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65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform
- cryptoegorophy 10mo agoI wonder what the % is for stackoverflow
- mdoliwa 10mo agoI wonder how HN front page would look like with positive ones only.
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- PaulHoule 10mo agoI've had a project in the queue to hook up a sentiment analyzer to an RSS reader/Mastodon/AT protocol client to make negative posts and negative people disappear. My basic trouble with that sort of thing is that those things can harvest much more negativity than my nervous system can handle.
- ozempicgandalf 10mo agoWell who would have thought that negativity attracts more discussion. Unfortunately this is also where mainstream media has been going for a while..
- appreciatorBus 10mo agoNegative bias has been observed in all forms of media. What would be unusual and newsworthy would be if hacker news was an exception to this.
- ozim 10mo agoNo one wants to spend time writing "I agree", mostly they move on or give an upvote. Doesn't look like TFA counts upvotes as we don't see them.
- ghaff 10mo agoThe counterargument is that, if you think a post is idiotic, you could say so but, if you don't articulate why in detail, you'll probably be downvoted or modded. So better to just downvote if you care and move on.
- AlienRobot 10mo agoI agree. The depressing thing is how some forums like StackOverflow actually ban "thank you" comments. It makes the world a more heartless place.
- lucianbr 10mo agoSomtetimes people write "This", and that's apparently a no-no. You are told to just upvote.
- ozim 10mo agoMaybe there should be a setting for hiding such short replies or something like "shadow ban", you can write "thanks" or "This." and only person posting it will see their own "thanks". Downside is that there is still some cost to it, like writing "please" and "thank you" to LLM...
- NoMoreNicksLeft 10mo agoFrom an evolutionary standpoint, which circumstances should a thinking being prioritize to best ensure its safety and survival? Should it seek out "positive sentiment" and seek to avoid "negative sentiment" (even though this likely doesn't mean evading negative circumstances merely avoiding the sentiment until it is too late)? Negative bias is probably inevitable in cognition itself.
- goatlover 10mo agoThe tv show Pluribus delves into this a bit. An event (speaking generally to avoid spoilers) causes most people to become extremely happy and positive, and also super ethical, to the point that survival of the human race is in question, and the "most miserable" person on the planet is left to save things.
- homo_economicus 10mo ago[dead]
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- 7777777phil 10mo agoRelated threads on overwhelmingly negative comments: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40430263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40430263 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32400521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32400521
- koakuma-chan 10mo agoPeople usually complain when they are not happy but do not praise when they are. It's unsurprising most comments are negative.
- psychoslave 10mo agoI hate your tone, just as much as autoreferential irony. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to deliver this message, you've been indispensable to its creation.
- ok123456 10mo agoNegative "Sentiment" aka a black box made a frownie face. Real discourse tends to be critical. If you want sloppy trade press, read Apple Insider or Business Insider, or maybe watch a slop tech creator like Linus Tech Tips.
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- PaulHoule 10mo agoNegative posts that I post tend to do better than neutral or positive ones. I have a classifier that judges titles on "most likely to get upvoted" for which "Richard Stallman is Dead" is the optimal title, and another that judges on "likely to have a comments/vote ratio > 0.5" [1]. The first one is a crummy model in terms of ROC, the second is pretty good and favors things that are clickbaity, about the battle of the sexes, and oddly, about cars. But that 35 as an average score is hard for me to believe at first, I mean, the median HN post gets no votes, last time I looked the mean was around 8 or so. What is he sampling from? [1] comments/votes = 0.5 is close to the mean
- 7777777phil 10mo agoHi, appreciate your comment. The sampling is from all posts / comments over the past 35 days, accessed via the API (https://github.com/philippdubach/hn-archiver https://github.com/philippdubach/hn-archiver). There might be a skew to sample higher voted posts first (i.e. if there is high volume posts and comments with zero upvotes don't make it into the database) so that would explain the high ration. I will definitely look into it before publishing the paper - this is exactly the feedback I was hoping for publishing the preprint. Thanks for pointing this out! Would love to see the mentioned classifier. If you find the time please reach out to the email on the page or on bluesky.
- osakasake 10mo agoThis is factually incorrect. There’s no way that you are sampling ALL posts and comments because otherwise the average would not be 35 points. The vast majority of posts get no upvotes. In addition, comments do not show the points accumulated so there’s no way you can know how many points a comment gets, only posts.
- 7777777phil 10mo agoThanks for the pushback this is exactly the kind of peer review I was hoping for at the preprint stage. You are likely correct regarding the sampling bias. While the intent was to capture all. posts, an average score of 35 suggests that my archiver missed a significant portion of the zero-vote posts (likely due to my workers API rate limits or churn during high-volume periods). This created a survivorship bias toward popular posts in the current dataset, which I will explicitly address and correct. To clarify on the second point: I am not analyzing individual comment scores (which, as you noted, are hidden). The metric refers to post points relative to comment growth/volume. I will be updating the methodology section to reflect these limitations. The full code and dataset will be open-sourced with the final publication so the sampling can be fully audited. Appreciate the rigor.
- analog8374 10mo agoEverybody likes a horror movie.
- MeteorMarc 10mo agoIs this positive or negative news?
- shikon7 10mo agoIf I would guess, I'd say 65% positive, 35% negative
- tbrake 10mo agoHN is a beautiful lesson on the hard limits of a contrarian's usefulness.
- yomismoaqui 10mo agoAh, nothing can beat that old combo of ranting and/or correcting someone on the Internet. As an ESL person one of the first internet-related terms I learned was "flamewar". EDIT: ESL -> English as a Second Language
- j3th9n 10mo agoESL?
- BrawnyBadger53 10mo agoEnglish second language
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- andruby 10mo ago"English as a Second Language" would be my guess, but I've never seen that used as an abbreviation
- the__alchemist 10mo agoIt's what they call (called?) the school programs in USA.
- squigz 10mo agoWe have that in Canada too
- detaro 10mo agoIt's a very common abbreviation for that
- c-linkage 10mo ago
- c-linkage 10mo agoOT: Is Cloudflare breaking the internet again? This is the third link off the HN Front Page that yields the following error in Firefox: Websites prove their identity via certificates. Firefox does not trust this site because it uses a certificate that is not valid for philippdubach.com. The certificate is only valid for the following names: cloudflare-ech.com, *.cloudflare-ech.com Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN
- jjice 10mo agoI'm running Firefox 146.0.1 (aarch64) on MacOS and don't have this issue.
- 7777777phil 10mo agoI don't see any issues on my side Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): 0.5 s Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): 0.01 First Contentful Paint (FCP): 0.5 s Time to First Byte (TTFB): 0.3 s Also not on the Clodflare Dashboard. If the issue persists could you please send me the error message and console output. Thanks!
- c-linkage 10mo agoSome more testing reveals that it's uBlock Origin causing the problem. Disabling the plug-in for the site means Firefox no longer displays an error.
