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

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482 points ilamont | 1 comments | 11 Jul 20 21:53 UTC | HN request time: 0.235s | source
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sgustard ◴[12 Jul 20 04:01 UTC] No.23808698[source]▶
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.
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ilikeerp ◴[12 Jul 20 04:53 UTC] No.23808934[source]▶
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.
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1. JohnBooty ◴[12 Jul 20 09:18 UTC] No.23810065[source]▶
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.