zlacker

>>stable+(OP)
Honest question, does HN feel unwelcoming or uncomfortable for women? In particular: “I’ve found that some conversations online escalate to shouting matches quickly” do female HN users identify this with HN? Not saying Leap shouldn’t exist or anything, I’m just wondering if HN has these particular issues that I haven’t personally recognised.

>>mcinty+bE
There's a certain style to HN discussions that feels completely natural if you've been here long enough, yet may appear excessively antagonistic to people not used to it.

Specifically, 90%+ of all comments are of the "you're wrong, because..." variety. Note that there's nothing wrong with such comments: they make up a large part of any group's pub conversations as well, for example.

Yet there are other sentiments that are possibly underrepresented on HN: self-doubt, questions, or comments expanding on others' ideas come to mind.

None of these can obviously be categorised as singularity "male" or "female". And there isn't much shouting going on, even metaphorically. Yet it may, from time to time, be a good idea to step back and examine common assumptions,

>>matt40+4L
For people who have been socialized to put agreeableness and pleasing people above all else, a community where it's the norm to bluntly challenge others is painfully stacked against you. It almost immediately makes you feel out of place. It can, indeed, feel like people are shouting at one another. When else would the conversation be full of nothing but clear challenge? Why is everyone an asshole?

It happens that the two styles are often categorized as female (agreeableness and pleasing others) and male (bluntly challenging). And indeed, in American society, men and women are in the broadest of terms socialized in those ways.

Personally, I wouldn't trade this norm for the world. I'm much too familiar with the Dale Carnegie crap of wrapping every point in senseless complements and false uncertainty to want to waste more energy on it than required. My own or anyone else's. I recognize that this preference leaves some people feeling uncomfortable. But that's my preference, and I am keenly aware that others may prefer differently approaches.

(EDIT: But read dang's comments instead. They're better than this.)

>>Kalium+VM
FWIW I thought your comment was excellent. Part of what makes this a difficult cluster of interlocking problems is the tradeoffs in it, one of which you've identified.

On HN the goal is to gratify intellectual curiosity, so we're looking for a sweet spot of, let's call it, playful substantiveness. Under the constraints of internet discussion, it's difficult to get there. Environments become boring when they're predictable, for example predictably negative or predictably positive. At the same time it's obvious that intellectual curiosity will fare best in a culture that is welcoming to all, since if we exclude some—whether actively or passively—we deprive ourselves of the intellectual curiosity they would otherwise bring.

I do think HN's culture falls short in this way. We can't fix that by imposing any formulas, e.g. a positivity rule, because that would make the site more predictable and thus more boring again. The fixes need to be more subtle.