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Ask HN: Is it just me, or are HN comments becoming more and more negative?
In the early days of HN, there seemed to be a tight-knit group of entrepreneurs that offered support and advice to each other. Now when I read comments, there seems to be a race to see who can write the first criticism or who can pick out the first inconsistency.
Don't get me wrong, constructive criticism is essential for growth. But I feel like the atmosphere of the comments dialogue is becoming more and more negative each day. Am I the only one feeling this?
Maybe I'm just overly sensitive.
- mrshoe 17y agoOh shut your dirty trap, you whiny moron. </sarcasm> I still find HN to be a friendly, positive environment. Let's keep it that way! Edit: Wow. Either starting your comment with a joke is somehow no longer OK, or nobody else agrees with me that HN is still friendly and positive. I've been reading HN everyday for a very long time. I think these negative trends are mostly just an illusion due to the novelty wearing off for newer users. "If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)" (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
- sli 17y agoOh come on, -3 points? It was a joke, people! I upvoted because he beat me to it AND because I agree with him. I'm not seeing the negative downturn.
- drhowarddrfine 17y agoUh oh. I did the same before seeing yours. Maybe sense of humor is the real problem here.
- dtby 17y agoDisrespect is never funny.
- Banzai10 17y agoI got downvoted one time by the same reason, but getting back to the subject, I really like the feedback guys receive when "asking HN", the community is always there to help who needs, I can't see this bad environment here (maybe few guys with bad sense of humor).
- alttab 17y agoSometimes, humor is not rewarded here. Even if during the process it is making a point. I've met quite a few hackers/cs guys who take themselves WAY too seriously. Maybe that's why they don't have girlfriends. Sometimes it feels like the vibe here can lean towards "I'm a super serious hacker who knows his/her shit and I'm going to be a millionaire with my start up, so I'm going to ignore the SPIRIT of your post and pick it apart like a trekkie at a convention." In the end, we all need to just get over ourselves.
- dtby 17y agoIn what spirit should calling someone a 'twit' be taken? Should we pretend that it's an insightful social commentary? Or accept that it's a cheap attempt at humor based in disrespect for others?
- alttab 17y agoTheres an important difference between being a sarcastic jerk at someone else's expense and pointing out the irony in situations that results in humor. Its been my experience that either type of humor isn't tolerated here very well.
- scott_s 17y agoYou're not as funny as you think you are.
- scott_s 17y agoPerhaps I was too terse, and it appeared I was trying to make a (meta) joke. I was not. If you ever find yourself thinking "It's just a joke!" you have to consider that the problem is with you, not the reader. Most people amuse themselves, but few people are actually funny. Your jokes will generally not be appreciated by others, particularly when you go for the obvious, aggressively ironic one-liners. Such things get downvoted as part of the noise.
- mdemare 17y agoTrue. One of the things I like about this place is that one-liners are frowned upon, even when they're somewhat funny. I feel that policy should be extended to sarcasm. Sarcasm doesn't work very well on the net, and is often rude and dismissive. What I used to like about Slashdot was that you could give the +funny modding a -1 weight. This improved Slashdot discussions quite a bit.
- jriddycuz 17y agoI don't notice HN being that negative at all, although I'm relatively new, so I don't know if I know anything yet. What I do notice, however, is a bit too much self-seriousness, and it can come across as cold or negative at times when you're not used to it.
- ncarlson 17y ago>"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)" Sweet. Only 8 more days and then I'll be able to voice my opinion without the "noob" stigma.
- unalone 17y agoI'm at a year and a half. Hacker News is turning into Reddit. It's following the exact same path, albeit thankfully slower, and the causes behind that path—influx of users, need for attention, karma lust—aren't causes that Paul is looking to fix. Reddit's not the worst thing in the world, but make no mistake, we're headed there.
- thenduks 17y agoEvery online community is naturally inclined to become 4chan. It happened to 4chan, it happened to digg, it's definitely on the cusp at reddit and I expect it will eventually happen to HN. I'm not happy about this :/
- unalone 17y agoEvery open, unfettered online community, anyway. Hacker News could save itself with harsher mods and possibly restraints on registration. I think it'll happen if we slide too far, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.
- thenduks 17y agoAgreed.
