This sucks, just trying to pretend everything is wine and roses and everyone is happy, happy, happy all the time.
Couldn't help it.
New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
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Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
#12I don't think negativity is intrinsicly bad or harmful.
Obviously there's a line where a comment becomes predominantly mean.
The only concern I have is that one day it takes too much cognitive overhead to post an insightful comment that happens to be negative.
Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
#13Great to see this. Fortunately those sorts of comments usually get downvoted here. Also this is one reason I stopped following so much of the developer community on Twitter. So much of it is full of snark and piling on others mistakes for a quick retweet.
Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
#14It's not just a good idea for HN. It's a good practice to apply in one's everyday life, generally.
Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
#15I think the downvote functionality is holding back the utility of HN more than anything else. It is grossly overused and very rarely for guidelines violations like it was designed for. Most people use to show they disagree with a comment. It's an awful experience and is the main fuel in a negative feedback loop that travels with users from thread to thread.
Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
#16That's OK, disagreeing with the hivemind (critiques of Google come to mind) gets you downvoted into oblivion anyways.
Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
#17Feels like the conflict of interest of a general news forum being run by an investment firm with PR interests is beginning to rear its ugly head.
Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
#18I think some examples might be helpful. I would consider a gratuitously negative comment to be some variation of "That's a dumb idea" with no elaboration, or an ad hominem, and such comments are pretty much always downvoted already.
Here's a few examples I know of:
Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
#19I suppose adding the guideline can't hurt, because it might at least make people more strongly consider their comments before posting them. Unfortunately, reasonable people can disagree about where the threshold is between appropriate skepticism/criticism and gratuitous negativity. Since "gratuitous" means unjustified or inappropriate, it by definition should be avoided. The trick is figuring out which things are inappropriate. Hopefully most of you judge this comment to be on the good side of the fence. :)
Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
#20This appears to be prompted (EDIT: related to) by my discussion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317028 .
As I mentioned there, it may be helpful to explicitly differatiate negativity vs. gratuitous negativity in that case. (Most examples of gratuitous negativity I've seen are low effort "this site sucks" comments, which are downvoted for reasons unrelated to negativity, and ad hominem attacks are already covered in the guidelines.)