65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform

https://philippdubach.com/standalone/hn-sentiment/

by 7777777phil • 7 months ago

503 458 7 months ago

Well who would have thought that negativity attracts more discussion. Unfortunately this is also where mainstream media has been going for a while..

appreciatorBus• 7 months ago

Negative bias has been observed in all forms of media. What would be unusual and newsworthy would be if hacker news was an exception to this.

ozim2• 7 months ago

No one wants to spend time writing "I agree", mostly they move on or give an upvote. Doesn't look like TFA counts upvotes as we don't see them.

ghaff• 7 months ago

The counterargument is that, if you think a post is idiotic, you could say so but, if you don't articulate why in detail, you'll probably be downvoted or modded. So better to just downvote if you care and move on.

AlienRobot• 7 months ago

I agree.

The depressing thing is how some forums like StackOverflow actually ban "thank you" comments. It makes the world a more heartless place.

lucianbr• 7 months ago

Somtetimes people write "This", and that's apparently a no-no. You are told to just upvote.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 7 months ago

From an evolutionary standpoint, which circumstances should a thinking being prioritize to best ensure its safety and survival? Should it seek out "positive sentiment" and seek to avoid "negative sentiment" (even though this likely doesn't mean evading negative circumstances merely avoiding the sentiment until it is too late)?

Negative bias is probably inevitable in cognition itself.

goatlover6• 7 months ago

The tv show Pluribus delves into this a bit. An event (speaking generally to avoid spoilers) causes most people to become extremely happy and positive, and also super ethical, to the point that survival of the human race is in question, and the "most miserable" person on the planet is left to save things.

7777777phil18• 7 months ago

Related threads on overwhelmingly negative comments: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40430263 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32400521

ok123456• 7 months ago

Negative "Sentiment" aka a black box made a frownie face.

Real discourse tends to be critical. If you want sloppy trade press, read Apple Insider or Business Insider, or maybe watch a slop tech creator like Linus Tech Tips.

PaulHoule6• 7 months ago

Negative posts that I post tend to do better than neutral or positive ones. I have a classifier that judges titles on "most likely to get upvoted" for which "Richard Stallman is Dead" is the optimal title, and another that judges on "likely to have a comments/vote ratio > 0.5" [1]. The first one is a crummy model in terms of ROC, the second is pretty good and favors things that are clickbaity, about the battle of the sexes, and oddly, about cars.

But that 35 as an average score is hard for me to believe at first, I mean, the median HN post gets no votes, last time I looked the mean was around 8 or so. What is he sampling from?

[1] comments/votes = 0.5 is close to the mean

7777777phil18• 7 months ago

Hi, appreciate your comment. The sampling is from all posts / comments over the past 35 days, accessed via the API (https://github.com/philippdubach/hn-archiver). There might be a skew to sample higher voted posts first (i.e. if there is high volume posts and comments with zero upvotes don't make it into the database) so that would explain the high ration. I will definitely look into it before publishing the paper - this is exactly the feedback I was hoping for publishing the preprint. Thanks for pointing this out! Would love to see the mentioned classifier. If you find the time please reach out to the email on the page or on bluesky.

osakasake2• 7 months ago

This is factually incorrect. There’s no way that you are sampling ALL posts and comments because otherwise the average would not be 35 points. The vast majority of posts get no upvotes.

In addition, comments do not show the points accumulated so there’s no way you can know how many points a comment gets, only posts.

pjc502• 7 months ago

"most likely to get upvoted" for which "Richard Stallman is Dead" is the optimal title

This is extremely funny, and reminds me of the famous newspaper headline "Generalissimo Francisco Franco Is Still Dead". Of course, at time of writing, RMS is still alive and the optimal headline is a falsehood..

PaulHoule6• 7 months ago

My system uses logistic regression on words and it thinks that HN (1) really likes Richard Stallman and (2) really likes obituaries so put them together and that headline gets a great score.

I bet if it was put in as "fake news" it would get hundreds of votes and comments before dang took it down. And when it does happen for real it will certainly get 1000s votes.

TeMPOraL• 7 months ago

Of course, at time of writing, RMS is still alive and the optimal headline is a falsehood..

That's where Betteridge's law of headlines comes to the rescue! Just rephrase the headline as a question - "Is Richard Stallman dead?".

nonameiguess• 7 months ago

Sorry to get both meta and personal, but I'm kind of curious because you're one of the few here whose name I instantly recognize, probably because I'm fairly interested in science and my impression is you mostly post scientific papers or articles discussing them. I'm looking at your profile of submissions now and the first page is 30 submissions all made in the last 24 hours. Most of them are indeed scientific papers. My own experience reading material like this is it generally takes at minimum 5-6 hours to read a paper and meaningfully digest any of it, and that's only true of subjects I'm somewhat familiar with. For subjects I'm not familiar with, there is rarely any point in reading direct research at all. Given you can't possibly be reading all of this, what is your motivation for submitting all of it to Hacker News? What is your process for finding this material and identifying it as interesting?

PaulHoule6• 7 months ago

(1) Answering "what is my motivation?" isn't simple because I got into this slowly. I really enjoyed participating in HN, around the time my karma reached 4000 I started getting competitive about it, around 20,000 I started developing automation.

When I helped write

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0308253100

in 2004 I thought text classification was a remarkably mature technology which was under-used. In particularly I thought there was no imagination in RSS reader interfaces and thought an RSS reader with an algorithmic feed. That December when Musk bought Twitter this was still on my mind and I made it happen and the result was the YOShInOn RSS reader [1] and I thought building it around a workflow where I select articles for my own interest and post some on HN was a good north star. [2]

It is self tuning and soldiers on despite changes in the input and how much time I vote to it. It spins like a top and I've only patched it twice in the last year.

Anything that gets posted to HN is selected once by the algorithm and twice by me. Reducing latency is a real goal, improving quality is a hypothetical goal, either of those involves some deep thinking about "what does quality mean?" and threatens the self tuning and "spins like a top".

My interest in it is flagging lately because of new projects I am working on, I am worried though that if I quit doing it people will wonder if something happened to me because that happened when Tomte went dark.

(2) I'll argue that scientific papers are better and worse than you say they are. Sometimes an abstract or an image tells a good story story, arguably a paper shouldn't get published. I think effective selection and ranking processes are a pyramid and I am happy to have the HN community make the decision about things. On the other hand, I've spent 6 months (not full time) wrangling with a paper and then come back 6 years later and come to see I got it wrong the first time.

I worked at arXiv a long time ago and we talked a lot about bibliometrics and other ways to judge the quality of scientific work and the clearest thing is that it would take a long time like not 4-5 hours of an individual but more like several years (maybe decades!) of many, many people working at it -- consider the example of the Higgs Boson!

Many of the papers that I post were found in the RSS feed of phys.org, if they weren't working overtime to annoy people with annoying ads I would post more links to phys.org and less to papers. I do respect the selection effort they make and often they rewrite the title "We measured something with" to "Scientists discovered something important" and sometimes they explain papers well but unfortunately "voice" won't get them to reform their self-destructive advertising.

I could ramble on a lot more and I really ought to write this up somewhere off HN but I will just open the floor to questions if you have any.

[1] search for it in the box at the bottom of the page

[2] pay attention if you struggle to complete side projects!

7777777phil18• 6 months ago

Sent you a message to the mail in your bio but I thought I also leave this here: Again, thank you for your comments. I went down a rabbit hole reading your essays Hacker News For Hackers and Classifying Hacker News Titles.

I've also been building an RSS reader with integrated HN success prediction – essentially trying to surface which articles from my feed are most likely to resonate on HN before I submit them. Your research directly informed several decisions, so I wanted to share what I've learned and ask for your insights.

V1 DistilBERT baseline: Started with a fine-tuned DistilBERT on ~15k HN titles. Achieved ROC AUC of 0.77, which felt promising. Clean architecture, simple training loop. V2 Added complexity: Switched to RoBERTa + TF-IDF ensemble, thinking more features = better. ROC AUC dropped to 0.70. Precision suffered. Calibration was poor (ECE 0.11). V3 Stacking meta-learner: Added LightGBM to combine RoBERTa + TF-IDF + 30 engineered features (domain hit rates, author patterns, temporal encoding, word-level stats). The model was "cheating" by memorizing historical domain/author success rates from training data: - domain_hit_rate: 79.9% importance - roberta_prob: only 18.6% V4 – Return to simplicity: Pure RoBERTa, no stacking. Added isotonic calibration (your probability clustering problem, solved!). Current performance: - ROC AUC: 0.692 - ECE: 0.009 (excellent calibration) - Optimal threshold: 0.295 (not 0.5 – exactly as you documented)

What worked for me: Isotonic calibration: Your observation that most predictions cluster below 0.2 was spot-on. Isotonic regression produces well-distributed, meaningful probabilities. Aggressive threshold lowering: At ~10% base rate (posts hitting 100+ points), 0.5 threshold catches almost nothing useful. Pure transformer, no feature engineering: Contrary to intuition, adding TF-IDF and engineered features mostly added noise. The transformer handles the semantics well on its own.

What didn't worked for me: Focal Loss: Made the model too conservative (760 FN vs 219 FP) Domain/author features: Feature leakage, didn't generaliz Stacking: Added complexity without improving generalization

Your essay mentions achieving similar ROC AUC with logistic regression on bag-of-words features. A few things I'm curious about: Do you still maintain this system? Has your approach evolved since 2017? What was your experience with full-content vs title-only classification? I'm title-only currently, which has obvious limits. Any insights on the non-stationarity problem? Topic drift (Apple launches, security panics) seems like a persistent challenge. What made you choose logistic regression over neural approaches at the time? The simplicity seems to have served you well.

analog8374• 7 months ago

Everybody likes a horror movie.

MeteorMarc• 7 months ago

Is this positive or negative news?

shikon7• 7 months ago

If I would guess, I'd say 65% positive, 35% negative

tbrake• 7 months ago

HN is a beautiful lesson on the hard limits of a contrarian's usefulness.

mdoliwa• 7 months ago

I wonder how HN front page would look like with positive ones only.

PaulHoule6• 7 months ago

I've had a project in the queue to hook up a sentiment analyzer to an RSS reader/Mastodon/AT protocol client to make negative posts and negative people disappear. My basic trouble with that sort of thing is that those things can harvest much more negativity than my nervous system can handle.

koakuma-chan4• 7 months ago

People usually complain when they are not happy but do not praise when they are. It's unsurprising most comments are negative.

psychoslave• 7 months ago

I hate your tone, just as much as autoreferential irony.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to deliver this message, you've been indispensable to its creation.

yomismoaqui2• 7 months ago

Ah, nothing can beat that old combo of ranting and/or correcting someone on the Internet.

As an ESL person one of the first internet-related terms I learned was "flamewar".

EDIT: ESL -> English as a Second Language

j3th9n• 7 months ago

ESL?

BrawnyBadger53• 7 months ago

English second language

andruby• 7 months ago

"English as a Second Language" would be my guess, but I've never seen that used as an abbreviation

c-linkage4• 7 months ago

English for Speakers of other Languages

yomismoaqui2• 7 months ago

Sorry, edited for clarity.

PS: I learned that acronym less than a year ago, so maybe it is not as used as I thought.

c-linkage4• 7 months ago

OT: Is Cloudflare breaking the internet again?

