PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN

I started an internet forum in 2006 whose audience was almost entirely female. It grew to a reasonable size, not huge, but what was remarkable was a nearly complete lack of trolls, arguments, and bad behavior. We saw that women just engage differently online, with a premium on expressing positive sentiments and encouraging each other to contribute constructively. Of course I don't want to generalize, but the removal of young men at their testosterone peak age from anonymous forums is remarkable.

I think that women can also be very toxic when given the right incentives.

I saw certain MLM groups where women (and exclusively women, since these MLMs didn't cater to men) would say pretty nasty and offensive things to push their agenda and using the same idea of positivity, encouragement and "female empowerment" and any naysayer will get shut down supposedly because they are being negative or not supportive (completely overlooking the fact that they're hawking a scam).

I am not sure whether women need an external trigger for this (such as the MLM in this example) whether as men tend to do it by themselves, or if you simply got lucky and happened to be surrounded by good people, especially in that early era when computers, internet access (for non-work purposes) and social networking was still relatively niche and acted as a filter compared to nowadays where every idiot has access to all those things.

I've been part of new mother forums when my wife was pregnant - the bitchiness and the flexing on each other was massive. Either you were tone deaf to it or some other factor prevented that on your site.

I think it's simply because 2006 was a different (and better) time when it comes to social networking on the internet.

Computers were still more niche, more complex and required more effort to use which acted as a built-in filter; if you invest all this effort into getting onto the forum to participate there's a higher chance that you legitimately want to contribute constructively.

Nowadays, every idiot out there has access to an internet browser and already has a social media account (and can use it to log into most other websites which implement social login for the sake of growth) and start spewing bullshit.

I have noticed a similar trend when it comes to online PC gaming. I used to play a shooter game (Crysis) back in ~2008 and the atmosphere on servers was always great; the chat was respectful, there were actual discussions happening in-game and I haven't seen any disrespect, rage or anger. Nowadays I play Battlefield and the chat is mostly empty, only interrupted by insults and the occasional server info message. Console gaming introduces voice chat and seems dominated by kids swearing their lungs out. I guess back in the day the cost of a machine capable to run these games acted as a filter, where as nowadays everyone has access to them, even those that shouldn't.

Mmm yeah I dunno about that, based on experience. I'm not looking to enumerate all of my experiences, but I feel pretty comfortable saying that women can do just as much bad behavior as men. I would wonder if it's really due to the size being kept small, whatever vetting mechanism was used to admit users, or moderator tactics.

I have seen that small forums, especially for a specific purpose, tend to be mostly civil and positive. It is pretty easy for a handful of bad actors, maybe even just one, to be disruptive enough to pretty much singlehandedly destroy such forums. It seems almost inevitable once a forum grows to a certain size, but swift and effective moderator action can often nip it in the bud. Experience or good instincts may help a lot in identifying users who are just inherently destructive and booting them out entirely before they have a chance to really get going.

>Of course I don't want to generalize, but

But you did, and it makes me sad to see the testosterone blaming stuff here.

To be honest, I do remember online communities being much nicer back then (we're talking 14 years ago here) but things have changed a lot. I feel like strong moderation and guidelines work great (see HN where discussions are mostly civilized) instead of blaming half of the world population from an individual observation which can quickly be debunked by visiting any female-only forum or subreddit in 2020 for example.

I think sometimes people luck out with the right audience. Online gamers have been obnoxious since well before 2008.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 (warning: language)

I think you're ignoring a vastly more applicable factor: 2006.

Yeah, hard to believe without URL, sources or anything. Also, was that just a feeling you had or had you done some kind of measurement?

Source: You know, I have been to Mars back in 2005.

Worth considering the first iPhone wasn't released until 2007. I think you had a very unique sample of the population: women who used internet forums pre-smartphone ubiquity.

MLMs are the corporate equivalent of social networking - but worse. And they appeal to a certain kind of person.

But it's a much more general problem. So much of what humans do is about creating Happy Brain and avoiding Unhappy Brain.

We're held hostage by our chemical pathways, usually in ways we're not even aware of.

We'd likely be more effective and have better survival potential if we could break out of the hedonic loop and not fall straight into the obvious traps.

Perhaps the exorbitant price of a PC that could run Crysis well enough to even think about multiplayer acted as a filtering mechanism?

I like that the link you posted is for unreal 2004. I used to play that with my mates in 2004 when I was 16 years old.

The server with the least lag and most players was always a French server, when it was the end of my night I'd start yelling "France is shit" into the mic until I got banned. I'd go to bed then play on the same server the next day because my DHCP IP address lease would renew overnight on my 2MB broadband ISP.

I don't know why I used to do that - we all thought it was hilarious though. We were actually quite a good onslaught and CTF team too.

I've not played computer games since.

Thanks for the nostalgia.

I thought the same thing but after witness several times how extremely cruel women gossip can be to a third person (usually another woman) I realized that they just are the same.

I'd argue that the time period plays a more important role there than the gender, considering the kind of mobs I've seen on Tumblr and communities for TV shows (Steven Universe/Adventure Time/Gravity Falls comes to mind).

This echoes my experience. My site (of which the forum was the most active part) was most active circa 2003-2012 FWIW.

Our male:female ratio was 2:1.

(Which was honestly really high for those days, particularly the early 2000's)

Our ratio of problems with male users to female users was probably more like 20:1.

