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New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

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Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#551
post #541
post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good to hear that you're fine enough to find some work and that you have help. As someone who has also been through a lot of pain, I find that some of your comments resonate. I feel a positive intention in them even when I don't understand the words. At the same time, a semi-anonymous online forum is not a great place to process major pain. What you need (in my experience) is warm connection with specific people…

I meet people here fine, some people treat me human. But I/we face a trauma 51% attack. Marginality breaks unconscious voting. I am beaten being treated as a child for saying pain while everyone counts pay to be called adult. I have plenty of appropriate help, what I do not have here is an account that survives talking about #Traumahack #Painhack #Centhack without losing my accounts because people use votes to sort f…

You understand that not everyone can blur between words the way you do, right? It's not something they teach people; I'm out of practice.

So yes, everyone here is focused on money and not beauty and definitely not poetry. This is a cesspit. It is one of the worst online communities there is, and I wouldn't be here at all if I weren't stuck in the web tech sector for at least a little longer.

But you're going to have to accept that if you want to share output here, you're doing so in a hostile environment, not because people don't care, or aren't interested, or aren't loving, but because what they can't understand they're going to downvote. Even if they strip downvotes from the audit log, other comments that say more mundane things will get upvoted more than yours.

Just like I accept that my downvoted comments were mostly a bland stand for anti-authoritarianism no one really wants to hear.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#552
post #301
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I just checked, and my last comment critical of Apple (and not even charitably so) is currently at +97 karma, so I'm not quite sure the argument holds much weight.

Thanks for taking the time to look into this. I am afraid it does not address the wider concern I have of which criticquing Apple is a specific example. On topics where there is a deep skew in the opinion held by the HN readerbase, it is probabilistically likely that going against the widely held view will receive more downvotes. This has a chilling effect on expressing dissent. Of course there will be people who wil…

I've made many negative comments about Apple, Facebook, MS, Google, etc and did not receive downvotes for them.

If HN is tribal then attacking one tribe while praising the others might be a method to farm positive karma.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#553
post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meet people here fine, some people treat me human. But I/we face a trauma 51% attack. Marginality breaks unconscious voting. I am beaten being treated as a child for saying pain while everyone counts pay to be called adult. I have plenty of appropriate help, what I do not have here is an account that survives talking about #Traumahack #Painhack #Centhack without losing my accounts because people use votes to sort f…

You understand that not everyone can blur between words the way you do, right? It's not something they teach people; I'm out of practice. So yes, everyone here is focused on money and not beauty and definitely not poetry. This is a cesspit. It is one of the worst online communities there is, and I wouldn't be here at all if I weren't stuck in the web tech sector for at least a little longer. But you're going to have…

I just want a stable log. Hiding language wars multiplies and divides problems trauma.

Inherent beauty is an argument for so much skill hacking at identities.

Trauma scales are a part of power scales we need to own at the point we start dictating how we distribute empathy log det.

Major Edit 5am EST.: Moderators just cut and deleted entire threads and removed a huge amount of posts from everybody again, each user logs gone too (http://web.archive.org/*/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i... https://archive.today/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9... http://www.webcitation.org/query?id=1428133249694151). If they tracked words like money it would break the book.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#554
post #353
post #112

Even when it's for technical stuff, it's getting condescending pretty quickly. You'll feel bad for being wrong.

And then you should get over it and learn something to correct it.

maybe the blog post about "avoiding gratuitous negativity" is kinda about avoiding the hurting of people's feelings.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#555

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 have noticed this too and have a humble suggestion: down-votes should require a comment from the down-voter. This would have the following advantages: - The extra effort will slow down causal unthoughtful down-votes. - If there is no justification, the down-voter can be down-voted in turn presumably by a greater degree. - Any pattern of abuse can easily be seen in user profiles.

Another advantage would be better feedback for the downvoted. Don't knowing why I was downvoted routinely drives me nuts.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#556

It isn't so much the negative comments that bug me as much as the downvoting with no explanation.

I wondered the same the other day. Best explanation I could come up with is that an explanatory comment would expose the downvoter to being downvoted (in retaliation or otherwise).

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#557
post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just keep talking at him. You don't seem to understand that he's winning . Everything you're saying just slides off him. He's stated his position and believes it's confirmed by how he's been downvoted and flagkilled. For what it's worth, I think he's right, I think that whatever you think of his comment, the reception was disproportionate; but that doesn't matter now: he's gone. And you jabber on and on. You find…

> And you jabber on and on. [...] You can't walk away. You hate to lose. Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. Moreover this subthread has gone far off topic. Please stop.

dang, thank you, but it's okay. I don't feel offended, and I'd rather let this thread run its course, but if you do want to stop the comments I don't mind.

FWIW, I've admired how you've responded with consideration and honesty to feedback elsewhere in the comments, clearly it's a contentious issue but I believe the thread has been more productive as a result of your approach.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#558
I have an idea related to this guideline.

Good tools already exist to do automated sentiment analysis. It would be extremely interesting to build forum software for HN that detects when a commenter is going too far with negativity and then gently guides that person to tone it down a bit while the comment is still being composed.

Maybe a few gentle prompts at the right moment is all it really takes.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm particularly leery of collapsible threads May I ask why? As someone who considers that the one change/improvement I'd like to see on HN I'm curious what there is to be leery of that I may not have considered.

Because this isn't like reddit where the most upvoted comments are elevated in otherwise collapsed threads. I've only read some of the most insightful and interesting comments and discussions on HN buried most of the way down the page because they were available for me to see despite their lack of being voted on. On HN, popularity isn't valuable, the ideas are, and non-precollapsed threads support that.

I'd argue that the main point of collapsible (not pre-collapsed) threads is to support what you're saying. When a comment spawns several pages of discussion on a topic you're not interested it, collapsing it would let you go directly to the next comment you are interested in, surely?

Right now, for me at least I often just scroll down to the next top-level comment because it's a bother to find the end of a comment tree that started several indentations in.

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