One of the themes of this blog is my struggles to understand that public-private divide which I feel is a more constructive framing than "Men are all just sexist pigs!" I think women get raised to have a private life, men to have a public life and we mentally frame things differently and don't speak the same language because of it.
I'm currently on hiatus from Hacker News. I've taken breaks from it before, some planned and some not. I have a history of participating less during the holidays, for example.
My expectations for what I imagine should happen as the only woman who appears to have ever made the leaderboard very much do not match up with my actual experiences and I have been perpetually disappointed with what I get back for what I put into the site.
I have noted in the past that 10.4 percent of Fortune 500 companies have female CEOs and my presence on a list of 100 names that over the years has included more than a hundred people puts me very much in a league of my own. As best I can tell, female representation on the leaderboard of Hacker News is under one percent and I'm it.
And I've done it twice under two different handles. If all my karma were under one handle, I would be higher up on the board.
A point of friction that I have repeatedly run into on HN is that I am frequently just trying to TALK with people. This is apparently not how other prominent members of the forum relate to the space and I have been asked at times questions about my agenda.
I'm medically handicapped and I'm frequently merely trying to occupy myself and trying to not lose my marbles. Secondarily, because I'm handicapped, I am often hoping that my online activities will somehow eventually lead to improved income though I seem to be failing spectacularly at figuring out how that might be.
It's possible that the above issue -- that I'm naively trying to talk with people without a particular agenda -- is part of why that stubbornly persists but it's incredibly difficult to determine the exact root cause because:
1. "Wherever you go, there you are." I cannot readily as a sample of one determine for certain how much is my gender, my medical situation or something else about me.
2. I can try to emulate the men and either I'm somehow not actually doing the same thing and don't see it or sometimes the exact same thing the guys do is treated differently because it's me.
I used to note on HN that men with a lot of karma would get told "You must be smart etc to have so much karma on HN." and I didn't get the same respect. Instead, I routinely got accused of being obsessed with meaningless internet points for pointing to my karma as something that "should" get me respect or assumed to be smart or whatever.
So two points about that:
1. Rather than treat ME better once I proved that was actually a thing and not me making things up, men stopped saying that to other men.
2. The entire reason I began keeping data on women and HN karma was to try to find some kind of objective metric as a means to do a sanity check because comments to me on HN suggested to me people viewed me as "prominent for a woman on HN" at a time when I fell extremely far short of being prominent in terms of how much karma I had on HN or in terms of having noteworthy career accomplishments.
I pointed to karma because it was internal to the site. You didn't need to know me from elsewhere. And I pointed to karma because most people would see nothing of note in comments directed at me that struck me as "That's weird that they know my name or gender or whatever because I'm a big fat nobody."
So I find social things interesting and I've studied such and I'm knowledgeable but I don't seem to generally approach such things the way men typically do. When men think about social stuff, men are typically thinking in political terms -- about exercising power and pursuing an agenda -- and I'm usually not thinking like that.
I spent some time collecting names of HN members who seemed to be female and then one day a discussion made it clear to me that the name on my list with something like 8000 karma at a time when the bottom of the leaderboard was about 10,000 karma was actually a man with a handle that seemed feminine to me but wasn't.
And shortly after that, the woman with the most karma, maybe 5000 points, was banned for her openly disrespectful, rule-breaking, man-bashing screed. This left me basically the highest ranking woman I could find in spite of having some pathetic amount of karma, like 2000 points.
By then, I was likely homeless and trying to figure out how to get karma on HN was a cheap hobby to entertain myself. For fun, I set a goal first to exceed the amount of karma the top ranked woman had before she was banned and later to actually make the leaderboard and not merely be what I called in blog posts "The top woman on the mythical women of HN leaderboard."
As far as I can see, it's basically done NOTHING for ME to be the only woman on the leaderboard of Hacker News and has come with an enormous downside. For example:
After publishing the piece, someone emailed me about it, someone upset that I had written it. My recollection is they felt it somehow "hurt" the person who had written the piece about her negative experience in the Scala community.
At some point, someone created a new Reddit account to ask me why I wasn't dragging Naomi Wu publicly and linked to a tweet by Ms. Wu where she had screenshotted my Hacker News comments and dragged me...I deleted the comment made on one of my subs advising me of her attacks on me, wrote a few blog posts -- because clearly just keeping my mouth shut about her is ALSO not okay with people -- and later redacted them as was a very common practice for me at one time.
So I get emails and comments on Reddit from people who know who I am apparently largely due to my participation on Hacker News and my "prominence" there and it's typically extremely negative stuff.
It's NEVER turned into any of the things I like to IMAGINE would be positives that would improve my life in some way, such as:
1. Friends
2. Professional contacts
3. Promotion of my work by other people
At least not that I can TELL and maybe that's ME having a blind spot and having no idea how successful men experience these things. Maybe that's ME being a clueless twit expecting career success to look like "We are all FWENDS!" or something.
I hate politics. I don't understand it and whatever the hell it is, it feels to me like it's all downside for me and no upside because OTHER people seem to imagine I have an agenda that I don't think I have and OTHER people seem to imagine I'm consciously and intentionally "exercising power" that I honestly don't believe even EXISTS.
My agenda has always been to try to make my life work via sorting my personal problems and establishing an adequate income. That's IT.
I can't seem to do either of those things, much less whatever the hell other people seem to be accusing me of for reasons I cannot fathom because my writing gets so little traffic and etc that I have no idea why ANYONE even thinks about "Why aren't you dragging Naomi Wu?" much less is so invested in the question that they went to the trouble to create an anonymous account to ask me about it.