Gender Diversity and HN

I spent YEARS helping to diversify Hacker News and I'm probably never going back. And the way to bet is it will gradually become more male dominated. 

It was about 98 percent male when I joined and it's now under 90 percent male, or was the last time I saw stats, and some of the most prominent women members were awful bitches who actively pissed on me when I was an active participant.

With my absence, those women may also be posting less on Hacker News and it's unlikely you will see another person like me following in my footsteps. I've participated in several of the first, oldest, best in class in some way forums on the planet and I've never met my match though the people involved in these forums are frequently well educated, have backgrounds that suggest very high intelligence etc.

I have a tendency to completely unintentionally set the standard in certain respects on whatever forum I actively participate on. And it tends to get me a lot of flak.

Men who were okay with awful bitches attacking me as a prominent woman making waves may not be so tolerant of awful bitches attacking men and people who do that are typically awful people looking for an excuse to behave badly and probably won't stop their shit if their current favorite target disappears. Most likely, they seek out new targets and if there's no socially acceptable target everyone is okay with picking on, it can become more apparent these are just not people we want here.

Most women openly HATE me. Probably because their story is "Men are all sexist pigs! That's why I can't get promoted!"

They absolutely don't want to hear "Or maybe you don't really understand what the job entails and you are a lazy hateful over entitled little bitch who they can't trust and you make excuses and blame other people instead of asking what you need to do different."

As far as I can tell, I am the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of Hacker News and I have done it twice under two different handles. I did so while very ill and frequently making an ass of myself completely unintentionally and I did so in spite of clearly lacking various "in crowd" characteristics (aside from the obvious: I'm not male).

I know a little code -- HTML, CSS, whatever markup language Reddit uses -- but I'm not a professional programmer.

I have a Certificate in GIS, but I never managed to get a job in GIS.

I worked for a Fortune 500 company, but not a tech sector company and not in the IT department.

I did some freelance work, but I'm mostly a writer. I made a few bucks setting up websites for other people, but only a few times. 

I am medically handicapped and spend a lot of time online and the forums I participated on that were the first or oldest or best in class were already established when I joined them. So I wasn't there at the beginning and don't really know how that happened.

It's taken me a long time to realize that successful (large) forums or people with substantial social media followings probably start in most cases with people who know each other in meat space.

I don't really know how Cyburbia started. I posted once when it was on some other platform, before Dan Tasman moved it to a bulletin board. When I joined, it was a one-man show and at some point Dan Tasman had a meltdown and said he can't keep doing this with no support and was considering throwing in the towel and that resulted in existing members volunteering to help run it.

So Cyburbia seems to be something of an exception, but my impression is that The TAG Project and Metafilter and even Hacker News all began with people who knew each other in person. And I never met anyone in the flesh from Metafilter or Hacker News and that's part of why I was never accepted there: A lot of the most important "insiders" met a lot of other people there in person at some point.

That doesn't mean I couldn't have gotten real acceptance. I was the highest ranked woman on Hacker News and one of the four founders is a woman, Jessica Livingston.

I spent YEARS trying to figure out how a pretty young woman founded a company with three men, dated one of three male co-founders and didn't have that turn into "The company is a shit show and bankrupt because three men are fighting over who gets the girl and have completely lost sight of the point."

I have been conservative about trying to talk about things like that generally because I got open hostility anytime I tried to delicately make observations, but there was once some remark or post on Hacker News where some man said he was married and his female co-founder was pregnant by him and OH GOD, PLEASE HOPE ME!

So while I know people want to act like I'm slandering people to have such questions, I think it's a completely valid question as a woman baffled by "HOW do you SUCCEED in business as a woman????"

It wouldn't have been unreasonable for Jessica Livingston to email me because of my prominence on Hacker News, which is the funnel for her multibillion dollar business. If she had written me early enough, I might have figured out sooner that's not what happened.

Initially, Paul Graham seemed to be the driving force behind YC and he was the moderator for Hacker News. Then I figured out the real backstory and with understanding that Paul Graham designed the business around her strengths, I spent some time thinking she was quietly "the power behind the throne."

I'm back to think that he was really the driving force behind it. He probably emailed a bunch of people he personally knew and asked them to join his forum and he has a PhD and that's why you see a lot of people with PhDs and the like on Hacker News.

I was never really an insider. Genevieve knew insiders and reached out to me to try to get what she needed from people who were insiders and that had good points and bad points with regards to me figuring out how to navigate Hacker News, but both I and people she was hoping to get help from were very leery of her agenda for all of us.

Her attempts to use me made me someone people were suspicious of and that's a long story I don't really want to get into.

Jessica Livingston never participated much on Hacker News and as the sole female founder never so much as spoke to the most prominent woman on Hacker News. It's actually quite remarkable I got as far as I did given all that.

And the way to bet is that without me there, it probably goes back to being brogrammer central and becomes gradually less welcoming of women.