https://twitter.com/doreen_michele/status/120130250640542105...
What is the basis for this accusation?
I read her original Ask HN thread and there was precisely zero snark or anything even remotely approaching misogyny.
I've been here over a decade. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board, yet this ratio of negative to positive attention remains an intractable issue.
Here is a guy with less than 1500 karma who has been on HN a similar amount of time as me who has had zero problem using it to network and make money:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21421327
Here is one of my many comments complaining about how poor I am and how HN doesn't work that way for me:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21541855
When I tell a guy he can discuss that with me further via email, I get shitty inquiries into basically "can we hook up, honey?" while their supposed important area of concern that I am knowledgeable about doesn't get mentioned at all. One of the few men on HN who was willing to exchange emails with me spent months pretending to be "friends" while intentionally not mentioning that he was ridiculously younger than me and married, which I learned when he finally decided to dump on me about how his marriage was in trouble, he was afraid he was facing a divorce and he needed a shoulder to cry on.*
I'm quite open about being desperately poor and wanting to find some way to support myself and my adult special-needs sons adequately and I occasionally get a few bucks of charity kicked my way by people who have a smidgen of compassion, but I mostly can't get men here to talk to me in a substantive way about topics that would have some hope of helping me resolve my problems.
Instead, I get lots of people willing to argue with me, tell me I'm wrong and stupid and so forth or men letting me know that although they can't be arsed to care one whit about my dire poverty they would nonetheless like to hit that and are absolutely sure that because a woman spoke to them, this is clearly a hook up opportunity.
After more than a decade of that pattern repeating over and over ad nauseum no matter what I do, including nearly six years of that spent homeless, I'm rather frustrated. I'm quite fed up with being poor and unable to get my questions answered while everyone acts like I'm just a whiner who should get a real job. Meanwhile, there are no shortage of men using HN to figure out how to make an adequate income online.
I'm not apologizing for being extremely frustrated and venting on Twitter. I added it to the bottom of the post because there is a long history of people on HN digging up some kind of "dirt" on me to sling mud and act like me getting frustrated with this extremely maddening situation is evidence that shitty treatment of me is completely justified.
Misogyny is perhaps not the best word. I don't think we have a good word for the phenomenon in question.
But after more than a decade of enduring this nonsense, I'm increasingly sympathetic to man-hating feminazi types because regardless of the relatively benign motives behind most of it, the impact on my life is overwhelmingly negative and there comes a point past which you can't reasonably claim that no one here had any idea that this was such a big problem for me.
Thank you to those people who engaged with my actual question instead of focusing on drama.
* (This is very, very slowly changing. In recent weeks, there are two men met through HN willing to exchange emails with me about housing issues.)
My interest in HN comes mostly from the technical and historical articles that get posted, and the often illuminating discussion threads, rather than the entrepreneurial or networking angle -- I tend to skip the business related stuff and I have never engaged with other HN'ers beyond replying to their posts (like this).
Thanks for replying. I understand better now.
But I honestly don't know what else to call it. My experience has been that getting too creative in an effort to distance myself from baggage associated with standard language for a particular problem space often ends up failing to actually communicate at all.
Thank you for posting a good faith question about the matter and following up in good faith.