- potatolicious 17y agoReddit's already there. They are, thankfully, less dangerous than 4chan (i.e., 4chan is likely to firebomb a building for their pet cause, Reddit is more likely to sit and post angry things about it)
- NikkiA 17y agoI disagree, the recent 'my pastor abused me...' posts on reddit proved just how dangerous reddit can be - they found his personal info and called and harassed him, he (possibly) committed suicide a couple of days later.
- Freebytes 17y agoOne thing I find interesting is that people will read posts on discussion groups, read articles on blogs and web pages, watch television, listen to music, and over time, they will begin to connect with the person with whom they believe they are interacting. The truth is that the other person that is providing the content for the lurker has no idea who that person is. However, the lurker feels like he knows the poster, the community, the musician, or the actor because he has been involved in a one-way interaction for such a long time. So, the poster may make a small joke that he believes to be harmless because he believes he understands the other person; however, he comes across as a stranger simply telling a negative joke. I have encountered this issue may times. I feel like I have some kind of connection, but that connection does not truly exist unless you actively engage with the target of your interest.
- elblanco 17y agoI've received that exact same reception here. I've lurked HN for about a year. And I get challenges like "your karma/post count/profile length/fame level is too low for me to take you seriously". Sorry, I don't measure a person's worth, or the quality of their statements by karma score.
- crystalis 17y agoIt had to happen- there's relatively fewer pg, patio11, raganwald, wheels, tptacek, swombat, etc., and more of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=903880 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=903880
- tptacek 17y agoCrap. I just upvoted edw519 for his pithy comment!
- crystalis 17y agoWould it be petty to edit you out of my original comment? :) To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how his asserted graph deserves the points it has now.
- pchristensen 17y agoHe made an ASCII art graph that was worth 1000 words. Worth an upvote.
- crystalis 17y agoA sentence a piece for 3 peaks and 3 troughs could cover 100, and the unspoken explanation of the hot air graph generation technique for the other 900? Without those useful 900 words, the post is just "Yeah, I think there are some roughly seasonal peaks and troughs and it peaked in summer '08. btw it's winter '09, rough times lol."
- pchristensen 17y agoI think I know why you've gotten negative reactions on HN. You seem to crave the exactness of a compiler yet you dislike nitpicking your statements. Have you seriously never heard the phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words"? It's a very common saying. The point is that an image can convey a lot, not that you need a certain number of significant figures in your image:word ratio. Lighten up.
- nkohari 17y agoI agree entirely. I rarely do more than skim the comments anymore, because too often it just turns into a contest for one-upsmanship and ego stroking. There are people on here that will take any opportunity to argue about any topic.
- tsestrich 17y agoEh, I get the sense that sometimes people will just grab any news story that hasn't been posted yet and post it hoping to get voted up points. I haven't been around all that long, but it seems like the signal to noise ratio is getting a lot higher even during the short time span that I've been on here. Not only that, but you get twenty blog articles submitted pretty much all talking about the same thing every time, and it can just get draining. I think people get aggravated when they start reading the same thing over and over. "Release early/iterate often" has been the subject of no fewer than one top-page article nearly every day, and though it's good advice, I think by this point we get the message. Once the main point of an article is understood, people start to pick apart and criticize the smaller points I guess.
- stanleydrew 17y agoI assume you meant to say it seems like the signal to noise ratio is getting lower? i.e. more noise.
- tsestrich 17y agoYes indeed I did, lol. Thanks
- spudlyo 17y agoI've noticed it as well. I'm not sure if this is due to an increased amount of criticism or if the quality of the articles posted has gone down, warranting more criticism.
- tonystubblebine 17y agoI've noticed it also. When I first joined people really took care that their comments were thoughtful and respectful, even if they were disagreeing. Is there anything to do other than to personally try harder to be thoughtful contributors?
- ErrantX 17y agoThose comments are still there, just a bit less obvious. I figure it is because the "original" members were of a certain level of contributor. "hand picked" in a sense (classic early adopters). A these move on to pastures new and a large numbers of new people come in you start to get a range of commentary style rather than just top class stuff. (not that all newcomers are bad - or indeed not that many of us are - just that you get a range of attitude). And of course almost outright trolling is less obvious once the general range of commentary style is expanded; so it passes off as serious discussion.
