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

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.

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.

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.