I don't doubt at all that you get people feigning professional interest that turn things that way, and I do think that your gender and the fact that there are sexist, and more particularly sexually exploitive, men here plays a significant role in that.
You absolutely should not have to deal with this, and you have every reason to be upset about it. I suspect—and I want to be clear that I say this by way of explaining a pattern I've observed with this kind of targeted behavior eslewhere and how it tends to be targeted, but not at all to imply any blame on you—that the fact that you tend to be very open about circumstances of intense and urgent financial need and your hopes for professional connections on HN to alleviate that contributes to people who are inclined to they type of exploitation seeing you as a likely target.
I want to emphasize again that this is a problem with the people acting this way toward you, not with your writing.
> But it's aggravating to be constantly told that this is an unrealistic expectation of mine when other people clearly pull it off and then also get told that my gender isn't the problem. If it's not, what is?
While I think your expectations as to the general level of success at that here is too high, if I were to take as given the assumption that you are underperforming in that regard based on what would be expexted your leaderboard position and other indicia of prominence in the discussion community, and had to come up with an explanation, my first suspicion would be the fact that your professional focus seems to primarily be neither/technical nor financial nor in a hot application domain for technology, combined with the fact that you don't have a lot of money. Much of the networking at HN seems to center, as one might expect given it's connection to a tech heavy startup accelerator, to connecting people with certain professional focuses with each other and with people with money. (I don't think the attitude you've projected in the community about the issue since you got the impression that your failure to acheive what you expected was due to gender and personal animus helps, either, and there may be a bit of a vicious cycle there.)
But you could really be getting significantly disadvantaged in networking in HN because of your gender. I don't see evidence that would lead me to conclude that, true, but I think I've made the mistake of being insufficiently clear in my reaction against what has seemed to be your repeated implicit argument that your leaderboard position alone combined with your lack of success in that regard was sufficient evidence of exclusion on the basis of gender and that I've given the impression that I am dismissing the possibility that you've been disadvantaged in networking here based on gender. To the extent thst that is the case, it is my error, and I apologize.
