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New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

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Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#101

Post by pdkl95 »

res0nat0r wrote: post #2

This is a good step, but I think just the increase in overly political postings vs. tech oriented content has been a major contributor to the negativity.

For better or worse, many "tech oriented" topics these days are politics.

Many people in the engineering and related fields often wish to ignore the political discussions and stay focused on the technology. This is an understandable desire. Technology is is often complicated leading to a general hatred of having to context switch into other topics. Experience teaches that it is a usually easier to achieve reliable results with technology you can logically prove or verify that with emotional, capricious, untrustworthy humans.

Unfortunately, technology brought us products such as "smart TV" that bring up serious questions about surveillance and evidence, cheap network clients that allow ubiquitous access to incredible amounts of knowledge that is certain to affect education and testing/grading, and self-driving cars that will require a serious refactoring of many aspects of society.

More importantly, I think it is important to remember that escaping the political side of anything simply cedes any disagreement to those that are addressing politics. I think JMS said it best in the closing lines of Babylon 5: "we had to create the future, or others will do it for us". Technology experts need to address these things, or important decisions will be left to those that are not qualified.

Now, that said, neither technology nor political discussions excuse rudeness, personal attacks, or generally disruptive behavior.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#103

Post by bengali3 »

dman wrote: post #26
dsugarman wrote: post #15

I 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.

I agree with this. Conflating disagreement with downvoting seems to be mixing unrelated concerns. It is currently inconvenient (in karma terms) to hold dissenting opinions.

Interesting, what if in downvoting a comment you had to pick a reason? What are all the reasons one would downvote something?

"I do not agree" "I do not believe this adds value" "Inappropriate conduct" "I think you are being mean / rude" "Bad attempt at funny" "Off topic to parent" "Off topic to post" "Difficult to understand/Noise"

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#104

Post by baddox »

dang wrote: post #60
baddox wrote: post #19

I 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 ina…

From the OP: Negativity isn't the problem--gratuitous negativity is. By that we mean negativity that adds nothing of substance to a comment. This includes all forms of meanness. That's enough for reasonable people to get the idea. Trying to force precision here would take us down a rabbit hole.

I think reasonable people can disagree about what adds substance to a comment.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#105

Post by mfringel »

sprash wrote: post #90

This is the worst idea ever. I'm generally a pretty negative person for a reason. Negative feedback is necessary for anything to actually get better. And who or what decides what is "gratuitous". This is a recipe for despotism and censorship.

I disagree. Feedback is usually necessary for anything to actually get better.

Negative feedback might be necessary for the commenter to feel better.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#106

Post by Karunamon »

300bps wrote: post #47
Udo wrote: post #8

One of the most negative habits is in my opinion the failure to read a comment charitably (to make an effort to interpret it in the best possible light). Instead, people often tend to misread or miserunderstand what's being said, only to use the opportunity to write a "correction" based on that false impression. A worse flavor of the same problem is a misunderstanding that is then used to justify outrage or personal…

rampant negativity...seems to have gotten less common recently HN does do a good job of weeding out uselessly negative comments and other trolling behavior. If you want proof of that, go to your profile and turn on "Show Dead". It is amazing to see how many people are shadow banned yet continue to post on a daily basis. I've seen several accounts that have posted daily for years completely unaware nobody is seeing an…

I've noticed the opposite. I browse with showdead on, and roughly half the time I'm left to wonder what on earth transgression the person committed to merit being silenced in that way after examining their comment history.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#107

Post by pain » 

    Old Hacker News Guideline: Avoidant (Kill Pain.)
    New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Trauma (Kill Pain. Be Nice!)
I (CC) @traumahack because I feel we are mistaking advanced emotional-intelligence with objectification eracing perfect forms.

The bitcism of pretending we can order people to make empathy.money by requring we read documentation to spell our own feelings and thoughts.

Amount of energy being distressed for distrust is enormously debilitating for a social enterprise that powers and issues social memory.

Voting taboo makes and takes time and space too variable a problem, yet we filter it as a memory equation for what and who stays alive to what degree, before power is even amount.

Voting taboo takes time, space, and variables, yet we filter it as a memory equation for what and who stays alive to what degree, before power is even amount.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#108

Post by DanBC »

foobarqux wrote: post #71
Alupis wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a few examples I know of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8938409

There are obviously bad comments, which most people agree are inappropriate but I think the problem is that there are another set of comments that the HN team thinks is inappropriate but a significant portion of commenters think is clearly okay. So I think informative examples would point out comments that many people think are okay but that the HN team does not.

Someone writes a detailed technical blog post and submits it.

A few comments are about the content of the post.

And then someone makes a comment about the blog CSS or the framework or javascript, wothout mentioning any content of the blog.

I get the impression that HN doesn't want those type of comments here.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#109

Post by ZenoArrow »

ohnomrbill wrote: post #84
Udo wrote: post #8

One of the most negative habits is in my opinion the failure to read a comment charitably (to make an effort to interpret it in the best possible light). Instead, people often tend to misread or miserunderstand what's being said, only to use the opportunity to write a "correction" based on that false impression. A worse flavor of the same problem is a misunderstanding that is then used to justify outrage or personal…

Why should I try to interpret comments in the best possible light? I could make an effort to interpret them in the worst possible light, too. I have no reason to believe that internet commenters mean well.

The issue is really with speed of judgement. It's all too easy to become close minded after judging something, especially when judging something negatively. The key is remaining open minded as long as possible to take in more information, then you're in a better place to judge. Disagreement in a respectful manner is a reflection of how you've balanced the positive and negative, if you prejudge Internet commenters you'll have made it much harder on yourself to find that balance.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#110

Post by throwawaymaroon »

Karunamon wrote: post #99
throwawaymaroon wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...What are you doing? Talking about 'the hivemind' isn't under some sort of blanket ban, and you're shutting down a right to a viewpoint simply because you think it's 'too negative'? This is exactly the kind of thinking that becomes prevalent in the atmosphere towards negativity engendered by HN.

The parent poster is perfectly entitled to their viewpoint, but calling a community "the hivemind" is terribly insulting and needlessly inflammatory.

I see. So any time a community displays well-known herding behaviors in a destructive manner, we can not discuss this behavior because that would be insulting and inflammatory.

(No shit it'd be insulting and inflammatory. Sometimes that's what the community deserves, and to believe otherwise is to believe in human perfection!)

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