This is the third link off the HN Front Page that yields the following error in Firefox:

Websites prove their identity via certificates. Firefox does not trust this site because it uses a certificate that is not valid for philippdubach.com. The certificate is only valid for the following names: cloudflare-ech.com, *.cloudflare-ech.com

Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN

jjice• 7 months ago

I'm running Firefox 146.0.1 (aarch64) on MacOS and don't have this issue.

7777777phil18• 7 months ago

I don't see any issues on my side

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): 0.5 s Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): 0.01 First Contentful Paint (FCP): 0.5 s Time to First Byte (TTFB): 0.3 s

Also not on the Clodflare Dashboard. If the issue persists could you please send me the error message and console output. Thanks!

c-linkage4• 7 months ago

Some more testing reveals that it's uBlock Origin causing the problem. Disabling the plug-in for the site means Firefox no longer displays an error.

hubraumhugo• 7 months ago

dang's explanation sums it up nicely:

It's human nature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias. Everyone does it, but we perceive other people as doing it more than we do, which is itself a variation of the bias. You can even see it in the title of the OP, in the word "overwhelmingly". That's excessive: the negative bias is noticeable, but if you look closely, it's not overwhelming. (To make up some numbers, it's more like 60-40, not 90-10.)

However, it often feels as if it is overwhelming; in fact, one or two datapoints, plus negativity bias, are enough to create just such a feeling. The feeling gets expressed in ways that trigger similar feelings in other people, so we end up with a positive* feedback loop.

The interesting question is, what factors mitigate this? how do we dampen negativity bias? or, how do we get negative feedback into our positive feedback loop of negative affect? That must also be happening all the time, or we'd be in a "war of all against all", which isn't the case, though (again) it may feel like it.

* ['positive' in the sense of increasing; a positive loop of negative affect!]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40430263

c-linkage4• 7 months ago

We focus on negative outcomes because that relates directly to survival. Our brains are wired for it. Talking about negative outcomes means we learn about them and have a better chance of avoiding them. Plus, the fear response is much stronger and lasts longer than the happy / joy response.

Note that for humans and other social animals "survival" doesn't always mean life or death -- it can mean being included or excluded from a social group which indirectly affects survival chances.

tocs3• 7 months ago

This was a really cleaver post to create the most comments of the sentiment mentioned. I am really impressed how well it is working and would like to know more.

skerit3• 7 months ago

Complaining is easy. And even when you complain, and someone comments to give another perspective that is not necessarily seen as a rebuke.

But posting something positive and getting slammed in the comments? That's depressing. So the barrier to posting something positive seems higher.

Peroni• 7 months ago

most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic.

This is addressed in OPs post. The vast majority of the 'negativity' I encounter on HN is technical critique rather than criticism or toxicity. I've found HN to arguably be one of the least toxic communities.

matthewfcarlson• 7 months ago

Salty but not mean is how I put it

gjsman-10003• 7 months ago

In my opinion; the technical critique is often thin, an edge case at most, or something overly pedantic; solely to make a negative claim.

“The sky is blue.”

“Technically speaking, no; it’s just a reflection, and at night it’s basically black, so you’re wrong even the majority of the time!”

As such I still completely back that article years ago calling this place lovably toxic. It’s gotten worse since then.

PaulHoule6• 7 months ago

Less toxic than Twitter and clones for sure.

giancarlostoro• 7 months ago

Except when its political talk in any way, which we try to avoid, but when it bleeds through from time to time, it can be all over the place on HN.

f1shy3• 7 months ago

I have seen pretty toxic comments in many political threads. Specially in threads of political that have nothing to do with technology in any way.

BTW even being the least toxic leaves the bar still pretty low, if you ask me.

mstipetic3• 7 months ago

There’s a lot of pedantry as well

mbesto• 7 months ago

Agreed. I for one would not want to be involved in a message board full of people constantly saying "yaa you're great, this is great!".

Constructive criticism isn't toxic and is incredibly valuable.

jerf• 7 months ago

Another problem I'm starting to see lately is accounts on Reddit posting vague positive comments to farm karma, make the accounts look real, run cover for other AI posts from the same account, etc. I'd love to see a world where we have more positive comments on articles but positivity on a post is starting to be a weak (but growing) spam indicator!

GypsyKing7162• 7 months ago

Reddit is more toxic than even Facebook to be honest. I've posted something just in discovery questions for something I'm building and immediate was banned from the group. First time on Reddit, first time in that group.

Has happened in two other same type situations. Find it super territorial and toxic TBH.

alach11• 7 months ago

I believe Nat Friedman said "pessimists sound smart, optimists make money." It's certainly much easier to give a snarky/negative take and shoot an idea down than think creatively about how to make it work. Also, negative people are perceived as smarter!

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/002210...

boringg• 7 months ago

Add in that optimists live longer.

lazide• 7 months ago

As a counter point - every couple I ever ran across in divorce court getting raked over the coals seemed to have at least one delusional optimist in the mix.

Both to have gotten in there, and to keep going.

Like anything, it's a balancing act. Being optimistic the IRS isn't going to throw you in jail for not paying your taxes, after all, has a so-so track record. But not zero!

pfdietz7• 7 months ago

That sounds like survivor bias.

It's very important to filter out bad ideas.

lo_zamoyski2• 7 months ago

No doubt he was making this claim in a business context, but I wish it wasn't framed in financial terms. Our culture is already too obsessed with money, falsely framing it as the measure of the good life and of human worth. What an impoverished, boring, and frankly nihilistic and horrifying worldview.

That being said, pessimism/optimism is a false dichotomy. The reason is that both are willful attitudes of expectation on an emotional spectrum rather than rationally grounded and sober assessments of reality. The wise path is prudent (I don't mean "cautious"; I mean the classic virtue [0]). Prudence is rational. You can't be better than rational (genuinely rational; believing you are rational is not the same as being rational).

[0] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12517b.htm

kreeben• 7 months ago

You just issued a complaint and that's a fact. In the context of "complaints are bad, m'kay" how do you feel about this?

moralestapia2• 7 months ago

Hi philipp (in case you're reading this),

Could you clarify what do you mean by "points" ("score" in your pre-print)?

Also, what's your data source?

"This study uses publicly available data from Hacker News." is not really a data source.

Also also, you missed the largest, most important effect that skews the votes on this site. But you can definitely find it on the dataset you got, that'd be a very interesting disclosure!

Hint: Immediately after posting this comment, it went to the bottom and "downvotes" magically started to come in ;).

7777777phil18• 7 months ago

Hi I'm trying to catch up to the comments but definitely appreciate this! I wrote a worker that uses the public API to archive all post and comments and create regular snapshots to track growth etc (https://github.com/philippdubach/hn-archiver). I will upload a newer version of the code and dataset when I publish the paper. And I will clarify the source as you noted. Thanks again! If you find the time please reach out to the email on my page or on bluesky (new there) very interested to discuss the "effect" you mentioned.

moralestapia2• 7 months ago

Okay, I'll reach out.

Btw, excellent work!

igleria• 7 months ago

Anger sells... but who's buying?

joshstrange4• 7 months ago

I've seen the same with comments (both negative sentiment and shorter length). Short, snarky, negative comments [0] normally get a much better response than well-reasoned, longer-form comments.

Not that karam matters on HN but I have been disappointed to see longer comments that I put a lot of effort into get ignored while short, pithy comments get way more upvotes/replies. I've spent literally over an hour on some detailed comments that didn't even get a reply from the original person asking a question and likewise had comments I fired off with near-0 thought that "blow up". It's frustrating that better content is not always rewarded.

[0] Something I'm guilty of

ryandrake• 7 months ago

Longer content isn’t always better. There is something to brevity. Anyone can make a point with 2,000 words, but it takes writing and editing skill to make that same point and have the same impact with 20 words.

joshstrange4• 7 months ago

I agree, longer does not mean better and I'll be the first to tell you I can be long-winded but it's because often there is a lot of nuance and I want to make my point as explicit as I can and leave little room for misunderstanding.

Most of my longer comments start as a single sentence that I feel is too ambiguous or leave too much room for misunderstandings and so they grow from there.

Teever2• 7 months ago

I’ve felt the same way with social media in general. It’s about managing your resources. In this case it’s your time.

Something I’ve been experimenting with here is writing smaller comments that serve as an invitation for someone to write an equally lengthy or longer comment in reply.

If the accept the implicit invitation then we can have a longer conversation. It has had moderate success.

heliumtera2• 7 months ago

It's frustrating that better content is not always rewarded

It could be. Maybe we just fail to create better content, despite the effort put in. Maybe your frustration comes from lack of engagement, maybe your effort was lost in the ether and no one noticed... But getting noticed could be one criteria to evaluate how good content is. You perform better while not creating the content you consider better. Or captivating an audience to appreciate the better. You see, they don't.

Do you have a blog? It sounds like you would enjoy that.

joshstrange4• 7 months ago

I do have a blog [0] that I occasionally (I think I’m averaging once a year haha) post to. And it’s possible that trying to create better content has the opposite effect, though I’m prouder of the stuff I put more thought/effort into so even if it results in worse content for others, it’s something I want to put my name on.

[0] https://joshstrange.com

r-johnv• 7 months ago

Thank you for pointing that out.

I'm recalibrating my own behavior to upvote more.

Is it the desired behavior of HN that silent upvotes are for agreement? (Instead of a positive comment that doesn't add substantially to the discourse?)

ksymph• 7 months ago

I've certainly noticed the same. I have two accounts here, a main one, and one that I use as a throwaway for occasional personal/emotional, off-topic, or snarky comments. The latter has roughly 4x the comment-per-karma ratio at the moment.

Though interestingly that's largely due to a few specific comments 'blowing up' -- it's typically either 0 upvotes or 100+. I believe the median is actually lower despite a significantly higher average.

pjc502• 7 months ago

I have 104872 karma on HN. You may find https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders and https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments interesting. However, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to sort one's own comments by ranking. One of these days I'm going to scrape mine and see if I can write the "rules of HN" for highly upvoted comments.

One is: HN does not like jokes, unless you put an explanation in the comment as well.

joshstrange4• 7 months ago

Hmm, I went looking for a comment [0] I made "sometime last year" talking about what does/doesn't get upvoted on HN, I finally found it, I made the comment 9 years ago (I literally stared at the date for a good few minutes, I thought it was much more recent) where I did a short analysis on my own comments over the previous 2 years (at that time) which sort of shows the opposite of what I've said (reviewing the comments I linked), only a few of them were short/snarky/pithy, most were not novels but were a little more fleshed out.

That said, I haven't done sentiment analysis on those or more recent comments but my guess is that "negative" comments get more upvotes

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13491266

byte_0• 7 months ago

I thought I had read you had 1048576 of karma and thought: what a coincidence: 1 megabyte worth of karma.

BTW, this comment is supposed to be joke-ish.

zahlman2• 7 months ago

One is: HN does not like jokes, unless you put an explanation in the comment as well.

Informative content gives people social license to approve of the comment. HN users intuit on some level that jokes are against the cultural norms; but being serious all the time in an open round-table environment almost goes against human nature.

zahlman2• 7 months ago

Short, snarky, negative comments [0] normally get a much better response than well-reasoned, longer-form comments.

My interpretation is that this is at least partially what flags are for. A comment that is clearly seeking to be amusing while also arguing a position, that would be clearly unfunny to someone who disagrees, is needlessly fanning the flames.

