I'm a woman. HN is overwhelmingly male and was distinctly unwelcoming of women when I first joined more than a decade ago under a different handle.

There are many people that have readily used HN as a means to establish or grow an online income. That was a goal of mine well before I ever heard of HN, but it's been a huge uphill battle to get taken seriously here and get treated like someone knowledgeable who needs and deserves an income.

I was homeless for nearly six years of the more than ten that I have been here and was getting dismissively told "get a real job" repeatedly in response to my efforts to try to develop an online income from the street. Men didn't really want to talk to me except to inquire if I might be willing to have coffee with them sometime, aka they were looking for a hookup while literally not caring that I was so poor I often went hungry.

There is a long history in my life of people thanking me for what I know and what I contribute to various online communities I have participated in and gushing at me and wanting to reach out to me for some feel good emotional connection. I was a full-time wife and mom for a lot of years. The world interprets me as very caring, has big feels about how caring I am towards them and then insists this isn't worth money, doesn't merit an income and is valuable to them apparently precisely because it is authentic and comes from the heart and isn't done for money.

It's amazingly sick stuff where they expect to benefit for free, they are very touched that I care about them and their response is not only that they don't care about me and my welfare, they are actively and openly hostile to my need to establish an income. Almost no one goes "What she brings to the table adds value, she deserves an income for adding value, so I should do one or more of the following in response to sincerely appreciating what she adds here: support her Patreon, leave a tip, hire her to do some writing, recommend her work to other people, promote her writing, etc so she can stop being dirt poor."

This is not unique to HN, but it's especially galling because it's perfectly normal behavior on HN to be participating here for purposes of developing an online earned income. It's also especially galling because I appear to be the highest ranked woman here. Between my old handle and this one, I have more than 50k karma which would put me respectably high on the leader board if it were all under one handle and I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board.

There are self-made millionaires on the leader board whose income comes at least in part from being active participants on HN. For men, HN is an opportunity to promote their work and network.

For me, it's been an opportunity to be sexually harassed by people content to watch me starve. Any time I talk about being the highest ranked woman here, I get attacked and dismissed as being obsessed with meaningless internet points. Meanwhile, it used to be pretty common for men on HN to tell each other "You have a lot of karma on HN. That's evidence you are uncommonly competent." and similar.

That seems to be less common these days, perhaps because I've pointed out at times that there is a double standard. Rather than admit that maybe it means I'm smart and deserving of respect, it seems they've stopped saying that to each other.

That's the really ugly version of more than a decade of participation. It's not all downside and hopefully answering your question will not lead to the usual pile on of ugly, dismissive personal attacks for commenting on it.

If I got nothing out of participating here, I wouldn't be here. But I certainly don't get what the guys get and I certainly haven't gotten the career enhancement I was looking for, which is clearly and obviously available if you are male.

(No, I don't want to hear for the umpteenth time that I'm just doing it wrong and sexism is not the problem. If I'm doing it wrong, why am I the highest ranked woman here? Where are all the women doing it right if it's just me and not sexist bullshit?)

Networking has mostly been a fail. Historically, men either didn't want to email me at all or they only emailed me to hit on me, while not giving a rat's ass about my dire and intractable financial problems.

After more than a decade, people are finally willing to email me for reasons other than to say "So, sugar, when can we have coffee?" but that puts me a decade behind on career development and I remain dirt poor at this point.