This is a big part of the reason why I dialed my contributions way back, and I've heard the same from many other great people in the IRL tech community that I respect. Unfortunately each time a positive person stops contributing on HN it just leads to the site becoming more negative. It is a vicious cycle.

The moderators here humor and even encourage it, despite it nominally being a rule not to editorialize titles they'll humor the people and edit it up 2 or 3 times.

It's the shallowest of content that contributes nothing to the larger discussion. I'm not sure if it's a weird way to farm karma or if people just tend to be a little bit on the spectrum, but some people just can't resist arguing about it.

Heavens no. We react the way we do to minimize off-topic title complaints. Otherwise they take over and make things even worse.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

For what it's worth, a few times recently (as well as on other occasions) I've submitted a title as-is very reluctantly, and knowing it will certainly be changed if the submission gets any traction.

I think the one that got the most traction was 'The NHS is looking for up to 250k volunteers' [0], original title:

> ‘Your NHS Needs You’ – NHS call for volunteer army

Of course that was going to get changed, and I mostly support that change, with only slight hesitation since the aspect I found most interesting (and provoked me to submit it) was the language; the article went on to talk about 'rallying the troops'.

My point is, yes it's in the guidelines not to editorialise titles, but it also says not to include numbers like '{6 }things you never knew about X' or superfluous adjectives like 'Show HN: {My amazing }whitespace to rust transpiler'.

It also qualifies not editorialising with 'unless misleading or linkbait', which I suppose I could arguably have used as a reason to change [0], and perhaps that's the basis on which they're all edited.

I and probably others generally submit the original thinking if it's popular as-is then there may be some discussion and collective (or moderated) decision on the title; who am I the submitter to make that call.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22677209

Both sides of that rule are important: when to not change the title and when to do so.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I find the worst type post is "the website is broken / that css could use some work / when I see this site on Chrobar XX Turbo the scrollbar disappears".

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

It's because they're devoid of any actual content and uninteresting to every other reader. I agree they might feel nice to the OP in the case of 'Show HNs', but in those cases there's probably another way to reach out (and the higher effort will make it more meaningful).

(I could've sworn there was a point in the guidelines on this even using similar language - 'devoid', 'content' - but there doesn't seem to be now. Perhaps I've just read someone commenting something similar a few times!)

Something like:

I've bookmarked this for later review, good post (this partially exists as the upvote)

I like posts like this (an overload of the upvote)

I want to read what other users think of this, but don't necessarily have a comment of my own. HN, please comment (an overload of the upvote as well)

I think this post is off-topic (this one exists - its called the downvote for users with ~520+ points)

I think this post violates the guidelines (this one also exists - called flag)

# "Changed my mind" (icon: graduation cap)

In most communities, this is a overload of the upvote. But it's a particularly good kind of upvote, the complement of the usual echo-chamber "upvoting because I already agree". The icon+phrasing combo reframes "I lost the debate" into a positive thing, more like "I was educated". It's my far my favorite reaction to receive -- lots of warm fuzzies. In order to avoid confusion/misuse, we did not make this the primary upvote (that's thumbs up, with the verb "appreciate").

# Sympathies (icon: blue ribbon)

It's a bit tasteless to "like" or "heart" sad news (eg, someone passed away). At the same time, a downvote isn't appropriate, either. This fills the role of "support for the person posting, not the topic they're posting about".

[1]: You can see some of it, as well as the full set, here: https://community.snowdrift.coop/t/custom-emojis-esp-as-reto...

The only thing that's 'missing' is the public declaration; putting one's name to the upvote.

Due to its roots, Hacker News started out with a community heavily biased towards people with entrepreneurial tendencies who are often optimistic by nature. Over time more tech people were told about Hacker News and started participating. These people in turn brought in other people from other academic fields (e.g. law, medicine, engineering, physical sciences etc). Many of the newcomers, especially those who had training beyond their graduate degree, are likely to have been immersed in an academic culture where ideas are put up to be critiqued. At a high level the goal being for ideas to be tested in a collaborative fashion and any weaknesses addressed so they can be improved. Everyone working together to move their field forward through the refinement of shared knowledge and understanding.

Having spent some time doing post-graduate research in science then transferring to working as a self taught software developer in industry - this difference in culture is something I've become aware of multiple times.