- dschobel 17y agoI think it's a vicious cycle. The more blog drama (AA killed my dog!) which gets through, the more people who like blog drama are drawn to the site and up-vote it. If I were PG, I would look at the data and try to categorize the type of submissions which draw the most negative comments (and I think we still do a good job of -4'ing useless comments) and set a high threshold for a story of that type to get through to the front page. As another example, if submissions about 37s tend to be really vitriolic, make it harder for those submissions to get through and make it harder for people with a history of incendiary -4 comments to post in them. The bottom line is that there is a lot of data collected here which can be used to optimize the content towards quality, since we all seem to be talking about the same thing when we talk about quality.
- elblanco 17y ago
- ErrantX 17y agoI think part of it is the extra traffic too: 10 comments pointing out the same criticism within a few minutes of each other. And you can see the rush in posting it. Personally I have a few names I like to read commentary from and so keep an eye out for - then skim the rest.
- edw519 17y agoQuality of HN Comments Over Time | . . | . . q| . . . . u| . . . . . . a| . . . . . l| . . . . . i| . . . . . t| . . . you are here -->. . y| (that's all) |________________________________________________________ S O N D J F M A M J J A S O N D J F M A M J J A S O N D '08 '09
- hack_edu 17y agoGraph is shockingly accurate. I've deleted and created accounts in each peak and trough you laid out.
- andreyf 17y agoDid you generate that from intuition, or by some concrete algorithm?
- yan 17y agoI'm pretty sure intuition : )
- chasingsparks 17y agoI smell a GraphJammer.
- drhowarddrfine 17y agoIt's just you....twit.
- amichail 17y agoCould this have something to do with startup failures? Multiple failures might put people in a bad mood.
- tptacek 17y agoDo you really think there are that many actual startup people here, relative to the commenters as a whole? Also, with few exceptions (myself clearly included), the people here who actually have companies tend to be very positive.
- amichail 17y agoProbably many want to have startups. Such people might be frustrated by their failure to acquire funding.
- unalone 17y agoAre you actually that negative? I hold my grudges against haters, but you always seem more snarky than actually hostile.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- elblanco 17y agoNo, tptacek and I have openly quarreled before. But, it was a good discussion I thought, sometimes conflict can flesh out ideas and make them stronger or make bad ideas more eligible to be discarded. I certainly took a lot away from it. I actually appreciated the debate, it's something I encourage in my company and helps us get to the good ideas faster.
- richardw 17y agoWhile quality may have been varying, it's still fantastic compared to the mire that exists outside. We're lucky.
- Luyt 17y agoI also like the frugal and simplistic layout. It's easy on the eyes and doesn't distract. Luckily there are no sidebars, blinking flash ads, 'next page' links, etc.
- jeromec 17y agoI think there are certainly times when things may go a bit far, but that's to be expected with such a volume of people - largely independent thinkers. A few might even be overtly negative or bellicose. I try to call it like I see it whether endorsing or critical, with no regard for being ingratiating for much the reasons PG points out here: http://www.paulgraham.com/discover.html http://www.paulgraham.com/discover.html
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- mahmud 17y agoThis is the pettiest comment I have ever read.
- DanielBMarkham 17y agoThere are a lot of complicated and interesting things going on here. I just wish I had more time and data to dig into them. One thing I have noticed is a consistent desire for the community to "meta discuss" how the board is doing -- much to the annoyance of others. (yes, this is a comment about meta comments, which makes it a meta meta) I'm not sure any of these conversations have kept the board from getting worse quicker or not -- it's impossible to measure something that didn't happen. There seems to be common "games" you can play on boards like this, whether you're into game-playing or not. Edw519 has a tendency to come up with pithy quips that the majority of readers would like, thereby gaining his comments a lot upvotes. People who comment early get the "pile on" effect. I know PG has tweaked the algorithm some to combat this, but all it's really done for me is to put rather worthless comments up above more interesting ones, so for me it makes the board less valuable. At the end of the day, I think 3 things: 1)karma matters, whether you like it or not, 2) people play games with karma, and 3) you can only play so many quality-enhancing games: as the crowd grows outlying players are left with "cheap and dirty" games which work every so often.
- notaddicted 17y agoWhat does Karma matter for? I notice that people care about it and experience consternation about downvotes, I don't yet understand why. In my experience with the site, every comment speaks for itself, and getting downvoted just means a lot of people disagree with you. When it happens in real life it doesn't bother me, I don't see why it would on here. The thing I'm really looking out for when I browse are the topical mega-comments that appear sometime, usually when someone understands the topic at hand better than the original author. There are only so many of those to go around, so the rest is chatter, it has to be. Everyone wants to talk, only a few people have relavant insight... still true to life :S.
