Ask HN: How it Works: what do the Dave Winer threads tell us about sexism in IT?

One of the things they could do to make HN work better is to add a waiting period for new accounts.

Like buying a gun. You can't use the account for five days.

Maybe we can still have anonymity in the cases where whistle-blowers need to say something and be protected.

But hit and run comments like this one are what's poisoning this place.

He has been writing publicly for a long long time and it makes people think that we know him. Well I don't and you probably don't either. Give the guy the benefit of the doubt and stop psychoanalyzing everything that he writes.

The problems you perceive with HN are not perceived as problems by many of its users. Since the solutions you suggest have been considered and rejected in the past, one may assume that the operators of the site have a similar opinion. As a user, your response to that reality can take a number of forms. You can simply stop paying attention to HN, and probably cut down on the stress in your life. You can escalate your posting of this sort of opinion, which will probably have a different result.

I suggest that you pause to reconsider your opinions. The "one-off flame" you cite reads like something else to me. It is simply a request for everybody to stop encouraging the submission of uninteresting material to HN. As evidence to back up the request, the poster offers the proposition that your behavior and communications have annoyed many people for many years. I'm sure there are people on Earth who would disagree with that proposition, but they don't post much on HN. I don't mean that to be a judgment of you or of your life, and I doubt that redmarx meant it as such either. HN still isn't a place you'll find much sugar-coating. redmarx's post is just the truth, stripped of all the bullshit that accompanies it in less Aspergian environments, with a bit of vulgarity thrown in for color.

There is probably a response to all of that which wittily acknowledges the inherent criticism while subtly undercutting it. Suffice it to say that you haven't found that response yet.

If you prefer fora in which anonymity is discouraged, please try Facebook or Google Plus.

Thanks for your work on RSS!

People crave sense in the world around them, especially when it comes to the bad things that happen to them. When no sense is forthcoming, they will make their own sense of it, and the natural impulse is to assume that one was singled out for some reason, good or bad.

Does this help people behave better? Usually not. We aren't in one another's heads, which makes trying to reconstruct another person's thought processes a process only slightly more reliable than a shot in the dark. The usual outcome is a poor match between the victim's hypothesis and the perpetrator's actual thoughts, and when that happens, it's all too easily dismissed. End result: nothing changes.