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Comment by inmygarage | Hacker News Reader

As an early HN user I secured the username "amanda" before promptly ditching it after 2 weeks. While I don't hide that I am female in my bio, I have also found that the style of interactions changed significantly when I changed my username. Figuring out how to leave the kid-gloves off in real life has been a bigger challenge.

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Weird, I wonder what percent of HN users are actually looking at a user name when posting a reply, I personally don't even read a username of a person who I reply to, never mind looking for any male/female meanings in it.

But because you posted this sort of comment I actually read your username for the first time :)

Of what possible use would a percentage of that be?

It is relevant to the subject of the post. (If nobody looks at usernames, then the issue cited in the post doesn't matter.)

Personally, I at least look at who I am responding to (especially when I disagree with them; sometimes the person you're responding to has readily-apparent expertise that you'd feel foolish disagreeing with.)

True. I also tend to look at usernames when a commenter annoys me, just to see if it's a troll who is camping out on a thread waiting to say the same things again. But... By then I've made up my mind what I'm going to say, and whether the troll's name is Jack or Jane isn't going to change that.

It would put some useful bounds on the behavior. If only 1% of people look at usernames when posting replies, she could conclude it's a very small subset of people generating this nonsense. If everyone does, we don't learn much at all.

sounds like it's time for an eye tracking experiment

what kind of name is usaphp ?! :P

Yeah. If I could get people to see me differently in real life without actually having to change anything about myself to do it, that'd be the real Jedi mind trick. ;-) As to the original topic, I worry everything I say is going to be taken the wrong way on HN: gender or otherwise -- HN's mods have touchy trigger fingers. :)

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