But hopefully you'll still be able to get something useful out of this crowd :D
On the other hand, what does the HN crowd say about technologies they really do find uninteresting and unimportant? Absolutely nothing. They drop right off the bottom of "NEW" without a single comment.
Edit: And to be fair, most market-speak is so vapid that we often only get one meaningful line of copy stating the purpose of a thing and a picture showing us its general physical shape to go on. We have to deduce everything else from that. In short, we've gotten used to disappointment.
This also encourages us in a way, as weird as it sounds. It probably means we're at least doing something right if everyone is paying so much attention to it. Thanks!
"Negative reviewers were perceived as more intelligent, competent, and expert than positive reviewers, even when the content of the positive review was independently judged as being of higher quality and greater forcefulness." — http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=7402
I personally find people like Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, Pauline Kael, and Eileen Jones incredibly enjoyable to read. Some "creators" like Wes Anderson actually went to great lengths to get Kael's opinion.
One-upper posters are annoying, but barbs disguised as blandishments like Ratatouille's bug me even more.
Criticism, like music, can be done poorly by nearly anyone and have little meaning, or by someone who has trained and studied carefully. Consider the source, I guess?
By the by: Did you really just criticize my critical quote on criticism? Recurse you, RodericDay!
It's not as easy at it seems. A critic needs to have experience, knowledge, and a certain eloquence in order to have any kind of power or influence. And a critic does take risks every time he writes a piece. Should he write something bad, he may lose his reputation and his following. A critic has to be consistent over time as well - one cannot say A and then B about the same time 2 years later. It's more challenging that it seems, and that is probably because this line was written by a movie script writer who does not like critics.
Which was, incidentally, not a very good or meaningful Pixar movie whatsoever.
And I liked many of other Pixar movies, some of which are among my favorites.
We're looking forward to replying to all of your posts here since we believe this is one of the best ways to articulate our points more efficiently. We have the highest level of trust in our product and we'd love to see how could we be able to present it even better.
We appreciate your support, so bring out the big guns, okay?
What we will do is pour our thoughts like water through your product and ideas. Anything that's not perfectly thought through is going to leak. I hope you'll take the criticism in the (mostly good) spirit in which its offered and use it to build a better product.