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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

...tools on Facebook and Instagram were being misused by adults seeking to profit from exploiting their own children...The content, often featuring young girls in bikinis and leotards, was sold to an audience that was overwhelmingly male and often overt about sexual interest in the children in comments...

So basically we exploit children for sex in a world that is so uptight that sex work by adults is still controversial and not legal in many places. We have a world of adults so uptight about their own sexuality that victimizing the most defenseless among us is preferable to dealing with adults meeting their needs with other adults and sorting out questions of how to do that in a world where we no longer automatically know some small group well from which to bond with someone and marry them and etc and are still sorting out how to find a mate for life in this big wide world.

Corporations and parents and assorted others are all doing this. This doesn't mean Meta is off the hook for this but this is occurring in a larger context where we routinely just don't want to know kids are abused it seems.

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> we routinely just don't want to know kids are abused it seems

Did you conclude that from the fact that there is a Wall Street Journal describing said corrupt practice?

This is a scandal. I hope people will go to prison (parents and costumers alike if what is described is true.) I hope Facebook develops better tools to prevent this from happening. If not I want people from Facebook to also go to prison.

Is this how “we routinely just don’t want to know” look like in your book?

Yes, in my book, this should not have happened. If people were honest about how common child exploitation is and really cared about it, it shouldn't have gotten to "and now there is an article about a scandal on the front page of HN about how far this went before anyone cared."

> this should not have happened

We agree on that.

> If people were honest about how common child exploitation is

I don’t know what “being honest” means. Do you think that there are masses who know about such exploitation and remain silent? If so please bring it to the attention of authorities.

> it shouldn't have gotten to

It shouldn’t. Someone responsible at facebook should have said “damn, this is very bad. We are shutting this down now, and reporting everyone to the authorities”

> how far this went before anyone cared

Caring presuposes that one knows about something. The fact that it is a scandal once it become known means that people care.

I think odds are good that someone in the room was a child molester and didn't want people to ask the hard questions.

And until it is okay for adults to have substantive discussions about such things without it being part of an attempt to get laid, people with dirty secrets who want tools to enable their crimes will have more say in "let's just gloss over this detail" than people who want something else.

> until it is okay for adults to have substantive discussions about such things

We are adults, we are having a substantive discussion about the topic.

> without it being part of an attempt to get laid

I don’t understand this part. I don’t know how this conversation would get anyone laid: “hey we just found out that bad actors are misusing our system, how do you think we should prevent this? Should we ban all monetised children accounts or only the ones the moderator team flags?”

> odds are good that someone in the room was a child molester

I think odds are good someone wanted a promotion by “moving fast and breaking things” and they haven’t entirely realised what are the consequences of not implementing more sophisticated safeguards.

I've been on HN for closing in on fifteen years. I have been open from the start about having been molested and raped as a child and also about being a divorced single mom who needs an income.

Most men who talk to me more than a little are hoping to get involved with me romantically. Trying to use HN to network professionally and establish an adequate income has been a spectacular failure.

While homeless, I was the "most prominent" openly female member of HN and trying to establish an earned income via freelance writing and resume work and couldn't do it. Meanwhile, merely being obviously homeless and not excessively ugly got me offers of cash for sex.

The entire world works this way. I have had people here tell me there is something very wrong with a woman talking about topics like sexual assault on an overwhelmingly male forum. I have had that said by someone who essentially positioned themselves as a trans activist which makes me wonder if you are a mtf trans individual, just who are you allowed to talk to about such topics? Only other mtf trans individuals?

Why is my gender something of importance here?

I have been dismissed for years as not having a valid point that as the apparently highest ranked woman in terms of karma on HN I still cannot manage to use this platform the way plenty of men do so: To earn an adequate living.

I shall sit back and wait for the comments insisting that is off-topic and irrelevant to role in. Or other means to try to stomp the point into the ground.

> I still cannot manage to use this platform the way plenty of men do so: To earn an adequate living.

Uh, what on earth gives you the impression that people are using this niche forum to earn an adequate living? Maybe people use it to find jobs in the sector if they have relevant skills but to make a living from the platform itself...?

I mean, how would you even go about doing that?

...what on earth gives you the impression...

I have been here nearly fifteen years. I know for a fact that participation here helps line the pockets of some of the men here.

I will let others decide if the entire community will, as usual, let someone assert that I am imagining things they know is fact or will for once back me up.

I'm not arguing with you, I just don't understand _how_ this is occurring.