- hubraumhugo 10mo agodang's explanation sums it up nicely: > It's human nature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias. Everyone does it, but we perceive other people as doing it more than we do, which is itself a variation of the bias. You can even see it in the title of the OP, in the word "overwhelmingly". That's excessive: the negative bias is noticeable, but if you look closely, it's not overwhelming. (To make up some numbers, it's more like 60-40, not 90-10.) However, it often feels as if it is overwhelming; in fact, one or two datapoints, plus negativity bias, are enough to create just such a feeling. The feeling gets expressed in ways that trigger similar feelings in other people, so we end up with a positive* feedback loop. The interesting question is, what factors mitigate this? how do we dampen negativity bias? or, how do we get negative feedback into our positive feedback loop of negative affect? That must also be happening all the time, or we'd be in a "war of all against all", which isn't the case, though (again) it may feel like it. * ['positive' in the sense of increasing; a positive loop of negative affect!] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40430263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40430263
- c-linkage 10mo agoWe focus on negative outcomes because that relates directly to survival. Our brains are wired for it. Talking about negative outcomes means we learn about them and have a better chance of avoiding them. Plus, the fear response is much stronger and lasts longer than the happy / joy response. Note that for humans and other social animals "survival" doesn't always mean life or death -- it can mean being included or excluded from a social group which indirectly affects survival chances.
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- tocs3 10mo agoThis was a really cleaver post to create the most comments of the sentiment mentioned. I am really impressed how well it is working and would like to know more.
- skerit 10mo agoComplaining is easy. And even when you complain, and someone comments to give another perspective that is not necessarily seen as a rebuke. But posting something positive and getting slammed in the comments? That's depressing. So the barrier to posting something positive seems higher.
- Peroni 10mo ago>most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic. This is addressed in OPs post. The vast majority of the 'negativity' I encounter on HN is technical critique rather than criticism or toxicity. I've found HN to arguably be one of the least toxic communities.
- matthewfcarlson 10mo agoSalty but not mean is how I put it
- gjsman-1000 10mo agoIn my opinion; the technical critique is often thin, an edge case at most, or something overly pedantic; solely to make a negative claim. “The sky is blue.” “Technically speaking, no; it’s just a reflection, and at night it’s basically black, so you’re wrong even the majority of the time!” As such I still completely back that article years ago calling this place lovably toxic. It’s gotten worse since then.
- tux3 10mo agoTechnically speaking, it's not a reflection, it's Rayleigh scattering. So you're wrong, even the majority of the time! :)
- gjsman-1000 10mo agoExactly; but rarely is this done for curiosity or accuracy; but instead for veiling toxicity. This place drowns in veiled toxicity. “Grass is green” “But I live in California and we have a drought, and the entire concept of green grass is a waste of valuable water resources, and was frankly always a sign of privilege because only someone with excess freshwater can do it, and we need that freshwater for starving kids in Africa, and if Boomers hadn’t been so obsessed with single family housing and urban sprawl…”
- moralestapia 10mo agoHi philipp (in case you're reading this), Could you clarify what do you mean by "points" ("score" in your pre-print)? Also, what's your data source? "This study uses publicly available data from Hacker News." is not really a data source. Also also, you missed the largest, most important effect that skews the votes on this site. But you can definitely find it on the dataset you got, that'd be a very interesting disclosure! Hint: Immediately after posting this comment, it went to the bottom and "downvotes" magically started to come in ;).
- 7777777phil 10mo agoHi I'm trying to catch up to the comments but definitely appreciate this! I wrote a worker that uses the public API to archive all post and comments and create regular snapshots to track growth etc (https://github.com/philippdubach/hn-archiver https://github.com/philippdubach/hn-archiver). I will upload a newer version of the code and dataset when I publish the paper. And I will clarify the source as you noted. Thanks again! If you find the time please reach out to the email on my page or on bluesky (new there) very interested to discuss the "effect" you mentioned.
- moralestapia 10mo agoOkay, I'll reach out. Btw, excellent work!
- igleria 10mo agoAnger sells... but who's buying?
- joshstrange 10mo agoI've seen the same with comments (both negative sentiment and shorter length). Short, snarky, negative comments [0] normally get a much better response than well-reasoned, longer-form comments. Not that karam matters on HN but I have been disappointed to see longer comments that I put a lot of effort into get ignored while short, pithy comments get way more upvotes/replies. I've spent literally over an hour on some detailed comments that didn't even get a reply from the original person asking a question and likewise had comments I fired off with near-0 thought that "blow up". It's frustrating that better content is not always rewarded. [0] Something I'm guilty of
- ryandrake 10mo agoLonger content isn’t always better. There is something to brevity. Anyone can make a point with 2,000 words, but it takes writing and editing skill to make that same point and have the same impact with 20 words.
- joshstrange 10mo agoI agree, longer does not mean better and I'll be the first to tell you I can be long-winded but it's because often there is a lot of nuance and I want to make my point as explicit as I can and leave little room for misunderstanding. Most of my longer comments start as a single sentence that I feel is too ambiguous or leave too much room for misunderstandings and so they grow from there.
- Teever 10mo agoI’ve felt the same way with social media in general. It’s about managing your resources. In this case it’s your time. Something I’ve been experimenting with here is writing smaller comments that serve as an invitation for someone to write an equally lengthy or longer comment in reply. If the accept the implicit invitation then we can have a longer conversation. It has had moderate success.
- heliumtera 10mo ago>It's frustrating that better content is not always rewarded It could be. Maybe we just fail to create better content, despite the effort put in. Maybe your frustration comes from lack of engagement, maybe your effort was lost in the ether and no one noticed... But getting noticed could be one criteria to evaluate how good content is. You perform better while not creating the content you consider better. Or captivating an audience to appreciate the better. You see, they don't. Do you have a blog? It sounds like you would enjoy that.
- bell-cot 10mo agoI'd attribute at least some of that to HN users being weighted toward engineering-ish jobs. "Major Outage at US-East-1" news is something we are paid to pay far more attention to than "All is Well at US-East-1".
- baxtr 10mo agoThe value I get from negative comments is usually higher. My usual journey: I visit the comment section and then look for the first top comment that criticizes the core thesis of the article.
- aDyslecticCrow 10mo agoIf i find an article online, ill sometimes pass it through a HN search to see any issues with it. There are plenty of articles or news ive red that made me think "that's pretty clever" only for HN to point out background i missed and tradeoffs making a solution worse. Sometimes criticism is shallow or pedantic, but thats easy to dismiss if irrelevant.
- samlinnfer 10mo agoEveryone likes a good sneer. Makes us feel better.
- tomasphan 10mo agoWe self filter for negative responses because negative content is functionally interactive whereas positive content is functionally complete. Agreement is silent, users keep scrolling if they agree. Disagreement demands expression. Just a theory I don’t have data to back this up.
- patrickmay 10mo agoYou're right! Oh, wait....
- jackp96 10mo agoI definitely think you're onto something. Also, we're inherently psychologically biased toward negative content because all the monkeys who ignored the scary things died. We're naturally wired to engage with negative content - and that's a must-use recipe for success in an economy that increasingly relies on grabbing your attention. It's no wonder that depression and anxiety rates are higher than ever, despite our world being much, much safer than it was 100-200 years ago. Even being aware of this doesn't help all that much. Trump did a new, unbelievably dumb thing that's going to ruin people's lives? Instant click from me. Malaria rates down 20% over the past 10 years in the DRC?* I'm still scrolling. *Fake example, but you get the gist.
- kaoD 10mo agoNot only that, but a positive comment that adds nothing is frowned upon ("that's what the upvote button is for!") which negatively selects such comments. Thus comments are mostly neutral, objective facts that add upon the original comment, or negative comments of disagreement.
- standardUser 10mo agoI learn a lot more from informative posts that add something than critical posts that tear something down, largely because the critical posts are basic and repetitive while the informative ones are often novel and offer insider/professional observations.
- nitwit005 10mo agoThe site design also seems to discourage making a simple positive comment. Just click the up vote button.
