Before Hacker News

Hacker News is the second predominantly male professional forum I joined. The first was Cyburbia which was around seventy percent male and run by a desperate for a date loser, Dan Tasman, who aggravated his own moderators with falling all over himself to talk to me and thereby derailing the discussion.

My first Hacker News handle of Mz isn't a feminist handle. It's typoed initials for my Cyburbia handle of Michele Zone.

A lot of people on Cyburbia had planning-related language in their handle which wasn't necessarily as professional as it appeared. My recollection is the Cyburbia handle Downtown Brown was an old personal nickname of a female urban planner from her get drunk and act like a ho college days.

I joined Cyburbia several days before I intended to do so. We were in the process of changing Internet providers and I planned to wait until I had my new email address when I saw a discussion of homelessness on Cyburbia that got my hackles up and I joined spontaneously to pick a fight with Internet strangers and make a terrible first impression.

My recollection is I went with Michele Zone because my TAGMAX email signature at that time was "The Michele Zone: Something like The Twilight Zone on laughing gas." to try to encourage people to laugh at what a shit show I was while deathly ill instead of taking it extremely highly seriously and picking fights with me because I was excessively respected on TAGMAX in spite of how not together I was and I was trying to participate in good faith without hurting anyone else and without being everyone's bitch.

There was a history of people picking fights with me on TAGMAX and then everyone acting like There SHE goes again! which I talked about once on Hacker News. That's one of my most upvoted comments and therefore listed on Fourteen Comments on Doreen Michele.

So given the short notice of "I need a handle RIGHT NOW to go make an ass of myself in public and pick a fight with people who have never heard of me!" I went with that handle and used that line in my Cyburbia signature at first for the same reason: To try mitigate social drama in spite of being unwell and opinionated and someone who turns heads without meaning to while sounding like the name was on theme for urban planning.

I did look for a planning job for quite some time while getting divorced, but most planning degrees are Master's degrees and most entry level planning jobs expect applicants to have a Master's degree. I hadn't even completed my bachelor's yet -- and I STILL haven't -- and I completely accidentally ended up founding and moderating a Citizen Planners subforum on Cyburbia which was more in line with my background and ethos than what I was seeing in the field of professional planning.

That's not a criticism of anyone else. That's just to say I ended up with a job that had nothing to do with urban planning and joined Hacker News and began wondering how to establish an income as a freelancer or business owner because I felt that would be a better fit for me personality wise and be better for me with regards to my medical situation.

So with Dan Tasman being a rampant butt to me and me having an insurance job and a file titled "The why Dan Tasman is an asshole file," I decided Cyburbia was a waste of time and not worth the nonsense.

He finally did monetize it thanks to my feedback, but did so in a way that undermined my participation and probably intentionally so. I was clear I was NEVER going to be respected there and was beginning to think I would probably never have your standard government desk jockey professional bureaucrat planning job and I haven't.

I felt clear I was going to keep my corporate job for the foreseeable future while working on my health. When I did eventually apply for a job in the planning wheelhouse, it was at a nonprofit and doing community development work and I appear to have been so over qualified it led to stupid levels of drama swirling around me and fostered the development of Eclogiselle as a potential planning business more in line with how I was seeing myself and my future than government bureaucrat.

The single most valuable thing I got out of Cyburbia is that in spite of having a substantially lower percentage of men than Hacker News -- which was something like 98 percent male when I joined AND those men trended towards making more money and having more power than men on Cyburbia -- it had the exact same patterns of behavior I later ran into on Hacker News. Only, you know, vastly more obvious, so obvious a doped to the gills former homemaker could see this stupid shit for what it was.

That was enormously valuable in figuring out the more polite and sophisticated social environment of Hacker News that reminds me of sayings like "An armed society is a polite society." and "Lions don't need to roar."