In my experience executives and business development/sales oriented people often struggle dealing with technical colleagues who point out problems in their ideas/plans. They perceive the challenges as negativity or pessimism instead of an attempt to refine the idea/plan to something workable or less risky. On the critics side, they have been sufficiently interested in the idea/plan to give it serious consideration so it can be disheartening to be ignored or rebuked for offering a critical response with the aim of refining the approach.

I've also noticed this difference in approach even when working with other software developers who went into industry straight out of university. From my perspective many of them don't routinely apply critical thinking in their work. They rarely question why the system is designed a certain way and simply try to jam whatever feature they are implementing into the current design even if it is a bad fit. This usually means adding many changes in lots of places throughout the code base, because it is quicker to do by the deadline (pace over perfection). Compared to stepping back a reviewing the business model at a higher level which would take longer to change but make the code easier to maintain in the long term.

You noted pedantic comments get upvotes. People who are deep in the details of a field have to be particular about word and language use to avoid misunderstandings and make communication with other people in the field more efficient (this often leads to heavy use of jargon). Marketing and sale oriented people like to be looser with word use to portray something with the best possible interpretation (ie "organic" products).

As a simple example, in a previous job I refactored an old code base doing Monte Carlo, Markov Chain simulations from doing each iteration sequentially in a single thread, to being able to run in parallel in multiple threads. For many workloads this meant a significant (many hours) reduction in simulation time. For other workloads the added overhead of collating all the results back into a single data set meant a slight increase in run time (a few minutes). The marketing people wanted to claim an X times speed up when promoting the new version (best possible interpretation for increased appeal to customers). I wasn't comfortable with that as I knew some existing users wouldn't have that experience (being pedantic).

I would see the marketing teams version as being way too loose with language (bordering on being untrue at times). They in turn saw my revisions as not sexy enough or too wordy. It took effort from both sides to get to something we were all comfortable with.

Having said all the above, I agree that sometimes HN can be unnecessarily negative of people's fun projects/weekend hacks. I sometimes like to play with sub-optimal solutions to problems because I have a sudden inspiration to try something and don't want to spend hours researching perfect approaches. These projects usually don't have any commercial or academic purpose, it's just an itch being scratched and an opportunity to do some greenfields coding with no restrictions (not something I get much opportunity for in my current job). I have seen other people's projects torn to shreds when they happen to make it onto HN and it always makes me a bit sad.

Is the critique and pedantry good or bad? I'd say it depends on the situation. Sometimes very good information or ideas will come from the critiques and the pedantry can help eliminate ambiguity from a conversation and lead to some new and interesting places (one of the main reasons I come to HN is the high quality of these conversations). Sometimes it can devolve into academic point scoring for no apparent purpose.

Maybe something for people offering critical feedback (including myself) to consider would be to lead or end their contribution with a positive note. This would at least signal their intention is to collaborate on getting to something better.

I'm sure what I've said above will be picked apart. I have generalised a lot to keep the response shorter. I do not believe all startup founders are optimists or technical people are all pedants etc. My point is more that the HN audience is composed of a wider mixture of people from different fields than when it started. This undoubtedly will affect the nature of the conversations.

I hope this response doesn't come across as negative :) It has been interesting to me to think about and speculate as to why it has occurred.

https://hbr.org/2019/09/how-to-create-an-online-community-th...

For what that's worth.

I spent a couple years not really participating on HN or anywhere else, just lurking periodically. Later I started using Twitter actively (mostly for work purposes). Many of the people in my community on Twitter are heavily critical of HN. Look up "the orange site" on Twitter for examples of a common way that people disparagingly refer to HN on Twitter: https://twitter.com/search?q=%22the%20orange%20site%22&src=t...

I wouldn't say that Twitter influenced my opinion of HN though, it just confirmed to me that there were other people who were also feeling uncomfortable with some of the personality types and commenting patterns on HN. Of course Twitter has its own serious problems with negativity as well haha.

Similarly, this is the place where valuable discussion and insights around WebGPU have been shared, even though some of that discussion is in the form of complaints ("Apple is trying to sabotage a SPIR-V based approach").

I don't think the better health is just because of smaller size and niche appeal, I think the reach of HN is considerable. I think we really do need to thank the tireless moderation work of dang and others for that.