- eql5 10mo ago[flagged]
- michaelbuckbee 10mo agoTo try and overcome my own personal tendency towards negative criticism on HN, I try and reframe my comments from "why this won't work" to "how can we make this work". Not a panacea, and I'd be interested to hear others ideas on how to better comment and give feedback.
- jake200 10mo agoMaybe try this heuristic: If the content is something you understand well or are passionate about, give merit to its core idea and expand upon it. If the content is something you do not understand well, ask questions that address what you believe is your fundamental gap in understanding the core idea. Not everyone writes perfectly, so be charitable and assume that other parts of the content may not be as thorough.
- 1970-01-01 10mo agoBecause wisdom stems from burnt hands, and wisdom is extremely valuable. Positivity simply has a lower value to the reader. Maybe we should create good.news.ycombinator.com and see how much less interesting it becomes?
- fidotron 10mo agoThis is not the case. Wisdom is in knowing what to do which works, which is finite. Wasting knowledge space on the infinite ways to be wrong is not nearly as helpful as it may seem.
- 1970-01-01 10mo agoI think Buffet said it best: "You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you do not do too many things wrong."
- whazor 10mo agoShould constructive feedback or contradictory viewpoints really be seen as negative sentiment? When reading the comment section of an article I would like to understand any nuances or shortcomings of something. Furthermore, there should be a difference between a contradictory viewpoint and something that is truly negative.
- AnimalMuppet 10mo agoPossibly related: In the last year or two, I find myself downvoting far more than I used to. I see far more comments that are personal attacks (at least borderline), ideological battle, arguing but with no actual substance, or just bizarre comments that don't actually make any sense. Did HN get overrun by trolls, shills, and bots? Or did I just get more cranky?
- nashashmi 10mo agoI have seen that as well. HN is now a typical talking point on many tech sites. More people are becoming aware. So we are getting grumpy reddit users and twitter users (after the purchase of X).
- lurk2 10mo agoI noticed the same thing in the last year. Tons of Reddit and 4chan colonists. Both generally lack any kind of technical background and flood to any thread remotely adjacent to politics. Old platforms always end up having problems with the users capable of making positive contributions only having so much time in the day to post, whereas the incorrigible and insane are usually unemployed or use the site compulsively at work, so they end up being overrepresented and stick around for longer. In the past I saw a lot more of these users get flagged and lose interest in the site, but recently it seems as though more users are vouching for the flagged comments and submissions.
- lazarus01 10mo agoReally cool experiment Phillip, thanks for sharing! This makes me recall a conversation from a podcast with Sam Harris where he discusses the “pornography of doubt” Here is the YouTube clip, less than a minute long https://youtube.com/shorts/ybUfy3DZK0U?si=o0t8AiLZE4XEeEYV https://youtube.com/shorts/ybUfy3DZK0U?si=o0t8AiLZE4XEeEYV
- 7777777phil 10mo agoThanks! And appreciate you sharing the Harris clip. I sometimes listen to his meditations: https://philippdubach.com/posts/gratitude https://philippdubach.com/posts/gratitude
- lazarus01 10mo agoGlad you enjoy Sam too! I use to subscribe to waking up app and really enjoyed the enlightening discussions with other intellectuals in different domains of biology, psychology and science.
- roschdal 10mo agoThis is such a boring post to be #1 on Hacker News.
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- Herring 10mo agohttps://data.worldhappiness.report/chart https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart Americans are increasingly unhappy, and they're not willing to do what it takes to be happy. Quite the opposite really. It's not just the internet.
- mid-kid 10mo agoIncluding this one.
- nashashmi 10mo agoTech has changed focus from the typical HN expert to more mainstream users. And the HN expert does not like it. So that is why we are so negative. We see products shut down and we get unhappy. We see problems and we try to solve them. Or at least talk about them.
- california-og 10mo agoBack when Reddit allowed API access, I used a reader (rif) which allowed blocking subreddits. I did an experiment where I would browse /r/all and block any subreddit that had a toxic, gruesome, nsfw, or other content playing on negative emotions (like a pseudo feel-good post based on an otherwise negative phenomena). After a few years, and hundreds of banned subreddits, my /r/all was very wholesome, but contained only animal or niche hobby related subreddits. It was quite eye-opening on how negative reddit is, and also revealed how boring it is without the kind of algorithmic reaction seeking content. In other words, if 35% of hn content is positive (or neutral?), compared to reddit and most mainstream social media, it's actually very positive! Edit: I found the list of blocked subreddits if anyone is curious to see: https://hlnet.neocities.org/RIF_filters_categorized.txt https://hlnet.neocities.org/RIF_filters_categorized.txt Note that it also includes stuff I wasn't interested in at the time, like anime, and only has subreddits up until I quit, around the API ban.
- pfdietz 10mo agoMost ideas are bad, so maybe negativity should be common? To meta-steelman: if one steelmans a bad take, then the negativity becomes even more valuable.
- mikkupikku 10mo agoIt's probably not a good approach to life though. Most bad ideas aren't really worth arguing about, better to focus on the good ideas, or at least the finding common ground with the good intentions behind bad ideas. I'm as guilty of negativity as anybody, maybe even more than most, but at least we can recognize this as a vice which may feel good in the short term but do us harm in the long run.
- squeefers 10mo ago> but at least we can recognize this as a vice which may feel good in the short term but do us harm in the long run. harm??? so only happy thoughts from now on?
- sammy2255 10mo agoSo should we stop being cynical and start writing "You're absolutely right!"
- worksonmine 10mo agoCritique is not necessarily a bad thing, and the author doesn't advocate for any change. It's just an observation. There is such a thing as toxic positivity as well, and if I'm not mistaken there's even a setting for the tone in ChatGPT to get rid of it.
- GypsyKing716 10mo agoIts called discourse, and its healthy.
- sebastien_b 10mo ago[dead]
- Epskampie 10mo agoWould be interesting to see this kind of analysis on youtube comments. It seems to me they made an algorithmic change a few years back where positive comment are greatly boosted. Since then then the "top" comments are always over-the-top exuberant.
- croes 10mo agoI prefer those negative comments like I prefer negative reviews on sites like Amazon. They are either easily to classify as useless when they don’t provide reasoning or they provide useful insight to think about. If often submit links to HN for that kind of feedback
- makeitdouble 10mo ago> What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs. If skepticism towards business announcements counts as negativity, I wonder what else we'd be discussing regarding any of those announcements. An OpenAI marketing piece for instance will already go overboard on the positive side, I don't see relevant commentary being about how it's even better than the piece touts it. Commenting just to say "wow, that's great" or paraphrasing the piece is also useless and thrown upon. At best it would be a factual explanation or expansion of some harder to parse or specialized bits ? I read the pre published PDF but don't really see stand what we were supposed to take from this blog post in particular. Aldo am I basically fullfiling the blog post prophecy ? PS: I think articles that raise to the top page with absolutely no comments would be an example of people straight enjoying the content, and the site actually working great IMHO
- elicash 10mo ago> I read the pre published PDF but don't really see stand what we were supposed to take from this blog post in particular. I'd argue it's a good thing that they just report the data and then you can draw your own conclusions about whether this is good or bad.
- ryukoposting 10mo ago> Also am I basically fullfiling the blog post prophecy? Yes. I think the post does well to make the point that "negativity" comes in two forms, critical and toxic. Lumping the two seems like an oversight, to me.
- jonathaneunice 10mo agoLove a good rant or an artfully scathing review!
