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I’m not surprised. I’m not a major OSS contributor of any sort, but I am a lead of a closed source product within my company, and if I got the kind of pointless

I’m not surprised. I’m not a major OSS contributor of any sort, but I am a lead of a closed source product within my company, and if I got the kind of pointless destructive criticism that usually makes it to the top of HN comments on something my team and I worked hard to create it would be beyond frustrating. The only thing that would make it tolerable was the fact that at least I got paid to do this. I can’t even imagine how terrible it must feel as an OSS contributor or leader who is putting all their effort out there in the open for anyone to see and use and they are deluged by the most awful petty criticisms. I really think HN comments probably need some sort of “feedback” tab, where the people who are providing what they think is constructive feedback can put their comments in, so the OSS software developers/contributors can choose to tackle the feedback when they are in the mindset to do so.

capableweb 3y ago
As someone who has launched countless of products, services, demos and more on HN (for almost two decades now) and other places, you can't really let those overly negative comments get to you. And it happens everywhere, not just on HN, even though people here tend to try to hit your soft spots, for some reason. But at least I've found that the overly negative comments on HN has at least a tiny bit of feedback one could learn from, compared to other platforms where it's just outright vile comments with zero feedback one could use. So yeah, HN can be ruthless, but so is the rest of the internet. At least here there is a tiny bit of feedback mixed in, and usually the rest of the comments have something insightful to say.