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Comment by Kiro | Hacker News Reader

I don't think Xe needs to prove themselves: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=xeiaso.net

Certainly some odd content there, seems to be just a blog about from a systems administrator/part time dev?

The point was that their content is always highly upvoted on HN. Why that is is discussed in a sibling comment.

i had never come across Xe prior to this. is there a canonical About link for what they do (and also why the interesting internet name)

Click the author's name. Or click the author's link to the blog. Read, read, read.

I'd like to know this as well. Nothing against them or their articles, they are usually interesting and well-written - but I did wonder why they show up on the frontpage so often. (They are a few other authors like that, like rachelbythebay).

The articles are good, but I don't think the findings are substantially more unique than what probably many other people in tech are experiencing.

I don't think there is some big conspiracy behind it, but I wonder if it might be the result of some algorithmic feedback loop: The system knows those sources as valuable, so posts reach the frontpage often, so people upvote them often, so the system registers them as even more valuable, etc...

That or there is some bit of HN lore that I don't know. In which case I would be interested in learning :)

Both Rachel and Xe are people that get at the heart of things. Many of the ideas I’ve had they can put out in words. I think a couple other people that fall into this are Julia Evans and Dan Luu. I think they are HN sweethearts because they verbalize much of what we think rather than saying something new.

Alternate explanation: Xe, Rachel, and quite a few other people (patio11? tptacek?) have been at this a while, have worked with a lot of people, and have consistently put out high quality content. They put in the time to build an audience.

It's not that "the system" knows them as valuable, it's that people have gotten to know them over time and trust them. These are people, for me, whose articles I'll always make time for. I suspect a lot of HNers feel similar, so that's a lot of upvotes, so that's a lot of frontpage hits.

Speaking as Xe, I'm not sure why my articles are so loved by people here either. I slightly loathe it at times because people can be _so toxic_ because I have had fundamentally different life experiences that have lead me down a different path than most other people have. It does happen enough that it's a meme among my friends and my husband is no longer surprised when it happens (he's more surprised that I'm surprised when it happens). I think this is just my curse as a writer.

What are you missing from https://xeiaso.net? There's also a short interview over at: https://usesthis.com/interviews/christine.dodrill/

Xe here, uhhhh I can write something I guess? What kind of information would you want there?

so a commenter replied with this link which is a more traditional 2 paragraph bio (https://usesthis.com/interviews/christine.dodrill/) - makes you a little more legible for people with absolutely zero context as to basic things like what you've done, where you've worked, what you're well known for, how you prefer to be addressed (it wasnt even clear what pronouns you use, the comments were all over the place) as far as i can tell, Xe is unexplained, and its a cool name so i'm curious to read more and theres nothing on the site to explain it

to be clear you dont owe us any of this, i'm just reporting my own confusion after going on your site and not knowing what "Archmage of Infrastructure" is (i only realized that your resume is public while typing this... oops)

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