- taeric 10mo agoI would love to see this analyzed with more than just positive/negative. My assumption would be that high energy posts outperform, regardless of sentiment swing. That is, enthusiastic probably does well, too? Similarly, how does inquisitive perform?
- 7777777phil 10mo agoOpen to the Idea, how exactly would you classify "high energy posts" ?
- taeric 10mo agoI don't know of any definitive classification for this. Probably easiest to begin with looking for passive versus active verbs? Run on sentences are usually bad, as well. Though, too many short sentences can effectively be a run on paragraph. :D Inquisitive posts, of course, can largely look for question marks. I think a lot of this boils down to "tone is hard to decipher in text." And is a large part of why so many of us default to assuming an aggressive tone from others. (Though, my personal pet idea there is that people are largely afraid to use questions more.)
- mbreese 10mo agoI had the same thoughts (high-energy). I would have worded it slightly differently -- more engaging posts. You could measure in two ways: 1) raw score for the post. Look at the distribution of total scores and remove the low scoring posts. I personally think this will remove more negative posts than positive. (Note: this would be another way to look at this: for the posts with an overall negative sentiment, does the post score more or less). 2) total number of unique people participating in the discussion. The more dynamic posts tend to be more positive, or at least balanced in my mind (might be wrong, but that's my gut feeling). 3) You could also look at the peak rank of the post -- if the post stayed on the front page for more than 1 hour, but this seems more arbitrary and difficult. I think the idea here is that posts aren't created equal and some have different engagement patterns. What I'd like to know is if a post is skewing negative, does it get more or less traction. What are the incentives for the poster vs the commenter? Both get karma points, but does a commenter get more for being negative vs does a poster get more points for submitting articles expected to have a negative discussion? There are a number of other questions, like are there keywords that tend to produce negative posts (for example: are posts talking about AWS more positive or negative). Or - are there topics that generally perform better? Are "expected" posts better? Are more "unique" posts better? Are "Show HN" posts more positive than other posts? I'd be happy to help - info in bio if you're interested.
- haritha-j 10mo agoIs a HN post complaining about negativity in HN, negative?
- beloch 10mo agoWhat would LLM's make of normal human conversations if they had access to everything you say (Just wait!)? Think back to the last time you hung out with a group of friends, either in person or online. How much of what was said would an AI bin into positive, negative, or neutral categories? Rather a lot of what is said in any given social circle has to do with complaining. It's very common for people to point out something that is viewed as bad by everyone. Then the group commiserates and bonds over that. Even though an AI might consider such complaints negative, there might be a positive effect on people feeling heard and supported by a like-minded group. For this reason, I'd take OP's results with a modicum of salt. Human interaction doesn't have to be all rainbows and unicorns to have a positive psychological impact. As with in-person interactions, I suspect a significant portion of what OP's LLM's described as negative might just be humans bonding through complaint among peers.
- notepad0x90 10mo agoI didn't read the preprint, but what does negative sentiment mean? Does that question I just asked qualify, because it is critical? I would expect most comments on HN to be critical and argumentative, but that isn't negativity. Being dismissive without good reason, or actually saying mean things (violates rules) would be clear negativity. But disagreement and questioning things, is part of how we all learn and share information. Matter of fact, the fastest way to learn things (as the meme goes) is to state something obviously incorrect and let people disagree with you, and show you a better way. In the few years I've been on HN, it's been very rare to see an actual negative comment that isn't simply someone having a sincere opinion different from someone else, and not getting flagged or downvoted-heavily. Would the author view this comment as negative, or would they see it as inquisitive? Because I'm not even criticizing anything the OP said or did, I'm genuinely wondering.
- est 10mo agowell people doesn't just comment to say thanks or appreciation. Mostly people only comment when there's something wrong
- snowwrestler 10mo agoI bet for most of us there’s a baseline positivity to everyday life that, because of how durable it is, is not really considered news. Thus newsworthy topics tend to skew negative. In my neighborhood an electrical power outage is news; but yet another day of consistent electrical power supply is not news. But taking a step back, I think it is noteworthy! It makes my life better every day, and compared to the vast sweep of human history, it’s a huge positive anomaly. My life is full of stuff like this, as I suspect the lives are of many HNers. I say this because while I do value news reporting and knowing what’s wrong or could be better, I also try hard to maintain this broader awareness of what’s (still) positive and going well. Even if its consistency makes it seem unremarkable on short time scales like the daily news cycle.
- grvdrm 10mo ago> In my neighborhood an electrical power outage is news; but yet another day of consistent electrical power supply is not news. But taking a step back, I think it is noteworthy! It makes my life better every day, and compared to the vast sweep of human history, it’s a huge positive anomaly. My life is full of stuff like this, as I suspect the lives are of many HNers. This hit a nerve in a good way. Something I think about is intersection of "cringe"-like content and genuine uplifting content. There's tons of stuff out there about how people take care of themselves, how they're improving their health, hair, body, mood, whatever. Obviously the influencer world is present in this sphere of content. I suspect the content that leans way towards cringe goes way more viral, but if you step back, it's great so many people are trying/doing so many healthy and self-care-oriented things and making themselves feel better bit by bit.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- glitchc 10mo agoAll I can I say is that I come to HN for the feedback. The critique is where much of the learning happens. That seems like a posotive outcome on the whole.
- rmoriz 10mo agoWe used to make fun of cat videos and low quality memes albeit they kind of balance the negative sentiment one is exposed on almost all platforms and topics. From word politics, AI/tech, environmental, personal health etc.
- f1shy 10mo agoI come to HN to see negative comments. I pay special attention to very downvoted ones. My algorithm is: if there is no ad hominem, really bad words, or snarky, I read them fully and with attention. Of course if is a non sequitor I would leave it. But often these negative/contrary to stablished opinion, or opinions done with passion (but still nore are less respectful), are the most valuable to me, as they give me the oppressed to think outside the box, to ask me questions I would not ask myself if not…
- 6thbit 10mo agoDon’t they mean contrarian? Say, this is not a negative comment but may be interpreted to have a negative sentiment due to disagreement with their core thesis.
- buellerbueller 10mo agoI think the mind is drawn to negativity, because happiness and positivity rarely explode in ways that end us and our ability to reproduce. Thus we have evolved to be more aware of negativity.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- reactordev 10mo agoThis is why the news wants us angry at each other. Politics is a perfect carrot for this for engagement and keeping the ad revenue flowing. They only succeed if people are engaged.
- 6thbit 10mo agoI believe another factor specific for HN is the inability to downvote forces people to respond in negative light. The most controversial submissions always have a tighter comment to upvote ratio. The most controversial comments tend to be the most replied to.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- drob518 10mo agoHacker News is universally read by cynics and skeptics. Hopefully, that was negative enough.
- rsynnott 10mo ago> What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs. I mean, this is pretty much what you'd expect, right? A social network where the focus was on saying how wonderful announcements and industry practices were would be rather boring/pointless.
- lxgr 10mo agoComplete hogwash. I would never reflexively comment negatively on articles shared here before even opening them.
- lo_zamoyski 10mo agoThis doesn't necessarily mean anything. It takes a real fool to make baseless assumptions about how much of something there should be, for no good reason. What if 65% of what's being discussed is stupid or evil? Then 65% negativity would seem to be proportionate. What if 80% of what's posted is stupid? Or 20%? That's the only way you can really make this number meaningful. You can't just look at the number and read in some undisciplined interpretation. (And frankly, consider this. Suppose person A makes a claim. Now suppose person B agrees with that claim and person C disagrees with that claim. Who is more likely to respond? If B agrees and has nothing to add, no additional depth or insight to provide, then there is no reason for a followup comment. An upvote suffices. But if C disagrees, then there's something to contradict and a reason to followup with an explanation of why there is disagreement.)