- DanielBMarkham 17y agoYeah whenever we've had a meta-chat inevitably people come on and say "who cares about karma?" That sounds all fine and dandy, but study after study has shown that if you put numbers/points/stars next to desired user behavior it is going to incentivize it. So yes, in theory it shouldn't matter at all, but due to the freaky way people's minds work, it actually matters a great deal. It's not a logic thing.
- raintrees 17y agoI do not post very often, as I frequently seem to have little to add to the already proliferate content. But it seems somewhat telling to me that my biggest recent gain in karma was directly related to a comment on Dell that seemed a bit of a zinger. Most of my other sparse comments were questioning a premise, offering my .00002 cents worth, and typically neutral to positive in tone. I think. (Or at least that was my intention).
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- _pius 17y agoYou're definitely right. Worse, I can feel the increase in negativity and trolling influencing me to become a more negative contributor myself.
- vaksel 17y agoI think we need more erlang threads to drive the quality up
- _pius 17y agoDon't even joke about that!
- dave_au 17y agoIt looked like the most recent wave of erlang threads - or the one around the time when _why disappeared - got deleted by the admins. I was really disappointed by that, since it seems like it was the unofficial way for the community to signal large scale concern over the quality of the site. It would be nice to have another channel to replace it.
- jacquesm 17y agoErlang is a great language (and a great way to design a language as well), it really does a disservice to all that using it as a way to drown out unwanted conversations. At a minimum I would suggest a mix of Erlang, Lisp, Scala and Clojure articles. Besides being more even handed it probably will be more useful.
- Freebytes 17y agoI was going to leave a rude comment in response to this as a joke, but someone beat me to it. What a jerk. (By the way, me saying "What a jerk." is a joke. (To prevent more downratings.))
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- louislouis 17y agoComments get upvoted for different reasons. Split the karma into sections like funny, insightful, cool, whatever.. then u can weed out the crap.
- tptacek 17y agoI mean, look how well that worked for Slashdot!
- potatolicious 17y agoActually, Slashdot's quality of moderation and posts is very, very good, not to mention having maintained a consistent quality over the years. In comparison, every other "upvote/downvote" system has succumbed to the Digg phenomena sooner or later. It's still one of the rare sites where, years later, I go back and see the same quality of posts (which honestly isn't that bad), and the caliber is kept high enough that my brain doesn't bleed internally.
- allenp 17y agoWhile I agree the moderation is better than Digg and Reddit, etc I think Slashdot can be a pretty harsh/negative environment because the culture accepts (and even likes to see) gladiatorial intellectual commenting. Things like, "Actually, if you had ever even seen the abc variation of blah blah expression you would know that it isn't nearly the same, there is a full .00002 measurable difference" etc. I'd like to see HN get past this sort of bullying and trend more towards helpful/intelligent.
- inerte 17y agoMaybe only let the person who's being replied moderate a comment. And up-arrow means "This is insightful and I'm glad you took the time to talk to me, you've made me a better person and I would like to continue having this conversation with you" while down-arrow could mean "I wish to stop talking right now, you're boring and I wouldn't have a beer with you". I mean, when everyone has the chance to judge what everybody says, you're favoring group-thinking. It's a meritocracy. Which isn't something bad, but if it's not your objective, then drop it. It's a pipe dream to still deny comments are up/down votted based on quality instead of agreement or agenda. It's written on the rules, yet it's simply not followed. I wish people could simply accept that this has been tried, many many times, on a lot of websites, and the reality is that it doesn't work. There are the rules and there is how people actually act. It's like how project management with Scrum is done. Or rather, what it is up against. Like the person who gave me the course on Scrum said: You can make the client write his requirements with the blood of his first born male, he'll still want to change. It's just how things work. Instead of trying to swim against the tide, fighting its force, we should accept and work with it. I think designing a system where "helpful" is the ultimate goal might be worthy pursuing. Or maybe Yahoo Answers or Stack Overflow -like systems are the best we can do.
- ramchip 17y agoI agree. I had a submission killed recently, even though it was getting voted up very quickly and (IMHO at least) completely relevant; a few people flagged and said it was 'garbage' without bothering to open the PDF referenced in the article. Doesn't make me feel like posting again.
