Negative comments

No but its used more and therefore in my mind overrated.

Thanks for proving the point :)

This is related to something I occasionally think about.

I used to take a lot of pride in 'critical' thought. Certainly I frequently take this attitude toward the things floating around in my head, and I like that.

But I've learned not to do the same for ideas from others, especially in short comments on the internet, where it's basically a given that the other didn't fully express themselves anyway.

'critical' thought isn't all there is. 'constructive' thought is important too; maybe even more important. It's easy to be a critic and find 10 things wrong with another idea. It's harder, riskier, but more rewarding to then prioritize which of those 10 things should be worked out first and in what way.

If someone throws out a half baked idea. You can critique it. Most people stop there. But you can also continue forward and construct on top of it, propose changes, make it better.

I now try now to be not just critical but constructive in most parts of my life.

I don't really buy the theory of this all being due to the education systems of Western culture. In my 20 years of education there was very little emphasis on challenging ideas or proving them wrong. I'm almost tempted to say that there was absolutely none. But as you can see from this very message, I'm totally happy to write a knee-jerk negative reply.

What I believe is really happening is that it's hard for a yes-man to add any value to the conversation. "What great points you have! Totally agree! +1" is going to be just noise. It takes a large amount of effort to simultaneously agree and add something to the original article. In contrast it's very easy to add value by pointing out any parts that are actually wrong, or by highlighting areas of disagreement since that's likely where the meat of the issue lies. (Of course there's going to be a threshold at which the value of pointing out errors is lower than the cost of the reply aggregated across all readers, such as pointing out insignificant typos or grammar mistakes).

Finally, I strongly disagree with this: "But pointing out all the places other people are wrong rarely teaches us anything". It probably doesn't teach anything to the person who disagrees, since they hopefully are already familiar with whatever issue they're disagree with. But it does teach something to others. And a place where people go to learn but nobody teaches sounds pretty miserable.

  > The cynical explanation for this is that people write negative comments to
  > show off how clever they are or how much they know. But I don’t think
  > that’s enough to explain how dedicated many commenters are to posting
  > negative feedback. Instead, I think people do it because they believe it’s
  > the right thing. Our cultural obsession with critical thinking compels us
  > to point out errors when we perceive them; errors are injustices that we
  > must right.

That explains why we tend to be so critical online, but I would expand upon the theory as to why we tend to do so so often.

Most of the web falls into three categories: Trying to Get Page Views, Trying to Sell You Something, or Trying to Proselytize. Just looking at the front page of HN, many story titles are intentionally vague, if not inflamatory. Read any thread on reddit, and many comments try to filter or twist facts to support an opinion rather than make an insight. Whether you call it mediaspeak, doublespeak, or bulshytt, it is still an offensive tactic for attention at the cost of truth, and our cognitive capacity is a resource worth defending.

  > I think this in part explains why the Hacker School community is so much
  > more positive than the world at large: People come here firstly to learn
  > new things, not to dispute them. This suggests an interesting question:
  > Could you build a site like Hacker News with a community focused on
  > learning above all else?

If it is possible, the system would need to go beyond current implementations of moderation that boil down to "up/down, flag/don't flag" and address the difference between disagreement and fact-checking (slashdot tried this by differentiating between "insightful, interesting, and informative"). I also suspect it would take a moderation team that vigilantly replaces link-bait summary articles with original sources and carefully considers the validity of paid content or opinion pieces.

Tangential Postscript: I would pay money for a news site like HN or /. that focused exclusively on news, information, and data. Nothing is worse than the almost-daily links we get from someone who thinks they know how to improve a business, technology, or process, but offers no hard data to back up their ideas or observations. Hypothesis is fine in comments, but I expect a bit more from articles.