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Comment by ljm | Hacker News Reader

Is it not apparent in the description that you were also assumed male by default, then? I don't recall 'cock and balls or GTFO' being a thing.

The point being that whatever noble intention was behind this anonymity, the simple fact of being a woman (or not a man) was enough to make you stand out. Therefore, a woman would have fewer problems if they either kept their own gender out of it, played along with the guys who would happily talk about women in questionable ways, or stuck only to conversations where all of that could remain ambiguous.

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Rule 29: On the internet men are men, women are also men, and kids are undercover FBI agents.

When the more puerile culture of The September that Never Ended happened, we saw most of this machismo garbage take hold. Myself, having access to AoL for a time, saw what that place was like and agreed it was a seething cesspool. Sexist, racist, homophobic diatribes were *everywhere* on AoL. Most heated arguments you'd get on the internet proper were the gnu vs bsd, or vi vs emacs.

Prior to that infamous date, either the custom was Mr. or Sir, or the like. Or, more commonly, was whatever nickname you chose for yourself. Some names have a more feminine sound, while others had more masculine. Yet more were androgynous. Yet when AoL decided to become the gateway to the internet, is when we saw that "average" (aka: racist, sexist, homophobic, different-phobic) people join for the first time, the old guard of the internet didn't know how to handle it - we've always dealt with a higher class of people, and these distinctly weren't it.

It really didn't start turning really bad until these Web 2.0 companies started linking payment gateways to real names. Overnight, your account would be locked/banned for "fake names or transgender names"... And companies like Facebook would use your friends as that proof. And of course, we know how all that is turning out - it's just as unsafe for women (or really anyone "different") walking on a sidewalk as it is with their real name online.

Fortunately, there's still fringes on the internet. I don't know if you're male, female, young, old, disabled, ,black, white, native, asian, from a different country, etc.... If we leave it out of the discussion, its unimportant. HN is most definitely not one of those areas, as the assumption is that you're a white, probably male, tech worker, and that you're happy with venture capital and startups.

(I really don't want to mention those quieter areas, as it reminds us of our old ideas of the internet and all the wonders we imagined it could do... Unlike today's marketing hell, capitalistic cesspool, and emotional monetization. It doesn't have to be like that.)

Well that's just an awful pretentious revisionist bit of rose colored navel gazing.

Now granted, I have only been online in various forms since 1992 (first on BBSs, then on the Internet occasionally in 1994, and then pretty much continuously since 1996), but I can tell you with a "vaguely feminine" name (Yvan, which is a French name, and any native speaker will tell you it's a male name) and almost 30 years of online activity under my real name, I can tell you that Internet has been a shitty place pretty much since the nerd realized he could stalk a classmate through the university mail system, and probably even before then.

Worked with a guy named Nikita who was on phone support. So many people in the US who couldn't wrap their heads around that normally being a mans name in Russia.

I don't get where Yvan would be confusing either. Weird people out there.

Although I honestly do have fond memories of the late 80's BBS era. But to the point those were local and largely only psudo-anonymous.

The Sysop knew who everyone was if they verified users. And here, at the time, the cost of calls greatly limited connection range. People were locals.

I'm going to avoid commenting on your writing style and vocabulary and instead focus on this one word:

> we.

Whatever group you are magnanimously attempting to represent, utterly fucking failed. You point the finger at the The Eternal September, but how many of those 'Septembers' did you (`we`) preside over before that? Failing one time after another until you give up and realise that, actually, the internet is for everyone.

> we've always dealt with a higher class of people, and these distinctly weren't it.

I'm not going to make the obvious reference to a Trilby hat--often tipped-- here, yet through my clever style of writing I actually just did.

> we saw that "average" (aka: racist, sexist, homophobic, different-phobic) people join for the first time

Different-phobic conveniently excluding your (as in, the group behind your `we`) disappointment at the unwashed masses finding the internet.

I appreciate you trying to do this detached 'yet curiously' thing but the fact is that nothing has changed. I dare say it's worse.

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