>Someone shares something interesting and OP gets a barrage of nit-picky commentary

everyone on hn is of the belief about themselves that they're dispassionate (objective) intellectuals and so of course their criticisms aren't in bad faith.

and moderators never address these kinds of comments but do often address comments like yours because they incite "flame wars" (since dispassionate intellectuals can be quite defensive).

I actually saw a comment yesterday from someone meta commenting on someone's project saying that the problem with coders is that they/we are "too nice" and thus we encourage too much bad practice.

So ridiculous that I didn't even feel it deserved a response.

I agree that the tone could certainly be better. That said, feedback like "why does a pixel editor need a graphics accelerator?" is probably warranted, since it limits the end users without apparent good reason. Perhaps just a better way of phrasing?

Unfortunately, that's pretty typical of HN nowadays. High up in the HN rules are "Be kind" and "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work," but I don't know that everyone reads the rules or cares much beyond proving they are better than the submitter :/ not sure how the community can get better about this.

It's probably not as simple as I'm about to make it out to be, but to me, it just seems that positivity is not rewarded nearly as much as negativity. How many people will upvote a Show HN on the new page, opposed to an article about "X is wrong," "X is shutting down," etc.? How many people will upvote a compliment or genuine feedback?

"I hate this too" goes a lot farther than "I like this too."

Maybe I'm on the wrong site if that's what I'm looking for, but I suggest anyone reading this try to boost some of the more positive comments they see.

I think as humans we are prediposed to attend to negativity rather than positivity. If things are well, we can safely ignore them. If things are not well we need to attend them to potentially fix them or arm ourself with knowledge that will prevent it again.

When you post your project that you've spent hours of hard work on to HN, expect a lot of criticism, with very little of it actually related to the purpose of your work, and even less of it to be actually constructive criticism.