> Twitter and Zendesk and more have volunteering cultures and do their best to support the community. Nobody cares, ...

...because their "volunteering culture" comes off as too little too late.

It was insane for Twitter to open their HQ in the middle of SF's skid row.

Let me point out one aspect that seems lost on a lot of downtown techies: They see you. The bums and druggies and wastoids see the kids with wealth and success and not-fucked-up-ness of life and they resent it and them. Right or wrong, it's human nature. So yeah, Twitter was never about solving Civic Center's outdoor Bedlam, so they're never going to get credit for saving the world when they are squatting in hell clearly not saving shit. Eh?

> Being a good neighbor in SF (or any other city in the inner Bay) is next to impossible.

Ask Rainbow Grocery. https://rainbow.coop/ No one blames them for anything.

> Anything that happens becomes your fault no matter how unrelated you are, even if it's fully self-inflicted. Like the tower, MUNIserable buses, or the housing shortage. Or SF General's billing practices, blamed on Zuckerberg after he gave... I don't even remember how many millions.

It's not impossible, but what you're talking about isn't "being a good neighbor" you're just complaining that people are blaming tech for their problems (whether it's true or not.)

(And don't get me started on Zuckerberg's gross purchased virtue signalling. He paid for a hospital, put his name on it so everyone would know, and now I can't talk shit about him and the problems his massive wealth and bewheemoth company are causing, because it makes me look like an ingrate!? Bullshit. Bull. Shit.)

> I've struggled to care about being kind to, and contributing to, a community that seems to not want me. There is, as far as I can tell, nothing I can do to gain welcome.

Have you asked, "What can do to gain welcome?"

Before ~2001 or so SF was one of the most welcoming places in the whole of this planet of Earth.

> The best I can hope for is a grudging sufferance, so long as I hate myself enough for being the wrong kind of different.

Okay if that's what you're getting from SFians you are hanging out with the WRONG SFians. This is a city of love, not self-hate. (Insert off-color joke about Castro, gay culture, learning to overcome hate and self-hate to love yourself and others freely, etc. just as a reminder that this city has been so many things to so many people in it's brief and drama-filled life.)

> And why should I care about a community that refuses to grant me membership? Whose life will be improved by my misery?

Again, no one worth respecting wants you to be miserable or to hate yourself.

I don't know you or what you've personally experienced here, so I can't speak to that (I can't even figure out why most people don't like me.) If you came here since ~2001 you're already too late, the culture of welcoming was already thrashed by then. ("Dot-Com Boom", yeah?)

A lot of the community has been pushed out, and most of us who remain are wary of the new wave of techie folks, or yes, outright hostile.

> I've struggled to care about being kind to, and contributing to, a community that seems to not want me. There is, as far as I can tell, nothing I can do to gain welcome.

So go somewhere else? I don't mean that in a mean or disrespectful way. I'm a proponent of the idea that just moving somewhere else can be an excellent way to solve problems. It's not a panacea, of course, but it often does the trick.

Maybe you're not weird enough to hang with the old skool SF crowd. It's not a reflection on you. SF has long been the city of crazies. This whole tech-Mecca thing is hella recent. Less than a generation.

The old joke: "All the crazy people in America move to California, and all the crazy people in California move to SF. (And if you're too crazy for SF you move to Berkeley.)"

- - - -

Benioff gets a pass because he supported Proposition C.

https://abc7news.com/marc-benioff-salesforce-prop-c-homeless...