I have been disappointed to see longer comments that I put a lot of effort into get ignored while short, pithy comments get way more upvotes/replies

I share the frustration. But publishing content on the Internet seems to be more or less universally like that.

carlosjobim2• 7 months ago

It could be that your longer and more thoughtful comments get a lot of upvotes, but also a lot of down votes from angry hackers who were oppressed by your writing. Resulting in a tiny negative or positive number. Impossible to tell.

troad• 7 months ago

This is spot on and has really reduced my willpower to post, tbh.

Like begets like. A glib and snarky comment gets an emotional response, leading to quick, emotional votes. A nuanced, thoughtful comment gets the reader to think, but that's rarely conducive to upvotes unless they were already in agreement.

Over time everyone is Pavlovian-conditioned by the dopamine hit of upvotes to stick with the glib and snarky comments.

The whole upvote system is just a slow-acting poison that inevitably destroys any online community. HN has fared better than most, thanks to great moderation, but it won't resist forever.

bell-cot• 7 months ago

I'd attribute at least some of that to HN users being weighted toward engineering-ish jobs. "Major Outage at US-East-1" news is something we are paid to pay far more attention to than "All is Well at US-East-1".

baxtr• 7 months ago

The value I get from negative comments is usually higher.

My usual journey: I visit the comment section and then look for the first top comment that criticizes the core thesis of the article.

aDyslecticCrow• 7 months ago

If i find an article online, ill sometimes pass it through a HN search to see any issues with it.

There are plenty of articles or news ive red that made me think "that's pretty clever" only for HN to point out background i missed and tradeoffs making a solution worse.

Sometimes criticism is shallow or pedantic, but thats easy to dismiss if irrelevant.

samlinnfer• 7 months ago

Everyone likes a good sneer. Makes us feel better.

tomasphan• 7 months ago

We self filter for negative responses because negative content is functionally interactive whereas positive content is functionally complete. Agreement is silent, users keep scrolling if they agree. Disagreement demands expression. Just a theory I don’t have data to back this up.

patrickmay• 7 months ago

You're right! Oh, wait....

jackp96• 7 months ago

I definitely think you're onto something. Also, we're inherently psychologically biased toward negative content because all the monkeys who ignored the scary things died.

We're naturally wired to engage with negative content - and that's a must-use recipe for success in an economy that increasingly relies on grabbing your attention.

It's no wonder that depression and anxiety rates are higher than ever, despite our world being much, much safer than it was 100-200 years ago.

Even being aware of this doesn't help all that much.

Trump did a new, unbelievably dumb thing that's going to ruin people's lives? Instant click from me.

Malaria rates down 20% over the past 10 years in the DRC?* I'm still scrolling.

*Fake example, but you get the gist.

kaoD• 7 months ago

Not only that, but a positive comment that adds nothing is frowned upon ("that's what the upvote button is for!") which negatively selects such comments.

Thus comments are mostly neutral, objective facts that add upon the original comment, or negative comments of disagreement.

standardUser• 7 months ago

I learn a lot more from informative posts that add something than critical posts that tear something down, largely because the critical posts are basic and repetitive while the informative ones are often novel and offer insider/professional observations.

nitwit005• 7 months ago

The site design also seems to discourage making a simple positive comment. Just click the up vote button.

michaelbuckbee• 7 months ago

To try and overcome my own personal tendency towards negative criticism on HN, I try and reframe my comments from "why this won't work" to "how can we make this work".

Not a panacea, and I'd be interested to hear others ideas on how to better comment and give feedback.

jake200• 7 months ago

Maybe try this heuristic: If the content is something you understand well or are passionate about, give merit to its core idea and expand upon it. If the content is something you do not understand well, ask questions that address what you believe is your fundamental gap in understanding the core idea. Not everyone writes perfectly, so be charitable and assume that other parts of the content may not be as thorough.

1970-01-013• 7 months ago

Because wisdom stems from burnt hands, and wisdom is extremely valuable. Positivity simply has a lower value to the reader. Maybe we should create good.news.ycombinator.com and see how much less interesting it becomes?

fidotron• 7 months ago

This is not the case.

Wisdom is in knowing what to do which works, which is finite. Wasting knowledge space on the infinite ways to be wrong is not nearly as helpful as it may seem.

1970-01-013• 7 months ago

I think Buffet said it best: "You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you do not do too many things wrong."

whazor• 7 months ago

Should constructive feedback or contradictory viewpoints really be seen as negative sentiment? When reading the comment section of an article I would like to understand any nuances or shortcomings of something.

Furthermore, there should be a difference between a contradictory viewpoint and something that is truly negative.

AnimalMuppet• 7 months ago

Possibly related: In the last year or two, I find myself downvoting far more than I used to. I see far more comments that are personal attacks (at least borderline), ideological battle, arguing but with no actual substance, or just bizarre comments that don't actually make any sense.

Did HN get overrun by trolls, shills, and bots? Or did I just get more cranky?

nashashmi2• 7 months ago

I have seen that as well. HN is now a typical talking point on many tech sites. More people are becoming aware. So we are getting grumpy reddit users and twitter users (after the purchase of X).

lurk22• 7 months ago

I noticed the same thing in the last year. Tons of Reddit and 4chan colonists. Both generally lack any kind of technical background and flood to any thread remotely adjacent to politics.

Old platforms always end up having problems with the users capable of making positive contributions only having so much time in the day to post, whereas the incorrigible and insane are usually unemployed or use the site compulsively at work, so they end up being overrepresented and stick around for longer.

In the past I saw a lot more of these users get flagged and lose interest in the site, but recently it seems as though more users are vouching for the flagged comments and submissions.

lazarus012• 7 months ago

Really cool experiment Phillip, thanks for sharing!

This makes me recall a conversation from a podcast with Sam Harris where he discusses the “pornography of doubt”

Here is the YouTube clip, less than a minute long

https://youtube.com/shorts/ybUfy3DZK0U?si=o0t8AiLZE4XEeEYV

7777777phil18• 7 months ago

Thanks! And appreciate you sharing the Harris clip. I sometimes listen to his meditations: https://philippdubach.com/posts/gratitude

lazarus012• 7 months ago

Glad you enjoy Sam too!

I use to subscribe to waking up app and really enjoyed the enlightening discussions with other intellectuals in different domains of biology, psychology and science.

roschdal• 7 months ago

This is such a boring post to be #1 on Hacker News.

Herring• 7 months ago

https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart

Americans are increasingly unhappy, and they're not willing to do what it takes to be happy. Quite the opposite really.

It's not just the internet.

mid-kid• 7 months ago

Including this one.

nashashmi2• 7 months ago

Tech has changed focus from the typical HN expert to more mainstream users. And the HN expert does not like it. So that is why we are so negative. We see products shut down and we get unhappy. We see problems and we try to solve them. Or at least talk about them.

california-og3• 7 months ago

Back when Reddit allowed API access, I used a reader (rif) which allowed blocking subreddits. I did an experiment where I would browse /r/all and block any subreddit that had a toxic, gruesome, nsfw, or other content playing on negative emotions (like a pseudo feel-good post based on an otherwise negative phenomena). After a few years, and hundreds of banned subreddits, my /r/all was very wholesome, but contained only animal or niche hobby related subreddits. It was quite eye-opening on how negative reddit is, and also revealed how boring it is without the kind of algorithmic reaction seeking content.

In other words, if 35% of hn content is positive (or neutral?), compared to reddit and most mainstream social media, it's actually very positive!

Edit: I found the list of blocked subreddits if anyone is curious to see:

https://hlnet.neocities.org/RIF_filters_categorized.txt

Note that it also includes stuff I wasn't interested in at the time, like anime, and only has subreddits up until I quit, around the API ban.

pfdietz7• 7 months ago

Most ideas are bad, so maybe negativity should be common?

To meta-steelman: if one steelmans a bad take, then the negativity becomes even more valuable.

mikkupikku6• 7 months ago

It's probably not a good approach to life though. Most bad ideas aren't really worth arguing about, better to focus on the good ideas, or at least the finding common ground with the good intentions behind bad ideas.

I'm as guilty of negativity as anybody, maybe even more than most, but at least we can recognize this as a vice which may feel good in the short term but do us harm in the long run.

perfmode• 7 months ago

That’s a fair point, but I think we can distinguish between critical thinking and negativity.

We can rigorously test an idea or decide it’s not for us while still maintaining a supportive environment.

Often, the most helpful feedback isn't ‘this is bad,’ but rather ‘here is a different perspective to consider.’

1122332• 7 months ago

Most things are inedible, yet we treat food poisoning as unacceptable event. Places serving expired food get shut down. Yet preparing speech and sights we feed others is a lost art. When I read how people wrote 100 years ago I feel like a brute

nospice4• 7 months ago

I think this is a common view, but it assumes that most of one's negative hot takes are good. And frankly, I've seen HNers being confidently wrong more times than I can count.

yread• 7 months ago

nit: 35%

I did something similar and ended up opening only /r/AskHistorian posts...

wellthisisgreat• 7 months ago

Unironically, how are history-related questions not negative? I’d imagine people would ask questions about some dark events.

I was blocking subreddits recently and was contemplating if /r/historyporn because of the amount of photos of dead bodies and politically-charged discussions that sometimes unfold

Topgamer7• 7 months ago

I personally only really noticed that I did not like the "after dark" style reddits. But I would generally try to ignore anything political, and focus on like craft/hobby content, media (but not tabloid style), and things not a commentary.

Reddit (or socially generated sites) are really a mixed bag.

tsunamifury2• 7 months ago

I think what became interesting and I nailed down with others was any hobby forum became toxic and lost its utility in direct correlation with its popularity.

For the most part I pinned it down to casual engagement from non hobbyists introduced noise and anti information at scale.

For example in r/cars a site that talks about vehicles the vast majority of commenters do not own, comments become about the “simualacra” of having an exotic (comparing specs debating reviews etc). Where as Ferrari chat forum is about the utilitarian ins and outs of actually owning one (financing, maintence, dealer issues etc).

This seems to apply to all hobby forums when grow in popularity to the point where engagement rewards contributions from non hobbiests over real ones.

My final takeaway was that the nature of the internet being a simulation inherently rewards non real content over real. (Fake news is inherent to the internet) And karmic systems specifically reconstruct and enforce that simualacra.

josefresco• 7 months ago

I went through a similar process recently mostly by hand and found the same result. After blocking negative vibes, my only "subs" were intentionally "wholesome" subs like animals/feel good news etc.

also revealed how boring it is without the kind of algorithmic reaction seeking content.

I also found this but realized this is a good thing(!) if your goal is to reduce Reddit usage.

That being said, a little negativity might be warranted in order to be a part of the discussion. Otherwise you're just opting out completely.

california-og3• 7 months ago

I also found it a very good thing. After the API use ban, and losing my blocklist, I couldn't go back to browsing normal reddit anymore and was finally able to quit after 10+ years. And, it has made me very resistant to joining or doomscrolling any other social media too. I think the hn model is decent because it doesn't optimize for engagement but for intellectual curiosity, whether it's positive or negative, which leads to mostly earnest and interesting discussion.

epolanski3• 7 months ago

Controversial content is discussed more than positive one, that's a well known phenomenon from gossiping with friends to discussing politics online to whatever.