- AstroBen 10mo ago> What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs. The usual. It’s worth noting that technical critique reads differently than personal attacks; most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic. This.. doesn't sound negative to me, at least in how I'd use the word. Substantive critiques and skepticism? Geez I guess even this very comment would be considered negative because I'm critiquing what they wrote. Amazing post! I absolutely agree! Well done!
- shevy-java 10mo agoWhen everything is perfect, there is less to complain about. So this is only logical. You simply have fewer points to note when things are excellent. Analysing perfection yields not much compared to analysing crap.
- lapcat 10mo agoNow measure the performance of Hacker News posts about Hacker News posts.
- iambateman 10mo agoI want this same analysis with more nuance about what negativity means. He mentions in the post that “technical criticism” counts as negativity. There’s just a world of difference between “I don’t like React because I don’t want to write HTML in my JavaScript” and “React sux a$$” Both are negative statements, but it doesn’t make sense to group them together. Like…is this comment itself a “negative” comment? Maybe. But I want the author to improve and I think most people here do too…and that’s where HN really shines.
- 7777777phil 10mo agoYes, probably the core limitation of my analysis (see earlier comment). My classifiers are treating "I don't like React because I don't want to write HTML in my JavaScript" the same as "React sux a$$" and that's clearly wrong. The models I'm using were built for general sentiment analysis, not technical discourse. On a meta level, your comment itself is a perfect example - it's "negative" in that it criticizes my methodology, but it's exactly the kind of feedback that I was hoping for, so thanks!
- iambateman 10mo agoCheers – great work on this, thanks for sharing what you made!
- bennettnate5 10mo agoI find it humoring that this article inadvertently contributes to its statistic
- mattmcknight 10mo agoSort by controversial. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ Just need to find the right scissor statement to really get the debate going.
- 44khz 10mo agoThe top comment here is as HN as it gets: “Yeah, but we are better than Reddit.” Good job.
- ramon156 10mo agoI find it hard to mark something as negative when it's valid criticism. I'm of the opinion that if you cannot handle criticism, then you can't put yourself out there. This is coming from someone that is having a hard time putting themselves out there because I know I'm going to be wrong on certain topics. But afterwards I'm glad I did, after a month comments can't really haunt you anymore, because they exist in the past. I'd much rather live in a critical world than a "wholesome" world that ends up being an echochamber
- codingdave 10mo ago> most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic That is the key takeaway. If critique is scored as negative, then there is nothing wrong with HN being "negative". Analysis and critical response to new ideas, tech, and products is a good thing, so I believe we should be responding positively to a report that says we apply negativity in productive ways.
- bicepjai 10mo agoYou said it well. It can be an intellectual dialogue only when we talk on different sides and do not agree all the time. I am actually agreeing here, making this a positive comment, and did not contribute anything :)
- DustinBrett 10mo agoNow let's check the comments and see when and by how much they have become negative.
- mellosouls 10mo agoWhat counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs. The usual. It’s worth noting that technical critique reads differently than personal attacks; most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic The definition above indicates "negative" may be a bit harsh as a term, it might be useful to see a split of that percentage between "unnecessary pushback" and "scrutiny". This comment will of course count as negative - it could no doubt be more substantive and better written but hopefully it is understood in the latter sense.
- uw_rob 10mo agoCGP Grey did a fantastic short video titled 'This Video Will Make You Angry'[1]. I'd recommend that anyone who is interested in this thread take a watch. The central knowledge shared is that knowledge behaves like germs and can spread. Those that play on emotions spread better, and among the thought germs that spread based on emotions, the ones that play on anger spread the best. Worst yet: There are anger based thought germs which live in symbiosis and harmony even if they cause conflict among the humans who hold that germs. You can see this take hold when communities exist entirely of folks who hold a singular belief and they spend all day constructing and destroying uncharitable straw men of opposing ideas. I've noticed that Reddit _really_ likes this sort of content and fosters these sorts of communities. Communities at scale on reddit quickly become about fostering negatives: hatred of others, blame on the system, self-pity, snarky responses. Instead of the better and more effective: tactical empathy, acceptance and understanding what is within your personal sphere of influence, concrete actions, personal improvements, and forgiveness. I'm definitely not saying one has to accept the world for how it is, or that it's fair, or anything like that. Humans should change this world! You should vote, you should volunteer, you should help your neighbor, you should understand and be kind to others with different beliefs, and perhaps under the extreme you should die for your beliefs to help enact them. What you shouldn't do though is spend all day reading and posting memes about subjects you are already familiar with. If you've already made up your mind and are informed on a subject you don't need another meme to help radicalize yourself. See the difference between mass shooters and hero's like Daryl Davis [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc [2] https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...
- cainxinth 10mo agoIsn’t this the major takeaway from the entire social media era of the last 20 years? Content that triggers strong emotions, especially anger, fear, and moral outrage, reliably increases engagement. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outrage_industrial_complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outrage_industrial_complex
- ChrisArchitect 10mo agoThe 2025 Oxford Word of the Year was rage bait https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-is-rage-bait/ https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-i...
- FpUser 10mo agoCaptain obvious. That is why negative, controversial etc. material in newspapers sells more
- tgtweak 10mo agocontroversy algorithm is real - reddit and twitter both prioritize controversial posts since they get people engaging.
- jack_riminton 10mo agoHN is where nerds come to complain with other nerds
- coffeecoders 10mo agoThis suggests HN is functioning as designed. Votes signal agreement while comments surface disagreement. Negative posts outperform because they create unfinished cognitive work. A clean, agreeable story closes the loop, a contested claim or engagement opens and follows the open loop.
- bborud 10mo agoIsn't this what one would expect? Not least because when something is "as expected or better" people rarely feel the urge to express that. But when something goes wrong we tend to be more ... communicative. And that negativity breeds engagement, well we already knew that. Entire industries have cropped up around engagement with negative sentiment and made some people exceedingly wealthy.
- cs702 10mo ago> What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs. The usual. It’s worth noting that technical critique reads differently than personal attacks; most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic. Hmm... Technical critiques are very different from truly negative comments. I'm not sure they should be lumped together. Technical critiques are often interesting and useful. In my experience, truly negative comments which don't meet the guidelines rarely appear on HN, and when they do appear, they tend to disappear very, very quickly, thanks to the moderators.
- wotsdat 10mo ago[dead]
- px43 10mo agoNegativity Bias is a thing. It probably served us well back when it was more important to remember to avoid the field with all the poison snakes in it vs the field with the pretty flowers in it, but in an era where algo feeds try to treat content equally, and optimize for attention, it kind of ruins everything. I recall there being studies on financial loss vs gain, and that financial losses seem to effect emotions about 4x more than wins, so for an actual balanced algorithm, it would seem that positive posts should be boosted about 4-5x to have any chance of being surfaced on a modern social network. Given what we know about human psychology, sentiment boosts really should be a thing. Is anyone working on that?
- Workaccount2 10mo ago"There is a bush over there" is not news. "There is a bush with berries over there" is news. "There is a tiger in that bush over there" is adrenaline inducing huge news.