;-p

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

As an aside, I don't read HN that way. Even when there's a pessimistic tone, I often read right through it and think to myself "that's some good advice". It will be interesting to see whether we become more bearish simply due to the COVID-19 environment we're all working in now.

Pragmatic: when hearing praise, my thoughts are sometimes, "yeah, yeah, cut to the chase." I guess you gotta read your audience.

Emotional: It IS easy to be negative. We also tend to over-experience/over-perceive the negative, which (partially) is how we get over-reaction to criticism or advice, even when asked for. And sometimes we really just want validation. I guess you gotta, uh, read your audience.

This is something I am trying to do in real life as well (although I don't always succeed). For some reason it's really easy for me to open my mouth to talk about weakenesses/problems with things, but it's not as natural to highlight the positive aspects. I also try to say aloud my positive thoughts about people when they pop in my head instead of keeping them to myself.

What happens when a forum or medium expands to basically the entire population? Twitter, at least for people who read both popular posts and reply chains that those posts inspire. It makes Eternal September look like a book club full of the world's most articulate English professors sipping tea and politely conversing about complex plot points while taking care not to say things that could be misinterpreted or incorrectly seen as a personal attack on someone else.

When people post good things (not necessarily positive things, but at least negative things that spark good conversations), those posts may or may not inspire other good posts. They probably won't inspire bad posts, worst case is that they don't inspire any responses but that's OK- good posts stand on their own and not everything needs to be a conversation.

Similarly, when people post bad things (not necessarily negative things, just things that spark bad conversations), it will hardly ever inspire good posts in response, but it's very likely to inspire many more bad posts.

So, good posts inspire more good posts, bad posts inspire more bad posts, but IME bad posts are like 10-100x more likely to spark followups. Going back to Usenet, you could have the greatest newsgroup in the world, but it could all collapse due to an influx of shitty posting from a teeny tiny subset of the people reading the group. It's like a virus that infects a forum. The bad posts explode in response to each other, the good posters slowly drift away altogether, and all of a sudden you find yourself in Slashdot or Usenet circa 1999. It's basically nothing but people insulting each other or using bad faith arguments or just writing at great length about how much they think stuff sucks.

That should be the single endpoint that every community optimizes itself to avoid.

Because typically, they have better things to do. And once they decide to leave, they're not coming back.

And once the ratio of those folks : total users drops below a certain point, there's no coming back.

By contrast, is there a case to make for when 'an un-informed, un-thoughtful, un-pleasant person decides they're not going to post anymore'? If so, what would you say that tells us about an online community?

Of course, Eternal September also applies and HN likely suffers from a low level case of it. If you aren't familiar, it's easily found on Wikipedia.

On Usenet, there was always the killfile and thread branch pruning (although the dedicated could somehow just create a new id, I suppose).

My takeaway being that it should be possible (or easy, even) for a user to shape their experience.

If we were designing a new community, which I guess we're not. :-\

I have been on HN for years but as I've not done much DMing and don't live in the Silicon Valley geographical area, I've never had an invite to join. Which is not a complaint as such, more like an acknowledgement that if there is a HN user who feels he's done at least okay in the effort to be a good HN user, yet has not been invited to lobste.rs, it probably would result in a more rarified user population for that site.

Exclusive clubs seem to correlate to good reputations, and for good reason.

I think part of the reason is that business has co-opted optimism and positivity. To the point where being positive seems to not be genuine. Furthermore, I think if the 80s-00s have taught us anything, it's that technology and business aren't going to fix the core problems us in the first world are facing currently... trust, community, health, environment, stress, etc. especially considering these are mostly problems caused by technology and business.

I think the industry has matured and lost its fun and sense of adventure. Once upon a time captain crunch and blue box, war dialling, or office-wide unreal ctf at the end of the day; now we have sprints, OKRs, and codes of conduct. It's becoming accountancy.

I've become a bit disillusioned with how negative HN seems to have become. Yes I'm well aware this has long been an issue (see: famous HN post from Drew Houston announcing DropBox), but it feels amplified these days. Maybe it's a sign of the times. There are certainly a lot of issues in todays world that seem to be increasing cynicism, but I'll see new tech posted on HN that is incredibly exciting only to see a bunch of comments tearing it to pieces over nit picks. It's like the community has lost ability to hold vision and have excitement for potential.

