Name a community with coherent discourse (not Twitter) that does not have a problem with negativity.
Hacker News is depressing
131–140 of 398 posts
Re: Hacker News is depressing
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sometimes we're not going to worship. It's not about worship. It's about civility and making an effort to write comments to a higher standard.
I write to my standard. You write to yours. We each get little buttons where people vote. That's the deal. I personally find Dave's attitude of self-entitlement to be very toxic. Coming first doesn't elevate you above reproach or scrutiny. Success and progress require questioning and even defying authority. I'm incredibly distrustful of anyone who would discourage that. So he's going to demand people be impressed – a…
Yesterday, in response to Dave's post, you wrote, "As a meta comment, Winer is a unfortunate last name..."
If that's the standard you hold yourself to, I'd encourage you to expect more from yourself.
Re: Hacker News is depressing
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> If you talked to your spouse like that it would be called abuse. And if you hit your spouse like boxers do in the ring then that would be abuse too. It's almost as if there are different rules for different situations. (No, I'm not saying that kernel development is like boxing)
The difference is consent. Now, of course, that sparks off a question about whether submitting your post or your startup to HN is de facto consenting to be verbally abused. But I think that's a pretty useful conversation to have.
I would say no. I'd say especially no if someone else submits it!
I can't load up the article again (squid error) but IIRC the guy was posted to HN by someone else,d then received a bunch of abuse on his site and via email etc. Perhaps better to keep the verbal abuse here rather than there?
When I first started using HN, only a little over a year ago really, it did seem different to now. A lot less criticism (yay, no mudslinging or fanboi fights!) and a lot more bootstrappy startup speak (though that can get just as annoying).
Oh well.
Re: Hacker News is depressing
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have as much right to defend the behavior as you have to attack it. It's an arbitrary questions of norms and of tolerance to criticism. In modern society it seems that we're so isolated and insecure in ourselves that we can't handle criticism and meanness. That everyone must be over socialized to be overly concerned about what everyone else thinks and not be concerned about the objectivity of what we're trying to…
The sooner people understand that anti-social behaviour is about community and not about rights the better, but I still see people confusing the two. Yes you've got a right to be rude, you've also got a right to blather on for two hours about Dragonball Z. Both behaviours will leave adults concluding that you're not capable of mature discussion. And if you and your mates establish a norm of anti-social behaviour, you…
Thank you for writing your point in a manner the reinforces your point. I have given your point a point.
Re: Hacker News is depressing
#135There were definitely a few overly harsh and trollish comments on the article yesterday attacking Dave, but looking at it now it seems like 90% of the comments were either defending Dave or attacking his critics or apologizing for the trolls. It sucks that the comments seemed to turn into a referendum on Dave but it was still orders of magnitude more civil and intelligible than how it would have gone down on any other site.
I don't know that HN itself is the problem here, it's still pretty exemplary compared to the competition. Maybe a broader point could be made that it's depressing that the site with by far the best comments can still descend into those kinds of discussions.
For context, it's also worth noting that Dave is no stranger to controversy and has angered more than a few people over the years. I have no idea whether he was right or wrong in those situations, but I'm sure that that animosity played a role in some of the comments people made yesterday. Many of the really negative comments didn't seem like typical kneejerk Internet comments so much as people with grudges against him personally, and those grudges bled out into the discussion. Again, no judgement either way here, just providing context.
Re: Hacker News is depressing
#136This is curious, maybe a little too reactionary[1], but I think we could use the introspection. On the one hand, being argued about is a problem a lot of people would like to have. I spent two years making a large canvas diagramming library and I would have loved for it to have frontpage'd on HN, even if everyone just told me it was terrible. On the other hand, I do think the meanness of programming communities is a…
>> "On the other hand, I do think the meanness of programming communities is a the biggest problem we have. Programmer-types are just not as supportive/empathetic as nearly everyone else I know. And I'm not talking about criticism, I'm talking about needless mean, shitty behavior that gets repeated and defended all too often."
I agree with this. I've noticed it in myself. The more involved I've got in the tech community the more argumentative I've been with non-tech friends. Spending time debating with other programmers on HN and in comment threads and mailing lists has lead to me trying to debate even small points my friends make. It's something I'm trying to tone down but it's definitely been a big change in my personality over the last few years.
Re: Hacker News is depressing
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sometimes we're not going to worship. It's not about worship. It's about civility and making an effort to write comments to a higher standard.
I write to my standard. You write to yours. We each get little buttons where people vote. That's the deal. I personally find Dave's attitude of self-entitlement to be very toxic. Coming first doesn't elevate you above reproach or scrutiny. Success and progress require questioning and even defying authority. I'm incredibly distrustful of anyone who would discourage that. So he's going to demand people be impressed – a…
> We each get little buttons where people vote.
Except we don't. I have an upvote button, but not a downvote button. I haven't reached the magical karma threshold for the downvote button, and my account is ~3.5 years old.
I think this may be contributing to the negativity OP is talking about. I don't have the option of using the downvote, so if I disapprove of content, the only way I can do so is to post a negative comment.
I know a lot of people in the community consider this a good thing, but I think it also leads to a lot of negative comments that wouldn't otherwise get posted.
Re: Hacker News is depressing
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sometimes we're not going to worship. It's not about worship. It's about civility and making an effort to write comments to a higher standard.
I write to my standard. You write to yours. We each get little buttons where people vote. That's the deal. I personally find Dave's attitude of self-entitlement to be very toxic. Coming first doesn't elevate you above reproach or scrutiny. Success and progress require questioning and even defying authority. I'm incredibly distrustful of anyone who would discourage that. So he's going to demand people be impressed – a…
I think Udo's reference to standards is a bit misleading. "Angels of our Better Nature" improve HN, and I take that to be his context. That said, I find it difficult to delete comments that have been upvoted. OK, I find it impossible to do so. Upvotes convince me that I am right.
Re: Hacker News is depressing
#139This is curious, maybe a little too reactionary[1], but I think we could use the introspection. On the one hand, being argued about is a problem a lot of people would like to have. I spent two years making a large canvas diagramming library and I would have loved for it to have frontpage'd on HN, even if everyone just told me it was terrible. On the other hand, I do think the meanness of programming communities is a…
"On the other hand, I do think the meanness of programming communities"
Disagree. Fluffy unicorn social hour, when discussed by a programming community, resulted in flamewar behavior.
Let me pick the most recent three "real programming" type articles. Phantom.py the headless webkit engine, Arduino Yun, and Nimrod the static typed language release. Behavior in the articles, by programmer types while discussing programmer type things, was fairly civilized.
Well, OK. The Arduino Yun is yet another product that is not terribly well differentiated from a zillion other products in an extremely crowded market. And there was a smoldering birthday candle sized flame in the nimrod comments about unicode, but not that bad. Phantom.py had some minor war story about a competitor being a nightmare but Mostly on topic and interesting discussions.
Re: Hacker News is depressing
#140Yup, HN commenters can feel like a stampede of negativity bearing down on you sometimes (and with increased frequency it seems). But then you can't really post your thoughts and ideas to the web then take umbrage when some people don't like it.
That said, I don't have a fugging clue why people objected to the original article, or what the point of their objections were.
So in summary: Eveyone's wrong.