Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

blog.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 673 posts

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#141

Post by chc »

guelo wrote: post #62
nostrademons wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9318001

Is there a way to express the existence of this conflict of interest without being accused of being negative?

Your comment looks like a lot like FUD to me. You're implying a lot of bad without even attempting to establish that anything bad has happened.

It seems to me that the way to say negative things without being accused to gratuitous negativity is to have the negative things be substantial and useful rather than just an expression of one's own cynicism.

For example, if a conflict of interest had actually reared its ugly head, that comment would be apropos. But in this case, the situation where HN used this rule to do something bad is entirely hypothetical, and is hardly an inevitable outcome.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#144

Post by DanBC »

andrewstuart wrote: post #122

It's "the programmers way" to try to come up with some sort of moderation/policing system to solve this. Please do not come up with a moderation system. There should simply be a confirmation step after hitting submit, reminding the poster that they are valued for their positive contribution and giving the poster the chance to rethink their post and cancel if its too negative. Additionally when posting, require people…

> There's nothing at the moment that explicitly asks or reminds people of expectations when they post.

New users are asked to read the guidelines when they post. I don't know how long that reminder stays there, but there's a linkto the guidelines right under the text entry box.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#145

Post by chc »

kolbe wrote: post #94

> 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…

> But I do not know of any place on the internet where I find better discussions on daily news; so my opinion: when it's this great already, why do some vague micro-morality-management thing like this to try to change it?

Well, I know of a place on the Internet where I used to find better discussions: Hacker News. I think Sam is attempting to push HN back toward what it used to be.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#146

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> Unfortunately, reasonable people can disagree about where the threshold is between appropriate skepticism/criticism and gratuitous negativity.

Reasonable people can disagree about the boundaries of most things in the existing guidelines. But the guidelines aren't intended as behavior definitions for a computing system, there met as guidelines to be applied by humans to a human community, so fuzzy boundaries are normal, and trying to create excessively crisp boundaries for that task is usually counterproductive.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#147

Post by Karunamon »

dragonwriter wrote: post #134
Karunamon wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discussing it is one thing, dismissing anyone who disagrees with you as "the hivemind" is at the very least not constructive, at most actively harmful. Where's the proof of this "destructive behavior"? How are we supposed constructively discuss a problem that hasn't even been proven to exist? Put another way, it's an extraordinary accusation (HN has a pro-Google bias) that demands extraordinary evidence. We disagree…

> Put another way, it's an extraordinary accusation (HN has a pro-Google bias) that demands extraordinary evidence. More to the point, IMO, whether or not discussion of whether or not a hivemind exists in HN and, if so, what its features are is a useful discussion to have in its own right , and whether or not the characterization would be appropriate in some context with appropriate support, that kind of meta discuss…

Indeed. https://blog.codinghorror.com/meta-is-murder/

These posts are nice every now and then because they give a place to talk about this kind of thing without it being off-topic of the thread.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#148

Post by krapp »

danellis wrote: post #88
happyscrappy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pedantic bickering is brutal because you cannot collapse threads.

The whole site needs rewriting and modernizing. Considering the audience, it's kind of shocking how stale it is.

I'm tempted to chalk that up to HN being, essentially, a pet project implemented in a toy language as a not entirely open source[0] forum maintained by volunteers. Of course, I don't know but that's my guess, that pg just didn't work very hard on polishing up the parts he didn't find personally interesting. For some reason, people seem to be weirdly elitist about HN's layout, and act as if any slight change to the UI is going to allow the barbarians of the internet to storm the gates, until Hacker News is aught but cat memes and ashes.

[0] The language and original forum are, obviously, open source. But AFAIK you can't make pull requests against the code HN is actually running, which has had tons of modifications made to it, because that's special sauce. There used to be a repo for making bug and feature requests but that seems to no longer be active.

Of course, you could roll your own minimalistic threaded forum, but getting people to move from HN anywhere other than lobste.rs[1] (if they want more moderation) or reddit (if they want less) might be difficult, unless you're serving some specific niche like DataTau[2].

[1]https://lobste.rs/

[2]http://www.datatau.com/

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#150

Post by waterlesscloud »

Karunamon wrote: post #115
throwawaymaroon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

Discussing it is one thing, dismissing anyone who disagrees with you as "the hivemind" is at the very least not constructive, at most actively harmful. Where's the proof of this "destructive behavior"? How are we supposed constructively discuss a problem that hasn't even been proven to exist? Put another way, it's an extraordinary accusation (HN has a pro-Google bias) that demands extraordinary evidence. We disagree…

I think it's more the case that members of the HN community who are likely to vote at all on a certain comment tend toward certain common views.

For example, a comment about Google is more likely to be voted on by Google employees and Google fans. A typical user wouldn't vote at all. If that comment is negative about Google, those who care about Google are more likely to vote it down.

I suspect this applies to all sorts of subjects, it's just more visible with something as easily identified as a "Google comment" or an "Apple comment".

Post reply on HN