I always bring the same example: if one of your best friends has troubles with it's partner you'll hear for hours. But when things go smooth they have nothing to say and you have little to add.

rvnx3• 7 months ago

It depends on the platform. Most of the platforms reward content engagement, no matter if the content is positive or negative.

Engagement means money. Even if this is bait content then you get rewarded (on TikTok, X, YouTube, you directly get cash).

Even here controversy is indirectly rewarded here because it creates engagement, and there is practically no downsides if you upset anyone;

You get points for every answer that someone does to your comment, and the downvotes you get on your own comments don't offset the gained points.

These points have real utility to make money indirectly: the more points you have, the more credibility you have on this platform and capacity to push a story.

[...]

and it helps to bootstrap your project or grab new customers for free (at most 1 day of writing the bot script).

Let's say, you want to launch a new Juicero, and nobody knows about it yet, it's great to be able to push it on the homepage of HN, otherwise nobody is going to notice.

slfreference2• 7 months ago

There's a saying : No News is Good news.

redserk5• 7 months ago

I'm tired of this point being repeated. This is not universally true. I'm in communities where the more active discussions are not ragebait.

I'd say HN's problem is rooted in that many folks participate in malicious contrarianism.

Aurornis• 7 months ago

That’s a factor, but the Reddit hive mind can take even non-controversial posts and turn them into a toxic, cynical cesspool of comments.

When I was still visiting Reddit my subreddit list was short and focused on a few hobbies and tech topics. Even those subreddits had become overtaken with cynical doomerism and toxic responses to everything. For a while I could still get some value out of select comments, but eventually everyone who wanted real discussion gave up and left. Now even when interesting or helpful topics get posted it’s like the commenters are sharks circling and waiting for any opportunity to bring doom and gloom to any subject.

cloverich2• 7 months ago

This is well known, and why forums that wanted to maintain their quality would consistently lock such threads going back at least 20+ years when I started using forums. Reddit, Facebook, et al, do the opposite. Its why they feel so bad to use over time - they are engineered to tap into this and to promote it. HN thrives because they very consciously do the opposite.

I'm sure many of us would take it much further, but I hope we can appreciate its not an easy task.

jayd16• 7 months ago

If you had a no tolerance policy then over time you ban every single sub. 99.99% positive would still mean they could get banned, under this algorithm.

You're also comparing Apples to Oranges by comparing zero tolerance records for subs vs average across all posts of hn.

gn4d• 7 months ago

Had the same experience with rif/res, and on X. If you go into algorithm-heavy sites with the intention of actively curating your personalized algorithm into your areas of interest, the sites can work quite well. One click blocking of subreddits and topics/posters sends strong feedback to the algorithm to readjust. I really don't know how people can use sites in any other way. For YouTube, I have filters and blockers set up such that I don't even get recommended any videos, and don't see any videos to click on unless I type in a search query or receive a notification from a channel to which I am intentionally subscribed. Facebook was/is broken beyond all repair, though. I recall that you could not remove posts from random groups and people from your feed, even if you were not friends with them or members of those groups.

Sometimes, I will see a screenshot of someone using reddit or YouTube "unfiltered" and it's night and day, full of slop and ragebait everywhere. No thanks!

My only difference of opinion with you is that I don't find positive content boring. I find positive things exciting and engaging! Negative content just makes me want to tune out, for the most part, unless it's some cathartic or amusing scenario like the recent thread here about SO imploding lol.

california-og3• 7 months ago

I didn't mean to imply that I find all positive content boring — just the kind of positive content that would rise to /r/all in reddit at that time, which was mostly quickly digestable content (like animal pictures). And it was also boring in the sense that it was much "slower" to change within a day than the unfiltered /r/all, so I would largely see the same content for a lot longer.

YouTube is also similiar. I need to be quite careful what to click so "my algorithm" stays interesting and wholesome. If I click on any remotely baity and negative video, the recommendations algo picks it up almost immediately and devolves into garbage.

b3lvedere• 7 months ago

So a nice bubble? :) ( I actually mean that positive )

wildzzz• 7 months ago

Unrelated but I still use rif daily. You can patch the apk using Revanced to use your own API key rather than the original developer's key. With the rise of AI, I've block a bunch of subreddits that have become infected with obvious engagement bait posts all with similar structures, writing styles, and tropes.

"Am I the asshole for leaving my spouse because they pushed me down the stairs and murdered my dog? He's also a member of an ultra-nationalist terror organization and doesn't put his cart away at the grocery store.

My friends and family have chimed in with mixed sentiments on social media. Some are praising me and others are telling me I'm wrong."

The account will of course be brand new and all of the top comments will be accounts that solely respond to similar bait posts on similar subreddits. It reminds me of subreddit simulator, it's bots talking to bots. My personal conspiracy theory is that reddit encourages this AI bait slop because it drives engagement and gets people to see more ads. The stories are like the soap operas I sometimes watched with my mom growing up.

skerit3• 7 months ago

What! You can still use rif like that? That's interesting. I completely stopped browsing Reddit on my phone after it went away (though maybe that's for the best...)

phantom784• 7 months ago

I switched to RedReader, which Reddit decided to still allow.

bena• 7 months ago

I feel like this goes back to the "trick" of getting your questions about Linux answered. Basically, if you just asked your question "How do I do X on Linux?", you'd get no response. But if you said "Windows is so much better than Linux because I can't even do X on Linux", you'd get 5 different ways to accomplish your task before the end of the day.

Nothing gets people engaged more than making them angry.

Y_Y3• 7 months ago

I feel ironically obliged to mention Cunningham's Law

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

Workaccount25• 7 months ago

The cynical doomerism of reddit is like an infectious disease that ensnares you in their pit of misery with it's initial blast of catharsis. People whose lives bring them out of that swamp leave reddit and stop contributing, so it's mainly populated with miserable cynical doomers all jerking each other off about how screwed they are. Most of them are teenage/college kids working bottom rung jobs/entry level work/unemployed, with all the naivete that comes with it. Stay away from it.

mstipetic3• 7 months ago

As someone who’s on Reddit a lot, I completely agree

yodsanklai• 7 months ago

Cynical doomerism isn't limited to low pay jobs. Another super negative place is Team blind, where a lot of contributors are extremely well-paid.

andersonpico• 7 months ago

their cynicism is perfectly understandable once you correctly identified the demographics (which you did), so I'm not sure why you're holding pessimism against poor people with a bleak future; like it or not that's far more anchored in reality than anything around these parts, as there are far more people with "bottom rung jobs" than software developers and VC investors in the bay area.

sdenton4• 7 months ago

My original home on the internet is metafilter, where I've been a member since 2001. For an extremely long time, it was the internet's best kept community, imo. Unfortunately, it also seems to be falling into pure doomerism, especially as the user base has declined over the last few years. The overall population is definitely on the older side at this: I was one of the younger users 25 years ago, and probably still am.

Which is to say, the feelings of doom are quite widespread. There's a good argument to be made that it underlies the rise of trumpism: people in the sticks feeling abandonment, resentment, and doom, and expressing it at the ballot box.

metanonsense• 7 months ago

In my experience, this depends a lot on the subreddits you are subscribed to. Even in that set, the general mood sometimes changes significantly over time, e.g. because moderators change, a flood of new people is coming in because of some trends (AI), or some reddit meta events (eg a post being bestoffed). Generally speaking, a few vocal asshles can spoil your subreddit and drag the overall sentiment down.

andrepd3• 7 months ago

Why would young people with dismal economic perspectives and a poisoned political system possibly be miserable? That doesn't take too much to understand.

idontwantthis• 7 months ago

The worst is going on any city's subreddit. You will think it is a terrible place with the worst drivers, crime, terrible schools, no jobs, and loneliness. And if you try to contradict that with some positivity you will get attacked.

Psillisp• 7 months ago

Reddit literally is what you make of it. Unlike HN.

andoando• 7 months ago

Its not the doomerism that bothers me. Its the hivemind mentality and brain dead comments and zero critical thinking, and the absurd negativity and judgment of everyone and everything, and the politicalization of all the main subs (top post on pics is pretty much guranteed to be something Trump) Even as someone thats far left I cant stand Reddits mentality.

15 years ago there were nice discussions happening on reddit, now all the comments are one liner stupid jokes from people who never even bothered to read the article and people calling you a bootlicker if you don't agree with every nonsense against Trump/Musk/some billionaire.

PaulDavisThe1st2• 7 months ago

Just pick your subreddits more carefully, and your experience of reddit will be extremely different. Mine bears absolutely no resemblance to what you describe, likely because I never go near the "top level" reddits, and stay only with the subreddits that matter to me.

seizethecheese4• 7 months ago

This is currently the top reply to the top comment. It’s classified at 89% negative by this model: https://huggingface.co/distilbert/distilbert-base-uncased-fi...

Ironically, the above comment scored 99.9% negativity.

asats• 7 months ago

Same, and what made me finally quit reddit for good was realizing that on a given r/all page I was blocking 98+% of the content, to the point where it made me question why I am even bothering.

1970-01-013• 7 months ago

A 45/65 balance feels like it's at the optimal balance for interesting. Users are expected to continually upvote more and more boring posts if the user pool grows with noise. If the system stabilizes to 50/50, the content would trend toward mediocre but harmless.. Ergo, HN really is a cut above social media.

sp1nningaway• 7 months ago

This totally matches my experience and is good way of describing OP's negative subreddit filtering.

R/weightlifting used to be total cesspool of rumors and gossip about athletes and coaches, but at some point the sub course corrected and got more heavily moderated. The result is a completely uninteresting feed of technique videos that are actually just kids showing off their latest PR.

However, the sub also aggressively reenforces that mediocrity. I posted what I thought was an interesting video of Lebron James doing a weightlifting drill, (with much lighter weight than a competitive lifter) and commenters jumped all the way up my ass about it being off topic, but also how Lebron has terrible weightlifting technique. No compelling discussion about weightlifting for elite athletes in other sports was had...

Buttons840• 7 months ago

Blocking subreddits is still possible with just the webpage btw. Go into the sub, click the 3 dots up top, choose "mute subreddit".

I do the same as you. If any post is harming my mental health, I just must the entire sub. But then weirder and weirder stuff just keeps surfacing. Some of it is funny though; like it keeps showing me alien subreddits now, which I find funny because I'm pretty sure 65% of the comments are just satire.

sammy2255• 7 months ago

So should we stop being cynical and start writing "You're absolutely right!"

worksonmine2• 7 months ago

Critique is not necessarily a bad thing, and the author doesn't advocate for any change. It's just an observation. There is such a thing as toxic positivity as well, and if I'm not mistaken there's even a setting for the tone in ChatGPT to get rid of it.

GypsyKing7162• 7 months ago

Its called discourse, and its healthy.

Epskampie• 7 months ago

Would be interesting to see this kind of analysis on youtube comments.

It seems to me they made an algorithmic change a few years back where positive comment are greatly boosted. Since then then the "top" comments are always over-the-top exuberant.

croes• 7 months ago

I prefer those negative comments like I prefer negative reviews on sites like Amazon.

They are either easily to classify as useless when they don’t provide reasoning or they provide useful insight to think about.

If often submit links to HN for that kind of feedback

makeitdouble• 7 months ago

What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs.

If skepticism towards business announcements counts as negativity, I wonder what else we'd be discussing regarding any of those announcements.

