I am a man so obviously I've not had the same experiences as you with regards to feeling excluded earlier on but I'm kind of mixed in my overall feelings. I've been here pretty much the same length of time as you and I agree with you that some stuff has definitely improved. Any topic dealing with women or minorities of any sort use to be truly dreadful places to view the comments in. Now they are just kind of dreadful but the bad is hugely outweighed by great comments.

But the general feel seems a lot meaner these days. There are less specific attacks against race/gender/sexuality/etc but more general attacks against anyone and everyone and I think it has a compounding effect. I know I am certainly less kind on here than I use to be. It's that drive towards the negative that made me all but stop posting on Reddit since I didn't like the person I was when commenting there. It's having the same effect here. Every Show HN/talk/release seems to be more than 50% negative these days.

I'd love to see someone run a sentiment analysis on the comments here though to see if it's just that I'm seeing more negativity or if it really exists.

I mean we all remember drews first dropbox post and the whole "Why not just use rsync! this is stupid" type comments so maybe I just have rose coloured glasses.