Paul

Many years ago, my son introduced me to Paul. Paul came into my life with glowing reviews from someone I deeply respect.

Or at least his writing did.

My oldest son is, hands down, the smartest person I've ever known in the flesh. He's always reading something or watching videos or otherwise feeding his mind. 

When life gets in the way of this habit of his, he starts losing his marbles and making everyone around him crazy. So it's not uncommon for him to spontaneously email me something or for him to be talking about something and have me say "Email me a link to that. I would like to see it myself."

So I was introduced to Paul that way. Paul has a PhD and he had recently started an online forum, linked from the piece in question which I no longer have any memory of.

I was getting divorced and thought "Oh, I like this man's mind. He's interesting. Maybe we will hit it off." 

That was one of two reasons I joined his forum, the second being I had fantasies I would learn to program and then write a simulation as something more information dense than my blog posts and that would somehow resolve my problem with trying to communicate something to the world while everyone screamed "Off with her head!" for trying to talk about it at all.

I soon learned Paul had a girlfriend and either there was a child or she was with child.

No big. I dropped the whole "Maybe we will hit it off" thought and stayed for other reasons.

I initially TRIED to talk to Paul because I'm a giant NINNY. He never replied to my idiotic comments.

At some point, I pulled my head out my ass and realized if I were Paul, I wouldn't have spoken to my sorry ass EITHER.

Men aren't the only ones who go "Oh, she's interesting. I would hit that." and do egregious harm to HER career, not usually to his, regardless of whether or not it leads to a relationship. We do that nonsense to ourselves too sometimes.

Paul is a socially awkward nerd. He's not the glib used car salesman smooth talker, so in some sense he's not the best moderator. They usually have better social skills.

But he knows something about something social that most people fail to understand, so he designed a forum where the goal was to be able to speak the truth. Most people call this "science" but it's really deeper than that.

And speaking the truth in a public space is extremely challenging. There's usually political crap and personal baggage and etc in the way of actually talking about anything true and talking about "How do we KNOW that's actually true?" 

He was talented at designing a social climate where it was POSSIBLE to talk about the truth and he let any ninny join -- for free -- me included, with no gatekeeping and then tried to educate our idiot selves on HOW to appropriately comport ourselves to have meaningful discussions with random Internet strangers.

I think in the years our active participation overlapped, he replied to me exactly once because his role as moderator compelled him to do so. If I recall correctly, he advised me he unfortunately didn't know how to help with my technical issue while I was on a tablet before planet Earth went mobile first as the design standard.

And yet having only actually spoken to me -- or "talked at me" as we might say in The South -- exactly once, he nonetheless saved my life by creating a forum that valued the truth and allowing me to stay in spite of what a fool I was.

If you're in the tech world, you've likely met Paul or at least know his name, his forum and the company he designed around his wife's strengths. His last name is Graham.

So I feel strongly that I am the ultimate test case for how well their rules work. The entire forum can literally think you are nuts and you can say things here that people literally believe is you being a deluded fruitcake making shit up, and if you behave you can stay.

So I think they are doing something amazingly well that's incredibly hard to do and I'm a huge fan in part because it has helped to save my life.

I'm sure there is room for improvement. I'm also equally sure no one else on the planet does it better.

My relationship to Hacker News is probably dead. I've had quite enough of everyone there openly pissing on me to count coup on the only woman on the leaderboard knowing you can say ridiculous and obviously untrue bullshit to me about how it's crazy talk to think people make money via HN and not a single soul will come to my defense and defending myself will just make me look crazy.

I don't know if HN has gone to shit or if it's just shit being the only woman on the leaderboard, but I owe my life to this man and the forum he created. 

Whatever else he's done in life, for good or for ill, he's okay in my book. I'm grateful I got to be there for a time during the years when I believe HN was the best forum on the planet and whatever was second best was a DISTANT second.