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.
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.