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I've been on HN for 11 years now, and each year its been more negative. At some point the best way to get upvotes turned into "say something pedantic that contr
by NathanKP 7y ago
I've been on HN for 11 years now, and each year its been more negative. At some point the best way to get upvotes turned into "say something pedantic that contradicts the parent post or criticizes it."
This is a big part of the reason why I dialed my contributions way back, and I've heard the same from many other great people in the IRL tech community that I respect. Unfortunately each time a positive person stops contributing on HN it just leads to the site becoming more negative. It is a vicious cycle.
- conanbatt 7y agoThere is also a very strong anti-capitalist trend. Anti-funding, anti-money, anti-profits. This is bonkers for a startup-community.
- dang 7y agoThat's because it's not just a startup community. It's an amalgam of many subcommunities, including (in no particular order) startup founders/employees, bootstrappers and freelancers, open-source hackers, academics, internet culture / forum mavens, activists, and many more. I think it's probably true that the anti-startup voices have grown, but that's also reflective of larger social trends.
- SturgeonsLaw 7y agoThe namesake original hacker culture tended to have a solid anti-establishment streak and valued accumulation of knowledge over material goods, and I think that's still highly represented among the community here
- conanbatt 7y agoIts a forum literally made by an "incubator" that gets VC investors for startups. People that come to HN to spout anti-capitalist, anti-investment, anti-profits are in the wrong community.
- bawolff 7y agoI haven't been around here that long, but i feel like hn may have started that way but at this point is more the modern version of /. [But not quite as "bad"]. Where we start is not where we end up.
- Kaze404 7y agoDisagree. HN being what it is makes it especially important that people with challenging ideas speak up. If you're looking for an echo chamber there are better communities.
- rubicon33 7y agoIs this reflective of HN, or the times?
- avip 7y agoJust deviation towards the mean.
- paulmd 7y agoTitle whining, while not the worst way that manifests, is kind of emblematic of the problem. Nothing I love more than loading up a comment thread and seeing... the only replies are 5 people whining about the title. The moderators here humor and even encourage it, despite it nominally being a rule not to editorialize titles they'll humor the people and edit it up 2 or 3 times. It's the shallowest of content that contributes nothing to the larger discussion. I'm not sure if it's a weird way to farm karma or if people just tend to be a little bit on the spectrum, but some people just can't resist arguing about it.
- dang 7y ago> The moderators here humor and even encourage it Heavens no. We react the way we do to minimize off-topic title complaints. Otherwise they take over and make things even worse. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20title%20fever&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- toyg 7y ago> while not the worst way that manifests I find the worst type post is "the website is broken / that css could use some work / when I see this site on Chrobar XX Turbo the scrollbar disappears".
- nitrogen 7y agoThose posts can be useful for site owners, but there's no reason they should be at the top of HN's comments
- OJFord 7y ago> The moderators here humor and even encourage it, despite it nominally being a rule not to editorialize titles they'll humor the people and edit it up 2 or 3 times. For what it's worth, a few times recently (as well as on other occasions) I've submitted a title as-is very reluctantly, and knowing it will certainly be changed if the submission gets any traction. I think the one that got the most traction was 'The NHS is looking for up to 250k volunteers' [0], original title: > ‘Your NHS Needs You’ – NHS call for volunteer army Of course that was going to get changed, and I mostly support that change, with only slight hesitation since the aspect I found most interesting (and provoked me to submit it) was the language; the article went on to talk about 'rallying the troops'. My point is, yes it's in the guidelines not to editorialise titles, but it also says not to include numbers like '{6 }things you never knew about X' or superfluous adjectives like 'Show HN: {My amazing }whitespace to rust transpiler'. It also qualifies not editorialising with 'unless misleading or linkbait', which I suppose I could arguably have used as a reason to change [0], and perhaps that's the basis on which they're all edited. I and probably others generally submit the original thinking if it's popular as-is then there may be some discussion and collective (or moderated) decision on the title; who am I the submitter to make that call. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22677209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22677209
- glitcher 7y agoI also notice HN voting tends to punish very brief positive comments. Sometimes it's nice to see some positive encouragement, even if the comment doesn't go into any deeper analysis or constructive criticism.
- onion2k 7y agoI don't downvote comments like "I agree!" and "This is good." but I often feel like I should. They're mostly noise. If you want to express gratitude get in touch with the article author. It'll have much more impact.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dang 7y agoEmpty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling. https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
- OJFord 7y agoDo you mean things like 'Nice!', 'lol', 'Amazing', 'nice I'm going to try this out this weekend', etc? It's because they're devoid of any actual content and uninteresting to every other reader. I agree they might feel nice to the OP in the case of 'Show HNs', but in those cases there's probably another way to reach out (and the higher effort will make it more meaningful). (I could've sworn there was a point in the guidelines on this even using similar language - 'devoid', 'content' - but there doesn't seem to be now. Perhaps I've just read someone commenting something similar a few times!)
- Multicomp 7y agoWould you prefer if there were 'reaction' features on a post to aggregate these sorts of comments? Something like: I've bookmarked this for later review, good post (this partially exists as the upvote) I like posts like this (an overload of the upvote) I want to read what other users think of this, but don't necessarily have a comment of my own. HN, please comment (an overload of the upvote as well) I think this post is off-topic (this one exists - its called the downvote for users with ~520+ points) I think this post violates the guidelines (this one also exists - called flag)
- sankalpb 7y agothanks for bringing this up. I'm interested by the way you characterize this 'vicious cycle', and wonder whether you see 'dialing back' to be as much of 'contribution' to the dynamic you're articulating since you are also suggesting that people doing so, 'stop contributing'. I'm also wondering whether you would be willing to share more about the how it was that the shared experiences you heard offline (i.e. IRL tech community that you respect) shaped your decisions as a member as to whether to or to not engage as much with HN, as an online community?
