HN makes you money only if you use HN to make money. At the end of the day, Hacker News is a public forum. Some people use it to launch their startup, or get hired. Some people use it to find news. Some people do not read the articles and instead read the comments.
It's up to you to use HN as you see fit as long as you are within the site guidelines. I think your confusion is stemming from the fact that HN Karma and the amount of dollars you make from HN are correlated. They are not.
No, I have no such confusion.
I mention my karma as shorthand for "I appear to have done the best job for figuring out how to participate as a woman here and can't turn it into adequate income though it's an explicit goal of mine."
I'm well aware you have to seek to use it that way and karma score does not directly correlate with success in using it that way. I've sought to use it that way. It has not gotten satisfactory results. I have good reason to believe my gender is a factor in that failure to achieve what I would like to achieve.
This is solely your depiction and doesn't make it a truth (and I don't think it's anywhere close to being true). I also think if you keep thinking that, you are unlikely to achieve satisfactory results (and subsequently shift the blame to your gender instead of your strategy).
Some issues:
1. If men will only take me seriously if they think I'm a man, what happens if they arrange to meet me in person and find out I'm a woman?
2. How do I arrange to accept payment online for work while continuing to hide my gender? My name is not gender neutral.
3. Business is done on a basis of trust. How do I convince people to trust me when they find out I have been actively deceiving them wrt my identity and gender?
There are other complications specific to me as an individual, but women generally will face the above issues if they try to take advice to simply hide their gender as a supposed "solution" to such problems.
I've heard that kind of thing a lot -- "On the internet, no one knows you're a dog if you don't tell them" -- and it ignores a lot of critical details. You can potentially be anonymous online for purposes of engaging in discussion in a forum but if you wish to actually make money, it gets vastly more challenging to be anonymous and hide your gender.
But it's no longer a barrier to YOUR success, and you just might, if it's what you want, have the comfort and audience in your success to spread this message more effectively.
But if you feel gas-lit, and like you're yelling into the wind, finish your breath and change tactic.
I did run into some sexism, but not enough to make me want to make my own account.
Genuinely: Do you want to do business with the sexists etc, anyway?
In seriousness, focusing on outliers sounds like a recipe for disaster. I hope you achieve your interpretation of success.
Honestly, my only idea is that you go to a strongtowns meeting (virtual or physical) and try to meet people there, they are far more involved in urban planning than any random HN user.
The people making money using HN are ones seeking it. Usually at the expense of other goals. At least in terms of directness of achieving those goals.
My suggestion would be to shift focus a bit and try to find money areas of public planning where money is being spent badly or where it can’t be spent currently.
What is a problem for public planners they’re willing to spend to solve and how can you use that to advance your own goals in public planning?
Although I'm not sure if HN is fertile ground for establishing an income. It would be less than 1% of users, I imagine.
The top answer to the question 43 days ago of Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN? is:
I did a Show HN for the idea of a SaaS for GitLab and I’m now the CEO of a $6b company.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26366538
There are people here who are not interested in using HN to make money. But there are many men who do, in fact, make tons of money because of their relationship to HN. This is extremely well documented to the point that it just makes me nuts that people try to tell me that doesn't go on.
They do monthly hiring threads. They advertise jobs here for YC companies. They do a Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer? thread every month. I've seen comments by individuals that talked about having no problem making money via HN from people who had been here about the same amount of time as me and had lots less karma.
Men can come here, connect to other businessmen and make money if that's what they are looking for. I appear to be the only openly female member to have ever spent time on the leaderboard and I remain dirt poor with terrible prospects for the time being and this has been true for a lot of years.
Please do not do this. Address the issue of sex work. Don't add comments politely dismissing the idea that men make money via HN or something. Men make money via HN. It's common knowledge that men make money via HN, sometimes scads and scads of it. Meanwhile, the highest ranked woman here still has to put up with this kind of crap where people act like I'm imagining things and this isn't a real problem.
It makes me feel like the entire forum is intentionally gaslighting me because, wow, can 5 million people actually all be that completely oblivious to how much men use HN to line their pockets? I have enormous trouble believing that.
Edit: I will add that even if it is "only 1 percent", with 5 million monthly visitors, that would be 50,000 people.
2nd edit: There was also this question two days ago that got overwhelming support for a young man who is having trouble getting hired and it stuck in my craw because there has not been overwhelming support by HN of people trying to help me solve my problem:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26825017
Instead, I continue to get amazingly shitty replies implicitly suggesting "It's not a real problem. She's exaggerating and the problem is her imagining that participating on HN has any real power to positively impact your income. Ha ha ha."