An OpenAI marketing piece for instance will already go overboard on the positive side, I don't see relevant commentary being about how it's even better than the piece touts it. Commenting just to say "wow, that's great" or paraphrasing the piece is also useless and thrown upon. At best it would be a factual explanation or expansion of some harder to parse or specialized bits ?

I read the pre published PDF but don't really see stand what we were supposed to take from this blog post in particular.

Aldo am I basically fullfiling the blog post prophecy ?

PS: I think articles that raise to the top page with absolutely no comments would be an example of people straight enjoying the content, and the site actually working great IMHO

elicash• 7 months ago

I read the pre published PDF but don't really see stand what we were supposed to take from this blog post in particular.

I'd argue it's a good thing that they just report the data and then you can draw your own conclusions about whether this is good or bad.

ryukoposting3• 7 months ago

Also am I basically fullfiling the blog post prophecy?

Yes. I think the post does well to make the point that "negativity" comes in two forms, critical and toxic. Lumping the two seems like an oversight, to me.

jonathaneunice• 7 months ago

Love a good rant or an artfully scathing review!

taeric4• 7 months ago

I would love to see this analyzed with more than just positive/negative. My assumption would be that high energy posts outperform, regardless of sentiment swing. That is, enthusiastic probably does well, too?

Similarly, how does inquisitive perform?

7777777phil18• 7 months ago

Open to the Idea, how exactly would you classify "high energy posts" ?

taeric4• 7 months ago

I don't know of any definitive classification for this. Probably easiest to begin with looking for passive versus active verbs? Run on sentences are usually bad, as well. Though, too many short sentences can effectively be a run on paragraph. :D

Inquisitive posts, of course, can largely look for question marks.

I think a lot of this boils down to "tone is hard to decipher in text." And is a large part of why so many of us default to assuming an aggressive tone from others. (Though, my personal pet idea there is that people are largely afraid to use questions more.)

mbreese• 7 months ago

I had the same thoughts (high-energy). I would have worded it slightly differently -- more engaging posts.

You could measure in two ways:

1) raw score for the post. Look at the distribution of total scores and remove the low scoring posts. I personally think this will remove more negative posts than positive. (Note: this would be another way to look at this: for the posts with an overall negative sentiment, does the post score more or less).

2) total number of unique people participating in the discussion. The more dynamic posts tend to be more positive, or at least balanced in my mind (might be wrong, but that's my gut feeling).

3) You could also look at the peak rank of the post -- if the post stayed on the front page for more than 1 hour, but this seems more arbitrary and difficult.

I think the idea here is that posts aren't created equal and some have different engagement patterns. What I'd like to know is if a post is skewing negative, does it get more or less traction. What are the incentives for the poster vs the commenter? Both get karma points, but does a commenter get more for being negative vs does a poster get more points for submitting articles expected to have a negative discussion?

There are a number of other questions, like are there keywords that tend to produce negative posts (for example: are posts talking about AWS more positive or negative). Or - are there topics that generally perform better? Are "expected" posts better? Are more "unique" posts better? Are "Show HN" posts more positive than other posts?

I'd be happy to help - info in bio if you're interested.

haritha-j• 7 months ago

Is a HN post complaining about negativity in HN, negative?

beloch• 7 months ago

What would LLM's make of normal human conversations if they had access to everything you say (Just wait!)? Think back to the last time you hung out with a group of friends, either in person or online. How much of what was said would an AI bin into positive, negative, or neutral categories?

Rather a lot of what is said in any given social circle has to do with complaining. It's very common for people to point out something that is viewed as bad by everyone. Then the group commiserates and bonds over that. Even though an AI might consider such complaints negative, there might be a positive effect on people feeling heard and supported by a like-minded group.

For this reason, I'd take OP's results with a modicum of salt. Human interaction doesn't have to be all rainbows and unicorns to have a positive psychological impact. As with in-person interactions, I suspect a significant portion of what OP's LLM's described as negative might just be humans bonding through complaint among peers.

notepad0x90• 7 months ago

I didn't read the preprint, but what does negative sentiment mean? Does that question I just asked qualify, because it is critical?

I would expect most comments on HN to be critical and argumentative, but that isn't negativity. Being dismissive without good reason, or actually saying mean things (violates rules) would be clear negativity. But disagreement and questioning things, is part of how we all learn and share information. Matter of fact, the fastest way to learn things (as the meme goes) is to state something obviously incorrect and let people disagree with you, and show you a better way.

In the few years I've been on HN, it's been very rare to see an actual negative comment that isn't simply someone having a sincere opinion different from someone else, and not getting flagged or downvoted-heavily.

Would the author view this comment as negative, or would they see it as inquisitive? Because I'm not even criticizing anything the OP said or did, I'm genuinely wondering.

est• 7 months ago

well people doesn't just comment to say thanks or appreciation.

Mostly people only comment when there's something wrong

snowwrestler• 7 months ago

I bet for most of us there’s a baseline positivity to everyday life that, because of how durable it is, is not really considered news. Thus newsworthy topics tend to skew negative.

In my neighborhood an electrical power outage is news; but yet another day of consistent electrical power supply is not news. But taking a step back, I think it is noteworthy! It makes my life better every day, and compared to the vast sweep of human history, it’s a huge positive anomaly. My life is full of stuff like this, as I suspect the lives are of many HNers.

I say this because while I do value news reporting and knowing what’s wrong or could be better, I also try hard to maintain this broader awareness of what’s (still) positive and going well. Even if its consistency makes it seem unremarkable on short time scales like the daily news cycle.

grvdrm• 7 months ago

In my neighborhood an electrical power outage is news; but yet another day of consistent electrical power supply is not news. But taking a step back, I think it is noteworthy! It makes my life better every day, and compared to the vast sweep of human history, it’s a huge positive anomaly. My life is full of stuff like this, as I suspect the lives are of many HNers.

This hit a nerve in a good way.

Something I think about is intersection of "cringe"-like content and genuine uplifting content. There's tons of stuff out there about how people take care of themselves, how they're improving their health, hair, body, mood, whatever. Obviously the influencer world is present in this sphere of content.

I suspect the content that leans way towards cringe goes way more viral, but if you step back, it's great so many people are trying/doing so many healthy and self-care-oriented things and making themselves feel better bit by bit.

glitchc• 7 months ago

All I can I say is that I come to HN for the feedback. The critique is where much of the learning happens. That seems like a posotive outcome on the whole.

rmoriz3• 7 months ago

We used to make fun of cat videos and low quality memes albeit they kind of balance the negative sentiment one is exposed on almost all platforms and topics. From word politics, AI/tech, environmental, personal health etc.

f1shy3• 7 months ago

I come to HN to see negative comments. I pay special attention to very downvoted ones. My algorithm is: if there is no ad hominem, really bad words, or snarky, I read them fully and with attention. Of course if is a non sequitor I would leave it.

But often these negative/contrary to stablished opinion, or opinions done with passion (but still nore are less respectful), are the most valuable to me, as they give me the oppressed to think outside the box, to ask me questions I would not ask myself if not…

6thbit2• 7 months ago

Don’t they mean contrarian?

Say, this is not a negative comment but may be interpreted to have a negative sentiment due to disagreement with their core thesis.

buellerbueller• 7 months ago

I think the mind is drawn to negativity, because happiness and positivity rarely explode in ways that end us and our ability to reproduce. Thus we have evolved to be more aware of negativity.

reactordev• 7 months ago

This is why the news wants us angry at each other. Politics is a perfect carrot for this for engagement and keeping the ad revenue flowing. They only succeed if people are engaged.

6thbit2• 7 months ago

I believe another factor specific for HN is the inability to downvote forces people to respond in negative light.

The most controversial submissions always have a tighter comment to upvote ratio.

The most controversial comments tend to be the most replied to.

drob518• 7 months ago

Hacker News is universally read by cynics and skeptics. Hopefully, that was negative enough.

rsynnott• 7 months ago

What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs.

I mean, this is pretty much what you'd expect, right? A social network where the focus was on saying how wonderful announcements and industry practices were would be rather boring/pointless.

lxgr• 7 months ago

Complete hogwash. I would never reflexively comment negatively on articles shared here before even opening them.

lo_zamoyski2• 7 months ago

This doesn't necessarily mean anything. It takes a real fool to make baseless assumptions about how much of something there should be, for no good reason.

What if 65% of what's being discussed is stupid or evil? Then 65% negativity would seem to be proportionate. What if 80% of what's posted is stupid? Or 20%?

That's the only way you can really make this number meaningful. You can't just look at the number and read in some undisciplined interpretation.

(And frankly, consider this. Suppose person A makes a claim. Now suppose person B agrees with that claim and person C disagrees with that claim. Who is more likely to respond? If B agrees and has nothing to add, no additional depth or insight to provide, then there is no reason for a followup comment. An upvote suffices. But if C disagrees, then there's something to contradict and a reason to followup with an explanation of why there is disagreement.)

AstroBen• 7 months ago

What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs. The usual. It’s worth noting that technical critique reads differently than personal attacks; most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic.

This.. doesn't sound negative to me, at least in how I'd use the word. Substantive critiques and skepticism?

Geez I guess even this very comment would be considered negative because I'm critiquing what they wrote. Amazing post! I absolutely agree! Well done!

shevy-java• 7 months ago

When everything is perfect, there is less to complain about. So this is only logical. You simply have fewer points to note when things are excellent.

Analysing perfection yields not much compared to analysing crap.

lapcat• 7 months ago

Now measure the performance of Hacker News posts about Hacker News posts.

iambateman2• 7 months ago

I want this same analysis with more nuance about what negativity means. He mentions in the post that “technical criticism” counts as negativity.

There’s just a world of difference between “I don’t like React because I don’t want to write HTML in my JavaScript” and “React sux a$$”

Both are negative statements, but it doesn’t make sense to group them together.

Like…is this comment itself a “negative” comment? Maybe. But I want the author to improve and I think most people here do too…and that’s where HN really shines.

7777777phil18• 7 months ago

Yes, probably the core limitation of my analysis (see earlier comment). My classifiers are treating "I don't like React because I don't want to write HTML in my JavaScript" the same as "React sux a$$" and that's clearly wrong. The models I'm using were built for general sentiment analysis, not technical discourse. On a meta level, your comment itself is a perfect example - it's "negative" in that it criticizes my methodology, but it's exactly the kind of feedback that I was hoping for, so thanks!

iambateman2• 7 months ago

Cheers – great work on this, thanks for sharing what you made!

bennettnate5• 7 months ago

I find it humoring that this article inadvertently contributes to its statistic

mattmcknight• 7 months ago

Sort by controversial. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/

Just need to find the right scissor statement to really get the debate going.

44khz• 7 months ago

The top comment here is as HN as it gets: “Yeah, but we are better than Reddit.”

Good job.

ramon156• 7 months ago

I find it hard to mark something as negative when it's valid criticism. I'm of the opinion that if you cannot handle criticism, then you can't put yourself out there. This is coming from someone that is having a hard time putting themselves out there because I know I'm going to be wrong on certain topics.

But afterwards I'm glad I did, after a month comments can't really haunt you anymore, because they exist in the past.