- NathanKP 7y agoInteresting questions. I had already slowed down my browsing and commenting on HN after about 5 years of using HN when I noticed that using the site was making me more negative. I noticed that I was getting into a pattern of making negative comments on HN because it was getting me more upvotes so I decided on my own to stop using HN as much. I spent a couple years not really participating on HN or anywhere else, just lurking periodically. Later I started using Twitter actively (mostly for work purposes). Many of the people in my community on Twitter are heavily critical of HN. Look up "the orange site" on Twitter for examples of a common way that people disparagingly refer to HN on Twitter: https://twitter.com/search?q=%22the%20orange%20site%22&src=typed_query https://twitter.com/search?q=%22the%20orange%20site%22&src=t... I wouldn't say that Twitter influenced my opinion of HN though, it just confirmed to me that there were other people who were also feeling uncomfortable with some of the personality types and commenting patterns on HN. Of course Twitter has its own serious problems with negativity as well haha.
- hkiely 7y agoIt’s so much easer to just join a tech company than spend 2-4 years of your life working and wind up with nothing but failure and anecdotes. Back in 08 more people were condemned to that reality. Those people contributed heavily to the “hacker community”. Many people are just naysayers or contrarians, that isn’t a bad thing either. I would have to say, I’m not sure it is the most supportive community for an individuals mental health. Is this class somehow part of the media lab?
- fian 7y agoInteresting observation, some thoughts on how this might have come about below. Due to its roots, Hacker News started out with a community heavily biased towards people with entrepreneurial tendencies who are often optimistic by nature. Over time more tech people were told about Hacker News and started participating. These people in turn brought in other people from other academic fields (e.g. law, medicine, engineering, physical sciences etc). Many of the newcomers, especially those who had training beyond their graduate degree, are likely to have been immersed in an academic culture where ideas are put up to be critiqued. At a high level the goal being for ideas to be tested in a collaborative fashion and any weaknesses addressed so they can be improved. Everyone working together to move their field forward through the refinement of shared knowledge and understanding. Having spent some time doing post-graduate research in science then transferring to working as a self taught software developer in industry - this difference in culture is something I've become aware of multiple times. In my experience executives and business development/sales oriented people often struggle dealing with technical colleagues who point out problems in their ideas/plans. They perceive the challenges as negativity or pessimism instead of an attempt to refine the idea/plan to something workable or less risky. On the critics side, they have been sufficiently interested in the idea/plan to give it serious consideration so it can be disheartening to be ignored or rebuked for offering a critical response with the aim of refining the approach. I've also noticed this difference in approach even when working with other software developers who went into industry straight out of university. From my perspective many of them don't routinely apply critical thinking in their work. They rarely question why the system is designed a certain way and simply try to jam whatever feature they are implementing into the current design even if it is a bad fit. This usually means adding many changes in lots of places throughout the code base, because it is quicker to do by the deadline (pace over perfection). Compared to stepping back a reviewing the business model at a higher level which would take longer to change but make the code easier to maintain in the long term. You noted pedantic comments get upvotes. People who are deep in the details of a field have to be particular about word and language use to avoid misunderstandings and make communication with other people in the field more efficient (this often leads to heavy use of jargon). Marketing and sale oriented people like to be looser with word use to portray something with the best possible interpretation (ie "organic" products). As a simple example, in a previous job I refactored an old code base doing Monte Carlo, Markov Chain simulations from doing each iteration sequentially in a single thread, to being able to run in parallel in multiple threads. For many workloads this meant a significant (many hours) reduction in simulation time. For other workloads the added overhead of collating all the results back into a single data set meant a slight increase in run time (a few minutes). The marketing people wanted to claim an X times speed up when promoting the new version (best possible interpretation for increased appeal to customers). I wasn't comfortable with that as I knew some existing users wouldn't have that experience (being pedantic). I would see the marketing teams version as being way too loose with language (bordering on being untrue at times). They in turn saw my revisions as not sexy enough or too wordy. It took effort from both sides to get to something we were all comfortable with. Having said all the above, I agree that sometimes HN can be unnecessarily negative of people's fun projects/weekend hacks. I sometimes like to play with sub-optimal solutions to problems because I have a sudden inspiration to try something and don't want to spend hours researching perfect approaches. These projects usually don't have any commercial or academic purpose, it's just an itch being scratched and an opportunity to do some greenfields coding with no restrictions (not something I get much opportunity for in my current job). I have seen other people's projects torn to shreds when they happen to make it onto HN and it always makes me a bit sad. Is the critique and pedantry good or bad? I'd say it depends on the situation. Sometimes very good information or ideas will come from the critiques and the pedantry can help eliminate ambiguity from a conversation and lead to some new and interesting places (one of the main reasons I come to HN is the high quality of these conversations). Sometimes it can devolve into academic point scoring for no apparent purpose. Maybe something for people offering critical feedback (including myself) to consider would be to lead or end their contribution with a positive note. This would at least signal their intention is to collaborate on getting to something better. I'm sure what I've said above will be picked apart. I have generalised a lot to keep the response shorter. I do not believe all startup founders are optimists or technical people are all pedants etc. My point is more that the HN audience is composed of a wider mixture of people from different fields than when it started. This undoubtedly will affect the nature of the conversations. I hope this response doesn't come across as negative :) It has been interesting to me to think about and speculate as to why it has occurred.
- JohnL4 7y agoI wonder if there are good subscription-based communities out there. Having to pay a small fee seems like a good filter for people who aren't a little more "serious". (Definition of "serious" left as an exercise for the reader.)