Don't Hang Your Crap on Me

I'm not the target audience even though my position on Hacker News has gotten me invited to a few forums of that sort. I don't really fit and I know from long experience most women don't really like my take on such issues, so there's no point in participating. 

I don't remember how many forums I've been invited to, what they were or all the myriad reasons it didn't work out. 

I think I did accept one invitation for a new forum called gurlic -- I don't think that one was a women's forum though -- and created an account and things simply didn't click for some reason. Another wanted it to be women only for realzy realz and was using log-in via Facebook as their gatekeeping method. Me and Facebook aren't on speaking terms, so I couldn't sign up even if I wanted to, before you get into whatever raftload of criticisms I half remember having.

I used to be a lot sicker and in a lot more pain. That situation didn't exactly help me be diplomatic and I'm controversial under the best of circumstances, so I did a lot of just trying to bite my lip and accept that my opinions weren't really welcome, much less respected.

The Facebook sign-up may have been a forum called Glass Breakers or similar and I may have published a blog post elsewhere that wouldn't be online anymore talking about what's wrong with that whole framing in my opinion.

I saw an article once where there was some snippet about some chick excitedly saying to Alanis Morissette "We're TAKING OVER!" And Alanis kind of rolled her eyes and said "We're JOINING."

So maybe that helps explain Alanis and her unusually big career: She didn't go in pissing on the men and thinking she was better than them.

Most women's career forums strike me as being openly hostile to men and primarily interested in creating an echo chamber of angry women eager to get validation that men are all sexist pigs, WE women are doing NOTHING wrong and so all we can offer is emotional support and not practical information on how to more effectively interact with men or do our jobs or whatever. 

Rest assured, I'm not welcome in such spaces and I don't really want to hang there anyway. Being like that is not how I made the leaderboard of Hacker News, a space that was probably around 98 percent male when I joined. 

I've given up on Hacker News and I'm currently rather bitter about the whole thing and I think that's not unreasonable. But I didn't make the leaderboard by getting nothing but mistreated every step of the way while getting nothing out of it and I know that's what countless buttheads will be inclined the think -- especially women -- but I'm not your bitch, don't hang your shit on me.

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.

I have a form of cystic fibrosis and when I first joined Hacker News, I was quite open about that while frequently writing typo-riddled gibberish due to being extremely impaired. One of the things I can document because the PhD biologist in question publicly verified my claim is that someone exchanged emails with me and answered some of my questions about how the CFTR works -- that's the genetically miscoded defective cell channel that is the root cause of all symptoms for my condition.

So without getting into anything hand wavy and unverifiable, I can state unequivocally that participation on Hacker News helped save my life, no joke, no exaggerating, no hyperbole. I'm supposed to be long dead and used to be a lot sicker and Hacker News is a factor in why I'm still alive and dramatically healthier.

Also Mz: I was the biologist that responded to your query!

Once, I stated that I appear to be the highest ranked woman here and when someone replied mildly dismissively because I said I've been here X years and the account wasn't that old, two people shot down that criticism.

Your account is only 4 years old ;-P

But seriously, +34k karma in four years is nuts

Wilduck 

Doreen has been around on HN for a lot longer than this account. She's definitely one of the OGs. I would believe 12 years, that's about how long I've been here and I don't remember a time when she was not a member.

auggierose 

I guess the broken glass is dispersed over another account.

That same conversation has my reply as the top comment on the page and getting support for my points and that's hardly the only time something like that happened. This conversation went that way as well and I only remember that mine is the top comment because I once linked to the HN discussion and someone thought I was linking to my comment because it is at the top.

In a discussion about rape, my reply to the top comment has 171 points, multiple people thanked me for commenting and some said extremely nice things and one comment was flagged to death and someone replied to it "Please be civil" and quoted HN guidelines and the person deleted whatever they said.

Hacker News used to be smaller and at one time I was clearly respected by a lot of people there. It never did for me what it did for the guys, but it wasn't always all downside all the time. That's a recent development. 

And it's not possible to clearly determine exactly why it didn't do much for me professionally.

1. THIS blog revolves around the idea that women get raised to have private lives, men get raised to have public lives and I've spent a LOT of years trying to figure out what I am doing wrong because of being brainwashed from birth to only ever behave like someone whose only purpose in life is to be a wife and mom.

2. I didn't join Hacker News with any initial goal of furthering my career. I was working at an insurance company at the time and still occasionally surfing urban planning jobs. I do have a Certificate in GIS but I didn't get it to get a tech career. I got it to support my urban planning dreams.

3. I was deathly ill when I joined and going through a divorce after being a homemaker for years. My focus was trying to address my mountain of personal problems and, as noted above, Hacker News helped save my life, so it was serving my goals. Those goals just had little or nothing to do with "make money online."

4. I'm fascinated by social things and found it fascinating to simply be there at all and try to figure out what the hell was going on in terms of social dynamics that were wholly alien to my experiences. Figuring out the social dynamics on Hacker News was my hobby for a long time and that's not really conducive to networking and social climbing. I thought it was kind of funny and entertaining to fall on my face publicly and see how everyone reacted to that.

I was deathly ill and not supposed to live. I didn't feel somehow threatened by pearl clutching or some shit. These people were helping me not die. Everything else was gravy. 

I'm crystal clear that at this point it boils down to toxic misogynistic abusive bullshit, may they all burn in hell for their shit. It's absolutely not remotely where it started and I absolutely did not spend years there being just nonstop shit all over without getting anything out of it.

At one time, I had a good working relationship with Dan Gackle, the moderator of HN, who was endlessly patient with answering my questions about how to title things on the site (The rules: Use the exact title of the article...except for these dozens of exceptions). I've never said that before because the site has grown and I don't want him drowning in women bugging him over STUPID SHIT because they imagine having a PERSONAL relationship to the mod is how you make the leaderboard. 

It's NOT. 

But because of that relationship, I hand walked what I believe to be the first black bar honor for a woman to that point. I did not ask for the black bar. I emailed him and said something like "Other people are saying they think she deserves it and if you are so inclined, it would be nice to have it happen in a timely fashion. It's a big forum. You're busy. I just wanted you to have the opportunity to make the decision in a timely fashion."

That was for Frances Allen.

I know he wants me back. I know most of the rest of you utter and complete turds don't miss me and wouldn't be kind or respectful to me if your goddamned lives depended on it.

But, NO, I'm not some fucking DOORMAT who ate shit and liked it for over a decade and then decided I don't like it anymore and left in a hissy. 

So bitches in tech who desperately WANT to piss on the men as sexist pigs, please go find your shit to fling SOMEWHERE ELSE because I generally like you a lot LESS than the guys who helped save my life while I routinely made an ass of myself and thought that was entertaining distraction from the constant agony I was in.