Self-promotion of products? I can see that. You aren't promoting any products. Did you try that in the past?

Self-promotion of written content or a blog? Yeah a lot of the links here are from URLs I've never seen before, are people actually making money or just blowing their own horn?

I'm asking you by what mechanism people make money here, as in, actual money, not beer money. Because I can see people making 5 cents a word back through adwords, but beyond that...

>I have been here nearly fifteen years. I know for a fact that participation here helps line the pockets of some of the men here.

Well... Yes. The way it works is the people who established reap ideas from the technically minded, but not necessarily business minded. Once the idea bubbles up sufficiently to be recognized as a viable business opportunity for someone, it is either acted on by onramping the originator to a source of funding/offers of partnership, or just run off with. Back when interest rates were zero, a Unicorn was well worth the risk if it decided to turn into a Pegasus.

That it functions as a cadre of technically/business literate individuals is a bonus in a sense. But I tend to limit myself to trying to be a voice for sanity here; as I've found that sometimes the tendency of YC to encourage people to disregard ethical constraints sometimes requires a bucket of cold water to remedy or at least give the Feds a datapoint in the inevitable investigation that someone was told somewhere that X is not a good idea.

Plus, it's a great way to keep a finger on what the people I vote "Most likely to facilitate the creation of an unconstrained technical helltopia" are up to.

If you're looking for people with a shred of unconditional decency (if such a person exists), mayhaps look elsewhere.

> I know for a fact that participation here helps line the pockets of some of the men here.

This is so vague as to be unusable.

Firstly, I (sadly) have absolutely no doubt as to much of what you said. Offers of cash for sex, flirtations, white knighting.

> trying to establish an earned income via freelance writing and resume work and couldn't do it

HN isn't - as you know - really about soliciting work for yourself, outside a few sanctioned threads a month. There may be random people here and there who might make an ad hoc mention of it with a "reach out to me" message. But if done too much, they get sanctioned and censured. Regardless of gender.

I would not be surprised if you had said you could not earn income from HN as a freelance writer if your name was John Smith. I fail to surmise that it has anything to do with your gender.

But back to your comment, participation here lining the pockets of some of the men:

The biggest way I see for anyone to earn income here is networking. But this place is also very specifically not LinkedIn. There is an acceptance, even encouragement of it as far as it doesn't interfere with the general discourse on posted submissions.

Beyond that, job posts and similar? I can tell you that I have responded to dozens (realistically a couple of hundred) hiring and other posts in my time here. I have reached out to people with ideas, offered assistance and input. And of that, nothing has come. Not one thing.

I'm not saying your experience is wrong: I'm just not seeing evidence to support your conclusion that your gender is what is limiting things here.

I'm just not seeing evidence to support your conclusion that your gender is what is limiting things here.

Okay, give me a list of openly female members who are "doing it right" and managing to successfully use Hacker News as a networking tool the way I know for a fact some of the longtime male members have done. Show me an example I can follow.

Of course my gender is not the only factor. You can chalk some portion of it up to other factors and me failing doesn't prove it can't be done by any women.

But I'm not personally seeing other women doing it. But men certainly are.

My argument isn't that my gender is the only issue here. My argument is that as far as I can tell, I fit in here better than other women based on objective metrics like my karma count and I can't manage to break the HN "glass ceiling." So if I can't, who can?

Point me to some examples.

A quick search tells me 10.4 percent of CEOs are women and 22 percent of C-suite executives are women. As far as I can tell, in nearly fifteen years of participation, I am the only openly female member that I know of who has spent time on the leader board and I've done it twice under two different handles.

So if the goal is "first fit in" I appear to do that better than most women. And I am unable to turn it into a means to make an adequate income.

Ergo I think it is reasonable to conclude that my gender is, in fact, a factor.

I will grant you it's "unprovable." How convenient for people who don't want change and want an easy out for dismissing critiques that might lead to constructive progress.

Honestly, the only member that readily comes to mind for using HN effectively to network is patio11/Patrick Mckenzie. (And pg way, way back in the day.)

Show us the examples of male members who are doing it right, so we know what you think "doing it right" looks like.

I hired one person after meeting them through an interaction here on HN comments. She's since left to work at Google.

Women aren't represented strongly here because they aren't represented as strongly by the numbers in tech.

It's pretty obviously selection bias.

Why that is, who might be responsible, we probably should all be talking about all of that more often.

