I'm female and I've been here, on and off, since Hacker News was founded. (I burn accounts every so often so I don't get attached to them.)
I participate for a few reasons:
1.) I'm a 3rd generation techie and that's a fairly rare perspective, particularly for people of my age group (I'm 36). HN is one of the few places online that can appreciate that nuance and why it might matter. Related to this, I'm a woman who can in no way be considered an interloper or someone who doesn't understand the culture or the professions. I'm basically here to offer the perspective that the average HN user might hear from his daughter in 10-30 years when I opine on gender stuff.
2.) It's one of the few places with a decent age spread amongst users. Too many other sites are dominated by people under the age of 30 (to be generous).
3.) It's text based and amenable to long format textual discussions, which are how I prefer to interact online since I joined the WWW in 1993 and grew up with the text based Web.
4.) It's somewhere online where a good chunk of the userbase is more technologically proficient than I am and I like talking to people who know more than me about esoteric subjects.
It's totally okay if you don't want to go into a nuanced discussion. I guess I'm just bored and curious. Overall, I find your comment interesting.
> a tech bro website like hacker news
HN doesn't feel like that to me. Whenever I'm here, I have my brainstorm and science hat on. Nothing more, nothing less. To call HN a tech bro site, it seems to be a bit of an attack and not conductive towards the discussion. I guess the definition of tech bro differs. Also, being a male that doesn't care too much about its own gender, I am probably "well-suited" to not care.
In my case, I draw the line if they're also into sports (like going to a soccer match or something). Probably others don't. But that's why I have a bit of an issue with words like "tech bros". Like, do tech bros even lift? Most don't seem to. The characterization is too vague.
> Women do not get paid to be condescended towards
That makes sense, and I can imagine how it is experienced as such. It's sad to see.
I remember being on a subreddit once and experiencing it the other way (r/womenover30 or something). When I said something I was downvoted. If a woman said the same thing, she wasn't. I can imagine some women feel that a bit here. Perhaps a lot, but my imagination fails there. I get that it sucks.
> This community is obnoxiously male and condescending, to put it mildly.
What does it mean to be obnoxiously male? I've seen so many different ideas on what it means to be male that I honestly stopped giving a shit about what people mean. It's too confusing, despite me being a hetero cis white male.
I guess it's the autism. Whenever it comes to gender (masculinity and femininity) I mostly see rhetorical nonsense (e.g. some people saying that being emotional sensitive is a feminine quality. It is most likely true that more women are like that, but I just find that whole frame of thinking toxic as the word "femininity" almost implies it's inherent, which I think is highly debatable - I can go on like that for a while, also about masculinity). Could you be a bit more factual so I can make my own conclusions?
I mean, I've been to a feminism class and while that was really useful, I still think the typology is silly.
---
That it is seen as condenscending, that depends. With regards to condescending on women in this thread, I see that. I've also seen it to some extent in other threads. But condescending in general? No. I'm not sure if that's what you mean, but you write a little hand wavy at times. I mean, the points you make still stand, but I think they'd stand better without the labeling things so strongly that are clearly a strong interpretation that I don't understand how you get to it.
I do get the general vibe of the average Hacker News person when the subject is about dating. Comments tend to steer towards hopelessness, and that particular way of being I found is strongly correlated with being out of touch with how women look at certain things. I get the sense when women write something the average HN commenter has an issue to not look past their own trauma in order to listen to what women are saying. In that sense, I can see it's off putting.
I really believe that you are approaching this in good faith, so I will do the same. I don't have time to really dig into this deeply with you so these brief justifications of my stance will have to suffice. I don't understand some of your tangents, and you will have to forgive me for not addressing the reddit or sports stuff.
> Re: tech bro
The tech bro thing comes across most apparently in the pro-VC slant of this site (inextricable, I know). There is a high proportion of believers in a fantasy meritocracy where current wealth concentration is justifiable due to the sheer genius of "founders". This is very much a tech-bro way of thinking.
The way HN regularly reduces socio-political problems into a technological gap is another tech-bro "thing". When someone suggests that a country switch its currency to crypto to eliminate state corruption, or suggests that biometrics scanners be installed at ports of entry to eliminate slavery and humans rights abuses, that is a tech-bro opinion. It is different from a blue collar environment because the people on this website are extremely insulated from the social issues that come up on here. Nonetheless, they feel like they have an obvious solution to a version of the problem that they've concocted in their head based on a 2 second glance at a headline. It reminds me of this Adam Savage video that I think is great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP4CKn86qGY
> Re: obnoxiously male
This is exemplified by the high confidence and combativeness in this and other similar comment sections on HN, but let's just talk about this comment section.