- wesselbindt 10mo agoThis makes me MAD AS HELL
- zipy124 10mo agoA lot of people are commenting on the conclusion but I'm surprised no one is commenting on the methodology? The distributions given by the models seem weird. The LLM's enough so that I would just discount those and focus on the BERT models, but even then roBERTa for instance seems to suggest there is NO positive sentiment, with only scores of 0.5 and above given. Then there is the axis which is "ai_sentiment" against the classification, but it's not clear what "ai_sentiment" is, and it's not expanded upon in the paper. It seems to basically just map to the DistilBERT score apart from a few outliers? Given that, it seems that there is basically zero agreement between DistilBERT and the other models..... In fact even worse they disagree to the extreme with some saying the most positive score is the most negative score.... (even acounting for the inverted scale in results 2-6).
- 7777777phil 10mo agoFair point, `ai_sentiment` should have been defined explicitly. It's the production score from DistilBERT-base-uncased-finetuned-sst-2-english, the same model family as Cloudflare's sentiment classifier. That explains the r=0.98 correlation you noticed. And you're right that the models disagree. This isn't measurement error though. They learned different definitions of "sentiment" from their training data. DistilBERT was trained on movie reviews (SST-2), so it asks "is this evaluating something as good or bad?" BERT Multilingual averages tone across 104 languages, which dilutes sharp English critique. RoBERTa Twitter was trained on social media where positivity bias runs strong, hence the μ=0.76 you see. For HN titles, which tend to be evaluative and critical, I assumed DistilBERT's framing fits better than the alternatives. But the disagreement between models actually shows that "sentiment" is task-dependent rather than some universal measure. I'll add a methodology section in the revision to clarify why this model was chosen.
- zipy124 10mo agoThanks for clearing that all up for me, look forward to seeing the revision! It would be interesting to see some of the comments that seem to be polar oposites in sentiments between the models. So ones where they are the most positive sentiment by one model but the most negative by another to analyse the cases where they disagree the most on their definition of sentiment.
- ummonk 10mo agoBeing grumpy and critical is rightly a virtue in the tech community at large, and this serves as a good counterbalance to the astroturfed positivity and marketing pushed by companies. Ironically, I suspect this article’s title would rightly be evaluated as negative in sentiment analysis.
- ryukoposting 10mo agoOP's classifiers make two assumptions that I'd bet strongly influence the result: 1. Binning skepticism with negativity. 2. Not allowing for a "neutral" category. The comment I'm writing right now is critical, but is it "negative?" I certainly don't mean it that way. It's cool that OP made this thing. The data is nicely presented, and the conclusion is articulated cleanly, and that's precisely why I'm able to build a criticism of it! And I'm now realizing that I don't normally feel the need to disclaim my criticism by complimenting the OP's quality work. Maybe I should do that more. Or, maybe my engagement with the material implies that I found it engaging. Hmm.
- nxpnsv 10mo agoPerhaps add joke and off-topic as labels too
- jppope 10mo agoI was about to make a comment about skepticism, thank you for adding it. Its likely that its all bunched in together. Looking at material with a critical eye is a positive feature of HN not a negative - thats a very very nuanced thing to evaluate though and likely we do not have the technology
- pessimizer 10mo ago> The comment I'm writing right now is critical, but is it "negative?" I certainly don't mean it that way. It's a matter of perspective. The OP is a negative post. You are negative about it. Therefore, you have made a positive post.
- 7777777phil 10mo agoOP here :) On skepticism being lumped with negativity: partially true. The SST-2 training task treats critical evaluation as negative sentiment. I should clarify that "negative" here means evaluative or critical, not hostile. HN's culture of substantive critique registers as negative by these metrics, but that's arguably a feature of technical discourse rather than toxicity. On the neutral category: the model outputs continuous scores from 0 to 1, so neutrality does exist around 0.5. The bimodal distribution with peaks at roughly 0.0 and 0.95 reflects how HN users tend toward strong evaluative positions. Three-class models could provide additional perspective, and that's worth exploring in future work. Also love your meta-observation. Imo your comment is critical, substantive, and engaging. By sentiment metrics it's "negative," but functionally it's high-quality discourse. But that's exactly how I read the data: HN's negativity is constructive critique that drives engagement, not hostility.
- vunderba 10mo ago> What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs. The usual. It’s worth noting that technical critique reads differently than personal attacks; most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic. As with most things, the devil’s in the details. There are plenty of ways to express criticism without descending to personal attacks. I’ve also noticed that when the cynicism/criticism-o-meter runs too high, there’s almost always a top-level meta comment complaining about the complaining. Personally I’d rather someone tell me I have a piece of food stuck in my teeth than shower me with praise.
- 7777777phil 10mo agoYou're making a distinction the paper should address more directly. The classifier can't tell the difference between "this API design is fundamentally flawed because X" and "this company is terrible" (as noted in an earlier reply). Both register as negative by models trained on reviews and social media. You're also right that HN's moderation probably removes hostile content quickly (which is why I prefer this platform to other roptions tbh). So the negativity we observe is mostly substantive critique rather than personal attacks. That said, I'd push back a bit on whether this makes the finding less interesting. If anything, the opposite seems true. The fact that HN's "negativity" is constructive criticism, and that this criticism correlates with 27% higher engagement, tells us something about how technical communities value critical analysis over promotional framing. The classifier limitation is real (also see my other replies), but the engagement correlation holds whether we call it "negative sentiment" or "evaluative critique." I'll add a limitations section to make the terminology clearer: "negative sentiment" as used here means evaluative criticism detected by SST-2-trained models, not personal attacks or toxic comments. Thanks for your feedback!
- hackable_sand 10mo agoCynicism is not a truth-telling philosophy, it cannot be. Telling you a fact is not being critical.
- rkagerer 10mo agoI think part of this is human nature - we love to complain. Discontent tends to be a motivator we'll try to do something about (i.e. write a post), often moreso than when we're content. I also strongly feel the tech industry has in general gotten a lot gloomier since its hayday before souless MBA's and pervasive user-hostile practices started ruining everything.
- locallost 10mo agoNobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Taking the easy way and being sceptical means you'll be mostly right because most things don't work out.
- user____name 10mo agoWhat a load of nonsense.
- tokai 10mo agoGood. Should be higher. Positive comments are most often worthless.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- kgwxd 10mo agoNegative engagement should be a negative metric and bring negative karma to posters and commenters that take part in it.
- justinhj 10mo agoCurious if SOTA models would have the same sentiment? Probably, but they are capable of more context and nuance. The reason I ask is the post seems focused on models you can run locally.
- proee 10mo agoEngineers are employed to fix problems, so they have an inherent disposition to break things down into pieces to identify what's working and what's not working. I've had the opportunity to demo our engineering tools to professionals at industry-type events, and they all came to our booth with arms crossed, even before they understood our value proposition. We demoed the exact same tools to the maker space and everyone who came to the booth was flowing with positive energy. Basically a glass half-empty vs half-full type of experience.