Overall it was a positive community. There were memorable exceptions involving problems with female members, both online and offline, but they were notable partly for being such anomalies.

Additionally, many female members expressed to me that the "sparring" nature of the forums tended to be a real turnoff. They preferred to use the other features of the site.

There's something to this. Online PC gaming communities can be really problematic, but online console gamers tend to be even worse. I think it's the younger age and lower bar to entry.

I frequented a tech forum for 10+ years, almost entirely male. Same thing, never any bad behavior or trolling.

Let's not draw premature conclusions from insufficient data.

Online new-mother forums are an extremely special and extremely toxic outlier.

We know how heated normal online discourse can become over the most trivial things. Right?

Now, raise those stakes by orders of magnitude. Now, if you're wrong, it doesn't just mean you have a bad opinion about Rust or mechanical keyboards or Star Wars or whatever. No, being wrong means you are literally a bad parent, or will perhaps be perceived as one.

Oh, and on top of that? Everybody on those forums is stretched beyond their physical limits due to chronic sleep deprivation.

And they probably just chugged a bunch of coffee.

And there's a crying baby in the background.

Yeah.

I wouldn't draw conclusions about anything else in the world based on new-mother forums.

Are you saying hormones don’t affect behaviors?

The CS 1.6 community could be pretty toxic circa 2007. At least in France.

I'm not sure that's what they were saying; at least, the second part qualified that first sentence.

It feels like you're changing what they said into something that is obviously false. It isn't so black and white as "do you believe hormones don't affect feelings", so asking that dumbs down the conversation and detracts from the point that testosterone may not be the only thing affecting online conversations.

I guess it's similar to replying to you with the question: "do you believe testosterone is the sole cause for unkind behaviour online?" That just isn't what you meant.

I think there is a genuine difference in how men and women interact, online and off - different tolerances for confrontation might be part of it.

More confrontations can lead to trolling or unnecessary flame wars, but also avoid the kind of misunderstandings that lead to festering resentment. I think bad behaviour is a human universal, but how it manifests might be quite different from community to community.

There's some research about a large decrease in empathy among students since the net(or the smartphone, I don't remember exactly ) happened.

Maybe that's a factor.

The Internet was not yet in our pockets.

You wanted to be online? Park yourself at a desk. Maybe have a laptop and wifi.

But your pants weren't tingling every three minutes.

The immediacy, ubiquity, and temorseless presence of mobile internet shifts psychology (and participation) markedly.

Toxic does not even begin to describe it. The rampant bullying and misogyny, the stupid machismo... It completely turned me away from pvp and competitive play.

The internet was plenty toxic in 2006.

I was part of, and eventually managed an internet forum around the same time.

Male and female were about equal, and no specific issues were more related to either gender.

Just one additional data point.

—-

In my experience, men will generally be overtly hostile/assholes.

Women will be nice to your face and then try to destroy your reputation behind your back.

It’s actually impressive that some groups can all gossip together about the one person that isn’t there, and somehow all expect that they are the exception to that rule (e.g. nobody hates them behind their back). I honestly do not understand how those relationships are supposed to work (but they do, or all of them are just deeply unhappy about the whole thing but don’t know how to leave).

> It’s actually impressive that some groups can all gossip together about the one person that isn’t there, and somehow all expect that they are the exception to that rule (e.g. nobody hates them behind their back). I honestly do not understand how those relationships are supposed to work (but they do, or all of them are just deeply unhappy about the whole thing but don’t know how to leave).

I felt the same way until I read ‘Sapiens’ (yes yes, I know it’s something of a meme book around here), where in a certain section it is pointed out that gossiping is one of the most efficient ways to disseminate information in social groups without creating direct conflict.

To be honest, I still largely feel the same way. I too don’t understand how people can be so incongruent as to talk shit behind people their back, but somehow operate on the mode that this doesn’t happen to them (they wouldn’t like it if people talked shit about them, so why do it). But, I’ve largely come to accept it, and even mildly participate. Apparently it is an important social construct, so by joining in you don’t seem like you are disapproving of the behavior and judging people for it.

One nice thing about male platonic relationships is that ribbing on each other with harsh jokes is commonplace, which allows to perform the same function as gossip but now in plain sight, including the person it is about. And because it is packaged as a joke it is both less hurtful and still allows the plausible deniability for either party to evade direct conflict.

I think this is also why women gossip more and do it in a much more toxic manner: they don’t have the same social culture of ribbing on each other, necessitating more and harsher gossip.

the internet was plenty toxic in the 90ies also, but you had a much thicker skin then and you simply blocked the kid in your personal settings.

it became problematic when you had to discuss to block/censor the offender centrally. before you never did that, central services refused to engage in such pleads and wars.

Good point on the nastiness in the name of positivity. See the askwomen sub on reddit. On some threads EVERY comment is deleted and the topic is closed because people supposedly weren’t being positive/inclusive/whatever enough. Really, every single person?! The moderation is off the rails and it creates an atmosphere of paranoia.

I am a member of a forum similar to the one described by the parent poster and I would under no circumstances link it here specifically and explicitly because of the behavior regularly and explicitly exhibited on HN, including and especially in your post.

"Citations needed" posts about anecdotal experience make good people leave because it turns a discussion into adversarial disproof.

Your post kills the kinds of communities that are better when fostered.

Also most of cancel culture fits in the nastiness in the name of positivity category.

Please don't be a jerk in comments here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23806806.

(Trying to prune the larger sub-subthreads.)