at least in terms of their beliefs (and very likely in other respects).
> ...Software is growing to touch every part of human existence, and it's probably actually dangerous for hackers to traipse through life ignorant of that fact...
HN does not need to hang up a #BLM banner in a cheap act of virtue signaling for us as hackers to grapple with the impact we have on society. Indeed, such an act would impede productive conversations.
