funny story: I got the wife of a friend to install tinder, a couple of years back when I was dating. I was having a hard time getting matches, so I figured I'd see how the other side lives. She created an empty profile, with a blurry hippopotamus as a profile picture, and a single letter as name. Just "H". For hippopotamus. No bio. Within five minutes she was matching with every other guy she swiped right on. Which wasn't all of them, mind you. Within another five minutes, half of the guys she had matched with had messaged her. Regular looking guys. A lot of them had same opening line. "Did you know hippos are the most dangerous animal in the world?" After that, I got why I wasn't getting any replies >.<

I think some of us have a fair idea. And I think both sexes have problems that we could solve but continue to ignore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Man_(book)

Still a very valid experiment. I know the source of both sex' strife though: competition. I don't think we'll ever solve that, not while we're still monkeys.

That old trope is pretty tired ("you can't possibly understand or talk about anything that you have not personally exactly experienced for yourself").

Of course men don't know exactly what it's like to be a woman, just like one person does not know exactly what it is like to be any other person. You can still have an understanding and talk meaningfully about things, in many cases.

The internet is not "dangerous for a woman", like you might say it is for a child. It can be much less dangerous because there is a very low risk of unwanted physical contact. I have never in my life "made an account" with identifiable names that are public on the internet. I don't post my sex, address, age, photos, bank account details, or mother's maiden name on internet forums either. So I have had exactly the same experience as a woman who had done the same thing in anonymous forums. I might even be a woman.

An identifiable woman will obviously attract unsolicited disgusting and horrible comments and content of course, not just sexual but threats of violence too probably more than men do. This is not some high mystery or something so complicated that we're befuddled trying to understand it. Offline is a completely different story, but online? I can see messages people I know get.

Online is about the safest a woman (or man) can be, and still talk and interact and collaborate and share with people. And I have been "stalked" (in an online anonymous account way), sent horrible graphic sexual and violent threatening things, for having differences of opinion. It's not nice, but it's not "dangerous" for me. I got ambushed and beat up walking in public one day -- offline -- that was dangerous.

Over the whole population, I bet the difference between sexes is very small when it comes to what % posts online comment. You're saying "most social platforms" - what's the biggest one in the world? Probably still Facebook. Yet I'm fairly sure it has a higher female than male DAU, at least in the West.

r/kpop has 3 million subscribers. Take a look at the most followed accounts on Instagram. How many of them have female-dominated comment sections?

> I am saying this as a guy we really don't understand the world women live in online or offline.

You're saying this as a guy who doesn't understand the world the general population lives in, outside your highly-educated male-dominated tech bubble. You're considering only the spaces you have been visiting for most of your life.

The idea that everyone has only one identity, one whole, is harmful.

People change over time. People change even a little based on who's around them. Even memories change as people see things in new lights.

The Internet of the late 90s and early 2000s was spectacular in that everyone could be as authentic and deep as they wanted to be, and as shallow and invisible as they wanted to be depending on context.

Firefox? Want to know how to really sell yourself. Be 'For the User', like TRON (but avoid that for copyright reasons and because normal people don't understand). The user should be able to TRUST that Firefox isn't selling them out, spying on them, or doing anything strange. That when Firefox creates identity sandboxes they're firewalled from each other to the maximum extent; including resisting device fingerprinting (just look generic and boring).

Completely agree. Look at some videos on YouTube. 20,000 comments on brand new videos sometimes. A lot of good people are commenting on the internet. The problem is that the trust in public institutions is at an all time low, and that is leading to much more doom and gloom and those of us who are from the 2000s can feel the difference in the comment sections.

Don't ask don't tell.

exactly!

I know. In fact, millions of us know your reddit username

> people trolled just as hard as anyone does now,

Trolling had (has) a different character in smaller, more private forums: it tends towards more effort. A low-effort troll just gets banned and loses their platform, so the troll needs to at least ride the line of legitimacy. Drawing the line back to Usenet, the sheer effort that went into some trolling garnered respect if not necessarily acceptance.

Drive-by interactions reward volume since the 'game' isn't repeated. Curated social media feeds like Twitter are even worse; the troll has their own audience predisposed towards acceptance and the victim is just set-dressing.

I analogize this to in-person interactions: ostracization is mutually costly. A small group loses a member who was at least making a 'warm body' contribution, but the ostracized person loses a whole set of social benefits.

I noticed a few people on HN have started complaining that anyone arguing with them is a bot. I think it's a coping mechanism at finding people who challenge them, but maybe they've been on too many bot-infested forums lately, or are just young (that might overlap with both users of bot-infested forums and those who haven't had their ideas challenged much).

> And yet, here you are, posting ...

Correction, I am posting while pooping. I don't care much about social media these days and I draw the line at the toilet door.

The forum where Skynet becomes self-conscious :)