Is HN negative by design? (2011)

http://www.mikealrogers.com/posts/is-hn-negative-by-design.html

by brennannovak • 14 years ago

35 17 14 years ago

arkitaip• 14 years ago

HN can be a very pessimistic and sad place and I honestly believe it's largely because of the constant downvotes of jokes and other activities that build camaraderie and understanding. I see this happen every single day and do my best to upvote the comments but to no avail. It's the No Me Too Posts Policy taken to the extreme and it alienates people from one another.

mindcrime2• 14 years ago

I'm sorry, but I just don't see that. Just because jokes and 'net memes get downvoted does not mean that we don't have camaraderie and understanding here. It just means that what we consider a positive environment here is about something more than a skin-deep, superficial veneer of joviality and light-heartedness.

Look at some of the threads where people have posted "Woe is me, I need a job and my wife is sick and my dog is dying and my car just fell over" and look at the generous offers of help and posts of support those get. Look at the "Hey, I'm coming to SV and want to visit some people, who wants to get together?" posts and notice how many people chime in to say "Hey, come see us." Look at the threads about depression and related topics, and notice the people saying things like "If you need somebody to talk to, call me anytime."

I think HN actually has (mostly) a very positive vibe, and I'm glad that jokes and Internet memes and (most) "me too" posts are downvoted. There's a place for that stuff... that place just happens to not be HN.

Now I'm not saying HN is perfect, and I won't even argue that the level of discourse hasn't suffered a bit the last few years. But, by and large, this is one of the most civil and productive forums I'm part of, or ever have been part of.

brennannovak2• 14 years ago

I definitely agree. I've seen some very humanistic threads- feedback, offers, and connections happen here. I've also seen some roaring egos and ridiculous flame wars that rival the dregs of 4Chan and YouTube. Sure, the HN comments are more "intelligently informed," but silly arguments none the less. All in all, I suppose that duality is healthy for a community. However, I've been a member for 5 years and have only 639 karma points. I have no clue if something I share will be wildly upvoted, flagged or just simply ignored- thus I feel unsure if I am actually "welcome" here or not.

killnine2• 14 years ago

I'm with you. I find HN refreshing. I come here because it is the crux. I come here so I don't have to read all the pointless, time wasting BS.

On top of that, HN seems like a get-shit-done site. If you aren't contributing, get out of the way. If you don't have something nice - no scratch that - *useful to say, then don't say anything at all. And this is not to be mistaken with, no laughing allowed, no fun, and no hearts. It is more of an efficiency thing.

javert• 14 years ago

HN can be a very pessimistic and sad place

Hmm, I never had that impression.

It's the No Me Too Posts Policy taken to the extreme and it alienates people from one another

That's what keeps this from degrading like Reddit.

Personally, I feel connected to others on HN (and not alienated) via the serious intellectual discussion I find on here. That is the fabric of this community.

brennannovak2• 14 years ago

I am curious to see if this gets downvoted, flagged or just simply what other people in the community think!

tjr• 14 years ago

It does require you to sign in with your real identity which curtails a lot of spam and outright trolling,

Is this new?

maethorechannen• 14 years ago

It's probably a deliberate error to provoke negativity.

Or the guy was confusing HN with Google+

kb1012• 14 years ago

I agree with the poster 100%. Originally I was very enthusiastic about the site, and happy I had found it, but ultimately I realized that every time I visited or attempted to add my input to a thread, I came away feeling depressed and/or angry.

It's too clubby, it's taken the general disgust that people feel toward the banality of messageboards that deteriorate into meme-ification or juvenile flamewars... and turned that into a kind of snobby elitism that is just as off-putting.

Don't say "thank you" for a useful post because it takes up too much time and space? How utterly ridiculous. Only an antisocial or asocial nerd would come up with such a rule and think it was a great idea, and I say that as an antisocial nerd myself.

The system of ranking people by points, insisting that every single post be some giant revelation of wisdom that advances the fortunes of the tech industry and mankind immeasurably, etc. has only exacerbated people's tendency to self-aggrandize, kiss ass, over-analyze minutiae, and constantly try to one-up each other... all cloaked in a brightly colored cheerful passive-aggressive candy coating, of course.

I still cruise the site from time to time because it does have great links (one of the few things left going for it) but there is no way in hell I would consider myself part of the community or welcome. I certainly wouldn't and don't come here any more to ask questions or try to learn anything by exposing any gaps in my knowledge to general ridicule and sneering.

