

Ask HN: Has HN become overwhelmingly negative? - jeswin

I was looking at this thread, and couldn&#x27;t help feel bad for the programmer who made something nice and decided to share it (for free) with everyone out here. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9624737<p>From the top comment: &quot;As a personal project for kicks? Sure it&#x27;s cool. Would I let me company run it? Hell no!&quot;<p>Another user: &quot;What I&#x27;m saying is that &quot;pull requests welcome&quot; is a really lazy way of telling someone to support themselves. That&#x27;s fine if you have a unique set of needs, in that case you should be building things out specific to you.&quot; - perhaps in reference to &quot;So if you&#x27;d like to be part of the project, please check out the roadmap and issues to see if there&#x27;s anything you can help with.&quot;<p>Really, what&#x27;s happening to people here?
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caminante
FYI, Altman made a post (April '15) re: HN conduct policy, encouraging folks
to "Avoid gratuitous negativity."[1]

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317916](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317916)

Just doing a quick pass over the examples you provided, I don't think any of
them impart negativity, let alone gratuitous negativity. If anything, I'm
seeing constructive feedback.

edit: Wait, in your example, are you sure that it was the actual creator that
linked the software? If so, he should've used the Show HN feature, which
Altman addresses -- along with YOUR concerns -- in [1] above.

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Artemis2
I fat-finger downvoted you. I'm so sorry!

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caminante
I find that hilarious! Honestly, I do. NP...

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noobie
Don't take this as negative but your post reads more like a rant than a
question. Which contradicts the "Ask" tag.

Edit: To address your "question", no HN hasn't become a negative place. A
simple read throughout the comments of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9628682](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9628682)
will show the great sense of human empathy that thread reflects.

There, an example and a counter-example, until someone runs a full analysis of
the "negativity" of HN, we can safely say HN is "neutral" :p

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jeswin
Not taking this as negative, and I agree it was partly a rant. Maybe I should
remove the Ask HN tag? But again, it's not a non-question either.

Negativity is a general sentiment I've often seen within threads these days
and it probably needs to be looked at. This forum should encourage people
building new stuff. While the quality of submissions may not have gone down
over the years, the negativity has certainly gone up.

ADD: To answer your edit.

> To address your "question", no HN hasn't become a negative place. A simple
> read throughout the comments of
> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9628682](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9628682)
> will show the great sense of human empathy that thread reflects.

That's a totally different type of article and I wouldn't be surprised if
comments are supportive when someone is struggling with cancer. Not saying
we've devolved into that level of inhumaneness. Not at all. OTOH, discouraging
people who build stuff (and try to share what they have built) is my central
point.

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lucaspiller
I've also been feeling this recently. I find Reddit to be a lot less hostile.
The thing is you shouldn't really take notice of this, when Dropbox was first
announced on HN, people were critical as ever :-)

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caminante
IMHO, Reddit's too balkanized to compare Reddit at-large (and not personalized
subreddits) with HN.

I appreciate HN's self-policing of CommentsLite™. We could easily flood the
threads with feel good "+1's" and nested memes, but that impairs the
discussion. HN opened my eyes to the value of that norm for discussions.