Commenters here are confidently asserting that the author's lived experience is wrong because of a certain interpretation of the words that they typed in the article. When she says that someone made comments that made her feel othered, the reaction here is to disbelieve and downplay. That is very much a "obnoxiously male" way of approaching things. In more balanced spaces, the presumption would be that this blog post was made for a reason and that the person who made it is valid and rational by default. Nobody here has any additional information, and they are asserting that their interpretation of her words is correct even though they are heavily influenced by their own biases of gender, class, and otherwise.
mezzie2|1 year ago
I participate for a few reasons:
1.) I'm a 3rd generation techie and that's a fairly rare perspective, particularly for people of my age group (I'm 36). HN is one of the few places online that can appreciate that nuance and why it might matter. Related to this, I'm a woman who can in no way be considered an interloper or someone who doesn't understand the culture or the professions. I'm basically here to offer the perspective that the average HN user might hear from his daughter in 10-30 years when I opine on gender stuff.
2.) It's one of the few places with a decent age spread amongst users. Too many other sites are dominated by people under the age of 30 (to be generous).
3.) It's text based and amenable to long format textual discussions, which are how I prefer to interact online since I joined the WWW in 1993 and grew up with the text based Web.
4.) It's somewhere online where a good chunk of the userbase is more technologically proficient than I am and I like talking to people who know more than me about esoteric subjects.
rickmortythrow|1 year ago
> a tech bro website like hacker news
HN doesn't feel like that to me. Whenever I'm here, I have my brainstorm and science hat on. Nothing more, nothing less. To call HN a tech bro site, it seems to be a bit of an attack and not conductive towards the discussion. I guess the definition of tech bro differs. Also, being a male that doesn't care too much about its own gender, I am probably "well-suited" to not care.
In my case, I draw the line if they're also into sports (like going to a soccer match or something). Probably others don't. But that's why I have a bit of an issue with words like "tech bros". Like, do tech bros even lift? Most don't seem to. The characterization is too vague.
> Women do not get paid to be condescended towards
That makes sense, and I can imagine how it is experienced as such. It's sad to see.
I remember being on a subreddit once and experiencing it the other way (r/womenover30 or something). When I said something I was downvoted. If a woman said the same thing, she wasn't. I can imagine some women feel that a bit here. Perhaps a lot, but my imagination fails there. I get that it sucks.
> This community is obnoxiously male and condescending, to put it mildly.
What does it mean to be obnoxiously male? I've seen so many different ideas on what it means to be male that I honestly stopped giving a shit about what people mean. It's too confusing, despite me being a hetero cis white male.
I guess it's the autism. Whenever it comes to gender (masculinity and femininity) I mostly see rhetorical nonsense (e.g. some people saying that being emotional sensitive is a feminine quality. It is most likely true that more women are like that, but I just find that whole frame of thinking toxic as the word "femininity" almost implies it's inherent, which I think is highly debatable - I can go on like that for a while, also about masculinity). Could you be a bit more factual so I can make my own conclusions?
I mean, I've been to a feminism class and while that was really useful, I still think the typology is silly.
---
That it is seen as condenscending, that depends. With regards to condescending on women in this thread, I see that. I've also seen it to some extent in other threads. But condescending in general? No. I'm not sure if that's what you mean, but you write a little hand wavy at times. I mean, the points you make still stand, but I think they'd stand better without the labeling things so strongly that are clearly a strong interpretation that I don't understand how you get to it.
I do get the general vibe of the average Hacker News person when the subject is about dating. Comments tend to steer towards hopelessness, and that particular way of being I found is strongly correlated with being out of touch with how women look at certain things. I get the sense when women write something the average HN commenter has an issue to not look past their own trauma in order to listen to what women are saying. In that sense, I can see it's off putting.
bradjohnson|1 year ago
> Re: tech bro
The tech bro thing comes across most apparently in the pro-VC slant of this site (inextricable, I know). There is a high proportion of believers in a fantasy meritocracy where current wealth concentration is justifiable due to the sheer genius of "founders". This is very much a tech-bro way of thinking.
The way HN regularly reduces socio-political problems into a technological gap is another tech-bro "thing". When someone suggests that a country switch its currency to crypto to eliminate state corruption, or suggests that biometrics scanners be installed at ports of entry to eliminate slavery and humans rights abuses, that is a tech-bro opinion. It is different from a blue collar environment because the people on this website are extremely insulated from the social issues that come up on here. Nonetheless, they feel like they have an obvious solution to a version of the problem that they've concocted in their head based on a 2 second glance at a headline. It reminds me of this Adam Savage video that I think is great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP4CKn86qGY
> Re: obnoxiously male
This is exemplified by the high confidence and combativeness in this and other similar comment sections on HN, but let's just talk about this comment section.
Commenters here are confidently asserting that the author's lived experience is wrong because of a certain interpretation of the words that they typed in the article. When she says that someone made comments that made her feel othered, the reaction here is to disbelieve and downplay. That is very much a "obnoxiously male" way of approaching things. In more balanced spaces, the presumption would be that this blog post was made for a reason and that the person who made it is valid and rational by default. Nobody here has any additional information, and they are asserting that their interpretation of her words is correct even though they are heavily influenced by their own biases of gender, class, and otherwise.