I don't think this is unique to HN. Western news in general tends to cover negative stories more often than positive ones. Quite a few studies have been done tr

I don't think this is unique to HN. Western news in general tends to cover negative stories more often than positive ones. Quite a few studies have been done trying to explain the effect; there's no bulletproof theory yet, but one theory is that people are more likely to read negative articles than positive articles and journalists are just catering to demand. http://hij.sagepub.com/content/19/3/360?etoc http://hij.sagepub.com/content/19/3/360?etoc