Women Doing It Wrong
I have an astrology themed blog called Gist of the Gemini. At one time, that was my personal blog. I've had a lot of personal blogs over the years and I don't really do that anymore.
Below is an unedited repost of an old piece there published when it was my personal blog and I was active on Hacker News. If you are a woman trying to further progress for the status of women, I suggest it as food for thought.
Original title:
Completely Free Feedback that CodeLikeAGirl No Doubt Won't Want
Oh, my. I think you are doing a lot of things wrong here.
I really, really hate the way you participate on Hacker News. I wish they would just ban you. Seriously. But they probably won't. So let me give you some unsolicited advice (that you likely will never read -- I assume you won't read an astrology themed blog ever).
First, you have left comments as if this is an individual's account, while apparently only ever posting articles from your platform. This is part of why I thought you were just one person.
Pick one. Either use the account to represent the organization or use the account like a person. Don't do both. Yeesh.
Second, please stop posting man-bashy crap with bad titles to HN. Please realize that your handle sounds like an angry feminazi, so you need to take extra care in how you title things when posting them on HN.
You posted a piece today titled "Men, be afraid. Very afraid." Do you realize that sounds like a threat? It sounds like "we are gunning for you." I was pleasantly surprised that the article isn't your usual poison pen, man hating tripe, but the article was flag worthy based on the horrible title alone.
Show some respect and, you know, common sense. Posting openly man hating stuff to a predominantly male forum is not a good means to further your stated goals. If you want to get taken seriously on Hacker News, you need to be a lot more thoughtful in how you approach it.
This means drop the F word, post more selectively, work harder at titling things well, and, for heaven's sake, spend a little time wondering why a bunch of men would be interested in reading your articles. You clearly have an agenda. But most of your articles are not going to be of any real interest to the HN crowd.
And it should not be that way. If you are having coders write articles, they should have plenty of interesting things to say about programming.
Third, put something in your HN profile. This would help clear up some of the confusion I have had over why on earth this handle has not already been banned. If you were posting as an individual, I think your posting history would be a bannable offense under the "no political agendas" rule. But presumably they are giving you a pass because you are an organization, not an individual.
Fourth, please, please, up your game generally. No, the "mere exposure" effect does not begin to explain the changes we are seeing. If it did, then simply having slaves on plantations would have cured racism and also ended slavery. You need to get yourself a great deal more educated here about how the world works.
Because at the moment, I deem you to be part of the problem, not part of the solution. As the only woman who seems to have ever been on the leaderboard of HN, that feels terrible. We should be on the same side.
But I just can't condone your approach here and I am sure I have flagged a number of your articles. Which just feels icky to realize, but I will likely keep flagging them if you keep posting in this manner.
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