But often you're coming across as bashing the reader/commenters, over the head with your repeated anecdotes of what you've classified as failures to "network-up" the types of professional success or connections, or relationships you're seeking¹, instead of talking about how to make progress on the thing you actually want to change: women aren't anywhere near as prominently, or noticeably, on HN - or in tech! Though thankfully this is slowly changing.

Have you written anywhere about what hasn't worked over these 15 years, so that others in a similar spot may have an easier time getting what they want from this community?

I have enjoyed many of your comments over the years, have engaged with you on a variety of topics under a variety of handles - but I've gotten tired of this topic never having solutions or any related positive forces behind it.

¹ Have you defined this anywhere?

You don't have to be "in tech" to do well here. There have been lawyers and school teachers and doctors on the leader board.

I've done tons of blogging over the years trying to find some kind of constructive approach. It gets no traction.

I've mostly moved on from that. Men don't spend all their time examining their belly button in public about their social issues with work. They talk about their work.

I don't know if you want to hear this, but your bio comes off as prickly/activist and I personally wouldn't hire you because I get the impression you'd just use my company or platform as a horse to ride into battle for whatever activist cause is at the front of your mind on any given occasion.

Probably could have worded that better but, y'know

You are looking for employment and networking in a tech bro forum while carrying a 'NGO' persona and tech bros are pretty much the antithesis of NGO people. Culture clash doesn't even begin to cover it.

What's your best-case scenario these days?

Top of the leaderboard?

Recognizable blogging name?

Building yourself a niche of tech, tech adjacent work, tech leadership/marketing work?

It's not overly up to me to demonstrate evidence of the opposite to disagree with your assertion. I wouldn't know where to begin. I also don't even look at HN the same way as you (the leaderboard? I wouldn't even know about its existence if you hadn't mentioned it).

Indeed, I commiserate with some of the misogynistic or sexist behavior you describe - the sexualizing of things, and such. And I also agree that women are drastically under-represented in tech, especially the higher you get up the corporate ladder. But I'm berated by you with reference to assuming I don't want change and being dismissive of critique. Disagreeing with one aspect of an assertion doesn't not give you sufficient evidence of my motivation.

> I am the only openly female member that I know of who has spent time on the leader board and I've done it twice under two different handles.

> So if the goal is "first fit in" I appear to do that better than most women.

And if you've been on the HN leaderboard, twice, you've also done far better than vast majority of the men, too, then. Despite (or in spite) of the "boy's club" keeping you down?

> And I am unable to turn it into a means to make an adequate income.

I think the proportion of people on HN that have made it into an "adequate income source" is vanishingly small. Their visibility may make it more noticeable, but I couldn't tell you the names of more than a couple of people here who have made ANY money from HN.

There's also a problematic assertion that you are somehow ... entitled ... to make money from HN. This is separate to any gender issues, too - as I said, people who tend to think of HN as a place where having a motivation for community interaction be "what can YOU do to help put food on MY table" is quickly shut down, because it quickly becomes obnoxious, no different to the recruiters sidling up to me on LinkedIn.

I didn't assume any motive on your part, actually. But people routinely take "general observation" very personally on the internet and this is a common source of conflict that is enormously hard to resolve.

I'm not too keen to continue this discussion. I didn't start by making it about me but let me make a single comment mentioning these issues and there is a huge pile of mostly openly hostile replies and if I engage, no matter how carefully and good faith, I am assumed to be the problem.

I'm not really responsible for other people here having very big feels about some comment or other of mine. If you -- the general "you," not FireBeyond in specific -- feel very strongly about my observations, maybe wonder why that is and leave me alone about it.

I'm a man who wasted twenty years programming with nothing to show for it. I moved on, to a working class job.

You're riding false hope and trying to get blood from a stone. HN doesn't pay for commenters, it pays start ups.

You should move on. Fifteen years is enough.

I gave up a long time ago on ever making money via HN. I rarely post my own work here. I no longer have my resume service linked in my profile.

Trying to get HN to hire me isn't the point of my remarks here.

Do note that multiple other people felt some need to shoot me down here and insist my gender isn't an issue and etc. I don't talk about me to try to get anything out of it for me.

I talk about me because talking about other people can get you sued for libel and not giving an example at all generally means it's too vague to make any real difference in anyone's mind. Talking about me is the least worst solution I have found even though it routinely gets me attacked and dismissed.

I talk about me and my track record on HN because I am on HN and you can verify my claims by checking my comment history under this handle and my previous one. You can see that I spent years trying to make money "honestly" while dirt poor and being offered money for sex while homeless and turning it down because I am celibate for medical reasons.