I'd much rather live in a critical world than a "wholesome" world that ends up being an echochamber

codingdave• 7 months ago

most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic

That is the key takeaway. If critique is scored as negative, then there is nothing wrong with HN being "negative". Analysis and critical response to new ideas, tech, and products is a good thing, so I believe we should be responding positively to a report that says we apply negativity in productive ways.

bicepjai• 7 months ago

You said it well. It can be an intellectual dialogue only when we talk on different sides and do not agree all the time. I am actually agreeing here, making this a positive comment, and did not contribute anything :)

DustinBrett• 7 months ago

Now let's check the comments and see when and by how much they have become negative.

mellosouls• 7 months ago

What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs. The usual. It’s worth noting that technical critique reads differently than personal attacks; most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic

The definition above indicates "negative" may be a bit harsh as a term, it might be useful to see a split of that percentage between "unnecessary pushback" and "scrutiny".

This comment will of course count as negative - it could no doubt be more substantive and better written but hopefully it is understood in the latter sense.

uw_rob• 7 months ago

CGP Grey did a fantastic short video titled 'This Video Will Make You Angry'[1]. I'd recommend that anyone who is interested in this thread take a watch.

The central knowledge shared is that knowledge behaves like germs and can spread. Those that play on emotions spread better, and among the thought germs that spread based on emotions, the ones that play on anger spread the best.

Worst yet: There are anger based thought germs which live in symbiosis and harmony even if they cause conflict among the humans who hold that germs. You can see this take hold when communities exist entirely of folks who hold a singular belief and they spend all day constructing and destroying uncharitable straw men of opposing ideas.

I've noticed that Reddit _really_ likes this sort of content and fosters these sorts of communities. Communities at scale on reddit quickly become about fostering negatives: hatred of others, blame on the system, self-pity, snarky responses. Instead of the better and more effective: tactical empathy, acceptance and understanding what is within your personal sphere of influence, concrete actions, personal improvements, and forgiveness.

I'm definitely not saying one has to accept the world for how it is, or that it's fair, or anything like that. Humans should change this world! You should vote, you should volunteer, you should help your neighbor, you should understand and be kind to others with different beliefs, and perhaps under the extreme you should die for your beliefs to help enact them.

What you shouldn't do though is spend all day reading and posting memes about subjects you are already familiar with. If you've already made up your mind and are informed on a subject you don't need another meme to help radicalize yourself.

See the difference between mass shooters and hero's like Daryl Davis [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc [2] https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...

cainxinth• 7 months ago

Isn’t this the major takeaway from the entire social media era of the last 20 years? Content that triggers strong emotions, especially anger, fear, and moral outrage, reliably increases engagement.

ChrisArchitect• 7 months ago

The 2025 Oxford Word of the Year was rage bait

https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-i...

FpUser• 7 months ago

Captain obvious. That is why negative, controversial etc. material in newspapers sells more

tgtweak• 7 months ago

controversy algorithm is real - reddit and twitter both prioritize controversial posts since they get people engaging.

jack_riminton• 7 months ago

HN is where nerds come to complain with other nerds

coffeecoders• 7 months ago

This suggests HN is functioning as designed. Votes signal agreement while comments surface disagreement.

Negative posts outperform because they create unfinished cognitive work. A clean, agreeable story closes the loop, a contested claim or engagement opens and follows the open loop.

bborud• 7 months ago

Isn't this what one would expect? Not least because when something is "as expected or better" people rarely feel the urge to express that. But when something goes wrong we tend to be more ... communicative.

And that negativity breeds engagement, well we already knew that. Entire industries have cropped up around engagement with negative sentiment and made some people exceedingly wealthy.

cs702• 7 months ago

What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs. The usual. It’s worth noting that technical critique reads differently than personal attacks; most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic.

Hmm... Technical critiques are very different from truly negative comments. I'm not sure they should be lumped together. Technical critiques are often interesting and useful.

In my experience, truly negative comments which don't meet the guidelines rarely appear on HN, and when they do appear, they tend to disappear very, very quickly, thanks to the moderators.

px43• 7 months ago

Negativity Bias is a thing. It probably served us well back when it was more important to remember to avoid the field with all the poison snakes in it vs the field with the pretty flowers in it, but in an era where algo feeds try to treat content equally, and optimize for attention, it kind of ruins everything.

I recall there being studies on financial loss vs gain, and that financial losses seem to effect emotions about 4x more than wins, so for an actual balanced algorithm, it would seem that positive posts should be boosted about 4-5x to have any chance of being surfaced on a modern social network. Given what we know about human psychology, sentiment boosts really should be a thing. Is anyone working on that?

Workaccount25• 7 months ago

"There is a bush over there" is not news.

"There is a bush with berries over there" is news.

"There is a tiger in that bush over there" is adrenaline inducing huge news.

wesselbindt• 7 months ago

This makes me MAD AS HELL

zipy1242• 7 months ago

A lot of people are commenting on the conclusion but I'm surprised no one is commenting on the methodology? The distributions given by the models seem weird. The LLM's enough so that I would just discount those and focus on the BERT models, but even then roBERTa for instance seems to suggest there is NO positive sentiment, with only scores of 0.5 and above given. Then there is the axis which is "ai_sentiment" against the classification, but it's not clear what "ai_sentiment" is, and it's not expanded upon in the paper. It seems to basically just map to the DistilBERT score apart from a few outliers?

Given that, it seems that there is basically zero agreement between DistilBERT and the other models..... In fact even worse they disagree to the extreme with some saying the most positive score is the most negative score.... (even acounting for the inverted scale in results 2-6).

7777777phil18• 7 months ago

Fair point, `ai_sentiment` should have been defined explicitly. It's the production score from DistilBERT-base-uncased-finetuned-sst-2-english, the same model family as Cloudflare's sentiment classifier. That explains the r=0.98 correlation you noticed. And you're right that the models disagree. This isn't measurement error though. They learned different definitions of "sentiment" from their training data. DistilBERT was trained on movie reviews (SST-2), so it asks "is this evaluating something as good or bad?" BERT Multilingual averages tone across 104 languages, which dilutes sharp English critique. RoBERTa Twitter was trained on social media where positivity bias runs strong, hence the μ=0.76 you see.

For HN titles, which tend to be evaluative and critical, I assumed DistilBERT's framing fits better than the alternatives. But the disagreement between models actually shows that "sentiment" is task-dependent rather than some universal measure. I'll add a methodology section in the revision to clarify why this model was chosen.

zipy1242• 7 months ago

Thanks for clearing that all up for me, look forward to seeing the revision!

It would be interesting to see some of the comments that seem to be polar oposites in sentiments between the models. So ones where they are the most positive sentiment by one model but the most negative by another to analyse the cases where they disagree the most on their definition of sentiment.

ummonk• 7 months ago

Being grumpy and critical is rightly a virtue in the tech community at large, and this serves as a good counterbalance to the astroturfed positivity and marketing pushed by companies.

Ironically, I suspect this article’s title would rightly be evaluated as negative in sentiment analysis.

ryukoposting3• 7 months ago

OP's classifiers make two assumptions that I'd bet strongly influence the result:

1. Binning skepticism with negativity.

2. Not allowing for a "neutral" category.

The comment I'm writing right now is critical, but is it "negative?" I certainly don't mean it that way.

It's cool that OP made this thing. The data is nicely presented, and the conclusion is articulated cleanly, and that's precisely why I'm able to build a criticism of it!

And I'm now realizing that I don't normally feel the need to disclaim my criticism by complimenting the OP's quality work. Maybe I should do that more. Or, maybe my engagement with the material implies that I found it engaging. Hmm.

jppope• 7 months ago

I was about to make a comment about skepticism, thank you for adding it. Its likely that its all bunched in together. Looking at material with a critical eye is a positive feature of HN not a negative - thats a very very nuanced thing to evaluate though and likely we do not have the technology

pessimizer2• 7 months ago

The comment I'm writing right now is critical, but is it "negative?" I certainly don't mean it that way.

It's a matter of perspective. The OP is a negative post. You are negative about it. Therefore, you have made a positive post.

7777777phil18• 7 months ago

OP here :) On skepticism being lumped with negativity: partially true. The SST-2 training task treats critical evaluation as negative sentiment. I should clarify that "negative" here means evaluative or critical, not hostile. HN's culture of substantive critique registers as negative by these metrics, but that's arguably a feature of technical discourse rather than toxicity.

On the neutral category: the model outputs continuous scores from 0 to 1, so neutrality does exist around 0.5. The bimodal distribution with peaks at roughly 0.0 and 0.95 reflects how HN users tend toward strong evaluative positions. Three-class models could provide additional perspective, and that's worth exploring in future work.

Also love your meta-observation. Imo your comment is critical, substantive, and engaging. By sentiment metrics it's "negative," but functionally it's high-quality discourse. But that's exactly how I read the data: HN's negativity is constructive critique that drives engagement, not hostility.

seizethecheese4• 7 months ago

Is it “negative” though? I ran it through this model and it gave 99.9% positive. (You tell me if this model is substantively different from what you used.)

https://huggingface.co/distilbert/distilbert-base-uncased-fi...

vpribish2• 7 months ago

- "negative" here means evaluative or critical, not hostile.

this is so far from how people are interpreting your results that I'd say it's busted. your work might be high-quality, but if the semantic choices make it impossible to engage with then it's not really a success.

bofadeez2• 7 months ago

Maybe version 2 will be better

stelonix• 7 months ago

I'm interested in seeing a plot of that percentual over the years. The past 3 or 4 years I've been seeing less and less tech savvy comments over here and this data seems a great way to find out if it's just placebo.

concinds• 7 months ago

There's a lot of legitimate criticism, but they're also a noticeable amount of "reply guy"-ism (pedantry that can sometimes derail the conversation and bring nothing of substance) and "pet peeve syndrome" (people who'll always repeat the same criticisms of a product or company even if completely off-topic for a submission). It would probably be hard to classify them. And whenever I go on reddit I see that both are enormously worse on there.

parpfish• 7 months ago

are the "reply guy" and "pet peeve syndrome" considered bad? because i think they're a big part of the value i get in the HN comments.

my mental model of the comment section on any page is "let's get all the people interested in this article in the room and see what they talk about" rather than "here is a discussion about this article specific"

i also assume that <50% of the people in any comment section have actually read the original article and are just people hopping in to have a convo about something tangetially related to the headline.

seizethecheese4• 7 months ago

I’m not sure if this is the exact model used by OP, but it appears close, and it classifies your comment as positive at 99.9%.

https://huggingface.co/distilbert/distilbert-base-uncased-fi...

7777777phil18• 7 months ago

Hi, if you find the time, please reach out to the email in my bio with the methodology and dataset you used. Did you only test one post or a whole set? Would be interesting to compare the setup. Thanks!

ryukoposting3• 7 months ago

I'd be curious to know how my comment scores if you cut it off after the bullet points.

citizenpaul• 7 months ago

You comment is very interesting observation. Its made me reconsider some things about sentiment analysis. You are right its not really that HN is negative its that sentiment analysis doesn't really have any way I can think of offhand to measure meaningful discourse rather than GOOD/BAD/NEUTRAL

I've never done any sentiment analysis outside of hobby tinkering. Maybe there is some HN experts that will chime in on how to deal with it?

lossolo• 7 months ago

Exactly, critical thinking is framed as a negative sentiment in that analysis.

nxpnsv• 7 months ago

Perhaps add joke and off-topic as labels too

aiiizzz• 7 months ago

Negative is negative, regardless of intent. Here's the llm positive way to write your post:

It’s a great exercise to reframe constructive feedback. Here is a more positive, affirming version of that post that maintains the original insight while shifting the tone to one of appreciation and partnership. A Positive Reframing

ryukoposting 17 hours ago | parent | context | flag | on: 65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment...

