For me, yes. My addiction on Twitter was centered around real-time news/events. HN doesn’t have that focus, so for me, it’s a lot easier to moderate time on HN. I love HN, and probably do spend too much time here, but at least I’m not pulling to refresh sorted by latest tweets for hours on end every time there’s a plane crash (literal or figurative).
I much rather prefer discussion on HN for the simple fact that it's anonymized. That makes it much easier for users to up/down vote comments and it just works better. It shows you what people really think. It also makes everything more equal because it doesn't matter who you are or how many followers you have.
Beware. One thing that happens to people in a homogeneous community is that the out-group shaming becomes invisible. So everyone in every little community thinks that their community is respectful, but the other communities are about hating.
Hacker News aggressively moderates to remove the most abrasive types of shaming, but you can still shame out-groups here, provided you do it civilly. See any thread about managing developers: At least one person will go on a rant about how managers are empty suits who do nothing useful and just get in the way while extracting rents in the form of cushy compensation packages.
That kind of generalization is also out-group shaming, it just doesn't look like a bunch of misogynists complaining that there are too many women in tech demanding equity.
(I'm in no way saying that just because Twitter has shaming, and so does HN, that the two are equivalent. They aren't even close to equivalent, because these things are not binary. But I am trying to point out how toxicity can be hard to judge from within a community.)
My wife is a developer in the same company as mine (albeit in a totally different sub-orga). This is maybe the cause I don't share your experience (at all).
She's the best paid person in her sub-orga. We're definitely lucky, but also the woman-vs-man topic isn't relevant at all here. We (as a company) are just looking at skill in all aspects, and she's good in most of them, as am I in a different subset.
She also has a twin-sister. She works in a different company, different federal state, and she earns a bit more than my wife - and she also doesn't care at all about the shenanigans happening, she's just doing what she likes and is good at. If you don't believe me I'll create an email alias you can mail me at and we'll get into touch.
Yes both of them have been humiliated, and this is what we should work against. But they have proven theirselves, and they have had support from co-workers, and instead of always putting blame on whatever, we should put focus on supporting good people, regardless of gender. This is so much lost.