I talk about me because I have been here long enough some people know what I am saying is true, having read my comments for years. Maybe it will get those people to actually think and do things differently.

It seemingly worked once before on a different subject. While homeless and on a tablet, I used to complain somewhat frequently "I can't access that/that doesn't work for me. I'm on a tablet." And now design is mobile first.

Is that all my doing? Of course not. But I suspect programmers who never spoke to me, never admitted they knew I existed nonetheless kept my complaints in mind and it likely got us there faster.

At some point I quit bitching all the time "I'm homeless. I'm on a cheap tablet. I can't do that." Things just began working and stopped being a problem.

All good. I have nothing to add to that. Real life people who know you, would have more to say.

I hope it works out.

The odds are 100%. When I joined Facebook, one of the potential openings after boot camp (Facebook hires "At Large" and does team assignments after training), one of the openings was with their safety and security team. A very senior manager within the production engineering organization dissuaded me from taking that job. I got really bad vibes off of him. A few years later, I wandered through Folsom Street fair, and ran into an acquaintance there. I did not recognize the senior manager at first, partially because he was falling over drunk. Quite frankly, I don't remember his name. What I do remember is that his drunken ramblings were almost a satire of what you expect a soulless remorseless pedophile to say.

To be clear, I do not believe the people working in that division were in on it. I think that they were very few people working in that team, and that their efforts were constantly sabotaged. It was very clearly willful ignorance of many of the people around him.

To put it kind of bluntly, it is because of a couple of years of looking actually at what the sex positive community turns a blind eye to that I am no longer in any way "sex positive".

We need another summer of love but one which is wiser. Something to defuse the incels which have invaded political life. I’m tired of our congress doing nothing because people don’t know how to fuck. Seems unrelated on the surface, but it’s not. So much of people’s acting out is based in sexual repression and lack of satisfaction sexually. Am I projecting? Sure as hell, but I’m not alone! (Hi asexuals, I am only talking about the sexually interested people, not erasing you <3)

Arguing that pedophiles would not be problematic if there was legalisation of sec work is an absurd notion.

I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing that the world is hella uptight and it drives both things, not that one would fix the other.

But I do think if adults felt they could just pay for sex to meet their needs like you pay for a hamburger at Burger King because you are hungry and that didn't have to be illegal or surreptitious, you would have a world where these conversations were easier to have and people would be more likely to hash them out in earnest.

These failings most likely start with everyone in the room not wanting to really have that conversation. Because sex is such an uncomfortable topic of discussion generally that a tough topic like child exploitation becomes effectively "unspeakable" for many people.

It has turned the spectre of abuse into a boogeyman, ripe for political misuse.

It becomes not just passable, but preferable to allow any legislator who cites it as their intent to have what they want rather than potentially open discussion on such a "sensitive topic". What would the newspapers print?

And without a third party to properly mock them, they can stay forever locked in their intensely serious and twisted dance of feeding the beast and shoveling its shit.

yeah, sex-related issues are about as easy to discuss as religion, and often tightly coupled / dictated by religion.

Now, politics and climate change seem to have also become religious topics - you cant discuss them without calling into question ones core identity, it seems.

Not sure how to get around this .. maybe the Street Epistemology approach, of essentially asking someone why they believe what they believe - examining ones beliefs without judgement.

It seems very infrequent that people change their beliefs based on facts - yet its a core tenet of science.

they didn’t argue that, they argued that if you’re not able to even talk about a problem you tend to smother it or not give it nuance which can lead to folks trying to kill any consensual sexual stuff, which not only consumes huge resources, but also leads to the situation where everyone is aware of how to skirt the rules meaning it is no longer esoteric knowledge.

Same reasoning is often applied to weed… it’s not a gateway drug, it’s not not that bad of a drug, but the way it’s treated leads you to being criminalized for trying it so you don’t seek support, and you suddenly have contact with a dealer that can get more things and will push you to try it all.

No, fucking little kids is not in the same ballpark as smoking weed.

I think you’re proving the point. They never remotely suggested it was, the context is discussions about sex work not child sexual abuse.

People like you can’t even read a very coherent analogy about sex work without getting emotional.

Excuse you sir, even the least charitable interpretation of what I said (which was an allegory) was not in any way inferring what you imply.

If anything, the allegory would be: consensual sexual images between adults is equivalent to smoking weed.

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