News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:65% of Hacker News Posts Have Negative Sentiment, and The... by immibis on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @10:53AM (#46513878)
I don't think YC startups need to sneak to promote their startups - they can just ask the moderators to give them a boost.

Meanwhile if you say anything bad about capitalism the comment is removed.

Re:65% of Hacker News Posts Have Negative Sentiment, and The... by nosianu on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @10:59AM (#46513979)
> Meanwhile if you say anything bad about capitalism the comment is removed.

If that is an example for how your usual comments look like, I can assure you it has nothing to do with whether you criticize capitalism or not. A low-effort single-sentence mood statement is just not a good fit for the site.

Re:65% of Hacker News Posts Have Negative Sentiment, and The... by rvnx on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @10:58AM (#46513972)
I am genuinely none sure.

I would tend to think that this goes naturally:

you get boosted by a circle of people you know, and who wants you to succeed, because if you succeed they will get money), so there is the incentive in some way.

but it's still plausible that getting a boost on HN is part of the package (but I am not sure it is needed, because of this natural push that you get from let's say 100 people around you).

What you said about capitalism is true, I noticed it too, and it sounds even strange to me, as we are literally on a board that is initiated by a capitalist fund.

Re:65% of Hacker News Posts Have Negative Sentiment, and The... by JKCalhoun on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @10:58AM (#46513973)
I've seen plenty of anti-Capitalism comments on HN. To be sure, not the popular opinion.
Re:65% of Hacker News Posts Have Negative Sentiment, and The... by mschuster91 on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @11:22AM (#46514363)
One thing I've noticed over the decades here: anti-capitalism used to get you flagged to death in the past... but since Covid and especially since the Russian invasion and associated price shocks / cost-of-living crisis, it takes a lot to even get downvoted.

The HN culture used to be almost exclusively a ton of nerds thinking that tech and the free market would be the answer for everything - but the last few years have served as a brutal, but very effective reality check for a lot of people.

Re:65% of Hacker News Posts Have Negative Sentiment, and The... by lostlogin on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @11:26AM (#46514426)
> last few years have served as a brutal, but very effective reality check for a lot of people.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much of a good side to it all. Work from home maybe?

It’s back a ton of progress on many fronts. Counter examples welcomed.

Re:65% of Hacker News Posts Have Negative Sentiment, and The... by mjr00 on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @01:08PM (#46516088)
> The HN culture used to be almost exclusively a ton of nerds thinking that tech and the free market would be the answer for everything - but the last few years have served as a brutal, but very effective reality check for a lot of people.

IMO it's more the HN userbase has expanded, a lot, and now includes a lot of people who aren't the same tech enthusiasts the site had historically. Yeah, I know, eternal September and all that, but to put it into perspective: Trump's first election victory got 2215 comments[0], his second election victory got 9275 comments[1]. There are some mitigating factors here--iirc HN was having downtime issues due to the traffic in 2016--but HN was already pretty popular among tech enthusiasts 9 years ago, and it's grown 400% from that!

I'm sure some people have changed their minds, but any shifts (perceived or real) in politics on HN are more likely due to changes in the userbase over time, IMO.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42057647

Re:65% of Hacker News Posts Have Negative Sentiment, and The... by mschuster91 on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @03:05PM (#46517874)
> I'm sure some people have changed their minds, but any shifts (perceived or real) in politics on HN are more likely due to changes in the userbase over time, IMO.

"Eternal September" explains (correctly IMHO) why there are more people of a different background, but more people doesn't explain why it is very noticeable that downvotes and deathflags don't happen as frequently as before.

Re:65% of Hacker News Posts Have Negative Sentiment, and The... by zzzeek on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @11:12AM (#46514202)
"you're posting too fast; please slow down"