You're right that there is a correlation. However, it's important to note that the community is not selecting for identifiable users by not upvoting pseudonymous users. The individuals with the highest karma are typically ones who have earned distinction in their field and are advertising themselves as such. This somewhat identifies them as authorities on certain subjects and their expertise is respected. The system is neither incentivising identified users, not punishing anonymous users. It's just rewarding certain identified ones.

I think it goes the other way. People who write good content often like to use their real name because it builds their personal brand, and don't want to harm it with shitposts. Fewer people put the effort in anonymously for no benefit. The voting audience isn't craving names.

The reason I'm aware that the top fifteen-ish names can generally be readily identified in most cases is because I post as openly female and I've gotten a lot of flak for that over years. One of the more common lousy things that has been said to me is "So don't tell people your gender. On the internet, no one knows you're a dog if you don't tell them."

So I wrote a ranty personal blog post about that at some point and went through the top names on the leader board. My point was: How do I hide my identity to hide my gender and also establish a professional reputation? This doesn't work. If you know my name, you can readily infer my gender.

I posted for years under a two letter handle that can be mistaken for a feminist handle though it wasn't intended to be any such thing and I had it six weeks before it occurred to me anyone might see it that way. It was supposed to be initials from some handle I had elsewhere and I typoed it.

I had blog posts on a personal blog explaining my handle and that it wasn't a feminist handle. After I finally hit the leader board, I became extremely uncomfortable with continuing to use that handle.

I felt there were too many eyes on me and if I needed to explain it, it wasn't a good handle under which to have that kind of visibility. So I changed to my actual first and middle name.

The first week or two, I got accused of trying to pull a fast one and trick people and ridiculous stuff like that. After that settled down, HN treated me dramatically better than it ever had under my previous handle.

Obviously, there are many confounding factors and you can't definitively prove that it's any one thing. But I think if you are establishing a relationship with a community, there is no clear distinction between "I choose to behave X way because of how I expect that to impact me." and "Other people behave X way towards me." Those things create a feedback loop and you can't completely tease out how much people find them credible because they know their name and reputation, so they upvote it and how much people make an effort to say good things.

I don't think I behave differently since changing my handle, but I certainly have a much more positive experience of the forum since changing it. So that influences my feeling that other people do care about such things.

If someone cares about your gender on HN or gives you a hard time over it or your choice to use it they're probably not worth communicating with anyway. I get your point about people maybe feeling a bit better about someone if they openly put up their real identity or link their pseudonym to a real public ID like a blog , twitter, or other account. I think that's probably just human nature but I don't think gender would come into that except maybe sexist persons who you are superior to anyway because of their choice to be an irrational person.

That's a little like telling someone of color to just ignore systemic racism.

I've been here more than ten years. I literally spent years doing all the stuff people say to do here to network, get taken seriously, etc.

It wasn't working because I got treated differently by essentially everyone due to my gender.

I was literally homeless for nearly six years and frequently going hungry while being blown off and told sexism wasn't a real problem.

You no doubt mean well. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Given that I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board, it doesn't appear to be me mishandling things. All the evidence suggests that I'm the most successful openly female member here in terms of getting accepted by the community, etc. And it has seriously sucked in a "The rampant sexism is going to help kill me" kind of way and this has been true for a great many years.

It's only in recent months that I'm beginning to get anything resembling what I wanted all along out if it. I'm quite clear this is largely due to my gender.

It's not really anything I care to discuss further. It gets me a great deal of flak to talk about all that. I've really gone to substantial pains under enormously difficult circumstance to minimize the focus on my gender and the BS I had to deal with because of it while being accused of making a big deal out of nothing, etc ad nauseum.

> It's only in recent months that I'm beginning to get anything resembling what I wanted all along out if it.

What did you want out of it?

> If you look at the leader board of HN

There's a leader board?

The footer has a link titled Lists. The leader board is the top entry on that page.