161–170 of 673 posts
I agree that we should try to reduce "this is a stupid idea" comments, but does that include "this doesn't belong on HN" comments?
> Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site.
One of the most passive-aggressive habits is avoiding negativity experiences and emotional developments to feel positively correct. Maturity realizing empathy seconds, that line numbers need to grow exponentially for any form of -logy, requires a deeper stance for tense problem solving pain points.
I agree with the avoiding negativity, but can you elaborate on an example of avoiding "emotional developments to feel positively correct"
An example being voted from hell to heaven and back and forth again and again is making your question triggering, meaning being nice is just a command and control like with linux top. I rarely resolve my (social(emotional)) system issues by just id removing and killing task.
(Intergenerational traumas as much and as well as intergenerative gramma(r) traumma [sic].
Aethic-apathic-empathic determination to make an example of singular social commentary is disturbing (but healthy too, if you can actually solve the problem long-term enough to granulate -logy.))
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 agree. This reminiscent of a manager that wants to make a mark by creating arbitrary, vague rules out of the blue. This a community. Was there a "we think we may have a gratuitous negativity problem" discussion? Thin end of the wedge, perhaps. I hope not. (From the article) "Too much gratuitous negativity might be the difference between someone giving up on a crazy idea and building the next Airbnb." If negative, a…
Absolutely. See Dropbox's Show HN, the slashdot iPod announcement, and every other worthwhile product ever. As a community we're pretty bad at picking successes.
> Negativity isn't the problem--gratuitous negativity is. Is it just regular negative of me to say statements like that one are horrible, or it is gratuitously negative? Am I being a critical thinker when I say that, whenever I hear people make statement like that one, they are usually weaseling into some businessey doublespeak that roughly translates into "people like me can be negative, people like you cannot, but…
You may be right that not many places on the internet are better, but HN can and should be much better than it is. Rather than measuring it against rampant internet negativity of today, we should measure it against a future online community where people have learned to refrain from taking their negative feelings out on others.
It no doubt took a long time for people to (mostly) learn how not to do that in person, so it's not surprising if takes us a while to learn not to do it online.
This 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 cov…
This wasn't prompted by any recent discussion. It has been a long, long time coming.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does that even follow, though? HN's community has traditionally (thankfully!) flatly rejected the "safe space" PC game whenever it's attempted to be played here, either in the comments or the submissions. Remember that the guideline is against "gratuitous negativity", not "negativity" in general. HN will still be a place where actual crap gets called crap, but hopefully this means that we'll see less middlebrow criti…
> HN will still be a place where actual crap gets called crap I daresay that this is the problem. When one has the option to say "I think this isn't good from perspective X, because of thing Y", and one says "this is crap", one is being unconstructive and mean. To say that something that someone did or thought is "crap" or "rubbish", the way I see it, is just needlessly inflammatory. I think a lot of people conflate…
In detail, I don't see HN ever being a place where legitimate (in other words, well articulated) criticism gets deflected or discouraged on the grounds of being mean or unfriendly. At the end of the day, if you have learned something factual about what you've done, it should not be discarded just because the usual social niceties were not provided.
Think of a Show HN post for an obviously slapdash and insecure web service of some kind. I'd fully expect the comments to contain almost nothing but proclamations of how the author is doing it wrong.
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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.
> Why should I try to interpret comments in the best possible light? Because doing so contributes to the community and not doing so harms it. When you respond to the strongest interpretation of a comment, you're responding to what's most substantive in it. That raises the signal/noise ratio for everybody, and curiosity is what we're trying to optimize for.
For example, if somebody tells me "Angersock, you can go happily fuck yourself", I'm not going to expect them to be wishing me a rousing and cheerful round of masturbation--that is the "best possible light", but not the "strongest interpretation".
Properly handled, assuming the worst of a comment, articulating the argument you think is being made, and then rebutting it, is far better than just assuming the best--provided it's done civilly, of course.
That's OK, disagreeing with the hivemind (critiques of Google come to mind) gets you downvoted into oblivion anyways.
disagreeing with the hivemind Using terms like "the hivemind" (which doesn't exist) is actually a good example of the thing the new guideline covers!
Just sayin.
This measure is bullshit.