New creations are full of problems -- there hasn't been time to iron out the wrinkles -- but a lot of HN comments expect perfection from the get go and when they don't see it they rip the creation to shreds. It's demoralizing.

Because the central purpose of technology is to make things easier and simpler, not more complicated, every new piece of technology should have to justify itself. People who developed programming languages always understood this, new features need to have a real, significant purpose, or long term you have a big problem.

So I don't mind people being harsh or critical of new stuff. If what you have built is really useful (like Dropbox) it will survive and the critics will be proven wrong. It's tempting to sort of hype each other up and motivate each other but criticism has a more useful function even if some of it turns out to be wrong.

But HN has a skeptical attitude towards everything. HN, if we're being honest, stopped being a tech discussion forum a while ago. A user is free to ignore the multitude of other subjects that HN discusses in a day, and focus exclusively on the tech posts if they wish. But it's been my observation that a post about whatever political, economic, or historic subject will draw more mindshare per minute resident on the front page. And of course, posts will be largely negative. That's the nature of HN.

And, not only HN. I think this is the nature of most online discussion forums unfortunately. Before we can get to the point of comparing a healthy online forum with a non-healthy forum, we'd have to concede that it's difficult to find a healthy online forum at all. I'm not talking about online forums where all users are known to each other. Like the medical forums you find in use at certain healthcare delivery networks. You would expect such professional forums to be a bit more contemplative. I'm speaking of average, completely ungated online forum. In these environments, a healthy ecosystem will become more and more elusive with growth. Not really aware of any demonstrated working solution to that issue.

None of this is really the fault of HN, it's just the nature of user behavior in ungated online forums.

Not to mention, it seems like Steve Jobs was right about DropBox. It's a feature not a product. For the same price you pay for DropBox, you can get the full Microsoft Office Suite plus 6TB of storage. The same with Google Drive and GSuite.

> they have never been profitable

Technically true, but mostly b/c of stock comp. Free cash flow positive for quite awhile:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DBX/dropbox/free-c...

Not exactly burning money. $1.2BN in cash holdings and growing, projected for an additional $1BN this year.

> have said in their own filings they don't know when or if they will ever be profitable

.. in 2017, and this is basically just boilerplate. Just about every company that goes public says this in their S-1 these days.

Now, 3 years later: https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/02/22/investors-cheer-dr...

Sadly that mentality has found its way here.

Then again Europeans also hate how much "moaning" goes on amongst themselves. Honestly it's easy to be down on everything all the time, try being an optimist these days. Not exactly easy.

But that's the thing isn't it? Does it feel amplified or is it actually amplified? Our misleading perceptions and biases may play a role (see: perpetual complaints about "young people these days", a common tendency to think things become worse with time).

With that said, there are still many new super cool technologies, markets, articles, events and other insights on todays front page. Don't loose hope people.

Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

(I'm sure the phenomenon isn't unique to Chicago, but rather shared among all major cities that aren't NYC or LA).

But most of HN doesn't work in startups; something like half of it isn't in the US. Without explicit norms-setting that HN seems loathe to do, it's probably not reasonable to expect the kind of enthusiasm you're talking about.

It's easy to spot in comments, posts, and articles–they have titles like:

"... is actually bad"

"... is actually good"

"... considered harmful"

"Actually, ... "

"No, you don't ... "

(1) The "senior" members do not set a good example, to say the least. People who have spent ten years honing their rhetorical skill and accumulating karma/fans so that their comments float to the top of every thread have a disproportionate influence on the overall tone. Too many of those seem to think their own startup idea from ten years ago was the absolute bees' knees, therefore anything else must be lame by comparison, and they're eager to say so at every opportunity.

(2) A lot of newer members have grown up (professionally) at FAANGs that are very opinionated in their own way, which is quite contrary to how startups work, and they are accordingly skeptical of anything startup-related.

Put those together and a torrent of negativity is pretty much inevitable.

Reddit as a whole is huge. I think of Reddit like a megalopolis, not a community.

I think some of the subreddits are communities. It would be sort of like a strong neighborhood association within a really big city.

The neighborhood or neighborhood association can have a strong sense of local community. The city as a whole probably cannot.