- kaitnieks 17y agowhat was this submission in question?
- ramchip 17y agoYou can click on a username then on submissions to see it (if you see dead submissions; you can change this in your profile). Otherwise, it was this story about Gödel, Einstein, and Morgenstern (not my blog): http://blog.plover.com//law/Godel-dictatorship-3.html http://blog.plover.com//law/Godel-dictatorship-3.html I don't really want to bring this into the discussion though; just saying I thought the way it was shot down was rather rude compared to what I was used to from HN, and I've seen similar posts in other people's threads.
- jacquesm 17y agoWhat bothers me more than your post being killed is some of the outright spam and drivel that passes unchecked.
- hyperbovine 17y agoHN should charge people for the right to post. Even $1 a month would go a long way towards separating out the yokels from those who actually have something to contribute. I'd pay it.
- tptacek 17y agoSo, the people here that annoy you most here can pay $1 to be entitled to annoy you, and meanwhile we make sure that people like David Heinemier Hanson and Nate Lawson and Joel Spolsky and the UX guy from Zappos and all the other interesting people who drop in to comment once or twice... never do.
- coffeemug 17y agoI'd pay too.
- jacquesm 17y agoPrice elasticity doesn't enter in to it. The barrier is having to pay at all. When you contribute to something online you are already paying, with something far more valuable than that $1, with your time. It also limits the speech to the voices of those that happen to be able to use the method of payment and adds significant overhead to the running of the site.
- ubernostrum 17y agoMetafilter does that. Guess what still happens there?
- tptacek 17y agoQuick caution: there's selection bias here bigtime. If you read the comments on this thread, Hacker News is clearly in urgent danger of becoming Reddit. Of course, this post is designed to attract people worried about Hacker News becoming Reddit.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- clistctrl 17y agoI find this phenomenon to be most interesting. Digg is constantly worried about becoming 4chan, reddit is paranoid towards becoming digg, and HN is speculates about becoming reddit. The question i'm ultimately asking is where is this place that fears degradation into HN? finally which social media portal is so elite, so stealthy that they have no fears at all?
- blhack 17y agoFinally which social media portal is so elite, so stealthy that they have no fears at all? I don't know if you'd call us "elite", but we're still really small over here (full disclosure: this is my website) http://www.gibsonandlily.com http://www.gibsonandlily.com (this is mostly just my friends and I along with a few people that jumped ship from reddit) Most of the articles are science and technology related, with a few funny, economic, and political things peppered in.
- jackchristopher 17y ago>where is this place that fears degradation into HN? It may not be on the web at all. Could be mailing lists.
- jurjenh 17y agoThe arc forum (http://arclanguage.org http://arclanguage.org) OK, ok I kid, I kid... but you are inferring that there is a lisp of forums, and most fall in the blub category. Whilst this is entirely possible, there is a lot more scope for orthogonal directions in discussion. It might be interesting to contrast some alternative discussion forums / mailing lists and discuss the relative strengths of each, rather than worry about becoming reddit or digg od 4chan or /.
- pg 17y agoA little, probably. There are good days and bad days. I was particularly struck by the harshness of this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=925034 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=925034 and also that such a huge number of people piled on to vote it up. In fact, that makes me wonder: could it be the voting that makes the tone of the site seem more negative? There are often nasty comments lurking at the bottom of a thread with 1 point or less, but they're not very noticeable. Whereas this one + 49 points (currently) = an angry mob.
- willwagner 17y agoOn the harshness scale, I'm surprised with the number of downvotes some recent comments get not on the quality of a comment, but that the voter disagrees with its stance. I like well-crafted comments that I completely disagree with; it challenges me to rethink my own position. I'd hate to see people get fed up and not write comments simply because it goes against the grain; it would change the nature of the site, and to me, part of its value.
