I think it's the opposite trend actually over the last two years. HN has become a lot more positive. Frankly I think it's reduced discussion quality a lot; people are unwilling to be frank and point out flaws.

I don't think this is a recent trend, look at the presentation post of Dropbox[1] from 9 years ago. On the one hand, YC is a relatively contrarian community. On the other hand, if you agree with something you may not have much to add, but if you disagree you'll probably want to express why.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Well, the top 2 comments are dismissive, but after that there are lots of positive comments.

> Part of me wishes HN had a really strong moderator that slapped down nay-sayers.

Slapping down dissenting opinions leads to an echo-chamber. One mans sceptic is another's "nay-sayer", I think community moderation (via votes) is filtering high value comments rather well,so specific moderation is hardly required: egregious flaming excepted.

> If you're not contributing something valuable, comment deleted

Just because you disagree with a given opinion does not make it worthless.

> Part of me wishes HN had a really strong moderator that slapped down nay-sayers. If you're not contributing something valuable, comment deleted.

What a load of rubbish. Note that HN already has strong moderation, and does delete "way out there" contrarian views. If this was taken to the extreme, only back-patting allowed, the comments would become useless. And I feel, like others, this already goes on a lot (e.g. the top karma posters all tend to agree/compliment each other, there isn't that much disagreement although it happens sometimes).

> I can't agree more. I've seen HN degrade into that kind of discussion over the last 2 years and it really disappoints me.

You say it's "degraded", but it's more likely that HN's audience has diversified as it's grown, and therefore it's less likely for you to agree with any given comment.

Just an idea: sentiment analysis has gotten pretty accurate.

What if HN included sentiment in the sort algorithm?

The post score you see would stay the same (upvotes minus downvotes). You'd just multiply the sort score by, for example, 1.25 for posts positive in tone and 0.8 for posts with negative tone.

So if two comments have about the same number of upvotes, the nicer one appears higher up.

Criticism or disapproval could still become top post with enough upvotes, but it wouldnt happen as often as it does now.

That presumes that the negative comments are always the ones derailing the discussion. For example:

"I think these questions at IAC are great, it's good that people get a chance to <self promote thing> at a technical conference"

"Wtf is with these stupid questions at IAC? They should be asking about <fascinating technical detail>"

Hah, you just described the sheer drivel which is comments on LinkedIn stories. Good point - contentious and _well presented_ negative arguments are still helpful.

Then perhaps use sentiment analysis to remove the derailing part of both negative and negative comments?

i.e.,

"I think these questions at IAC are great,..."

"...they should be asking about <fascinating technical detail>"

> What if HN just automatically penalized negative posts?

"I think it's a good idea to start a national wingsuit base jumping team."

"I don't know if that's a good idea. Pretty high chance of death"

Penalized - negative post

I am currently doing a (simple) sentiment analysis for the complete reddit comment set. Perhaps when I am done with that, I can have a look at the HN corpus (where to download?) for correlations between upvotes and users, though I doubt that rating post quality by sentiment is easy.

But it could be useful to look at the comment history of a user. When someone who is an overall positively minded contributor (with a high average positive sentiment) suddenly writes one scathing reply, this could mark a potentially interesting thread.

You can query the HN corpus with Google's Bigquery: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news

If that worked at all, it could be applied before the comment was even posted. Warn the user that their comment looks inordinately negative, and ask if they would like to revise before submitting.

This is not about censoring or discouraging criticism. Often criticism is fair and warranted.

I just want positive comments to appear as the top comment more often.

Negative commenta should have a bit of a higher bar (in other words, need more votes) to get to the top

I think hackaday is a good example of a community with similar (techie) people to HN that has gone further down the same path of negativity, cynicism, and salt. HN is great and the moderators here do a good job (I'm always impressed by the way dang handles issues), but I do think some sort of push is needed to get us off of that path.

Hackaday comments have never not been salty, and I say that as someone who's followed that site since before the pictures were in color. I'm not sure there is a useful comparison to be drawn.

I was there in those days too. Maybe it didn't change, I just got sick of it.

The way I recall it is that I was the one who changed. Of course, I haven't gone back to check, so I may be wrong about that.

> Part of me wishes HN had a really strong moderator that slapped down nay-sayers. If you're not contributing something valuable, comment deleted.

Pointing out flaws == not valuable?

Not nearly as valuable as negative people seem to think.