The OP has done a fantastic job putting this together! It’s such an interesting dataset that it really invites deeper exploration into how we categorize human speech. I think we can make this even more accurate by looking at two exciting opportunities:

* Celebrating Skepticism: We could distinguish between "negativity" and "healthy skepticism." Often, a critical eye is actually a sign of deep interest and a desire to refine a great idea.

* The Value of "Neutral": Adding a neutral category could highlight the balanced, objective discussions that happen here, showing just how nuanced the community’s input really is. I’m writing this because I’m genuinely inspired by the quality of the presentation and how clearly the conclusions are articulated. It’s exactly that clarity that makes it so easy and fun to brainstorm improvements! I’m realizing now how much I enjoy engaging with high-quality work like this. It’s a reminder that even when we’re being analytical, it’s because the original content is truly engaging. Kudos to the OP for sparking such a thoughtful conversation.

Key Changes Made: * From "Assumptions" to "Opportunities": Instead of pointing out flaws in logic, it frames the points as ways to build upon an already strong foundation. * Emphasis on Inspiration: It explicitly states that the criticism is a result of being impressed by the work, rather than just "not meaning to be negative." * Active Appreciation: It turns the "Maybe I should do that more" realization into a proactive statement of gratitude for the OP’s effort. Would you like me to try another version focused on a specific tone, like "professional" or "enthusiastic"?

...

Even if you hate it, the vibe of that is completely different.

boomlinde• 7 months ago

Yes, the original post has the vibe of something a human wrote to express an idea, while your version has the vibe of meandering, insincere, sycophantic AI slop that obfuscates the original idea in service of congratulating everything.

Both express the same basic criticism; you've just replaced the neutral tone with something that's perhaps more effective as a vomitory than as a criticism.

dogleash2• 7 months ago

Even if you hate it, the vibe of that is completely different.

It's so mealymouthed my internal sentiment analysis grades it as insanely toxic.

Nobody actually talks like this. And if they do they have a terrible office culture.

raxxorraxor• 7 months ago

There also is some conflict of interests. VC investors and marketeers obviously want to nurture optimism. And that is entirely understandable and very likely necessary for good ideas to be spread.

While engineers, especially those that like to share knowledge and open source solutions are far more critical of monetizing products.

Overall HN doesn't lack criticism, since there many technically minded people around. But I like the mix to be honest and agree that skepticism is often seen as simple negativity. Sure, you probably don't want to advertise your product as "pretty decent, but there are numerous better theoretical solutions".

dogleash2• 7 months ago

I think you're on to something about bad categorization. Sentiment analysis as practiced is almost always pseudoscience. (And that's a hedge. I've never seen it done right but I'm not outright discounting the possibility.)

bar000n• 7 months ago

HN is not the rest, it is not the majority. It's for a specific tech-savvy social category. This category does want skepticism and criticism because they tend to be perfectionists. This is not "negative sentiment" anything but very positive "evrika!" sentiment for members of the aforementioned category.

Would one say: nice attempt trying to tell people how they are supposed to feel around here?

vunderba• 7 months ago

What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs. The usual. It’s worth noting that technical critique reads differently than personal attacks; most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic.

As with most things, the devil’s in the details. There are plenty of ways to express criticism without descending to personal attacks. I’ve also noticed that when the cynicism/criticism-o-meter runs too high, there’s almost always a top-level meta comment complaining about the complaining.

Personally I’d rather someone tell me I have a piece of food stuck in my teeth than shower me with praise.

7777777phil18• 7 months ago

You're making a distinction the paper should address more directly. The classifier can't tell the difference between "this API design is fundamentally flawed because X" and "this company is terrible" (as noted in an earlier reply). Both register as negative by models trained on reviews and social media.

You're also right that HN's moderation probably removes hostile content quickly (which is why I prefer this platform to other roptions tbh). So the negativity we observe is mostly substantive critique rather than personal attacks.

That said, I'd push back a bit on whether this makes the finding less interesting. If anything, the opposite seems true. The fact that HN's "negativity" is constructive criticism, and that this criticism correlates with 27% higher engagement, tells us something about how technical communities value critical analysis over promotional framing. The classifier limitation is real (also see my other replies), but the engagement correlation holds whether we call it "negative sentiment" or "evaluative critique."

I'll add a limitations section to make the terminology clearer: "negative sentiment" as used here means evaluative criticism detected by SST-2-trained models, not personal attacks or toxic comments. Thanks for your feedback!

hackable_sand• 7 months ago

Cynicism is not a truth-telling philosophy, it cannot be. Telling you a fact is not being critical.

rkagerer• 7 months ago

I think part of this is human nature - we love to complain. Discontent tends to be a motivator we'll try to do something about (i.e. write a post), often moreso than when we're content.

I also strongly feel the tech industry has in general gotten a lot gloomier since its hayday before souless MBA's and pervasive user-hostile practices started ruining everything.

locallost• 7 months ago

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Taking the easy way and being sceptical means you'll be mostly right because most things don't work out.

user____name• 7 months ago

What a load of nonsense.

tokai• 7 months ago

Good. Should be higher. Positive comments are most often worthless.

kgwxd• 7 months ago

Negative engagement should be a negative metric and bring negative karma to posters and commenters that take part in it.

justinhj• 7 months ago

Curious if SOTA models would have the same sentiment? Probably, but they are capable of more context and nuance. The reason I ask is the post seems focused on models you can run locally.

proee• 7 months ago

Engineers are employed to fix problems, so they have an inherent disposition to break things down into pieces to identify what's working and what's not working. I've had the opportunity to demo our engineering tools to professionals at industry-type events, and they all came to our booth with arms crossed, even before they understood our value proposition. We demoed the exact same tools to the maker space and everyone who came to the booth was flowing with positive energy. Basically a glass half-empty vs half-full type of experience.

pessimizer2• 7 months ago

I'd like to make two points about this:

-----

1) I do not understand in any way the sentiment that discussion should ideally consist of people agreeing with and encouraging each other.

The reason I speak with people is either to inform or learn. If I'm informing, this is not really a discussion. I'm just telling people something that they may not know. There are two ways to learn: one is to listen and not speak, which is the mirror of the above. The way to learn through speaking is that somebody says something, I dispute or question that thing, and that person shows me why I'm wrong.

So the way to learn while speaking is that someone says something, I say something negative about that thing, and then that person says something negative about the negative thing I've just said.

Friends and family are what you need, not the empty, uninformed, ritualistic, and above all socially-pressured positive comment of strangers.

-----

2) Following up on the first point (which is mainly a personal observation), it's important to say (although completely unsurprising and obvious) that negativity is relative. On HN (or reddit, or any comment site), the first post or OP is assigned positivity.

A great example is this very OP, which is an accusation of negativity on Hacker News, which with no context is quite obviously a post with negative sentiment. The way you would grade reactions to it in a vacuum would say that other posts disputing its conclusions are positive.

Its methodology, however, requires that the posts disputing it be graded as negative: "Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs." What are the OPs that contain these posts? Links to technologies and technology advocates, announcements, recommendations of particular practices, descriptions of APIs.

Accusations of negativity and tone policing are always content-free social control. If I set my point of view as positive and uplifting (while posting about how HN and reddit and social media are evil poison promulgated by evil people who should be physically stopped to save civilization), I can silence dispute through calling the mods rather than through discussion.

The more indefensible my position is, the more I will prefer the sort of "discussion" where I say something, other people dispute it, and I accuse them of being negative people with implications of bad faith and possibly psychological unsoundness.

positron26• 7 months ago

Hierarchy and plurality are essential properties of any functioning information space.

- People with expertise / exceptional qualities are by definition out-numbered by the rest, so there must be privileged seats if you want quality to become represented.

- Social coherence requires turning lots of conversations into a few, again requiring fewer privileged seats to represent views efficiently and have conversations between well-informed people trusted by those they represent.

- Preventing runaway power feedback loops from reinforcing one single set of views requires that independent hierarchies can exist, which is pluralism.

https://positron.solutions/articles/hierarchy-elevates-socia...

pepperball• 7 months ago

Hilarious!

HN post about sentiment analysis on the site and the top comment and thread is just “reddit bad xd”. So glad these sort of novel, riveting conversations are being had here.

dehrmann• 7 months ago

There's something that feels seductive and clever about taking the contrarian, usually pessimist stance—like you're the only one who sees things for how they really are.

cryptoegorophy• 7 months ago

I wonder what the % is for stackoverflow

renewiltord• 7 months ago

Haha, this place is as gullible as Reddit. Remember that obvious hoax post about DoorDash/UberEats being a dick to drivers with a “desperation score”. There were so many people there just wanking themselves off at the thought it could be real. It obviously wasn’t.

The cooorrrrrporatioooons! OooOOooOoOOoo!

api• 7 months ago

"If it bleeds it leads" has been known since near the dawn of published media.

Humans have a powerful negativity and bad-news bias. It's probably a left over adaptation. "If you mistake a bush for a lion, you're fine. If you mistake a lion for a bush, you're dead." Your paranoid negativity-biased ancestors survived.

charlieyu1• 7 months ago

Maybe the reality is actually quite bad.

And at least the negativity allows us to fix the problems. I’m actually sick of modern toxic positivity, problems that could be fixed early are deliberately ignored until they couldn’t be ignored anymore.

joelthelion• 7 months ago

And at least the negativity allows us to fix the problems

Does it? A lot of the negativity is structural (late stage capitalism and all), and there is very little talk regarding fixing these issues.

727374• 7 months ago

"If it bleeds it leads". -famous newsroom adage. This is true for all news and media, always. Humans are drawn toward stories that arouse fear and negativity.

aragonite• 7 months ago

In the preprint they write:

... we observe extreme inequality in attention distribution. The Gini coefficient of 0.89 places HN among the most unequal attention economies documented in the literature. For comparison, Zhu & Lerman (2016) reported Gini co-efficients of 0.68–0.86 across Twitter metrics. ... The bottom 80% of posts [on HN] receive less than 10% of total upvotes. (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5910263)

This could probably be explained by HN's unique exposure mechanism. Every post starts on /newest and unless it gets picked up by the smaller group of users who browse /newest, it never reaches the front page where the main audience is. In most forums/subreddits by contrast a new post (unless it gets flagged as spam) usually gets some baseline exposure with the main audience before it sinks. On HN the main audience is downstream of an early gate and missing that gate is close to being effectively invisible. IMO this fact alone could probably explain why "attention inequality" seems more extreme on HN.

kqr• 7 months ago

This also explains how early performance can be predictive despite the lack of preferential attachment.

ManBeardPc• 7 months ago

News in general. Also works well in sales, see how often financial "advisors" try to convince people the market is crashing soon and everything except their product is unsafe and how they try to mitigate downsides (active funds, low/zero interest savings accounts).

jdthedisciple• 7 months ago

In a way it makes justifiable sense:

Consider that purely positive but otherwise unconstructive comments like "wow great project! clap" are – for good reason – not what the HN comment feature is intended for and are reliably downvoted to oblivion.

Contentious, challenging, or even slightly provocative reactions however – which are inherently somewhat negative in a wider sense – usually kick off fruitful debates and knowledge-proliferation.

