Re:Open-letter: Did hackernews become hateboard?
by brudgers on Monday March 26, 2012 @01:01PM
(#3757575)
Negativity can be bad. Grinfucking always is.
HN offers a certain type of feedback for new ideas. When it was a smaller community, it offered a different type. This probably had some advantages when someone needed encouragement. The downside was that feedback was closer to the fiends and family end of the spectrum. Now a shared idea will see a broader range of opinions, and this probably means more people who will see the idea as pointless, trivial, or just plain dumb. The upside is that the idea will see more diverse debugging.
The issue with many "new idea" posts is that there doesn't seem to be a specific purpose behind them. So many are, "here's my site" followed by "yeah, I know the landing page sucks" and "thanks for letting me know that not everyone wants to log in with Facebook."
General requests for feedback illicit general responses.
Sometimes, I read "My great idea" threads and my impulse is to debug it. That means ruthlessly pointing to problems or possible problems - e.g. the person whose "startup idea" is a lifestyle consultancy which doesn't scale well and probably will never attract outside investment.
While one of the things I appreciate about the HN culture is "think about what you would say face to face," there's a certain way in which it doesn't apply - in person, I would know if sandwiching was productive, online, I assume that it isn't.
The reason I assume it isn't is because online comments are not just for the individual who asks the question -- this comment doesn't start "Dear Devrim." This comment is more or less standing on a soapbox in the public square, as are most in an online forum. In a public forum sandwiching adds noise and tends to ignore the context.
HN offers a certain type of feedback for new ideas. When it was a smaller community, it offered a different type. This probably had some advantages when someone needed encouragement. The downside was that feedback was closer to the fiends and family end of the spectrum. Now a shared idea will see a broader range of opinions, and this probably means more people who will see the idea as pointless, trivial, or just plain dumb. The upside is that the idea will see more diverse debugging.
The issue with many "new idea" posts is that there doesn't seem to be a specific purpose behind them. So many are, "here's my site" followed by "yeah, I know the landing page sucks" and "thanks for letting me know that not everyone wants to log in with Facebook."
General requests for feedback illicit general responses.
Sometimes, I read "My great idea" threads and my impulse is to debug it. That means ruthlessly pointing to problems or possible problems - e.g. the person whose "startup idea" is a lifestyle consultancy which doesn't scale well and probably will never attract outside investment.
While one of the things I appreciate about the HN culture is "think about what you would say face to face," there's a certain way in which it doesn't apply - in person, I would know if sandwiching was productive, online, I assume that it isn't.
The reason I assume it isn't is because online comments are not just for the individual who asks the question -- this comment doesn't start "Dear Devrim." This comment is more or less standing on a soapbox in the public square, as are most in an online forum. In a public forum sandwiching adds noise and tends to ignore the context.