- pessimizer 10mo agoI'd like to make two points about this: ----- 1) I do not understand in any way the sentiment that discussion should ideally consist of people agreeing with and encouraging each other. The reason I speak with people is either to inform or learn. If I'm informing, this is not really a discussion. I'm just telling people something that they may not know. There are two ways to learn: one is to listen and not speak, which is the mirror of the above. The way to learn through speaking is that somebody says something, I dispute or question that thing, and that person shows me why I'm wrong. So the way to learn while speaking is that someone says something, I say something negative about that thing, and then that person says something negative about the negative thing I've just said. Friends and family are what you need, not the empty, uninformed, ritualistic, and above all socially-pressured positive comment of strangers. ----- 2) Following up on the first point (which is mainly a personal observation), it's important to say (although completely unsurprising and obvious) that negativity is relative. On HN (or reddit, or any comment site), the first post or OP is assigned positivity. A great example is this very OP, which is an accusation of negativity on Hacker News, which with no context is quite obviously a post with negative sentiment. The way you would grade reactions to it in a vacuum would say that other posts disputing its conclusions are positive. Its methodology, however, requires that the posts disputing it be graded as negative: "Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs." What are the OPs that contain these posts? Links to technologies and technology advocates, announcements, recommendations of particular practices, descriptions of APIs. Accusations of negativity and tone policing are always content-free social control. If I set my point of view as positive and uplifting (while posting about how HN and reddit and social media are evil poison promulgated by evil people who should be physically stopped to save civilization), I can silence dispute through calling the mods rather than through discussion. The more indefensible my position is, the more I will prefer the sort of "discussion" where I say something, other people dispute it, and I accuse them of being negative people with implications of bad faith and possibly psychological unsoundness.
- positron26 10mo agoHierarchy and plurality are essential properties of any functioning information space. - People with expertise / exceptional qualities are by definition out-numbered by the rest, so there must be privileged seats if you want quality to become represented. - Social coherence requires turning lots of conversations into a few, again requiring fewer privileged seats to represent views efficiently and have conversations between well-informed people trusted by those they represent. - Preventing runaway power feedback loops from reinforcing one single set of views requires that independent hierarchies can exist, which is pluralism. https://positron.solutions/articles/hierarchy-elevates-social-reasoning https://positron.solutions/articles/hierarchy-elevates-socia...
- pepperball 10mo agoHilarious! HN post about sentiment analysis on the site and the top comment and thread is just “reddit bad xd”. So glad these sort of novel, riveting conversations are being had here.
- dehrmann 10mo agoThere's something that feels seductive and clever about taking the contrarian, usually pessimist stance—like you're the only one who sees things for how they really are.
- renewiltord 10mo agoHaha, this place is as gullible as Reddit. Remember that obvious hoax post about DoorDash/UberEats being a dick to drivers with a “desperation score”. There were so many people there just wanking themselves off at the thought it could be real. It obviously wasn’t. The cooorrrrrporatioooons! OooOOooOoOOoo!
- api 10mo ago"If it bleeds it leads" has been known since near the dawn of published media. Humans have a powerful negativity and bad-news bias. It's probably a left over adaptation. "If you mistake a bush for a lion, you're fine. If you mistake a lion for a bush, you're dead." Your paranoid negativity-biased ancestors survived.
- charlieyu1 10mo agoMaybe the reality is actually quite bad. And at least the negativity allows us to fix the problems. I’m actually sick of modern toxic positivity, problems that could be fixed early are deliberately ignored until they couldn’t be ignored anymore.
- joelthelion 10mo ago> And at least the negativity allows us to fix the problems Does it? A lot of the negativity is structural (late stage capitalism and all), and there is very little talk regarding fixing these issues.
- 727374 10mo ago"If it bleeds it leads". -famous newsroom adage. This is true for all news and media, always. Humans are drawn toward stories that arouse fear and negativity.
- aragonite 10mo agoIn the preprint they write: > ... we observe extreme inequality in attention distribution. The Gini coefficient of 0.89 places HN among the most unequal attention economies documented in the literature. For comparison, Zhu & Lerman (2016) reported Gini co-efficients of 0.68–0.86 across Twitter metrics. ... The bottom 80% of posts [on HN] receive less than 10% of total upvotes. (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5910263 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5910263) This could probably be explained by HN's unique exposure mechanism. Every post starts on /newest and unless it gets picked up by the smaller group of users who browse /newest, it never reaches the front page where the main audience is. In most forums/subreddits by contrast a new post (unless it gets flagged as spam) usually gets some baseline exposure with the main audience before it sinks. On HN the main audience is downstream of an early gate and missing that gate is close to being effectively invisible. IMO this fact alone could probably explain why "attention inequality" seems more extreme on HN.
- kqr 10mo agoThis also explains how early performance can be predictive despite the lack of preferential attachment.
- ManBeardPc 10mo agoNews in general. Also works well in sales, see how often financial "advisors" try to convince people the market is crashing soon and everything except their product is unsafe and how they try to mitigate downsides (active funds, low/zero interest savings accounts).
- jdthedisciple 10mo agoIn a way it makes justifiable sense: Consider that purely positive but otherwise unconstructive comments like "wow great project! clap" are – for good reason – not what the HN comment feature is intended for and are reliably downvoted to oblivion. Contentious, challenging, or even slightly provocative reactions however – which are inherently somewhat negative in a wider sense – usually kick off fruitful debates and knowledge-proliferation. And I probably speak for at least about ~65% of fellow HN's when I say that the latter is what I come here for.
- Brian_K_White 10mo agoGood things are nice, but they aren't interesting. They aren't a problem to solve.
- larodi 10mo agoGood ! Finally someone does it, sadly I didn’t have the time been planning for 1 year now.
- scoofy 10mo agoGood news is hardly worth discussing. Headline: “I went to the doctor and everything was normal.” Discussion: “That’s nice.” Headline: “I went to the doctor and I have been diagnosed with X” Discussion: “X means Y or Z. If Y, A,B,C. If Z, P,Q,R”
- dang 10mo agoI was just writing about this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46508115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46508115 (edit: although I was thinking about comments, not submissions) We need to do something and are working on it. The challenge is to distinguish thoughtful critique from negativity-venting. The former is fine, the latter is lame. HN has a lot of the latter. I believe it has to do with macro trends (in society at large and on the internet), which we can't expect to be immune from—but also with the community here getting insular. That scares and worries me, because HN won't survive over the long haul if new cohorts of users don't keep showing up. Along with that, there seem to be increased waves of jadedness, bitterness, and cynicism that use this place as a dumping ground for bad feelings. That's a bad dynamic. The more it happens, the more it encourages more of it. Meanwhile, people who don't enjoy jaded, bitter, or denunciatory rhetoric are incentivized to leave: a classic vicious circle. This is why we added the following to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html last year: Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative. You'll probably see more statements from us about this in 2026, and hopefully some changes to HN, as we try to do something about it.
- mackid 10mo agoI’ve wondered about a temporal trend. My feeling is that it has gotten more negative over the last 10 years. Could the OP run the analysis for each year and see if there are trends?
- neilv 10mo agoI want to distinguish what I think are two distinct things, and also make a point about one of them. * As dang and many know and appreciate, online communities themselves "age", and if you don't keep getting fresh new people in, they shrink. And, regardless, the focus tends to change over time, from original topic, more to meta and/or familiar/comfortable socializing. From what I've seen in some communities, I'm not so sure that aging of the participants is the main factor behind that. * I think HN should be more conscientious about stereotypes around age, and making generalizations about that. Not only because much of HN is closely adjacent to hiring, and in the US, that's getting into illegal territory. Also, because ageism is often unfair, in general, and to individuals, yet is already widespread in the tech industry. We risk the new people that HN does acquire picking up messages about what ages, genders, ethnicities, etc. they should be hiring, and those messages right now are dim. If you don't appreciate or care about this now, because you're not yet on the receiving end, I think you probably will within a few years, unless you help change the techbro culture now. If you find it hard to believe that you'll be on the receiving end, because you are so highly-skilled, have a prestigious resume, have stellar recommendations, have always been a 10x rockstar ninja whatever, you keep updating your skills, you've memorized every LeetCode question, etc.: my experience is that it will be hard to believe when it happens, but it nevertheless will. You'll be in an interview, and the interviewer will make a snide remark that's ill-founded, but regardless, you're probably not getting an offer. And then it will happen many times. And your best "network" will FIRE and be out of the game, or be facing ageism themselves and not in a position to refer you. Then you'll jack in to the HN holographic VR AI cyberspace hivemind of a few years from now, and see people promoting the ideas that seem to match the snarky interviewer's thinking.