My two cents.

mehmeta• 14 years ago

I fully understand the sentiment behind this comment since it resonates with how I feel about HN for the most part. However, there's undeniable value in this particular style of a community:

Don't say "thank you" for a useful post because it takes up too much time and space? How utterly ridiculous.

As far as I can see, if you have a point or articulation in your "thank you" comment, it's not really frowned upon. But if all you can contribute to the conversation are those two words, isn't that what upvoting is for? I really like that HN threads are much easier/faster to navigate (compared to reddit for example) merely because of the lower number of comments, which stems from the pressure to provide more substance behind them.

I spend over an hour a day on this site, yet have so few comments or submissions; because it costs so much time and effort to put anything in front of a pedantic, productivity/efficiency obsessed audience ready to shred anything to bits and pieces that is less than a throughly fact-checked, carefully constructed argument. I think that's what makes HN worth reading.

For example, I'm about to post about a project I've been working on for a while. I'm sure it'll feel good to hear if people have good things to say about it but the most valuable feedback I'll receive will be from the people who overanalyze things and are highly critical.

mixmax• 14 years ago

I've had an account here for more than four years, so I'd like to think I have a somewhat informed perspective on how the community has fared thus far.

The first year or so was a private club. I knew many of the posters, and would have great arguments, some won, some lost but it didn't really matter because everyone shared a passion for knowledge, and would rather be proven wrong than not learn something new. The discussion was great.

The second year I started losing track of the usernames and thus it became less of a club of peers, and more of a regular forum, albeit a very high quality one.

The third year the site had attracted so many users that the original patos of intelligent discussion based on merit started to fade. Based on mere numbers this had to be so; for any given subject there are only a limited number of people that adhere to the standards to which we had becomme accustomed, and new users mistook nitpicking for good discussion.

The fourth year I've more or less stopped posting and discussing here, primarily because it's become a game of winning, and not a game of learning. Nitpicking is a great way of winning, but terrible if you want to have an interesting discussion. Negativity is highly correlated with nitpicking in this respect :-)

I remember the first year here i had a long discussion with MattMaroon about a linked story where a consultant had saved a company 100 million dollars by changing a few bits and pieces around in the check-out process. He was concinced the company was Amazon, I was convinced it wasn't. The discussion dragged on, and we each tried to throw statistics, numbers and good guesses on the table, until at the end Matt found a link directly confirming that it was indeed amazon. He was right, and we were both happy because now we knew. I don't see many of those discussions anymore. Unfortunately.

hollerith2• 14 years ago

>Don't say "thank you" for a useful post because it takes up too much time and space? How utterly ridiculous.

The comp.* hierarchy and probably most of the rest of Usenet in 1992 had the ethic that you should not waste a whole message on just a thank-you (thank-yous sent by email were fine, and in 1992, almost every Usenet From field contained a valid email address) or on any other purely social nicety unless perhaps the social nicety's purpose was to conclude or cap off a long series of back-and-forth messages.

Usenet was probably where a good 40 to 50% of thoughtful public discussion happened on the 1992 internet (the other places where much public discussion happened being mailing lists and IRC).

snowwrestler• 14 years ago

I think Hacker News strikes people as negative because a wide diversity of opinions occur here. Like all online communities it is self-selected, but in this case only really along one criteria--coding. All the other bases for affiliating with other people (politics, ideology, opinion, location) can vary widely.

Whereas, social network communities like Twitter and Facebook are self-selecting along any number of criteria--political, personal, ideological, local, employer, etc. As a result, I bet most people don't see as much diversity of opinion through their personal social networks as they do in single-issue dedicated online communities like HN.

So, I'm not surprised that this author found a more positive response from Twitter, than he did from Hacker News. The people following him on Twitter are already people who have affirmatively chosen to hear what he has to say. The people here have not, so they are more likely to argue, point out flaws, etc.

That can come across as negativity, sure--but is it? Is disagreement or challenge such a bad thing?

Personally speaking, I think that one result of highly personalized social media networks is that it leads to segregation from opposing opinions or very different points of view. The result is, seemingly, less tolerance for those opinions or points of view.

hollerith2• 14 years ago

>When open source communities figured out blogging they started to setup planets

Although my interest in open source was very high when one of the early planets, Debian Planet, started, I never found Debian Planet or any other open-source planet worthwhile.

>Apache's policy to this day is that any member of the community can syndicate the entire contents of their blog or a specific tagged feed of their blog to the planet. It's the individuals decision how much of themselves they want to share. Mozilla had a nearly identical debate and came to the exact same conclusion

This policy has been tried many times, but has never resulted in a blog, feed or form of public online discourse I want to follow.

Is HN negative by design? (2011)

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