- kls 17y agoYou have a point on this one, I recently moved over to HN from Slashdot. I was one of the first 100 users over there, so it was hard to accept that the place had gone completely to pot. Anyway, I am sidetracking, let me get back to the point. One of the things that makes me jump from a site and not look back is down modding because of disagreement with the idea of the post and not with the nature of the post. I feal that just because you do not agree with a subject of a post if it is well articulated, covers that persons rational and is not abusive or deriding then if you don't agree with it just move along. In saying that, I have had allot of post here that I thought where great debates (which I love) get blasted down to -1. None of which I thought where particular offensive or abusive. I am passionate and opinionated but to down mod for that, reflects of a desire to constrict ones freedom of expression. Let me be clear I do not blame HN for this, it is a personal issue among each of us as individuals, but one should really be introspective before they click that button either way (up or down) and ask themselves, is this a good argument, not just I agree with this or I don't like what this guy is saying. If a person does not then they should really reflect on their ability to critically analyze information as they are doing themselves a disservice by limiting their horizons to there own intellectual prejudices.
- messel 17y agoTimes are tight, so while more unemployed folks are desparately tearing revenue out of their businesses, the business growth is seeing less of the capital fired back in as growth. Suspect YC comments will be more optimistic with perceived wealth increasing and folks spending more of their hard earned $$ I'm optimistic, but I have food in my belly at this moment, and a warm place to sleep tonight. That combination falls under the "rich" category at the moment.
- bjclark 17y agoI've noticed it. Especially the anti-37signals comments. I got -4 for saying I agreed with DHH about something.
- utku_karatas2 17y agoWas your post only saying that? That you agree with DHH? In that case you got those downvotes for adding a useless comment to the discussion where a simple upvote would cut. Your agreement or disagreement without a story backing you up means nothing to the reader. Don't take it the wrong way.
- Poiesis 17y agoWait--wasn't an upvote supposed to be based on post quality, and not on agreement?
- jacquesm 17y agoThe temptation to write 'you must be new here' was resisted (for the most part), but it was tough (and mostly because I think I'm 'new here' myself). As for upvotes being on post quality, that may have been once the intention but it seems that has long gone out the window. Imo that degrades the quality of HN quite a bit but since you can't really check why someone got modded down I guess it does not matter much. People that mod down because of disagreeing with you would have done so anyway even if that would not have been policy. And those that mod up/down based on post quality would probably do so too. Any change you perceive is probably more related to how the numbers of those groups develop.
- chasingsparks 17y agoIf the proportion of negative comments is growing and if this is a symptom of karma lust, it's a pretty interesting event. The assertion being that as karma wealth grew, the system has became more volatile. There are some complaints about swarming in up-votes, but this thread deals with increasing down-votes. The question now becomes will a higher frequency of down-votes bring about smarter comments so as to avoid down-votes, or will the system become unhinged? ..I wonder if any systems act similarly? ;)
- logicalmind 17y agoThe Law of Hacker News Comments: Any sufficiently long comment thread will converge on a semantic argument. Prediction, the comments in this post will converge on the semantics of the word "negative".
- hernan7 17y agoI don't know... comments here have always had a dose of healthy skepticism. Now, if I never again read a comment starting with "meh", "yawn" or "shrug", I will die a happy man.
- fauigerzigerk 17y agoI'm going to look through my comments to see if I'm contributing to that. Admittedly, it's tempting to react when I see something I disagree with.
- zackattack 17y agoThe reason that now it is a race to see who can write the first criticism or who can pick out the first inconsistency, is because people think that they will be upvoted for that. So, we just have to start changing what people get upvoted for. I think we should create a small group of supermoderators who have 10x voting power.
- elblanco 17y agoIt's perhaps not helpful that HN is also full of pedantic know-it-alls (I count myself among that group). A community of self-made people tends to self-select for a certain personality type.
- fjabre 17y agoAgreed. This is kind of the reason PG did away with numbers on comments a little while ago but brought them back after a lot of criticism.
- techiferous 17y agoI'm a refugee from Reddit. That place has become too immature and ignorant. It's hard to have a courteous, intelligent discussion there; it very easily degenerates into name-calling, arrogance and dogmatism. It feels like middle school all over again. Hacker News' voting system is very Reddit-like, so it will also become Reddit. Expect Hacker News to become more immature as it grows in popularity. Here are two changes that can be made to Hacker News to keep it from becoming Reddit: * Discourage controversial or dramatic posts. For example, the latest brouhaha about American Airlines and Dustin Curtis was very dramatic, but its educational value was lower than some other less-dramatic posts on Hacker News. I think it's okay to have content like that on Hacker News, but there should be some damping effects to keep the controversial stories lower on the list. Otherwise, Hacker News will be taken over by knee-jerk, reactionary thinking instead of deeper, more nuanced, intelligent discussion. Technical gossip will supplant technical news. * Provide two ways to vote: vote up if you agree, and vote up if you think the content is valuable. It's important not to conflate the two into one vote up button.
