New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

We want the Recurse Center to be a space with as little bigotry as possible in it.

and yet their financial aid policies are explicitly discriminatory [2]:

The Recurse Center is free for everyone, and we offer need-based living expense grants for women and people from racial and ethnic groups traditionally underrepresented in programming.

In other words, poor white and Asian men can attend, but they don't qualify for any extra support. This is an "ism", but there's nothing subtle about it.

[1]: https://www.recurse.com/manual#no-subtle-isms

[2]: https://www.recurse.com/diversity

For instance, discussion of the motivations of Sam Altman in creating this suggestion-guideline: is he lashing out after the negative reaction to his bubble essay?

That's insulting! It's also fair game!

You can argue that as a statement it's inaccurate, given what you know or believe, but I hope you understand that that kind of statement is exactly the sort of negativity this thing seems designed to prohibit.

> The first link is a low-quality comment / ad hominem, the second link is off-topic / ad hominem. Both of those were already against the rules.

Although I wouldn't call this comment "gratuitously negative" or even "negative," I do believe it exemplifies one of the major root behaviors that lead to negativity (gratuitous or otherwise): failure to fully digest the conversation plus a reflexive desire to make a point.

First, as @dang pointed out elsewhere, this comment's point was anticipated and addressed directly in the original post:

> Sharp readers may point out that the HN guidelines have always excluded those things. That's true. But it's still enough of a problem in HN threads that this is a clarification worth making. We tried it out last year when we released special guidelines for Show HNs. It worked well there, so we're extending it to the whole site.

Even if the point were worth making, it was already made by @sama. Why assume the grandparent comment wasn't written with that very paragraph in mind? If you didn't read all of the original essay, why jump in to comment on whether the examples were appropriate or not?

Second, even if that paragraph weren't there, comments like this add absolutely nothing constructive to the conversation and risk starting an irrelevant debate over the semantics of "gratuitously negative" vs. "ad hominem" vs. "off-topic". Much more constructive would be, "When @sama said 'gratuitously negative' I was thinking more of comments like: . To me these are different from the examples you listed because ."

Don't have any examples in mind? Don't have time to go look for them? That's fine — don't comment!

Honestly, I'd bet money that @sama added that paragraph specifically in an attempt to head off pointless top-level comments like, "Isn't this already against the rules? Look, here they are: Rule 3, Rule 14, and Rule 78(b)! Does @sama even read the rules of his own site? UGH."

All of these things pile up, leading to people responding reflexively to other people, who respond reflexively in turn, leading to...etc. etc.

Its ok for people to be dumb, and for ideas or products to be shit. They exist / will keep coming. But if you want to actually contribute to the discussion, ask questions instead of belittling them. Try to steer them in the right direction instead of trying to get them to jump off the tracks entirely. Building stuff is hard, presenting things to your peers is nerve wrecking. Armchairs are comfy to speak from, but they don't move anything forward.