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The crowd here was originally dominated by entrepreneurs. Now it's dominated by employees. Entrepreneurs tend to be somewhat out on a rope themselves, so they

The crowd here was originally dominated by entrepreneurs. Now it's dominated by employees. Entrepreneurs tend to be somewhat out on a rope themselves, so they're more likely to offer support to their peers rather than try to drag them down. Employees, on the other hand, tend not to have much skin in the game, so they're a little more free with their criticism of things that they see. I bet you could put together an interesting chart by running a poll for "where do you work" and graphing negative comments elsewhere on the site by whether a given user answered "for myself" vs "for [company x]". So yeah, there are still plenty of supportive, encouraging entrepreneurial folk here. But there's also an ever growing peanut gallery. Try to ignore them. They don't mean any harm.

ScottWhigham 13y ago
In the old days, I would've just upvoted you and watched your comment score go up, up, up. The rest of the readers of the thread would see how many previous people had agreed/upvoted and it was nice. Today though I have to comment to show my appreciation - comment scores aren't shown and have little if any value any more. I've been around for 5+ years here I guess and this is my explanation for it as well. I'd also add that such negativity is inevitable for some people - they visit HN 20x a day, they want to contribute in some way, but no one has made a post today that they can "show off" with an answer. In the end, they reply with a silly/off-the-cuff/disresectful/snide/etc answer just b/c they have this need to "participate in the community". HN is reddit-like for many people, myself included, in that way. I'm not immune to it either.