FLOHN

Previous posts on this blog site talking about my relationship to Hacker News cite public remarks on Hacker News as supporting evidence. But there are things other people mostly didn't see about my relationship to the community there. 

In addition to exchanging emails with other members, I routinely did stuff like write a blog post and link it in my Hacker News profile or leave remarks in my Hacker News profile. 

I have editing control over that space and there's no permanent record of what I posted there and later redacted.

One blog post I linked in my profile addressed friction I was having with someone on the leaderboard. After it got a few hundred page views, I felt like I was less in the goddamned dog house on Hacker News and removed it from my profile and redacted it to keep the conflict private. 

I didn't lambast him in the piece. I just talked about "This is a giant headache for me and I WISH it weren't."

Those are things about my relationship to Hacker News you cannot dig up even if you got a warrant to examine everything I've redacted. Even if that draft still exists, which it may not, you couldn't determine that the page view count was entirely from it being linked in my Hacker News profile for a few weeks while I mostly didn't participate, much less that I removed it not due to the page view count per se but because I felt like I was getting less shit on Hacker News. 

For a time, I somewhat frequently had stealth success with pieces I posted hitting about twenty points and never making the front page, which suggests to me some members read things I posted because I posted them. In fact, I can imagine people who saw that misinterpreting it as evidence of sexism and suppressed attention simply due to my gender. 

But they weren't "popular" topics for the site and they weren't getting upvotes from being highly visible on the front page. So I think they got traffic because I was respected by some portion of the membership. 

Even if you closely stalked me at the time, most people probably wouldn't think that was anything significant. Looking back on it, it would be vastly harder to figure out that was a pattern and what it might have said about site social dynamics. 

The site has grown. Point count has trended up because there's more traffic. Twenty points wouldn't strike most people today as noteworthy.

FLOHN is something I joked about once before on one of my blogs and redacted: First Lady of Hacker News.