HN gets about 5 million unique visitors per month. It's the largest forum I consistently participate in. I'm not personally aware of any other "tech" forums that are larger.

For example, Lobste.rs is much smaller. And that's one of the names I hear the most.

According to this source, there are currently 58 subreddits with more than 5 million subscribers:

https://redditmetrics.com/top

Some of them are for STEM topics and maybe Data Is Beautiful is sort of like HN, but I'm not seeing anything obviously aimed at programmers the way HN is somewhat positioned. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.)

Facebook is also huge. I want to say it's got like a billion users. But it's not a community of a billion people. It's a bunch of individuals with a curated list of "friends."

There are Facebook groups. That's where you would look for "communities" on Facebook. I have no data on them and I'm not going to look.

I would be curious if anyone else can even name any other online communities with at least 5 million members that aren't on either Reddit or Facebook.

From where I sit, HN looks quite large and looks to me to be possibly one of the largest tech communities. I welcome any data that suggests otherwise.

I personally mostly participate on Reddit in relatively small communities with, say, 20k subscribers or 80k subscribers or a lot less than that.

There are different mods for different Reddits. If you don't get along well with one Reddit, you can go elsewhere. There can be membership overlap but you aren't necessarily subject to the "I shot the sheriff" phenomenon where no amount of trying to behave and fit in is ever enough because one or more of the mods has it in for you.

I have been on the receiving end of that. Such experiences help shape my conceptualization of the problem space and how to define a "community unit."

LinkedIn seems to be akin to Facebook in how it works. Twitter is extremely different in how it gets organized. I don't think it compares at all to things like HN or Reddit.

I'm not really familiar with Pinterest or StackOverflow.

People say HN is small and then cite Reddit or Facebook as examples of large forums. I would say that neither Reddit nor Facebook are communities or forums at all.

I would say that both Reddit and Facebook are platforms that host communities. Subreddits are communities and Facebook groups are communities and that's what you need to compare HN to if you want to gauge how big it is in comparison to other communities.

Comparing the 5 million visitors per month HN gets to the half billion members of Reddit is an apples to oranges comparison. I don't think it works.

As a platform, HN isn't very big. Reddit, Facebook and many other platforms have more traffic.

As a community or forum, I think HN is quite large. As far as I know, it's the largest and most influential (English language) tech forum on the planet.

Size does matter. The human mind only really computes a sense of community for a group of about 150 people. Above that size, you start having social dynamics like a big city, not like a tribe or village.

I generally define online communities in terms of "a group with one set of overlords." Platforms that have many subgroups with many different moderating teams strike me as platforms that host many communities. This is how Reddit works.

HN has one mod team. It has no subforums. So I think of it as a single community because it has some degree of cohesion provided by having one set of moderators (and a single space -- it doesn't really get broken up by topic, etc, the way some things do).

This is one of the reasons I feel HN is actually a very large community. Most platforms of this size or larger are more like Reddit and have been broken up into smaller subgroups.

Those subgroups are your communities. The fact that different people are in charge of different groups will foster different cultures, etc, even if the topic is nominally the same and the rules are nominally the same. They will be interpreted differently.

I've left a few other comments here already touching on some of this, chiefly these two:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22704995

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707047

There is no point in positive comments. You know what they’re going to say and they rarely add anything that the article didn’t already express. Negative comments are more intellectually satisfying to unpack.

Most new products fall in two categories: bros trying to recreate mommy hotel by introducing new and new ways to exploit poorer people but since it's an app it's not seen as bad as hiring servants. The other is just pure rent seeking. Products genuinely creating value and making the life of normal people are extraordinarily rare.

I'm definitely not one of the more talented people here, but off the top of my head...

Python 3:

  print('Hello, world!')

  console.log('Hello, world!')

  echo 'Hello world!'

  Hello, world!

  #include <stdio.h>
  
  int main() {
      printf("Hello, world!");
  }

My point is just that Hello World is really easy.

As much as I hate the language, it's a great example of the absurdist pragmatism that has made it so popular.

I disagree with your implied dichotomy between "complaining" and "improving things and building the future" - when everyone who is "building the future" is chasing the exact same surveillance-capitalist business model, what do you propose our reaction should be?