I'm pretty controversial. I've been banned from a number of forums, including Metafilter where it was mod policy at the time that I joined to actively encourage the membership to gang up on and bully certain members. I was homeless when I was gifted a membership to Metafilter, which was an extremely classist environment, and I was one of the people the moderating staff actively encouraged members to gang up on. No amount of good behavior on my part was ever enough because it was a social climate where the goal was to justify mistreatment of me and where mod policy was that the onus was entirely on me to improve the situation while other people were not asked to stop being ugly to me or stop picking on me and where it was dangerous for someone to have any compassion for me and come to my defense and point out how I was being ganged up on because they now became a target.

A common practice on Metafilter when I joined was for the mods to tell such a person to shut up and leave the discussion because they were "being disruptive" and then let everyone else keep taking pot shots at the person who would get in trouble if they came back to defend themselves after the mods had told them to leave. This often happened solely because the person had a minority view or was a demographic outlier and was otherwise doing nothing wrong, imo.

In contrast, I posted as openly homeless on HN for nearly 6 years and my views on homelessness have become respected on HN. I was never targeted by either the moderating staff or membership of HN the way I was on Metafilter, even though there is noticeable overlap of membership between the two sites.

Given the overlap in membership, I'm pretty confident the difference between the two sites is about moderating policy.

I'm also a woman and HN is overwhelmingly male. I originally joined over 11 years ago under a different handle and posting here as openly female can be somewhat tough and used to be tougher and de facto makes me a representative of a minority view here.

I have a really long history of commenting on gender issues on HN and that still sometimes turns into something of a hubbub, but has gotten to be less thorny than it used to be.

When I first joined, members of HN sometimes posted surveys asking about things like "What's your age and gender?" Those surveys at that time showed that members were 95 to 98 percent male.

HN is not very transparent about certain things and lacks avatars and has a completely free form profile section which many members put little or nothing in, so demographic data here is somewhat hard to come by. It's not even necessarily apparent what the gender of a person is.

At a time when I had maybe 1500 karma and the bottom of the leader board was around 10k or 12k, I was getting comments from members that suggested they perceived me as being "prominent" for a woman on HN. I was probably homeless at the time or possibly still working an entry level job at an insurance company. I was also getting a shocking amount of social pushback that suggested to me my participation was being disruptive of social norms here and I was rocking the boat in terms of gender norms on the site.

So I spent some time privately gathering my own data on HN membership wrt female participation here.

I no longer have some of that data and I've always been not very forthcoming with the details because it feels uncomfortably close to "doxxing" people to me and I'm aware of the potential for it to be hurtful to other people and for it to come back to bite me. But I did keep my own data at one time and I still keep an eye on certain things somewhat casually and female participation here is less problematic than it used to be.

I'm probably the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board of HN, so I'm sort of a unique minority here and for that reason I make some effort to some degree to quietly let people know that I sincerely believe that HN is a place where you can get past your minority status if you will make an effort to read the guidelines and follow the guidelines, even when it feels like you are being ganged up on and have a minority view.

It's a big forum with about 5 million unique visitors a month, so sometimes you will get a bunch of replies that don't agree with you and this will tend to be more true for minority views. But unlike other forums I've been on where the moderating staff were clearly and obviously part of the problem, it is okay to stand your ground here on your minority view and not crumble to social pressure lest they ban you.

It's not easy because you do need to keep following the guidelines and that's emotionally and psychologically hard to do when you are representing a minority view and most other people are telling you that you are wrong and some of those people aren't following the guidelines and are engaging in personal attacks and the like.

I'm okay with you chalking this up to "personal opinion and she can't prove it." I'm never going to be able to provide the level of data sets your comment suggests you are looking for, but I'm quite confident my statements are accurate and I make them to try to assure people here who are feeling picked on that it is possible to present a minority view on HN and stand by it, but you need to have a thick skin and be prepared to back your position with data, citations and solid arguments. The membership here will take you to task and demand you support your ideas with something substantive, but if you can meet that standard, the social climate here is not actually the usual BS where you get banned for making people uncomfortably aware that they are merely prejudiced assholes. People here will consider your minority view if you can adequately support it.