When TypeScript came out and for the first couple of years, I was the biggest TypeScript zealot on the planet. I loved it! There was a point when I typed T that the autosuggestions on iPhone would suggest "Typescript" :-) This all to say: when anti-Typescript sentiment popped up, I definitely noticed it, and it definitely annoyed me. (I still think back on jashkenas saying that he didn't see any point in TS because any good engineer wouldn't make the errors it catches and I just want to throttle him! But I digress...) And there definitely was a lot of it.
But there was a difference in quality between the anti-TS sentiment and the anti-AI sentiment. No one ever attacked my abilities as an engineer for saying I liked TS; no one ever said the things I built with TS were embarrassing or intern-quality like they have with AI. It never devolved into personal attacks the way that anti-AI commentariat pull out when they run out of other arguments.
I'd make a humble suggestion. I would like to suggest that when comments get that derisive, that those comments are removed faster and those users are banned faster. I genuinely think it brings down the quality of discourse site-wide. (FWIW, I think the same about pro-AI incendiary content - very low-quality comments about how people are going to lose their jobs / become obsolete without AI should equally well be flagged, removed and banned.)
I know the HN moderator team is incredibly busy and I am very thankful for all you do!
> I completely am fine with HN being a negative place
That can't be true, or else the personal attacks, derisive and incendiary content you're describing wouldn't bother you!
Also, it isn't possible to treat comment quality and negativity as separate issues because the two are related. Negativity reduces comment quality, for many reasons. One is what when people are angry or frightened they become repetitive and uncreative. Another is that such comments evoke more, and worse, from others.
> I would like to suggest that when comments get that derisive, that those comments are removed faster and those users are banned faster.
No argument there, but this is what we're already doing, or at least trying to do, regardless of the topic. If we knew a more effective way to do it, we'd be there!
FWIW, I think we agree on almost everything, but just a clarification on this point. I am perfectly fine (in fact I delight in reading) if HN is negative in the flavor of "You are completely wrong, here are sources 1 2 and 3 that show you exactly why you are wrong". I have read plenty of anti-AI writing on HN of that form and enjoyed it. OK, I don't love it when it's directed at me, but everyone needs to be told they are wrong sometimes. But I very strongly dislike "Only an inexperienced person could hold a view like that", i.e. personal attacks.
> No argument there, but this is what we're already doing, or at least trying to do, regardless of the topic. If we knew a more effective way to do it, we'd be there!
Godspeed :)
The interesting question is, if it's so consistent, how can it go unnoticed for so long (as you've reported) and/or get perceived as one-sided ("HN is so anti-A!") when in fact it is almost always two-sided ("HN users are divided on A")?
I believe there's a clear answer: it's because what you notice depends on how you feel [2]. If you like A, or (more precisely) dislike anti-A, you are far more likely to notice anti-A posts. Not only that, but they will make a stronger impression on you than the median post—even the median pro-A post.
These two factors—frequency of impression and impact of impression—combine to create a strong picture of the site as anti-A—so strong that people often use universals like "always" and "never" and "absolutely" when describing it. In reality, HN is a statistical cloud of datapoints and your pre-existing feelings are what determines which datapoints you notice (i.e. frequency) and how strongly they affect you (i.e. impact). [3]
This is why people with strongly opposing views feel the same about how biased HN is, just in opposite directions! i.e. with the A team convinced there's a strong anti-A bias and the B team equally convinced there's a strong anti-B bias. It's simply (<-- that word again) that their feelings cause them to notice different subsets of the available datapoints. Abstract out the directional bit (pro- or anti-A), and their comments become isomorphic.
Unfortunately for us, HN is more afflicted by this phenomenon than sites which allow sharding, whether by social group (e.g. Twitter's follow lists) or content (e.g. Reddit's subreddits), and thus organize the community into silos [4]. HN is non-siloed, meaning everyone is in the same big community: all the As, all the anti-As, all the Bs, and all the anti-Bs - all roaming the same threads and bumping into each other. You are therefore more likely to run into datapoints you dislike and so more likely to feel that the community is biased against your view, and - what's worse - more biased the more strongly you feel!
For me this is sad, because I believe that in reality HN is a somewhat (<-- let's not exaggerate) more thoughtful and tolerant community than most others of the same or greater size, but precisely because of this dynamic, ends up being perceived as less so. (I wrote a thing about this a few years ago, if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.)
I believe this is why one so often hears about how toxic, nasty, negative HN is—not that it isn't those things! but the relative level of them gets distorted. Human beings simply can't take very much of what they dislike and disagree with before resorting to generalization and other internal barriers. This is basically an immune response. It often takes only a handful of datapoints (3, or 2, or maybe even just 1) before the impression burns into the retina and becomes a permanent image [5].
(Side note: in one case I saw, some people were agreeing about how terrible and mean Hacker News is, and to prove the point, one of them linked to a vile reply he had received. That reply, however, was from Twitter—not from HN at all! He hastened to add "HN is the same"—somewhat self-refutingly, since if this were true, an actual example would not have been hard to find. In reality, while such vile comments do appear on HN, the community quickly flags most, and moderators eventually flag most of the rest. This is an example of the skew in perception I'm talking about.)
This phenomenon is at its most painful when the topic is close to one's heart—for example, when one's own work is being discussed. In cases like that, it doesn't take much before one feels wounded, and such painful impressions rarely go away.
I write a long digressive post about this once or twice a year because it makes me sad, especially since I've learned that it comes from fundamentals [6] - in this case, how HN's design interacts with human hard-wiring. Because of this, it is not going to change, and cannot be affected by argument.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] I don't mean "you" personally, of course—everyone does this. It's a double whammy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion, sometimes described in this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect.
[3] Lots of past explanation here if anyone wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[6] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...