Without the hostility, the designers might get the idea that their suggestions were good.
Without the hostility, the submitter might get the idea that hackernews liked the article.
You say the response "is not constructive and leads to no learning whatsoever". I'd like to substantively address the second claim.
"A smart man learns from his mistakes.
A wise man learns from the mistakes of others."
The designers learned that their changes were bad. They learned WHY their changes were bad: many responses gave detailed reasons. The submitter learned that their model of what HN likes was wrong. And if the submitter thought this was a good design, they learned their understanding of design is wrong. All the others who read the submission and responses learned a few design pitfalls to avoid. There are whole chapters in books on design that teach less than this.
And this is learning from the event itself! What learning could this event LEAD to? I don't know, someone might pick up a book on design?
(As an aside, I didn't address "not constructive". I have a truly marvellous rant on the emptiness of this concept that this comment field is too small to contain.)
What, in your eyes, is a better indicator of hacker news liking or not liking something? Is it the over 400 points or the stream of hate coming at them in the comments?
Sometimes these redesigns reek of audacity, sometimes they're just not done very well. In any case, hostility is not necessary to make that point. The situation is not so dire that we need to be mean to someone to tell them we don't like something. It's hard to share what you've done with the world, and it's even harder when many people from a community you respect will shit on you in the case you overlook something.
I don't mean to be impolite, but don't try and pass your anger that something has 400 points on hacker news for some sort of tough-love criticism.
Say what?? I, for one, LIKED the submission a lot! The Wikipedia Redefined site is a great way to present a design proposal from an outsider. The redesign had some flaws, like not fully accounting for i18n and accessability issues, but there where some great nuggets in there too. Such as using a stylized W instead of the plain boring W as the favicon.
It is so sad that people instead choose to criticize the flaws and ignoring the good and valuable ideas just so they can be extra critical.
Without the hostility, the submitter might get the idea that hackernews liked the article.
You say the response "is not constructive and leads to no learning whatsoever". I'd like to substantively address the second claim.
The designers learned that their changes were bad. They learned WHY their changes were bad: many responses gave detailed reasons. The submitter learned that their model of what HN likes was wrong. And if the submitter thought this was a good design, they learned their understanding of design is wrong. All the others who read the submission and responses learned a few design pitfalls to avoid. There are whole chapters in books on design that teach less than this.And this is learning from the event itself! What learning could this event LEAD to? I don't know, someone might pick up a book on design?
(As an aside, I didn't address "not constructive". I have a truly marvellous rant on the emptiness of this concept that this comment field is too small to contain.)