

Ask HN: Why such negativity? - alecsmart1

I&#x27;ve been an avid reader of HN for a year now and have started commenting only recently. However, I find the comments extremely negative. No matter how the positive the subject is, there will be a barrage of negative comments. Take the bender post, someone is complaining about the div styles. It&#x27;s just a concept and it&#x27;s free. Even code that is open sourced is not spared. Anything MS or Apple gets instant hate. Why?
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jasonkester
The crowd here was originally dominated by entrepreneurs. Now it's dominated
by employees. Entrepreneurs tend to be somewhat out on a rope themselves, so
they're more likely to offer support to their peers rather than try to drag
them down.

Employees, on the other hand, tend not to have much skin in the game, so
they're a little more free with their criticism of things that they see. I bet
you could put together an interesting chart by running a poll for "where do
you work" and graphing negative comments elsewhere on the site by whether a
given user answered "for myself" vs "for [company x]".

So yeah, there are still plenty of supportive, encouraging entrepreneurial
folk here. But there's also an ever growing peanut gallery. Try to ignore
them. They don't mean any harm.

~~~
ScottWhigham
In the old days, I would've just upvoted you and watched your comment score go
up, up, up. The rest of the readers of the thread would see how many previous
people had agreed/upvoted and it was nice. Today though I have to comment to
show my appreciation - comment scores aren't shown and have little if any
value any more.

I've been around for 5+ years here I guess and this is my explanation for it
as well. I'd also add that such negativity is inevitable for some people -
they visit HN 20x a day, they want to contribute in some way, but no one has
made a post today that they can "show off" with an answer. In the end, they
reply with a silly/off-the-cuff/disresectful/snide/etc answer just b/c they
have this need to "participate in the community". HN is reddit-like for many
people, myself included, in that way. I'm not immune to it either.

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GovStuff
It's just criticism. Emotions and sarcasm don't transfer well as text, so
criticism reads more negative than it probably intended.

Don't take this comment as negative.

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thejteam
It's tough to grow as a person when everybody is telling you how wonderful you
are. Negative comments are important to learning to grow as a programmer, as a
businessman, and as a person.

It would be nice if people learned some rhetorical skills to communicate
better. But that's a separate issue. As it is, it is on you to interpret the
comments in a way that will help you improve. Learn from the helpful
suggestions and ignore the unhelpful. Try out, or at least think about, the
div styles comment. See if it really is an improvement. If it is, then you
just learned something new. If not, then you learned something not to do in
the future.

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pestaa
I always attributed this to the three virtues of great programmers.
[http://threevirtues.com/](http://threevirtues.com/)

Even the extremely negative comments are usually written in good faith here.
Minor incremental improvements such as div styles will make the world a better
place. (It sounds like a stupid statement to make, but hackers do believe in
better software and its ability to make a difference.)

