Comment by appplication
5 hours ago
I know she seems to be popular enough on HN, and I’ll admit I don’t know her in any capacity other than what posts I occasionally see here, which are innocent enough.
That said, her bluesky or mastodon profile leads with “I have DMs muted from people I don’t follow”, which just rubs me in such a wrong way. The vibe is “don’t be confused: communication is for me to give and you to receive, and NOT the other way around”.
I’m sure she has her reasons (presumably weird/angry onliners), but this - and in particular its digital real estate indicating it’s one of two facts you need to know about her - feels like the digital equivalent to checking out at the grocery store with headphones on: “I don’t know you and I don’t want to know you.”
Just makes me feel sad seeing things like that, and I don’t know that I resonate with being happy to share a planet with people with such world views. They certainly don’t seem happy to share it with me.
This is something that a lot of celebrities have to do (I have actually known a number, over the years).
One thing about living a life, where you share a lot of personal information, is that people tend to create close relationships that are entirely one-way.
In many ways, this benefits the celebrity, because they get rich/famous from it, but it can also lead to some fairly serious consequences. I was just reading yesterday, about some young lady that had to get a really toothy restraining order against a nutter that keeps trying to break into her house.
Many of these folks are really "people people," and the need to restrict access truly bothers them, but it's basically a requirement for their life.
She's not DMing you, is she?
On the other hand we can't even have DMs on Hacker News because the feature is considered hostile and disruptive and many people don't even bother to put contact information in their profile. Her rules for discussion seem no more limiting than HN's own guidelines, which are extremely tone policed.
I can't hold it against her - it isn't the 1990s anymore, the entire web has become an aggressively toxic space and one has to curate everything nowadays.