You have a lot of disappointment with HNMuch realer talk: I have been here nearly 11 years. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board and it looks like I am probably on track to also be the second woman to spend time on the leader board under my new handle (this one).
I have my criticisms of what goes on here, but I spend so much time here because whatever sexism and nonsense happens here pales in comparison to the hip deep crap of most other spaces. So I'm quite fond of HN, which is a large part of why I am here so much.
Rumors of my supposedly significant disappointment with HN are somewhat exaggerated for various reasons.
Though I stand by my position that it should be easier to turn my writing into income than it has proven to be and I stand by that not solely for my benefit but because of broader implications throughout the world that this issue has which people complain loudly about on a regular basis here and seem to fail to connect the dots between those issues and their choices. The fact that I choose to use myself as an example of this phenomenon should not be misconstrued as me being hugely personally butthurt with no larger point.
I use myself as an example because then I'm not doxxing other people or making them a target or whatever. I can decide just how much heat I care to take for today and walk away when I have had enough.
I do that as a "best practice" that I have worked out over the years. That's it. It's the least worst option in situations where unpleasantness is unavoidable.
I have zero plans to sell health fad crap. That absolutely will not happen and it's one of the reasons most of my sites have no ads: because the kinds of things I talk about tend to attract ads for things I would never, ever recommend, like colloidal silver which is straight up literal poison. I may at some point in the future move to zero ads. I'm aware that most of HN uses adblockers and I understand and respect the reasons they do that.
But if you want good content and you don't want ads, somehow that has to be paid for. And the current climate adds up to "Writers are just supposed to work for free." I think that's a fundamentally broken mental model. It's not sustainable. It's in line with ideas like "If you aren't the customer, you are the product." People decry content marketing, then don't want to support indie authors.
If you want everything free and don't want to pay your authors, they will work for someone who will pay them. And that means content marketing. If that's not the internet you want, then you need to stop insisting that writing simply doesn't pay and start kicking a few bucks towards indie authors whose content you would like to see more of.