- dcurtis 17y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=924943 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=924943 It is because of this thread that I probably won't participate in discussions here anymore. The extreme negativity and personal attacks make me feel as though I'm not a welcome voice here. I miss the hacker news from two years ago, when I doubt wmeredith would have been supported so highly for a nasty personal attack. On the other hand, I understand Michael Arrington a lot better now.
- unalone 17y agoWhile I sympathize with you, you're a part of the blogosphere and you're acclaimed. With that comes the criticism you deserve. Would you claim to be perfect in skill and intent? Are your writings brilliant and your designs unilaterally breathtaking? No? Then you should not only accept intensive criticism or embrace it. The simple fact is that if you were flawless, wmeredith wouldn't have felt the need to call you an ass; that he chose to, and that others agreed with his sentiment, implies a fault of your own, and one that you can fix and mature in the process. Pressure makes diamonds and suchlike. I learned when I was thirteen that the Internet existed to call me out for my bullshit. I have it to thank that I've become as shitless as I am, and I welcome the future negativity that I'm sure will shape me in the future. You can either sulk that people think you're an asshole, or you can figure out why and become better in the future. The contrast between this controversy with you and the Fake Steve controversy last month is striking. You get called out for bullshit and reply by being smug. You don't even drop the smug in private email conversation, as I found out last night. Then, when people get irritated and slap you, your reaction isn't to lose the insincerity but to get mad at the people who'll call you out for shit. Meanwhile, last month Dan Lyons decided he was pissed off at John Gruber, and Gruber utterly ignored him except when he had a crushing rebuttal. That's maturity. You'd do well to learn it before you try grandstanding the way you did with your American Airlines series. EDIT: Can whoever's started downvoting Dustin please not? He made an earnest argument, and he's contributing to the conversation.
- dcurtis 17y agoI have been trying to resist responding to you. At least ten of your comments in that thread contained petty negative personal attacks as well. You do not know me, yet you have created a very negative image of me in your head after reading an angry rant I posted to my personal website. Come on.
- kingkawn 17y agoIf you're convinced that the world is getting worse and less civilized, it means you're getting old.
- jsz0 17y agoI haven't noticed it myself but I like seeing inconsistencies picked apart. It's constructive. If I disagree with someone they might get some value out of understanding why their idea/argument doesn't jive with me. I think it's only negative if you approach it with an accusatory or condescending tone. Otherwise it's exactly what a lively discussion should be.
- WesleyJohnson 17y agoI haven't been around HN long enough to really notice a shift in the negativity of comments, but I have been around long to realize I could very easily become part of the probably that a lot of you talk about: signal to noise. I keep coming back to HN because of the caliber of minds that offer up advice, criticism or personal thoughts on a daily basis for little in return. I envy the amount of collective intellect that HN users have, and yet therein lies the problem - I envy it, so I want to be part of it. I'm considered the most intelligent person in my family and in my previous job I was the "goto" guy for the tougher questions, the hard assignments or just general advice on your random everyday things. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with this sense of worth. You're admired, needed even, and feel like you have something to offer. On HN, however, I often feel like I have something to SAY, not necessarily something to contribute. This realization has made me very cautious about posting unless I really feel like I can add value to the conversation. Commenting, as I understand it, should really be about just that - adding value. Having said that however, I also think there is room to embrace newer users who don't really understand this mechanic. Down voting a comment to oblivion doesn't help with educating those who really don't understand why they're being down voted, whether or not it's a troll or just a misguided newbie. Repeat offenders are a different matter and I can't really offer up suggestions on how to handle them, but for the newer members of HN who just happen to confuse something to add with something to say - hopefully giving them a casual nudge in the right direction will really with keeping HN on track.
- techiferous 17y agoAnother idea is to hide the karma number beside posts and comments. You still position the higher-ranked ones near the top, but no number is displayed so that it doesn't influence your vote as much (the bandwagon effect).
- Pistos2 17y ago"Experiment: No Comment Scores" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844979 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844979
- Mz 17y agoAs a place grows in size, it changes in structure. There are always growing pains. Some places handle the transition better than others. Small, close-knit communities where people know each other well function very different from large communities where most people don't know each other well.