And I probably speak for at least about ~65% of fellow HN's when I say that the latter is what I come here for.

Brian_K_White• 7 months ago

Good things are nice, but they aren't interesting. They aren't a problem to solve.

larodi• 7 months ago

Good ! Finally someone does it, sadly I didn’t have the time been planning for 1 year now.

scoofy• 7 months ago

Good news is hardly worth discussing.

Headline: “I went to the doctor and everything was normal.”

Discussion: “That’s nice.”

Headline: “I went to the doctor and I have been diagnosed with X”

Discussion: “X means Y or Z. If Y, A,B,C. If Z, P,Q,R”

dang2• 7 months ago

I was just writing about this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46508115 (edit: although I was thinking about comments, not submissions)

We need to do something and are working on it. The challenge is to distinguish thoughtful critique from negativity-venting. The former is fine, the latter is lame. HN has a lot of the latter.

I believe it has to do with macro trends (in society at large and on the internet), which we can't expect to be immune from—but also with the community here getting insular. That scares and worries me, because HN won't survive over the long haul if new cohorts of users don't keep showing up. Along with that, there seem to be increased waves of jadedness, bitterness, and cynicism that use this place as a dumping ground for bad feelings.

That's a bad dynamic. The more it happens, the more it encourages more of it. Meanwhile, people who don't enjoy jaded, bitter, or denunciatory rhetoric are incentivized to leave: a classic vicious circle.

This is why we added the following to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html last year: Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

You'll probably see more statements from us about this in 2026, and hopefully some changes to HN, as we try to do something about it.

mackid• 7 months ago

I’ve wondered about a temporal trend. My feeling is that it has gotten more negative over the last 10 years. Could the OP run the analysis for each year and see if there are trends?

neilv2• 7 months ago

I want to distinguish what I think are two distinct things, and also make a point about one of them.

* As dang and many know and appreciate, online communities themselves "age", and if you don't keep getting fresh new people in, they shrink. And, regardless, the focus tends to change over time, from original topic, more to meta and/or familiar/comfortable socializing. From what I've seen in some communities, I'm not so sure that aging of the participants is the main factor behind that.

* I think HN should be more conscientious about stereotypes around age, and making generalizations about that. Not only because much of HN is closely adjacent to hiring, and in the US, that's getting into illegal territory. Also, because ageism is often unfair, in general, and to individuals, yet is already widespread in the tech industry. We risk the new people that HN does acquire picking up messages about what ages, genders, ethnicities, etc. they should be hiring, and those messages right now are dim.

If you don't appreciate or care about this now, because you're not yet on the receiving end, I think you probably will within a few years, unless you help change the techbro culture now.

If you find it hard to believe that you'll be on the receiving end, because you are so highly-skilled, have a prestigious resume, have stellar recommendations, have always been a 10x rockstar ninja whatever, you keep updating your skills, you've memorized every LeetCode question, etc.: my experience is that it will be hard to believe when it happens, but it nevertheless will. You'll be in an interview, and the interviewer will make a snide remark that's ill-founded, but regardless, you're probably not getting an offer. And then it will happen many times. And your best "network" will FIRE and be out of the game, or be facing ageism themselves and not in a position to refer you. Then you'll jack in to the HN holographic VR AI cyberspace hivemind of a few years from now, and see people promoting the ideas that seem to match the snarky interviewer's thinking.

dang2• 7 months ago

Fair enough, I've edited out my references to age in the GP. One can make the point better based on the "aging" of the community itself, as you say.

7777777phil18• 7 months ago

dang, thanks for the thoughtful response. I’ve been following your recent comments on the "curmudgeonly" guideline, and it’s clear this is a priority for the health of the site in 2026.

My current analysis was a ~30 day snapshot, but I’d love to help get a clearer picture of the "macro trends" you’re worried about.

If you’re open to it, I’d be happy to collaborate on a deeper temporal analysis. Specifically, I could:

Map the "Sentiment vs. Performance" premium over a 10-year horizon to see if negativity is becoming more "rewarded" by the algorithm/community over time.

Segment "Substantive Critique" vs. "Generic Negativity" (venting) to see if the latter is actually the growth driver, as you suspect.

Run my workflow (DistilBERT, Llama 3.1, etc.) against any internal data you might have that isn't easily accessible via the public API (like flag rates or deleted comment correlations) to refine the "toxicity vs. critique" classifier.

The goal would be to provide a data-driven baseline for the changes you're planning this year. Happy to discuss further here or via email.

bilater• 7 months ago

Most things don't work. You can be an arm chair critic and scoff and you may be right a lot of times. But you'll also never really build anything of note and/or have crazy hockey stick growth in your life.

ChrisMarshallNY• 7 months ago

Rants and Complaints rule. News at 11.

That's fairly basic human nature, unfortunately; especially in today's climate.

For myself, I try to keep it positive. I am quite capable of going really dark (have done so, in the past), but I don't like to shit where I eat. I also feel that I need to recompense for some of the nastiness I used to spew, last century.

That said, my sunshine approach gets some pretty nasty responses. I have to bite my keyboard, and not respond as I'd like.

I just say "Have a great day!", which means I'm done engaging. I have found letting the other party have the last word, ties off the fight.

lewdwig• 7 months ago

One thing that seems to mark most nerds is a tendency towards being utopian about tech in general but deeply sceptical of specific tech.

tempodox• 7 months ago

This should be measured in regular intervals and plotted over a time axis. Just one sample doesn’t say much.

groundzeros20153• 7 months ago

How much correlation is there between positive sentiment and blatant marketing?

pengaru• 7 months ago

It should be higher

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

GeoAtreides• 7 months ago

OP, I haven't licensed my content to you, only to HN (and sadly, without my _informed_ consent, to YN affiliated startups). Please remove my comments from the archive and stop processing them.

jama211• 7 months ago

I would love to see comparisons year on year. I want to know if it’s gotten worse or not, there’s a lot of venting about AI in here these days.

keybored• 7 months ago

Some have commented that “negative” is too negatively-charged of a word for this submission. I don’t think so. I don’t subscribe to the Pollyanna-hacker-American idea that positivity is a virtue. You’re gonna feed me with negative news about the world? Get some negativity. You’re gonna feed me with bad ideas? Get some negativity.

Having a healthy personal mindset is a different matter. Which is not some public discussion boards business.

swyx• 7 months ago

The results I use in my dashboard are from DistilBERT because it runs efficiently in my Cloudflare-based pipeline.

interesting - why use cloudflare vs say hf inference or modal? and is this replicate-cloudflare or normal cloudflare?

_DeadFred_3• 7 months ago

Hacker News is a space for problem solvers. Problem solvers tend to see, think about, and talk about problems more than non-problem solvers, especially in a space designed for discussion discussions between problem solvers.

saltysalt• 7 months ago

The reason is easy to understand: HN commenters feel compelled to correct mistakes. The rage bait is real.

websiteapi• 7 months ago

Why won’t the people on this site let me hide the karma it shows under my username?!?!

SilentM68• 7 months ago

I find that most negativity comes from the inexperienced, young, and one-track minds of individuals, which through no fault of their own, have only been exposed to one way of thinking, one way of looking at the world. Since they don't know any other way of doing things, they refuse to understand the knowledge or experience that is being shared and jump to conclusions. That is one way that regional conflicts thrive, after they arise. These conflicts usually arise from the self-interest of the older generations. Unfortunately, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. It's no different whether on the physical or digital battlefield.

Flame away ;)

everyone• 7 months ago

There's a cultural thing also.. People from USA defo seem to have this "always be happy happy smile smile!!" thing going on. If you're not always outwardly positive and happy and smiling you're viewed as some kind of asshole there.

Even in terms of language, if a USian says "great!", they mean passable, and "ok" means bad.

Imo this is the result of corporate culture being so prevalent it has leaked out into general culture.. The corporate world of bullshit, just be really positive towards your boss and pretend everything is great, all that matters is the hype and getting more investment this quarter.

Also, engineering types tend to be a lot more "negative" relative to those corporate business guys.. If you want to engineer something, and make it work, and actually do a good job, then you need to appraise things realistically and objectively, and you certainly need to point out stupid decisions and bad design.

tim333• 7 months ago

I wonder if HN posts are more negative than the internet they link to? Compaing the top three just now:

HN:

Vietnam banning ads, AI for drug discovery, geolocating vehicle pic - I'd say two positive one neutral

Google News (UK):

Trump wanting Greenland, Storm Goretti snow, hero could get posthumous award - I'd say two negative one neutral

So maybe HNers have a positive bias after all?

bawolff• 7 months ago

Purely positive content is kind of vapid. If all you have to say about something is "looks cool" you might as well say nothing at all. Its not critically engaging at all.

piloto_ciego• 7 months ago

I actually think I understand why almost all the discourse is terrible on the internet. Reddit, HN, whatever. It's because of the reward mechanisms at play.

So...

If you say something is going to suck, and it actually sucks, you look like a genius. If you say something is going to suck, and it actually is ok, nobody cares because things turned out fine. If you say something is going to be good, and it turns out good, people say you're smart. If you say something is going to be good, and it turns out to suck, people say you're a moron.

Because of negative bias and game theory, the most logical take to get "social rewards" is be consistently pessimistic. You'll look "smart" online and the times you miss it will be largely ignored. If the reward you get from interacting online is some sort of social capital, being a pessimist will do better than being an optimist unless you're certain things will turn out good. So people tend to be negative.

Or, as I've heard it stated before, "pessimists get to be right, optimists get to be rich."

tonymet• 7 months ago

For those curious about how the model was trained, and examples of positive/negative sentiment, here's a "nutritional label" of sorts.

- SST-2 (stanford sentiment test) example dataset from IMDB reviews https://huggingface.co/datasets/stanfordnlp/sst2/viewer

- BERT https://aclanthology.org/N19-1423/

- DistilBert -- the optimized model OP was using https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.01108

SST-2 may have been used to train or qualify BERT -- read the papers to get the full story. I did a quick perusal.

It would be nice to have a nutritional label shared with Abstracts, showing the training data, with examples, and the base models.

armchairhacker• 7 months ago

I’ve noticed that my short comments that express cliche HN views get upvoted more than the long unique ones that I feel are more interesting. And in general, many top posts and comments are cliche.

If I respond to an article about open-source with “open-source is good”, article about privacy with “privacy is good” etc. with a basic justification and slightly fancier words, I’ll almost surely get upvotes. But I see those opinions on this site practically every day.

I wish people would instead upvote posts and comments with uncommon knowledge and opinions. I do see the former: cool projects and “fun facts” (e.g. an article about the cultural history of an isolated small region) are constantly on the front page and in top comments. But the latter are only in /new and further down comments.

thegrim000• 7 months ago

In some recent sentiment analysis experiments I did, I also noticed that stories that were classified as either rule-breaking or overly political in nature got significantly more upvotes on average than stories that were classified as within the HN guidelines and not political. The current system essentially provides incentive for that type of content.

mahirsaid• 7 months ago

This would be a great study vs the stackoverflow sentiment outlook.

7777777phil18• 6 months ago

Thanks everyone for the discussion. In the meantime I tried to take some of the learnings and posed a followup focused on predicting potentially successful titles. You can find the update here: https://philippdubach.com/standalone/hn-prediction/

65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform

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