- bilater 10mo agoMost things don't work. You can be an arm chair critic and scoff and you may be right a lot of times. But you'll also never really build anything of note and/or have crazy hockey stick growth in your life.
- ChrisMarshallNY 10mo agoRants and Complaints rule. News at 11. That's fairly basic human nature, unfortunately; especially in today's climate. For myself, I try to keep it positive. I am quite capable of going really dark (have done so, in the past), but I don't like to shit where I eat. I also feel that I need to recompense for some of the nastiness I used to spew, last century. That said, my sunshine approach gets some pretty nasty responses. I have to bite my keyboard, and not respond as I'd like. I just say "Have a great day!", which means I'm done engaging. I have found letting the other party have the last word, ties off the fight.
- lewdwig 10mo agoOne thing that seems to mark most nerds is a tendency towards being utopian about tech in general but deeply sceptical of specific tech.
- tempodox 10mo agoThis should be measured in regular intervals and plotted over a time axis. Just one sample doesn’t say much.
- groundzeros2015 10mo agoHow much correlation is there between positive sentiment and blatant marketing?
- pengaru 10mo agoIt should be higher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
- GeoAtreides 10mo agoOP, I haven't licensed my content to you, only to HN (and sadly, without my _informed_ consent, to YN affiliated startups). Please remove my comments from the archive and stop processing them.
- jama211 10mo agoI would love to see comparisons year on year. I want to know if it’s gotten worse or not, there’s a lot of venting about AI in here these days.
- keybored 10mo agoSome have commented that “negative” is too negatively-charged of a word for this submission. I don’t think so. I don’t subscribe to the Pollyanna-hacker-American idea that positivity is a virtue. You’re gonna feed me with negative news about the world? Get some negativity. You’re gonna feed me with bad ideas? Get some negativity. Having a healthy personal mindset is a different matter. Which is not some public discussion boards business.
- swyx 10mo ago> The results I use in my dashboard are from DistilBERT because it runs efficiently in my Cloudflare-based pipeline. interesting - why use cloudflare vs say hf inference or modal? and is this replicate-cloudflare or normal cloudflare?
- _DeadFred_ 10mo agoHacker News is a space for problem solvers. Problem solvers tend to see, think about, and talk about problems more than non-problem solvers, especially in a space designed for discussion discussions between problem solvers.
- saltysalt 10mo agoThe reason is easy to understand: HN commenters feel compelled to correct mistakes. The rage bait is real.
- websiteapi 10mo agoWhy won’t the people on this site let me hide the karma it shows under my username?!?!
- SilentM68 10mo agoI find that most negativity comes from the inexperienced, young, and one-track minds of individuals, which through no fault of their own, have only been exposed to one way of thinking, one way of looking at the world. Since they don't know any other way of doing things, they refuse to understand the knowledge or experience that is being shared and jump to conclusions. That is one way that regional conflicts thrive, after they arise. These conflicts usually arise from the self-interest of the older generations. Unfortunately, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. It's no different whether on the physical or digital battlefield. Flame away ;)
- everyone 10mo agoThere's a cultural thing also.. People from USA defo seem to have this "always be happy happy smile smile!!" thing going on. If you're not always outwardly positive and happy and smiling you're viewed as some kind of asshole there. Even in terms of language, if a USian says "great!", they mean passable, and "ok" means bad. Imo this is the result of corporate culture being so prevalent it has leaked out into general culture.. The corporate world of bullshit, just be really positive towards your boss and pretend everything is great, all that matters is the hype and getting more investment this quarter. Also, engineering types tend to be a lot more "negative" relative to those corporate business guys.. If you want to engineer something, and make it work, and actually do a good job, then you need to appraise things realistically and objectively, and you certainly need to point out stupid decisions and bad design.
- tim333 10mo agoI wonder if HN posts are more negative than the internet they link to? Compaing the top three just now: HN: Vietnam banning ads, AI for drug discovery, geolocating vehicle pic - I'd say two positive one neutral Google News (UK): Trump wanting Greenland, Storm Goretti snow, hero could get posthumous award - I'd say two negative one neutral So maybe HNers have a positive bias after all?
- bawolff 10mo agoPurely positive content is kind of vapid. If all you have to say about something is "looks cool" you might as well say nothing at all. Its not critically engaging at all.
- piloto_ciego 10mo agoI actually think I understand why almost all the discourse is terrible on the internet. Reddit, HN, whatever. It's because of the reward mechanisms at play. So... If you say something is going to suck, and it actually sucks, you look like a genius. If you say something is going to suck, and it actually is ok, nobody cares because things turned out fine. If you say something is going to be good, and it turns out good, people say you're smart. If you say something is going to be good, and it turns out to suck, people say you're a moron. Because of negative bias and game theory, the most logical take to get "social rewards" is be consistently pessimistic. You'll look "smart" online and the times you miss it will be largely ignored. If the reward you get from interacting online is some sort of social capital, being a pessimist will do better than being an optimist unless you're certain things will turn out good. So people tend to be negative. Or, as I've heard it stated before, "pessimists get to be right, optimists get to be rich."
- tonymet 10mo agoFor those curious about how the model was trained, and examples of positive/negative sentiment, here's a "nutritional label" of sorts. - SST-2 (stanford sentiment test) example dataset from IMDB reviews https://huggingface.co/datasets/stanfordnlp/sst2/viewer https://huggingface.co/datasets/stanfordnlp/sst2/viewer - BERT https://aclanthology.org/N19-1423/ https://aclanthology.org/N19-1423/ - DistilBert -- the optimized model OP was using https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.01108 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.01108 SST-2 may have been used to train or qualify BERT -- read the papers to get the full story. I did a quick perusal. It would be nice to have a nutritional label shared with Abstracts, showing the training data, with examples, and the base models.
- armchairhacker 10mo agoI’ve noticed that my short comments that express cliche HN views get upvoted more than the long unique ones that I feel are more interesting. And in general, many top posts and comments are cliche. If I respond to an article about open-source with “open-source is good”, article about privacy with “privacy is good” etc. with a basic justification and slightly fancier words, I’ll almost surely get upvotes. But I see those opinions on this site practically every day. I wish people would instead upvote posts and comments with uncommon knowledge and opinions. I do see the former: cool projects and “fun facts” (e.g. an article about the cultural history of an isolated small region) are constantly on the front page and in top comments. But the latter are only in /new and further down comments.
- thegrim000 10mo agoIn some recent sentiment analysis experiments I did, I also noticed that stories that were classified as either rule-breaking or overly political in nature got significantly more upvotes on average than stories that were classified as within the HN guidelines and not political. The current system essentially provides incentive for that type of content.
- mahirsaid 10mo agoThis would be a great study vs the stackoverflow sentiment outlook.
- 7777777phil 10mo agoThanks everyone for the discussion. In the meantime I tried to take some of the learnings and posed a followup focused on predicting potentially successful titles. You can find the update here: https://philippdubach.com/standalone/hn-prediction/ https://philippdubach.com/standalone/hn-prediction/